The Expedition to the Baobab Tree (7 page)

A slave raider?

Everyone is a robber of something. Robbers are all I know.

Am I one?

How should I know?

What if I were?

Then you are.

I rob money, I don’t rob people, said the stranger. I rob on the open seas. I rob before I am robbed, before I become booty.

Like me, I said.

Yes.

Did my benefactor hunt us in the interior?

No, the stranger laughed, that is not how one becomes rich. The outlay is not worth the trouble and the profit. Rather be an ivory hunter, for your product is something dead, more easily transported. People, on the other hand, die like flies, and have to be fed, and try
to escape, and your expenditure on guards, on food, on weapons, is tremendous. Human loss is comparable to capital loss. No, it is the exceptional type who becomes a slave hunter. And then you run the danger too of being killed and robbed in turn. That is how your benefactor set to work. He had spies everywhere, and messengers. Then he ambushed the slave raiders and their convoys somewhere near the coast, when all of them, captives and guards, were tired to death and offered little resistance. That was when he was young. He put together enough to build his house, where he could live peacefully as an established prominent citizen, turned his back on brigandage, and concentrated on gold, ambergris and wood, on copper, to which the rich people of the city attached more value than gold, and on his hobby.

Then the stranger lay with his eyes shut, silent, as though exhausted by talking.

I felt helpless with humiliation but tried not to cry, or not to cry visibly or audibly. Possession and loving are concepts that damn each other. I did not want to be as he and the others, all the others in my life, from my earliest memories of huts and mother and security in a misty, sultry forest basin, from my memories of the lascivious man who bought me to deflower me, and the spice merchant whose labors I had to endure grinding my teeth, I did not want to be as they all regarded me, all of them, my benefactor with his fatherliness and this one too, this man whom I embraced with my whole body and allowed to come into me time after time so as to be absolutely full of him, absolutely convulsively full and rich and fulfilled, floating, seed
satisfied, making him, self-content, part of me, of me exclusively – he too, he who had just described me analytically and disposed of me like an object in a dispensation, even he, I was different from what they all thought, utterly different from what anyone might think, I rejected all the opinions, all the observations and reprimands of all the women in my life, what did they know of who I was, what did any of them know.

I remembered the poets’ sarcastic remarks about women in general, but at the time I had not taken them to heart: to tell the truth, I joined in the so-called sophisticated disparagement, and this kind of superficial display of lust did not strike me as vile and immediately to be condemned. Vain. Vainly and frivolously I participated. Clothed in luxurious fabric that enveloped me like a soft caress and with saffian sandals on my feet, quickly adept in all the little arts of seduction, I joined in the talk and laughter. I felt, I knew I was in my flower. I laughed without reserve. I sent laughter upward and outward and picked myself the pale purple double stars of the wild chestnut blossoms to stick in my hair.

My benefactor smiled. He found it attractive. When I put my arms around him it was like protecting a child. Crazy, when he was the possessor, but it was so. He propped his head against my shoulder like, and with the innocence of, a child. And in the wink of an eye he changed and became wiser than I, scolded me, took over and initiated the caresses, and when we had intercourse he was both father and son and I mother and trustful daughter. We knew everything together, completely, wishing for nothing more. Until later on he grew so weak, so pathetically emaciated and listless as the fever got the upper hand
that he scarcely made his appearance in the dining room any longer but chose to remain lying on cool palm mats in his room. Afternoon rain outdoors, the cool brought on by the evenings and followed in the nights by the sharp sparkling of stars as a bonus, the white splash of moonlight over him – all this did little to change his state of mind. In every corner of the room the eye of death glittered. Sometimes he stared absently out over the sea and declined the extract of bitter false-thorn pods that one of us held out to him in a delicate little porcelain bowl. Likewise ignored the prescriptions of the city’s best doctors, uttered his thanks laconically in a hoarse voice and made no use of them.

In my perfect arms he died, supported between my perfect thighs, leaning against my perfect breasts, he and I, father, mother, child, owner, valued art object and servant, lovers.

It had happened too long ago to wish to hate him. There was no time to hate anyone and plan revenge. The veld threatened us. I turned back to the stranger whose gentle nature I had also found out about on this interminably long journey to the mirage of a city in a blooming red desert. Where I had earlier allowed myself to be charmed by his wit, I learned during this time to appreciate his humanity and helpfulness. The circumstances were certainly not conducive to deep conversations embroidered with light-hearted thesis and antithesis, and in those days it seldom happened that the two of us spoke together. I think the encircling silence was too great. It compelled our respect. No, it is silly to think so, for in truth we were usually too tired to begin a conversation. I could not deny that things were going badly for us.
We shuffled one behind the other through the hot region, our tired gaze measured the distance to the next spot of coolness and the relief of a roof of leaves, and though we knew we could not afford it, we lingered longer and longer in this way in the shadows of trees. Like now.

We exchanged apologetic looks. I took his hand and pressed his fingers to my mouth.

We had to be going. It was no good. We had to make up our minds. We thought of the alluring city and everything that would be awaiting us there. We filled in the scanty information provided by the hunters with our imagination, and the deeper we went into the interior, the further from home, the more desolate the bush and the slower and more unwilling our bodies, the more richly we festooned the images we had called up. We did not see that we had begun to pretend that what we wanted must exist. We referred to the city as if it were an accomplished fact that we would soon reach it, just another day and another day, just another couple of days and another couple of days, then we would see it lying on the horizon, flat and shining at the foot of mountains consisting of pure rose quartz.

I dreamed of that rose quartz. My dreams were stuffed full of rose quartz. I could barely move among the craggy pieces. The floors of my dreams were rose quartz, the pillars and the ceiling of my dreams. I peered out between the rose quartz at the rest of the world. I withdrew into rose quartz and nodded contentedly.

But first we had to cross the swamp, the hunters had said.

The more burningly I longed to see the city at the foot of the rose quartz mountains, the longer I wanted to postpone the sight of the
swamp between. For I did not believe the description of white and green water lilies arranged on dew-clear water wherever you looked, and golden reeds to which the tiniest red and silver painted frogs clung, and spiders that tumbled from the glitter of their webs when the dugouts bent the grass.

I had seen what a swamp looked like when we left the sea behind. I felt its oppressive air upon me and its sharp smell irritated my nostrils. Its endless green expanse stretching into the haze enclosed me. I heard a sucking and a bubbling and saw the snouts of crocodiles lying in the bruised mud. I saw mosquitoes in a mist above the pools. I saw mudskippers creep halfway out to stare boldly at me. And the worst was the silence that I vaguely recognized from earlier on. It was the oppressiveness that had been lying in wait for me on a journey of horror so long ago I should scarcely have been able to report on it. But I recognized this silence. It was the supreme wide silence that prevailed over the noisy croaking of the frogs. The silence had a width of weight that muted your appetite for life and then after a never-ending day tried to press you into the mud and bury you with the wingbeat of night. Was it the immeasurability that made yellow sweat drops burst out on your forehead and disturbed your breathing? I recognized it. There was also fear, a sticky fear that shut off your throat. I recognized the fear. In what ways could I still experience it? I knew the fear of bloodthirstiness and of isolation and of ignorance and of punishment and of bewilderment. I knew him.

This fear was part of the air. It hung as far as the coast where the city of my various owners commenced with shanties and pole fences,
with herds of untended goats and spill-off channels full of nightsoil, the busy commercial city to which I was kidnapped.

I had already tried to imagine a kind of existence in which I was not a possession, but it did not come easily to me. What would have become of me in the land of my origin? Would I, for example, have walked, sat, stood differently? Would I have entered into other kinds of friendship, accepted wholly different opinions? Would I have clung to religion? Would I have had a husband, and children by him only? Children I would have raised till they could stand on their own feet? Suddenly I thought: I would have been able to be a grandmother. Grandchildren playing around me in a yard full of tame guineafowl.

Suddenly I saw: here in this city I would never become a grandmother. Here I functioned as a mother till my children were as high as my hip, then I lost all say over them. They disappeared from my life. For me there was no continuation, no links backwards or forwards. There was coming and ending, a finality as if darkness were made abiding. If it had been death, I would have had certainty. Now I did not know.

Where were the children I had brought into life? How would I be able to recognize them if I bumped into them somewhere? And would I be able to recognize them? Sometimes I looked attentively at young faces, searched for myself in their features, their voices, their behavior, their posture – assuming that my children were all here, I thought bitterly, and not sold into service in other cities and countries. I wondered whether I would be able to pick out a child of my own by maternal
feeling, no matter where or how we met. Would I know it was he? Would I immediately feel a glow of recognition course through me, and yearn to press him to me, meticulous identification having been rendered unnecessary by a bittersweet knowledge within me, a source of certainty warmer than the sun, like mothers are supposed to have? Mothers being unfathomable, after all.

It had not yet happened. Nor had I yet heard of such cases. But I continued to look into young faces, listen to young talk.

In the house of my benefactor it was part of my duties to amuse his grandchildren when his married daughters or his middle son paid visits with their spouses and children. Such visits occurred often, at any time, unannounced, and I enjoyed the fun. I liked to see the little ones gobble down sweets. I liked it when they clambered up and over me tirelessly, and I liked telling stories; but with the older boys and girls I did not get along as well. I felt strangely embarrassed with them. It was as if I had consciously to sense their attitudes and desires, and as if my lack of intuition were noticeable in my behavior, as if I betrayed my confusion, even as if I were afraid that they would detect a flaw in me which excessive friendliness and affability simply could not disguise. So there remained a distance between us. Fortunately some of them were already provided with their own slave or slave girl to see specifically to their needs, while the slave girls who came along to look after the small children were only too ready to leave the work and fuss to me. And I enjoyed it. I enjoyed wiping dirty little mouths and listening to terrible accusations and finding words of comfort for
little hurts and big frights. Hey! Hey! I called – Don’t put finger into the parrot’s cage! Oh no! And I cuddled the little bodies till they were out of breath with delighted laughter.

I felt uneasy when my benefactor caught me doing this. His smile. It did not at all rhyme with the self I tried to be for him, and it was certainly not good for my self-confidence in his bedroom. Abruptly I stopped playing and waited, hanging my head, for him to go.

On the whole I could not complain about my place and the scope given to me in his household. I considered myself a lucky, privileged person, without rights but not wholly without choice. Not all slaves by far were as well cared for as those of this house, as I could attest from experience. Granted, we slept in an outside building, but it was built of stone like the main house. Our floors were not covered with carpets. We slept on thick coir mats. There were no ornately carved low tables and red-copper urns standing about in our rooms. But compared with the slovenliness and stuffiness and sour mud and the holes in the wind-torn roof of my previous owner’s slave huts, I could certainly consider myself lucky. Add to this my privileged position which I knew very well how to maintain, and the spick-and-span organization of the house, and I really had little to grumble about.

On the terrace roof where, thanks to my position as favorite, I could freely repair without permission, I liked to spend the sunset, when I could fit it in. At such times I would look at the glow over the interior out of the cloudy fierceness of which I had come, and on the opposite side at the darkening sea that had called me, and I would
stand caught in perfect balance in the interlight. In inescapable transitoriness I could have dissolved like a phantom into the swift black. I was marked out in peacefulness, and whole. When a dog barked, I started out of my rumination and breathed deeply, salty air, smell of crayfish, smell of damask rose, smell of clove and broadbean. I could smell the first early stars. For that reason I could not understand why I might not keep my children. For that reason I had to accept that grown children were what I lacked.