The Expedition to the Baobab Tree (6 page)

Hateful one. You are loathing like me. Come and kindle your ill in me. I am evil and dangerous. I am dried-out ape dugs and fresh slippery ox eye and peeled-off human skin and the venom of the deadly sea slug with the sucker mouth. I am hatred and hatred’s mask. I am deformed. There is a snake in my blood. I drink my own blood. I kick in my swoon. I flounder.

Men came and sang like girls to lay the spirits, but the fires would not flare up. Timbila players from all over the city gathered around me in a circle of clinking slats whose water sounds, sounds like water stars, star drops, dew of bitter stars, were supposed to cool me and, sprinkling down, extinguish my rebellion. But what was I if I was no longer my child? How could an afflicted person feel regret?

Finally the gora player. Tap the single string, a flow of thoughtful sounds gradually moving down the string, a continuous tapping of
sounds, each of which immediately fell to earth and became sand and remained lying in the sand never to germinate. Down and down slipped the sounds, deep into the sand. Deeper than taproots ever go.

Deeper than the kingdom of the earthworms. It was enough. It was buried. It was done. I was picked up and, apparently for a risible sum, disposed of. The gora player stopped playing, pushed the stick into his thong belt, put the gora over his shoulder, and left.

That day my new owner bought a glittering cock with bright yellow feathers on head and throat, the neck purple-brown, the back impressively speckled yellow-brown, the wings magnificently black-green with rust-colored tips, the breast a glitter of dark grey and green-gold, a cock with a kick and a crow, and me.

The cock walked around the yard as he wished and mounted the hens whenever he wished. He crowed us awake in the mornings but also crowed in the evenings to predict good weather, upon which it poured. We threatened him with the pot. Cock, cock, we want to eat you. Cock, cock, fly onto the roof ridge of our hut and crow the day red. Your owner is stingy with his chickens. I mean our mutual owner. You and we, cock, cock, your crowing and shitting and our chatting and our excretions and secretions, our babies, our ornaments of pod mahogany seeds and our body cloths, and the house and the warehouse full of baskets of spices and the rats there, all his. The cooking equipment, the eating utensils, our lice, the cockroaches, the ants in the cracks of the walls and the earth around the house, all his. My labor his. My sleep his. My coming and my going. My sweat. My hair. The soles of my feet. The ant can hide away. So can
the cockroach. And the rat. Not I. I do not know where. You and I, cock, we are trapped.

When I was expecting my third, I visited an abortionist. My friend stopped me. Life is cheating me, life is poison honey, I complained tiredly. She threw away the seductively scented violet tree roots I had bought.

What did you pay with? she asked.

With myself.

She scolded me. Whore, she called me, which made me laugh.

If it were true I’d be rich.

Go away! she scolded.

Yes, I joked tetchily: the world stretches as far as the master’s eye can see.

One day. Oh yes, one day. As far as the master’s eye can see, but I wanted to go still further. One day.

My next benefactor-owner plainly had a wider worldview, stretching from deep in the bush to the sea’s horizon, including negotiations with gold-miners and woodcutters and the dispatch of goods up the coast and, through the intervention of the charming stranger to whom I, an impudent slave girl, became enslaved, to lands over the sea as well.

It was far, but I wanted still further. I had a craving for distance.

Here now in my baobab I am still bounded on all sides by the horizon. So does one ever break through a horizon? Life is treacherous, like poison honey. Come from afar, I thought I should perhaps pack all the landscapes that had passed before my eyes in a ring around me,
that would certainly yield a wider horizon. The further I traveled, the wider it had to become. And in fact everything has shrunk to what a tree defines.

Here there is standstill. Here there are hollowness and artefacts. Here there is care – I hesitate to call it adoration – on the part of the little people who pretend they are invisible. Here there are gifts of venison and sour plums and edible fungus. My ostrich eggshell with the neat little hole breaks and is replaced. My collection of beads is added to. I acquire clothes. I feel good, I feel presentable in my leather apron and cloak decorated with spring-hares’ bones, in my self-strung black and green beads and my long strings of ostrich eggshell chips. They are the clothes of a new life in which I travel all around the baobab and never lose sight of it, since what lies on the road back happened only once, and what lies in whatever direction on the other side is (bitter realization) not intended for me to tackle on my own.

I am a melancholic but I do not stop searching, said my ever-voyaging, ever-traveling, my always charming stranger when the eldest son made him the offer. I like to reconnoiter. I like to discover. I cannot get enthusiastic about humanity, but I do not stop testing and do not stop searching.

No, let me not curse him. He should have known that I had no choice but to follow him, for I was not a searcher, I was one driven from circumstance to circumstance, and whoever bought me had to keep me, and this time would keep me. Sometimes it was pleasantly advantageous and easy to be property. I was simply someone together with someone else.

Even before the death of the youngest son, the eldest son had conceived the fantastical plan and begun making arrangements for a brand new kind of expedition. No one had ever heard of such a thing, and our city dwellers were not uninformed. News from across the seas and from the interior reached them regularly. As wide-awake traders they were skeptical about whatever was supported by nothing but guesswork and whatever was, in their considered opinion, the idle talk of poets. The dream of the unknown. The enticement of the foreign. Playing games with knowledge. For such purposes the city had its marginal figures, the subtle word artists and the storytellers on the squares to whom the children listen open-mouthed and whose entertainment value, including the word artists’, rose and fell according to whether they succeeded in exciting or boring listener and reader. Yes, they, the colorful madmen. And if a rich man’s heir wanted to act stupidly romantic, wanted to prove that an overland route ought to exist, then it meant that there would be opportunities for preying in his absence. It meant that the trade contacts so carefully initiated and forged by his father could now freely be grabbed and taken over by whoever was sly and quick enough. No one expected competition from the middle son, seeing that he had long since settled into a remarkably profitable brothel enterprise behind the glitter and show of the gold-trading business that he had already begun to manage several seasons before the father’s death.

And then there was the unfortunate accident to the youngest son, the carefree one. So many disasters struck this house. On the death of his father there followed the quarrel between the eldest son and
the spiteful unmarried daughter. She left the family home fuming. Now her dried-out spirit nourished itself on thoughts of vengeance. They swelled up her whole existence from early in the morning till late at night as she intrigued and schemed to bring the eldest son to his knees, even if it meant that she and the married sisters and her two brothers should all go under. She had the look of someone on the hunt. She had the smell of someone who had become cancerous, and whatever she came in contact with she polluted with the venom and the cunning in her breath. She was contaminated with bitterness.

I stayed out of the way of her breath and attached myself with softening heart to the youngest son, to whom I had been bequeathed. He was good and kind and not interested in the slightest in the slaves and slave girls and the other duties he had inherited, and went his way unperturbed with an engaging smile and a casual greeting.

No, I did not believe the stories that he sought out his death because of a disappointment in love. Someone who knew the way through the coral reef as well as he did does not simply stumble, so whispered the slaves to each other, and the mourners in the house. Two fatalities between new moon and full moon. How long is the life of a man? From one wink to another of the lightning. From the fuller swelling of the drop to its fall. So long is the life of man. From move to checkmate. And heads were shaken and hands were wrung – yes, so long is life. And the young tree was chopped down, and the voyage was short and the boat capsized and sank, and the mourners piously got through with all such nonsense as befitted the occasion.

No, he was not the type who willfully stepped on a stonefish. Perhaps
one of his comrades called his name to draw his attention to a school of rabbitfish in the purple deep-sea water beyond the reef, and he looked up and staggered on a sharp coral point and lost his balance. That was more likely. That, too, was what his comrades said. They brought him home on a stretcher, in his death as slender and beautiful as he was when he left the house in the morning to go and catch fish in that remote bay. Helplessly they had had to watch how, after they had carried him back to the beach, he had thrown himself down without control and kicked, and how foam had come from his mouth, and how he had then grown still, glorious again after the brief mad interlude that had helped him from life to death, again in death as perfect and untouched as he had been in life, a youth who was contained in himself, I reckon, and in his self-absorbed charm had never experienced either sincere friendship or sworn enmity.

I counted up what I stood to lose by his death and what I stood to gain. For the umpteenth time my future was being decided on a whim. I waited tensely. For I knew this fear. Were he and I not old friends? If anyone was ever true to me, then it was he, perhaps because he had become part of me and accompanied my heartbeats as he accompanied my breathing, because he sat in the white of my eye, in the trembling of my fingers. My companion, who had come to acquaint himself with me on my forced march, who had openly made himself at home alongside me and blown his suffocating breath over me – here he was again.

The day after my benefactor’s death, when I, soggy with love and confused, had gone in search of the stranger, then too the fear was
with me, and it was fear and longing that propelled me forward; and uncertainty, the only certainty I could always count on, led me to streets where mold made the walls break out in multicolored sores and the gates hung askew and rotten and I recognized a building, I recognized some of the slaves who went in and out there with baskets on their backs. It was my previous owner’s spice warehouse and I decided to visit my girlfriend, and I arrived in my splendid silk robe and my new quick way of talking, my precious manners, and there I stood awkward with embarrassment, confined within my affectations.

She sat with her legs crossed on the ground in front of the dilapidated hut scratching in the sand with a stick. The hens and chicks scoured as before in the yard, around the huts and house, and around the mango trees where fallen fruit stank sourly. She did not seem to mind the chicken shit and the filth. A naked baby with snotsmears on its top lip crept about on one side and stuck filthy sand into its mouth. I asked if it was hers. She did not reply. She gazed at me. I wanted to pick up the baby but thought better of it. I considered what I could give him. My friend gazed at me. When I walked off, I felt that piercing gaze on me. I felt someone throw something that hit me. I turned around. I saw her picking up handfuls of sand and throwing them at me. I called her name. The baby, also hit by the sand, laughed with delight. Then he began to cry. I walked off, overcome. The baby cried with rage.

I went back past the slaughterhouse and the tall palm trees there that tried not to see anything. I walked past the market women and the slave square and the skiffs drawn up on the beach, their masts
snapped back like comical antennae. I saw the sole dhow frisking on the swell and called out again my shrill inquiry about the stranger and saw again gestures saying no, and I turned back to the great dreary silent house where bundles of jasmine bulged over the garden walls and put their scent in service of the dead.

How did my benefactor come by his wealth? I once asked the stranger, when he and I were all that remained. I stroked the pea-shaped swellings of the scarification marks on his forehead. My finger glided over them. Two mad pioneers that we had become, now two devoted to each other.

How? I asked again in the intervals between a lourie’s abuse. My finger glided over his lips, purple as a fig. How thin he had become, it struck me. His cheeks so sunken. He lay with eyes closed in a hollow full of soft moldering leaves.

Busybody, he tried to hush me. I kept on asking.

Your kind made him the most powerful person in the city, the stranger then said. You ought to feel flattered, actually. Your benefactor was a connoisseur in a class of his own and seldom bought lower-grade material. In your case he was absolutely right. Look, he indicated, your physical proportions are of a rare symmetry.

He wanted to stroke me. I pulled my arm away.

How did he come by his wealth?

Again the stranger came with evasive explanations of aesthetic considerations that had led the benefactor-merchant to seek perfection, a balance between beautiful externals and the intrinsic, and that had also led him to view his slaves as a collection of art objects, meticulously
purchased with an eye to investment and sometimes disposed of individually at a profit after he had refined them through education, as he had admittedly done in my case. It was then pointed out to me that my benefactor had displayed a remarkable appreciation of my qualities, to such an extent that he had never disposed of me and even allowed me at his deathbed.

That’s not how he got rich, I objected. He must already have had a lot of money to afford such a hobby. Where did this man come by the means for it?

And what if I said he was a brigand?

Then that is what he was.