The Whale Caller (11 page)

He learns table manners, although he suspects that the whole ritual is geared towards arousing him. He is well aware that in the “civilised world” the ritual of eating is some kind of foreplay. That is why gentlemen and ladies have candlelight dinners before bedding each other. He remembers from his travels along the coast that in the African languages he came across the crudest word for sex, which literally translated into “eating.” In this garish language of the gutter a man eats a woman. The Whale Caller surmised it should have been the other way round—although that still leaves his body cringing from the rawness of it all.

The eating rituals extend to “window shopping” at the supermarket. This entails strolling along the aisles, stopping at the shelves displaying food they like, and then eating it with their eyes. They walk together pushing a trolley. Saluni stops in front of a shelf containing cans of beef stew. She looks at the pieces of meat, tomatoes, carrots and potatoes swimming in brown onion gravy on the label. She swallows hard as she eats the stew with her eyes. Then she moves on to the next shelf, and this one is stacked with cans of corned beef with a picture of the beef, potatoes and fried eggs sunny-side up. And then to cans of chicken à la king in thick mushroom sauce. Food fit for a queen. She gormandises
it all with her greedy eyes. She takes a look at the Whale Caller, who has been staring at canned ravioli in tomato sauce. She is disgusted with him.

“You can’t eat that,” she says. “We came all the way so that you can eat good food, not what we eat every day at home.”

“We don’t eat ravioli every day.”

“What’s the difference? We eat pasta. Pasta is pasta even if it has bits of mince in its stupid little envelopes.”

“It is good food to me.”

“Come here, I’ll teach you good food,” says Saluni, dragging him by the shirtsleeve and stopping at a shelf of smoked oysters in cottonseed oil. “Eat!” she commands, and drags him to a shelf of smoked mussels, and then to white crab meat. For dessert they go to a section that has fudge brownies and peanut butter crunch bars and angel food cakes, all pictured seductively on the boxes.

By the time they walk out of the supermarket they have satisfied their tastes, now they go back home to satisfy their hunger with macaroni and cheese.

“I am ravenous,” says Saluni. “I am ready for your macaroni and cheese,”

“Perhaps we should introduce a new system, Saluni,” suggests the Whale Caller. “We should start with macaroni and cheese first, and then take our eyes to enjoy the supermarket delicacies… with full stomachs.”

“It sounds like a brilliant idea,” says Saluni doubtfully. “But if our stomachs are full, are we still going to enjoy eating the food with our eyes? Are we still going to salivate?”

“We can only try,” says the Whale Caller.

“We can only try,” agrees Saluni. She is pleased that he has finally got into the spirit of the eating ritual, in the same way that she got into the spirit of the dance.

They walk quietly for some time, and then he mutters to himself:
“It beats me who would want to buy canned oysters and mussels when we can have the real stuff, fresh out of the water.”

“If we have the real stuff right under our noses, why don’t we ever see it on our dinner table?” asks Saluni. “Why do we only see macaroni and cheese?”

“Because, Saluni, old-age pension money can go only so far. Plus I like macaroni and cheese. It’s as decent a meal as you can get.”

It’s been more than a month since Sharisha migrated to the southern seas. Autumn still carries smells of warmth. Soon it will be winter, and then the rains will fall. Saluni is an almost fulfilled woman. She no longer has the need to waste her life away in the taverns of Hermanus. She has the Whale Caller now. And she has the Bored Twins. She has the wine too, either from the mansion or from the Whale Caller, who has got around to buying her the occasional bottle of plonk, according to her demands. However, she suspects that though Sharisha has been gone for such a long time, her aura still hovers in the air, especially in the bedroom. Hence her lack of complete fulfilment.

The Whale Caller continues to sleep in the sleeping bag in the kitchen. But today Saluni is determined that their relationship will be consummated. She will no longer throw hints as she has been doing these past weeks. Hints don’t get through his thick gleaming pate. She will drag him kicking and screaming into bed. And indeed, after taking a bath she gets into bed and calls him to the bedroom.

“I am tired of your nonsense, man,” she says.

“And now what have I done?”

“It’s what you have not done that concerns me.”

He is mystified.

“What have I not done?”

“Tonight I am going to make you cry for your mother,” she threatens.

The Whale Caller is scandalised. And filled with fear.

“You do want to cry for your mother, don’t you? I haven’t met a man who wouldn’t want to cry for his mother. Come on, man, you can’t deny me the joy of making you yell for your mother. I am a love child.”

Such talk makes the Whale Caller very uncomfortable. And very embarrassed. But at the same time it makes him want her. Especially the part about being a love child. He wants nothing more than to make love to a love child. Without further to-do he strips naked and shyly creeps into bed. She shifts against the wall to create more space for him on the single bed. Her body immediately charges him with electric currents. But images of whales interfere at that moment of excitement and he goes limp. Still he manages to convince himself that the whales are blameless, even though he can almost touch them as they float before his closed eyes. The fault for his limpness can only lie with the sweet and mouldy smell, even though tonight it is quite subdued. He tries very hard to obliterate both the smell and the whales from his mind, and focus more on the warmth and the softness of her body. For some time it seems things will work. But at a crucial moment the image of Sharisha appears. His weak manhood becomes even weaker until it dies completely as Sharisha lobtails in the sea of his mind.

“Is there something wrong with me, man?” asks Saluni.

“It is not you.”

“It is that stupid creature, is it not?”

“At least you no longer call her a fish.”

“That stupid
fish
has castrated you.”

She spits out the word
fish
as if it were invective. He winces.

“In any case,” says the Whale Caller, “sex is overrated. I don’t
need it. I can live without it. Ever since coming back from my travels around the coast I have lost all appetite for it.”

“If that is the case, go back to your sleeping bag and have wet dreams about your bloody fish.”

Even as she says this, she knows that it contradicts her true wishes. However, she does not want his sinewy body to provoke her into utter madness for nothing. He apologetically gathers his clothes from the floor and slinks out of the room.

She realises that the only way she will ever possess this man and restore his manly functions is to get rid of Sharisha. But how do you get rid of a whale? She closes her eyes tightly and a hazy image of the past emerges. She sees genteel women walking on Cape Town’s promenades wearing long colourful dresses. They are perfectly shaped because of the corsets made from baleen. Some are shading their heads from the sun with umbrellas whose ribs are made of baleen. Down on the rocks by the sea men are fishing and their rods are made of baleen. The beautiful corseted women are bringing them picnic baskets. She looks at them longingly, for if she had lived during their time she would have been one of them. She would be there with the Whale Caller. There would be no Sharisha, for her baleen would have been part of her corset and umbrella. Some of it would have been part of the chair-seats in her beautiful seaside cottage.

In today’s world, with all the foolish laws that protect these useless creatures, what do you do with a stubborn whale that refuses to let loose your man’s very soul? You cannot just go to any old whale and kick it around and beat it up with your stiletto-heel, shouting that it must leave your man alone. Whales don’t take kindly to that sort of thing.

She decides to bide her time. In the meanwhile, in the mornings following the nights her body has been raging, she hunts for mating seals on the rocks and sand hills for her own gratification. She sits on a rock and watches them. She finds it titillating that
the females can make love to their males only a few weeks after the birth of their babies. Sometimes a couple is mating while another female is giving birth on the rocks, with seagulls waiting to feast on the placenta and the umbilical cord.

The whale caller sits on the green bench and watches Saluni frolic in the shallows. The wind is blowing her hair in all wild directions. She dances with the wind. She raises her arms and flaps them in some imagined flight. She takes off and soars higher than any bird has soared. She soars to the clouds. Her perpetual coat fails to weigh her down. And then from the clouds she dives back into the water to resume her dance with the wind. The shallows are a perfect place to express her elation. There are no whales to mess up her day and all his attention is on her. She is truly beautiful, he observes, in spite of her ravaged face. He grudgingly admits to himself that indeed the village drunk’s presence at the Wendy house and at the seaside has brightened his life, especially during an off-season like this when the whales have migrated to the southern seas.

She has no cares in the world. She does not worry about what the next day will bring. She is a transgressor of all that he holds sacred: moderation, quiet dignity, never raising the voice, avoidance of vulgar vocabulary, never flaunting desires of any kind, frugality. Created in sin, she is such a wonderful sinner. A glorious celebrant of worldliness. He envies her for that. He would like to transgress once in a while… to be as carefree as she is… to be taken over by that wanton spirit! She has often egged him to stop being so stiff and taking himself so seriously. Go out on some hedonistic binge! But his fear is stronger than his desire for pleasure. People were made for different things, he tells himself. Saluni was
made to be recklessly happy. He was made to be cautious. And to be patient.

Whereas she always demands instant gratification of life, he would rather have delayed pleasure, for it carries in it something more solid. Momentary pleasure is flimsy and is for the lightheaded ones such as Saluni. True pleasure must be restrained. Whenever Saluni complains of boredom because she thinks there is no variety in their lives or they don’t have much “fun,” except for the waltz and the window shopping, he answers: “Tomorrow is just as good a day as any. We can still be happy tomorrow. You don’t gormandise pleasure as if there is no tomorrow.” She, on the other hand, suspects he is conserving his energy for the return of the whales… for Sharisha.

“Don’t just sit there, man! Come fly with me!” she calls out.

“Those waves don’t look friendly today,” he warns her. “Better be careful.”

“You are just a coward,” she says. “You don’t want to come and play in the water in case you actually enjoy it and become happy! I have never known anyone so scared of happiness!”

She stands on a smooth rock that is surrounded by water. She is looking in his direction and doesn’t see the returning tide.

“Hey, look out!” he shouts.

But it is too late. The tide sweeps her away. Her eyeballs almost pop out in bewilderment, which leaves the Whale Caller in stitches. She disappears in the waves and then pops up again, raising her hand as if she is waving. He waves back, still laughing. As the waves toss her about she reminds him of a breaching whale. Although she is just a speck compared to the smallest whale that ever visited Hermanus, she begins to assume the demeanour of a playful whale. And this sends him into a further paroxysm of laughter. Until he realises that Saluni is not clowning about. She really is in trouble, wrestling with the waves. And they are getting
the better of her. For a while he had forgotten that Saluni was not Sharisha and that not all women are at home in the sea like Sharisha. He kicks off his boots and runs in her direction. He dives into the water. He is still laughing when he swims back to shore with her.

She is both angry and puzzled as she gasps for air and throws up the salty water. She has never seen him laugh this much. Come to think of it, she has never seen him laugh at all. At best he chuckles. And here he is, having a good laugh at her expense.

He places her on the sand and takes off her coat. He pumps the water out of her stomach. Thankfully she has not swallowed that much. She vomits bits of the macaroni and cheese that she had for lunch.

“The damnable coat,” he says as he continues to pump. “It almost killed you.”

“You don’t like my drinking,” she says between the heaving and the groaning. “You don’t like my coat. What else don’t you like about me?”

“Your stubbornness,” he says. “You could have died in there. You should have seen yourself. You were quite a sight.”

“You think this is funny, do you?” she asks, and then a stream of curses—mostly about his mother’s genitalia—escapes her beautiful but chapped lips.