by Zakes Mda
While the father went to get a good and supple one from a tree a few steps from the compound Marubini had dashed out of the door and escaped. Ma Chirikure had seen her running away from the neighbourhood and had stopped her in her tracks. She invited her into her house where she gave her succour after hearing her story.
“You’ll stay here until we can figure out what to do,” she had said. “In the meantime don’t venture out at all, not even to relieve yourself.”
Marubini had done all her business in the house and poor Ma Chirikure had to dump the result in the gullies under cover of darkness. She had not told Chata of her secret guest because she knew that once transferred to a third party a secret was no longer a secret. It was only after five days that Ma Chirikure had returned home to tell Marubini of the rumours that were doing the rounds in the town: her betrothal had been cancelled. No one had advanced any reason for the cancellation. Marubini had therefore assumed it had something to do with her spirited resistance. Had she not run away from home, she believed, she would have been a resident of Rendani’s compound by then.
The neighbourhood, on the other hand, had variously attributed the cancellation to the witchcraft of Chido’s grandmother, Marubini’s supposed big-headedness ever since people praised her for being the kind of dancer who made rain fall, the notion that she would be a disgrace to the nobility on top of the hill because she was alleged to have exposed herself to Chata who had sculpted her nakedness, the fact that she had frequented the boisterous crowds outside Chata’s house and maybe she had even joined the Community of Gapers . . . and many other speculations that ranged from the wild to the plausible.
Right from the beginning Rendani had suspected that Chata had something to do with the King’s abrogation. It had to do with whatever he might have told Baba-Munene that day of their dance confrontation. He could not fathom what it might have been. All he knew was that that very evening he had received an unexpected delegation of Baba-Munene and four members of the Council of Elders. As soon as he welcomed them into his house he had known that something was wrong; they were not making a social call. He also knew that it was something personal. If it had to do with matters of state they would have summoned him to Baba-Munene’s compound or to the Royal Court. Also, he had observed that none of the elders wanted to look him in the eye. When he had offered them a calabash of beer they had said they would drink it another day, their message was urgent and they didn’t want to waste any time. They had then expressed their regret that they had to be the ones to bring bad news to a fellow member of the Council of Elders. Baba-Munene had then ceremonially announced that the King was ordering him to cancel the dzekiso arrangements that were planned for the next day. The King did not approve of the marriage.
At first Rendani had thought it was a joke. But none of the elders was laughing.
“Since when does the King approve or disapprove of people’s marriages? Doesn’t he have bigger things to worry about? The lack of rain, for instance?”
Rendani’s next thought had been of the people at his compound who were busy preparing for the festivities. His maternal uncles were there and already drinking beer near the cattle enclosure and looking forward to leading the mission the next day. His wives and their friends from the neighbourhood had started to brew more beer. The beasts that were to be slaughtered in the morning had already been selected, and the slaughterers were ready with their knives, already salivating for the pieces reserved for them by tradition, which they would roast as they completed the skinning of the animals. What would all these people say when they heard there would be no dzekiso? How was he going to live down the shame and the embarrassment?
“The King’s decision has nothing to do with you personally,” Baba-Munene had continued. “It has to do with Marubini. She’s a national treasure as the Rain Dancer. She can’t be that and be married at the same time.”
“She will be more of a Rain Dancer when she’s married to me. Doesn’t the King see that? She will belong here on the top of the hill. She’ll be ours; we’ll make her dance for us any time we need rain.”
“Not as a married woman; no, she can’t,” said Baba-Munene.
“Did you see the kind of dance she performed during the rainmaking festival? Did you see how rigorous it was?” asked one elder.
“No married woman can do that dance,” said another.
“Only maidens who have not been touched by men can do that dance,” said yet another.
“And we know that when she is married she will have children,” added Baba-Munene. “No mother can or should do those dances.”
“And who knows if motherhood will not take away her rainmaking powers?” said the first elder.
Rendani was getting desperate.
“What if I promise never to touch her? That she will stay a virgin as long as we need her as a rainmaker?”
“Not a rainmaker, son of Zwanga,” Baba-Munene corrected him firmly. “Only the King can be a rainmaker.”
“Rain dancer, I mean,” said Rendani.
“Then what would be the point of marrying her? Just the prestige of having her as a wife?” asked an elder.
There was some logic in what they were saying. He had not thought of all that. But how ridiculous it was that the King of Mapungubwe had been reduced to depending on little girls to make rain for him! How enfeebled and impotent could a King be? Rendani had kept these thoughts private. He had not wished to be accused of reviling the sacred being of a living ancestor. He had also wanted these men to be on his side so that they could plead his case for him. It no longer mattered to him if Marubini could make rain or not after marriage. All he had wanted to do at that point was to save face.
The King had not changed his mind even after Rendani’s representations through the Younger Father of the kingdom. For a few days Rendani had walked around his compound in a daze. He had even neglected his leopards; they could be heard from a distance grumbling and roaring in their cage. His wives had spilled all the beer in a nearby stream and had retreated into their houses where they sat on mats with heads bowed as if there was a bereavement. Princess Dova had done likewise, although deep inside she was rejoicing. The maternal uncles had returned to their homes in the town below the hill and at the outlying farmsteads.
One day Rendani just snapped out of it. He returned to his duties as the Royal Sculptor and a member of the Council of Elders with renewed enthusiasm. He gathered the sculptors of Mapungubwe for the carving of the new palisades for the King, and he joked and laughed boisterously with everyone, including Chata. He had not shirked this time and supervised the ritual personally while also carving even more palisades than the rest of the sculptors. Once more Baba-Munene was proud of him; he even believed that perhaps it had all been Chata’s imagination that his son-in-law had ambitions of usurping the power of the King. Yet during all that time Rendani was hatching a plan to get even with Chata.
That was when he was struck by a bright idea: give Chata an award for his chryselephantine work of art. Crown him Carver of Carvers. Place him on a pedestal and that would take away his freedom to create at will.
EVEN AFTER CHATA HAD completed most of his work on his sculpture the Gapers continued their vigil. We’ve seen that they no longer gathered to watch him work, but to gaze at the sculpture as it stood impassively in the grotto, which was now more of a shrine. They sang their joyful songs that could, however, turn mournful at the snap of Anotida or Lutendo’s fingers.
Lutendo had brought some of her drummers from the top of the hill, causing further disgruntlement in the ranks of the religious leaders. The prophecies were continuing unabated. When the rays of the sun shone on the Rain Dancer Anotida read her predictions in the language of the spirits. Lutendo confirmed the divinations with her tablets. She no longer used clay tablets. Chenayi had carved her new ones from ivory – the first time Chata noticed that he had learnt to carve ivory from watching hi
m. Chenayi had used some of his prime ivory without his permission. He returned from a hunt one day to find Chenayi carving. At first he had been angry, but he let it go with a warning when he noticed how skilfully the boy was handling the tools, as if he had been born with them in his hands; how smooth and accurately rectangular the completed tablets were; and how fast he had accomplished the job.
“Next time please ask if you want to use any of my things,” he had said.
“I am making these for Lutendo because she is beautiful,” Chenayi replied.
So now Lutendo could cast the tablets on the ground with the forcefulness of a dance without any fear that they would break. And Chenayi was right. She was beautiful. The young men who salivated whenever they saw her said hers was wasted beauty because she would never marry any man, as was the tradition in her order of diviners. She could only marry other women, in the same way that male diviners of that order married other men.
The presence of an esteemed diviner with such strong royal connections at Chata’s compound brought along more people who were not necessarily captivated by the Community of Gapers but were eager to have their fortunes told and their ailments healed.
The increased traffic was beginning to get on Chata’s nerves. Once he had been irritated enough to ask them to leave. He had threatened to close the grotto and restore his house to what it had been before it was destroyed by the King’s men. “This must stop!” he had cried. “I want to get on with my life.” But Anotida had responded: “It’s not up to you any more.”
Those who saw the Community of Gapers as lunatics wondered why Chata had let things go this far. For instance, what was in it for him? Some were impudent enough to ask. He laughed it off and told them that he had nothing to gain from the gatherings. He did not subscribe to whatever their teachings were, if they had any. He did not tell the people that he had rejoiced at the presence of the Gapers in the beginning because it was wonderful that people were admiring his art. Artists are needy beings who thrive on approval. To create to the roar and applause of such fervent audiences was orgastic for him. But as time went on the excitement had worn off and he merely tolerated the crowds. He hoped that one day they would get bored and go home, never to return; the novelty of the Rain Dancer would wear off. But it never did.
Later Chata realised that the grandees on top of the hill were exercised by the presence of these people at his homestead. They were seen as a source of instability and a disturbance to the peace and security of the town. To crown it all, Lutendo had descended the hill to join them as did more renegades from the well-bred sectors of the community. People said she no longer returned to her home on top of the hill but was sheltered by Anotida at her dilapidated house. These blue-blooded devotees mixed with the common people from the despised old residents’ sector of the town in defiance of the natural divisions that had been determined by Mwali Himself. The fact that the grandees were unsettled by these developments was reward enough for Chata. He covertly rejoiced that Baba-Munene and his circle were squirming in their juices because they did not know how to deal with Lutendo’s apostasy. They couldn’t drag her by the hand up the hill or whip her to her senses; she was a diviner and they wouldn’t want to enrage the spirits that inhabited her body. Only her father could take disciplinary measures against her. But he was so devastated by his daughter’s desertion that he was not speaking to anyone. His spirits were deflated; they were not ready for a showdown with her spirits.
Though Chata had no power over the Gapers – to them only the sculpture mattered and its creator might as well not exist – in the presence of Rendani he pretended that he commanded influence over them. Not that he had socialised with Rendani since the confrontation of seasons before. But in a town like Mapungubwe he was bound to bump into him somewhere. For one thing, Rendani was the Royal Sculptor and therefore Chata was under his jurisdiction. He had an obligation to answer his call when he summoned sculptors, carvers, blacksmiths and goldsmiths – more often than not the same people – to the hill to outline the needs of the kingdom and the comings and goings of the Swahili traders. And during the carving of the King’s palisades they had spent a number of days working together. They had both made a show of cordiality, but those who knew them from the days when they were growing up under Zwanga’s wing could sense the tension between them. Rendani made jokes that were on the surface self-deprecating but were really meant to teach the misguided that he was not defeated and was still a powerful man in the kingdom who could marry whoever he wanted any time of the day. Chata laughed heartily to show his appreciation of Rendani’s jokes, but those present could sense his insincerity. Chata had also made jokes of his own about his Gapers. He imitated some of their songs and Anotida’s arthritic dance. Rendani had joined in the laughter, though his seemed exaggerated in his attempt to feign conviviality.
Besides feeding mopane leaves to his quagga and going for an occasional hunt, there wasn’t much work for Chata after he completed the major work on the Rain Dancer. He had no gold left since he had used the last of it on the head. He was contemplating going back to his mine. His assistants, Batsirai and Chindori, had not brought him his share of gold for a while. The last time Chindori came he claimed that things were difficult as the mine was turning out to be not as productive as before. A mining village had emerged and the yields had to be shared among too many people. He and his brother were even thinking of prospecting for gold further north. But they promised to wait until Chata returned.
Even if he had had some gold he would not start on another sculpture. The Rain Dancer had drained him. He felt empty inside since completing it. And yet he went back to the grotto from time to time and just stood there looking at it. Most times Chenayi would be with him. People said Chenayi was Chata’s tail because he followed him everywhere. It was just fortunate that Chata never went courting otherwise the idiot savant would be there as well with his mirror. When they had had their fill of the Rain Dancer they sat on the veranda and watched the antics of the Community of Gapers.
Chata’s hope of seeing Marubini among them had long died. Ma Chirikure told him that her parents had sent her away to live with relatives to the north, in the land of the Karanga, after the ignominy of the cancelled betrothal. She had not returned since. Maybe she had found a man there and had married and forgotten all about the pain of Mapungubwe.
By the time Chata completed the head Marubini was already gone, so she didn’t get to know whether it was her face or not. What he created, however, was not a human face at all. The only features that were recognisable as human were the chin and the lips. From there, the face extended in many directions like the branches of a baobab tree. When Rendani heard of it he said it confirmed Chata’s distorted and aberrational vision, which could only be expected of the son of a Zhun/twasi. Each branch took the shape of a grotesque creature of the artist’s dreams. Chata had not given up his dream creatures after all. When people saw how real the body of the Rain Dancer looked and how the Namaqua woman, sitting under the dancer and holding her leg, looked as though she was ready to stand up, reach for her begging bowl and walk the pathways of the town, they had concluded that Chata had outgrown the creatures and had learnt to mould and carve life as it was. They didn’t know that Chata could portray both the world of the living Mapungubweans and the dimension of the dead and the unborn, depending on whether or not he was in a trance, or how deep the trance was.
There was a sigh of relief when the neighbourhood saw that the face was not Marubini’s after all. Maybe it was just a coincidence that the body looked like Marubini’s and that those who were privy to her hidden parts recognised them in the sculpture. Even Chido, who had nursed a grudge against Marubini for a long time, felt bad that her erstwhile friend had been bad-mouthed for nothing. But Danai was a hardliner. “Only one person is called the Rain Dancer in this town, and that is Marubini.” Chata, she insisted, was only saving face by creating an ugly head with many faces. He was
belatedly trying to restore the honour of his partner in depravity – Marubini.
The differing perspectives of the two friends extended to the betrothal and its cancellation. Chido was more charitable towards Marubini than Danai. She believed the version of the gossip that said Marubini ran away because she didn’t want to betray her friend by marrying Rendani. Danai tried to convince her that it was in fact the opposite. Marubini ran away to escape the shame after Rendani decided he wouldn’t marry her after all because she had displayed her nakedness to Chata.
Chata, on the other hand, appeared to be unperturbed by Marubini’s disappearance. But Ma Chirikure could see through the pretence. So could Chenayi.
“Let’s go and look for her,” Chenayi said one day.
Chata did not know where that had come from or why it came at the very moment he was imagining how things might have been if he had just come right out with it and proposed to Marubini. He did not respond to Chenayi but just stared fixedly into empty space.
After a long moment of silence he said, “Instead of looking for her I must go to my mine. I need gold more than I need her.”