The Expedition to the Baobab Tree

by Wilma Stockenstrom

  I was reaching a stage of forgetting my counting toys, which then numbered only three and were gradually beginning to bore me, on the knot on the inner wall of the tree, when one day I picked up in various places more potsherds and beads as well as copper wire, and brought all this back. I added the rest, sherd and bead, to the heap, these leavings of inhabitants whom I wished ill because they could leave no more than this, potsherds that would not fit together and become a whole roundness, pitiful decorations that I irritably strung on stalks and carried around my neck, rusty copper-wire rings, thick and heavy as shackles, with which I could do nothing, and nothing more in my vicinity. Nothing more – or was I roaming over graves? Nothing more – or was I roaming over walls submerged in dust and overgrown with plants? Was I perhaps roaming over courtyards and squares, fortifications, terraces, conduits, halls and shanties, settlements and streets crumbled into insignificance, taken over by the winters and the summers? Was I roaming over the place that we aimlessly came looking for, purposefulness long ago relinquished in the pitiless sun? Place of strips of underbrush and prickly grass, of a river off to one side hidden behind ripine trees and creepers, of hills with flattened crests on which gigantic round rocks piled in fantastic shapes, place of my towering baobab? Tableaus through which we roamed dazed, frightened? Place of predator and prey?

  I imagine bloody wars of extermination. Droughts. An epidemic. I think of unflagging zeal, followed by collapse and despair. And then nothing, just a tiny residue that does not help me however much I make believe I have found a way of warding off the danger of timelessness through order. Because I resisted becoming a mere yawn in the lazy passage of the days, a mere transitory draught of air, a subordinate beat in the rhythm, a phantom within a rupture in eternity.

  Too scantily endowed to fashion something myself, I used the artefacts of forgotten people to while away time, to coagulate time, with the bitter realization that it was changing nothing in the nothingness. But it made me feel good to handle the things and to wonder and to give my imagination rein, supplemented by memories of a different kind of earlier time.

  For it was endowed with nothing but memories that I landed here, a famished, tattered being, struggling through plains and valleys, fevered with privation, stumbling on towards a steadily receding horizon, always day stages away, always the same, to be swallowed in by a tree, merciful harborage, merciful cool shelter that reminds one roughly of a building with walls and spout-shaped rising ceiling and earth for a floor, a giant hut crowned with branches and leaves.

  Curse the will-o’-the-wisp that led me here, that traveler through my life and the lives of others on whose lips I hung and whom I slavishly obeyed, blind with obsession, disordered, out of my senses. Curse him who made a spectacle of our sacrifice and wanted to give the attractiveness of understanding to hardship, the attractive useless self-knowledge that killed him, oh the talk, the talk, the omniscience, the all-investigating consciousness that could explain nothing, least of all the betrayal of comrade and following. Oh, the powerlessness of reasonableness!

  Stranger in msasa-red clothes, from the beginning his wit charmed me. He knew the quips that light up an all too gloomy conversation. He knew more points of the compass than the disputatious poets and other such celebrities who congregated in the home of my owner, the rich widowed merchant, to eat my well-prepared meals and to pay for them and for the intercourse with his pretty slave girls with sophisticated conversation, even if this was limited to looking and desiring, or at most to some daredevil trying to fondle them when he thought his host was looking the other way. This one, on the other hand, in his msasa-red, in his water-green, in his flame-yellow, this one with his gold-speckled necklaces and slim gold bracelets was in no small measure well-read and self-confidently informed about affairs. Without being asked he delivered a rejoinder, briefly summed up long-windedness, and time and again carried the arguments to ridiculous ends. Which made him little loved among our great spirits, who without success egged him on and tried to catch him in sacrilege or sedition. Let the gods stare over our heads. They know what they see. He asserted. Let the ancestors alone. Their intercession is not needed when you live unimpeachably.

  Isn’t that so? he asked. Isn’t that so?

  As fresh and new as lightning he put it to me.

  So too the intercession of the prophets and the intercession of the family members of the prophets and the intercession of the gods combined and the intercession of god-fearing people, as well as the moral lessons to be learned from the experiences of people who elevate their tribal history to a religion – all this is interesting, and long may it be so. And invoking a deity morning and evening is beautiful music, is a resonant component of the sounds with which a man attests that he not only thinks of food and propagation but considers himself immortal as well and therefore wants to take appropriate measures to ensure himself a pleasant afterlife. Let them. Let them by all means.

  And let the merchants carry on. They are providing all this prosperity – and with an eloquent gesture he handed a porcelain dish of shrimps stewed with rice in sesame oil and coconut milk to the peevish poet on his right, while smiling in my direction. I thought he winked at me.

  My owner’s sardonic gaze rested on me. He beckoned me closer and his copper bracelets fell from his wrist to his elbow, so thin had his arm become. I picked up the palm fan to fan him. His upper lip was damp with droplets of sweat. Tonight he would again shiver with fever. He was already a sick man, probably dying, when I moved in with him and dared to become his youngest favorite. With long regular movements I tried to stir the heavy air around his face. He had left his food untouched, just tasted a dish of water. Poor creature inexorably gasping out a rich man’s life with the spectacle of so much abundance before him. Influence and power slipped out of mouth and nostrils. Stored-up memories played themselves out in his cloudy eyes when the eyelids, between the spells when he sat and dozed, opened a slit and he presumably observed his guests, his slave girl servants, his sons and daughters gathered in luxury and pride. And his emaciated fingers, what were they trying to catch? A butterfly? The salt breeze? A woman’s laugh?

  The talk grew dull. He asked to be carried to his room. I say asked, not commanded. He asked in a whisper.

  Left alone with him, I held him tight and soothed him, for he rebelled against his weakening and was far too fidgety; but then out of pity I let him be and by watching I understood what his hand was grasping for. He was trying to tear the fine web that death was spinning around him. When he jerked in spasms the web vibrated and shimmered slyly in anticipation. Tighter and tighter it was spun around him, so that the threat of sounds outside the room could not penetrate and the murmur of people with concern or concerns remained far outside the ring of his death stillness.

  I let the invalid nestle between my drawn-up knees with his head on my breast. In his language I whispered lewd stories which made him smile blissfully in my arms. Shrunken baby, what an easy delivery for me. I fed you with the deathsmilk of indifference, for it could do your dried-out body no more harm and perhaps it was your way out, this being set free of any charitableness. Any pity would only delay your departure painfully.

  One morning I climbed up to the highest terrace on the roof of my owner’s house to breathe in the morning freshness and look out over the city and the sea, at the skiffs lying drawn up on the sand, several of them belonging to him whom I had just said farewell to forever, that would probably now, like me, be disposed of. My future and the future of my fellow slaves, women and men, as well as that of the skiffs over there in the rosy daybreak, as well as that of the stores of elephant tusks and ambergris and iron, and that of the great house now at last plunged into mourning, and that of his fragrant garden down below me, had been allotted a precarious fate. Only those who have, have security as well. For me there was only insecurity. I waited, expecting to sigh. I waited for my feelings to well up. It was now the time for that.

  I who come from the heart of
the country bear the murmur of waters subliminally with me, a water knowledge preserved in my tears and saliva, in the blood of my veins, in all the juices of my body. I who knew how to extinguish attacks of fever with my water being, I found myself crying uncontrollably here in the morning stillness about so many things all at once that I would try to sob my tangle of thoughts to death rather than seek an interpretation that would amount to mourning but also a feeling of relief, anxiety about the future but also plain happiness about the purity of the morning after the oppressiveness of days and days in a sickroom.

  With a corner of my robe I dried my eyes and cheeks and climbed back down to the garden. I had to find out what was going on. I walked down to the beach and from there – for my call to the solitary dhow in the bay remained unanswered – from there I walked through the neglected waterfront area, hoping that no one would notice my absence in the bustle and diminished supervision that follow such an important death. And even if they did notice it, what did I care. I was dumbfounded with grief, but more, with longing, and did not care who saw it. My longing was a hard little nut hidden deep within me. I did not care who knew of it now. Now, after my benefactor’s decease, this feeling was my only certainty, and it helped me forget my fear of what lay ahead. Frivolous, perhaps, if I had been a woman who could have decided her own fate, but surely a permissible escape for the owned class to which I belonged. To fall foolishly in love and try to pocket happiness where happiness waited visible through a chink, and the time possibly favorable.

  So now I searched for the man I had fallen in love with. I heard him laugh behind a heavy, richly carved teak door in secret consultation in his life away from me. I saw him disappear round a corner. I smelled him out, wherever he might stay, where he might yet walk, for he had promised to come again, and he would come again over the swell on the lee side of a billowing lateen sail, and I followed him in my imagination where the hem of his robe dragged through the mud, brushed over the fleshiness of a broken melon, and whisked over sand and fins and scales. I lingered with him where he stopped before the market women, occupied in observing how the poorest of the poor lived. Clouds of flies swarmed up from the piles of grilled fish and meat. They settled in patterns against the blue of this clothes and crawled over his nose and eyes and forehead, at the wet corners of his mouth, wherever there was moisture.

  An old acquaintance came shuffling along with a flat basket of plantains on her head which she put down with a groan; then she took up position with legs stretched out in her traditional place under the shade tree. He began to chat to her and to others round about. He listened to brusque surly answers, embarrassed answers or equally embarrassed silences, to eagerly supplied information and quick-witted remarks in answer to questions from him, this presumptuous gentleman who was certainly not a client, making his own deductions. And with his inquiries about the price of crabs and clams and mussels and the availability and readiness to hand or otherwise of meat and fish and firewood, he built up cases using his own information, acquired on the spot, with which to refute other later arguments, opposing this information to the vague theories of rulers and well-meaning people. An attentive man. An inquisitive person who came to acquaint himself with the lot of the lowest, so much more complicated than the easy existence of a slave girl in a generous household, as he often pointed out to me.

  My easy, indolent existence, yes, an existence now perhaps at an end.

  Where did I find myself now, and was this smell of smoldering fear not familiar to me? The stench of blood. From this fear I never escaped, this trusty dizziness that impaired my sight, that made me brush with my hand over my eyes to see better and made me rue the act at once, for where I found myself, I discovered, was very near the slaughterhouse where I was sometimes sent by my second owner to buy entrails for his slaves. This smell known all too well to me, this lowing and bleating. Slippery heart liver lungs and gullet messily wrapped in leaves, a messiness too prone to slip out to carry on my head, I held it before me a little way from my body and walked away from a desolation soiled with dung and filth where animals buckled at the knee and the sad palms in their long dresses rustled dry leaves and grated, powerlessly anchored. Walked off from the joking butchers’ teasing and provocative remarks and obscene gestures to go and cook the food that I would share with many mouths, and plot how to keep the liver aside for myself and mine, and how to pinch a scoopful of my master and his wife’s rice in the – advantageously for me – untidy running of the household.

  In two low huts with collapsed roofs we lived, the slaves, all together, not separated by sex. From sunrise to late at night we toiled for him, the spice merchant. The work was what separated us. The men worked in his warehouse on the waterfront and the women in his residence. From far and wide we came, we spoke a variety of tongues, but here we got along by mangling the natives’ language and turning it into our idiosyncratic workers’ language. We were acquired secondhand, third-hand, even fourth-hand, mostly still young and healthy, we women fertile and rank. At night it was legs apart for the owner on his sweaty skin rug. Some of us welcomed it. Not I. He was clumsy and rough. I envied the slaves exempted from this sort of service. It brought a certain freedom along with it, after all, to be unmanned, I thought. I did not mind standing in front of the fireplace. I did not mind toiling with pick and hoe in the garden in the murderous heat to keep it neat around his mango trees and yam vines. I did not mind tidying his house under the eye of his shrew of a wife, obeying her expressionlessly, keeping my murmurs for the sleeping quarters, and even there being careful, for there were tell-tales amongst us. And to be discovered meant that your tongue was cut out.

  I kept myself to myself. Lived as much uneasily as patiently. I was a coward and refused nothing.

  With a stiff face I listened on his skin rug to the noise of the sea. I became a shell plucked from the rocks but kept my oyster shell of will, my thin deposit of pride, kept myself as I had been taught. I did not give in. I did not surrender. I let it happen. I could wait. I listened to the beat of the waves far behind his groaning, and it lulled me. I was of water. I was a flowing into all kinds of forms. I could preserve his seed and bring it to fruition from the sap of my body. I could kneel in waves of contractions with my face near to the earth to which water is married, and push the fruit out of myself and give my dripping breasts to one suckling child after another. My eyes smiled. My mouth was still.

  Always still. Frightened mice in the middle of a great roaring, that was what we were, the subordinates of the system, apparently docile, our children taken away from us and sold while still infants, while our bodies still hungered for them, our past a past of pitiless mistreatment or the sarcasm of gifts, our present without prospect. We were all one woman, interchangeable, exchangeable. So we comforted each other and each other’s children, so we shared, so we looked for lice on each other’s scalps and wore each other’s clothes and sang together, gossiped together, complained together. Without prospect. Once someone tried to run away. She was caught and her feet chopped off. A second time someone tried. She got away. The eunuchs deserted regularly.

  There were stories current about a colony of deserters far from the city in the middle of the great swamp, where the escaped slaves lived by hunting, where they built mat huts and survived unbearable heat and loneliness to die there eventually as free people. It was said that they had developed their own system of government, with a headman and advisers, that they considered themselves safe, protected from the pursuit by the impenetrable swamp infested with mosquitoes and leeches whose secret paths only the initiated knew, that they knew the authorities winked at them seeing that it would have cost a great deal of money to bring them back, seeing that those who had escaped would always be looking for trouble, would always grumble and rebel, and that it was wiser to punish such rebellious souls with oblivion in the wilderness, seeing that there were anyhow always fresh consignments of slaves coming from the interior. And that the eunuchs did not allow slave women amon
g them.

  One day a storm blew up worse than any I had yet experienced. It felt as if the heat were taking possession of me. It felt as if my eyes were going to bulge and stand out on stalks like a crab’s. I pressed my palms hard against my eye sockets, for it felt as if sand and glass splinters were rasping over my unprotected stalk eyes, as if they beheld too much and too tenderly, therefore I tried to press them into my skull, but they throbbed so violently in my head, they rolled around inside my skull, and when my eyelids opened, I saw nothing, I saw only heat, and that made everything roll and heave. I could no longer hear anything. I could only feel in the pitch-black air that came towards me and drew away from me and began to push me around, to tug me in gusts this way and that way, to bring me face to face with rending lightning bolts that transformed everything into gaudiness and in a flash blacked everything out again and left me totally confused as to the direction I had been taking. I saw a bitter-orange tree where none had stood before. I saw a grey cloud consisting of crested terns and a second cloud thick with glistening sardines. I saw fishes rain and jellyfish tumble down and flotsam performing tricks and saw how a hut sucked in air till bursting point and suddenly collapsed and was flattened and suddenly began to whirl away in pieces.

  Then I fled before the wind that was snatching up me and the refuse and everything that was frail, and I struggled onward at a slant, half-crawling, reeling from one support to the next, tree, pole, gate, building. That I could be blown into space, I, the peels, the tatters, go up in the whirl into all eternity. The sea beating. It fought with itself. It drew apart and clashed and balled together, it drew itself up high into the sky, it beat thunderously down on the high-water mark and rolled over and over covering the city’s shanty quarter and the luxuriant woods there, and hurled pieces of wreckage from dhows and skiffs that had been made for and dedicated to it, down between the palms and rosebushes of the gardens of the rich. The wind tore the sails loose from the trees where they tried to hide like the ghosts of birds and blew them far away into the strange interior.