The Whale Caller (25 page)

Saluni explains their mission. She confesses that during the Kalfiefees she took the girls to town to record. Now the radio man is back with the CD. The father must convince his wife to come and meet the radio man and listen to the CD. She outlines to the man the significance of this great event and the financial rewards that the family will reap. Saluni’s description of the beckoning stardom is so vivid that the man can see banknotes floating in front of his eyes. But he knows that when his wife hears that
Saluni defied her and took her daughters to town, she will be so wrathful that no promises of lucre will make her go to the hotel to meet the man she believes is a thief of voices.

“Don’t tell her about it yet,” says Lunga Tubu. “Let it be a surprise.”

“You are a sly one,” says the Whale Caller. “It might just work. Just tell her that before you go to collect bones and scrap metal you must meet a man in town who may have an interesting business proposition for you.”

“At least now you two are becoming helpful instead of putting obstacles in my way,” says Saluni, obviously pleased with the suggestion. “We need the girls too, man. They must hear their CD. Come with the girls.”

“And how do I explain that to my wife? No, Saluni, you are asking for too much now,” says the father as he walks into the house.

After a few moments he returns with the mother. They all ride on the donkey cart to town. After crossing the Mossel River bridge into the suburb of Voelklip where the hotel is located, Saluni takes out a compact mirror from her sequinned handbag and looks at herself. She rearranges her hair. She applies a little blusher, some lipstick and mascara. She brushes her fur coat with her hands for any speck of dust that may have the temerity to sit on it.

The receptionist phones the radio man and he swaggers down from his room. He is taken aback to see the motley crew. After the introductions and assurances from Saluni that everyone present has a vested interest in the business at hand (which continues to remain nameless for the mother’s sake) he invites them to his room.

“Where are the girls?” the radio man asks when everyone is settled on his bed, on the dressing table stool and on the two easy chairs.

“Girls?” asks the mother, becoming suspicious. “What girls?”

“The singing girls, of course,” says the radio man.
“Saluni and the Bored Twins!”

“They can’t make it today,” says Saluni. “Their parents are representing them. We just want to listen to the CD and hear your plans for making us international stars.”

The radio man gets agitated. He screams: “I need those girls here… now!”

Everyone is puzzled by this sudden loss of temper.

“Calm down, man,” says Saluni. “Just play us the CD.”

“It didn’t work,” says the radio man. “Something I can’t understand happened.”

He takes out a CD from his bag and plays it on a portable machine on the bedside table. The voices of the Bored Twins are distorted. Saluni’s voice comes out clearly in its richness, but the girls’ voices are unrecognisable. They sound like mating cats. The mother angrily turns to the father: “And you knew all this?”

“I only knew this morning,” says the father. “These people deceived me too. They came this morning with their story.”

“I swear I don’t know what happened here,” says the radio man. “I came back to arrange for a new recording. It was wonderful when I was listening to the three of you. I sound-engineered the recording myself and everything was wonderful. I am just as mystified as you are that the CD came out this way. I want to take
Saluni and the Bored Twins
to a proper state-of-the-art recording studio in Cape Town.”

“Not my children!” the mother bursts out. “They are not going to Cape Town. They are not going to record their voices ever again.”

“But, please, you can’t do this to your children,” Saluni appeals.

“I do not want to have anything to do with you, Saluni,” cries
the mother. “Do not talk to me. I do not want to see you near my children ever.”

“If you want to be that spiteful, then you can stay with your children, man. I am going to the recording studios in Cape Town. I am going to be a solo act.”

“I can’t record you on your own, Saluni,” says the radio man. “The girls are the main attraction, not you. If they are not part of this, then there is no deal.”

This hurts Saluni deeply. She looks at the Whale Caller to see if he is gloating. He is not. His head is bowed in embarrassment on her behalf.

“I really don’t know how this happened,” the radio man keeps repeating.

“I told you so,” says the mother, glaring at Saluni. “You are fortunate that the machine failed to steal their voices. It tried and failed. That is why the voices on the recording didn’t come out right. They sound like the voices of ghosts. You nearly destroyed my kids. They should just be happy that they still have their beautiful voices.”

She leaves the room in a huff and her husband follows her. They climb onto their donkey cart and ride away. Saluni tries to plead with the radio man to give her a chance but he is adamant that he would not be able to sell her act. He brutally tells her that there is nothing special about her singing. She has the kind of voice that one can hear in any tavern across the country. The Bored Twins were the act he was really interested in. Sooner or later he would have discarded Saluni for the Bored Twins. They would be a successful international act without her rough voice to mess up their angelic voices.

This is too much for the Whale Caller. He smashes his huge fist into the face of the radio man, who goes crashing to the floor. He lies there seeing multicoloured stars. The Whale Caller grasps
Saluni’s and Lunga Tubu’s hands and leads them out of the room and away from the hotel. As they walk along Seventh Street back to the Old Harbour area the Whale Caller expresses his regret that he had to resort to violence. He keeps repeating that he never wanted to hurt anyone.

“Stop whining, man,” says Saluni. “That bastard deserved it. You are
the
man, man. You don’t let anyone mess with your woman.”

The whole town is excited about the eclipse of the sun, but not Saluni. People are buying dark glasses that will enable them to look at the eclipsed sun. Those who cannot afford the expensive glasses that have been made especially for looking at the sun make their own by blackening glass with fire and smoke. Others look for old negatives of photographs, which are also reputed to be effective in protecting the eyes from the wrath of a sun that is being upstaged by an impertinent moon. When the eclipse happens later in the day they will be ready. Everyone knows that only a fool would look at the eclipse with naked eyes, for that is a surefire way of inviting blindness.

Saluni does not participate in the eclipse madness. Her dreams of Hollywood have been crushed and for days now she has been nursing her bruised feelings. She sinks into the silence of depression. The Whale Caller tends to her and feeds her. She does not care about civilised living anymore. She drinks broth from a mug and survives on that. Then she explodes into a rage, walking up and down Main Road cursing aloud at all those who have betrayed her in the past and those who intend to do so in the future. She counts the whales, particularly Sharisha, among those who will have their day of reckoning sooner than they realise. Days of silence alternate with days of rage. Days of silence fill the Whale Caller with sadness because she becomes such a pitiful figure. At
least rage becomes her. Self-pity drains all dignity out of her. The Whale Caller understands that there is nothing personal about these mood swings. He blames it all on the radio man, and this salves his conscience a little for hitting him.

This morning of the eclipse he busies himself with preparing a glass for looking at the sun. At first he hopes the dark brown beer bottles will do the trick. But then he decides it will be much safer to do the tried and tested—he breaks a cold drink bottle and coats it with an even black layer from burning papers just outside the Wendy house. Saluni is standing at the door in her fur coat and red pencil-heel shoes, watching him mournfully.

“I am going to make one for you too, Saluni,” he says.

“I don’t care about it, man.”

“It is a wonder of nature, Saluni. You will see; it will make you feel better. And they say it is going to be a total eclipse this time… just after midday. Hermanus will fall into darkness.”

“I just can’t work myself into an orgasm over darkness, man,” she says, and walks into the house. “I am going to bed. Switch on the lights if your damn eclipse comes while I am asleep.”

His heart bleeds for her. It does become worse when she doesn’t lash out at the world… when the storm rages silently inside her. But there is nothing he can do about it. He has tried to comfort her, to tell her that another radio man—one who will be smart enough to recognise her true talent without the Bored Twins—will come one day. But she only stares at him as if she does not really believe him … as if it does not matter anymore … as if she has resigned herself to a fameless life.

“I am going down to the sea, Saluni,” he says through the doorway. “I’ll be back before the eclipse.”

She does not respond. Maybe she is already napping. All the better if she is because he will feel less guilty about leaving her in this state. But he desperately needs some respite from her sullen-ness.

He finds Sharisha and the child in the blue depths off the peninsula. She seems to be teaching the young one how to use the baleen to sieve prey from the water. Or perhaps they are just competing in some whale game that the Whale Caller has never seen before. He has not brought his kelp horn this time, so he just sits on a rock and laughs at their antics.

All of a sudden the game stops and Sharisha rallies protectively to the young one. She has fixed her eyes on the crag behind the Whale Caller. He turns to look up and sees Saluni walking gracefully in her stilettos and fur coat down the concrete cliff path. Sharisha starts to sail away but changes her mind and moves in towards the peninsula.

“You should have seen them, Saluni,” says the Whale Caller. “They were having so much fun.”

“What kind of a man are you? You can see that I am not well and yet you leave me for these stupid whales.”

“You said you were going to sleep, Saluni. What went wrong? You were not bothered about them anymore. You promised we would not fight over Sharisha again.”

“Obviously you took advantage of that. From now on it’s either the fish or me.”

She tries to shoo Sharisha away, but the whale holds its own. It bellows deeply. It sounds more like a groan. This worries the Whale Caller. He has never seen Sharisha like this; furiously blowing and sending tremors under the water that reach the rocks of the peninsula. She seems to be gearing for a fight. If only he had brought his kelp horn with him he would have calmed her with the tune she knows so well.

“We must go home now,” says Saluni.

“We can’t leave Sharisha like this. There is something wrong.”

“Every time it is Sharisha this, Sharisha that!”

She races to the edge of the peninsula. The Whale Caller now
knows that she came especially to pick a fight with Sharisha. Under the fur coat she wears nothing but her God-given skin, making her intentions very clear: she intends to flash Sharisha to death. She opens the coat, raises her leg and screams: “Take that, you foolish fish!”

But Sharisha has decided to assert herself. She does not budge. She stares Saluni straight in the eye. She does not look scandalised as she usually does when Saluni moons or flashes her. She looks defiant. Instead it is the Whale Caller who looks scandalised.

Saluni tries again. She opens her coat, raising the other leg and shouting: “You take that, stupid fish!” And then moving from one leg to the other in a frenzied dance, all the while opening and closing the front of her coat and screaming: “And that! And that!”

Still Sharisha does not move. Her defiant stare is unflinching. It is clearly a standoff that Saluni cannot win. She is devastated. She runs up the cliff path weeping, back to the Wendy house.

The Whale Caller remains confused for a while. Sharisha continues with her deep bellowing. The Whale Caller becomes frantic. He should have brought his kelp horn. Somehow he needs to calm Sharisha, to comfort her, to assure her that everything is fine. There is kelp all around him. But it is wet and even soggy. It cannot produce any music. He locks the fingers of both his hands together and shapes his hands into a roundish sound box. He blows into the hole created by his thumbs and produces deep bellows similar to Sharisha’s. It works! Sharisha seems to calm down. Her anger gradually melts as he continues to bellow. She bellows back. They exchange bellows for a long time. The child finds this game thrilling and joins with its own weak bellows. These feeble attempts leave the Whale Caller chuckling to himself. He is having such a wonderful time that he does not notice that darkness is gradually creeping in.

He had almost forgotten about the eclipse. He blows the final
bellow to say goodbye and runs up the cliff path. When he gets home he is shocked to find Saluni standing outside looking at the eclipse with her naked eyes.

“You are in a warlike mood today, Saluni,” he says. “First you pick on Sharisha and now you are challenging the sun.”

“You would take her side, wouldn’t you?”

“You started the whole fight, Saluni. She was minding her own business and you came and started the fight,” he says as he reaches for her, trying to save her from her own foolishness.

“Don’t touch me.”

She opens her eyes even wider and defiantly fixes her glare on the sun, outbraving it into darkness. The Whale Caller panics.

“You will go blind, Saluni.”

She turns and looks in his direction and breaks into laughter. She laughs for a long time, jumping about in a jig of victory and joyfully shouting: “I am blind … I am already blind!”

Saluni. She lives in a world of darkness. Her eyes are wide open, yet her world remains black long after the eclipse is gone. The Whale Caller keeps on asking: “Why did you do it, Saluni, why?” She calmly responds that she went blind because there was nothing worth seeing in the world anymore. After all, she has lost Hollywood. And she has lost him to Sharisha.