Salamander (33 page)
Authors: Thomas Wharton
For the first few days out of Canton, the
Bee
had kept along with the East India Company fleet, but soon she outpaced the
huge, lumbering trading vessels with their laden holds. The white spray flew from the ship’s bows as day after day the
Bee
sliced through the waves, her taut sails straining.
Once through the Strait of Sunda they rode the monsoons northwest to Ceylon, laying over to caulk the leaking seams of the hull at the port of Trincomalee. Pica, Darka, and the twins sat under a sailcloth awning on deck, twining strands of tarred rope to make oakum, which Snow and Turini hammered into the loosened joints and cracks between the planks. Eventually even Flood was driven out of the sweltering tomb below decks, and took a hand in the repairs. At the end of the day they all lay prostrate on the deck, drinking the milk of coconuts.
– It’s too bad, Pica said, we can’t sew the ship up like a book.
The next day, to her surprise, her father led them on an excursion through the town. Soon leaving behind the tidy lanes of houses around the harbour, they entered the borderland of the half-castes, a narrow zone of unroofed light between the angled black shadows of the European streets and the hushed, towering forest. On a road curving up a bare hill, a thin snake of blood slid through the dust at their feet. At the crest of the hill they found the source, a ramshackle tannery. The reek of blood and the moans of animals about to meet the knife propelled them forward, but Flood lingered, his eye caught by a display of undyed skins on racks by the entrance.
Pica’s comment the evening before reminded him he had yet to consider how he was going to bind his stack of pages.
While the others waited, he fingered the pale yellow skins, tugged at them, gathered an impression of resilience and supple pliability. The Sinhalese tanner, his own skin dyed a deep blue, knew a few words in English, French, and Dutch, and by
trading these scraps of language back and forth Flood learned that these were the skins of rare monkeys from the interior hills. If he wanted to know more, the tanner told him, he would have to consult the
alam
.
– The what?
–
Alam
, the tanner repeated. He sighed, beckoned Flood though a beaded archway and up a curving staircase. On the roof, under a parasol, an old naked man sat cross-legged on a carpet of palm leaves.
– Father-in-law, the tanner said.
Flood crouched in front of the old man, who was mumbling softly to himself, his head sunk forward, his long, root-like beard covering his naked body.
– Are you … the
alam?
The old man’s muttering ceased and he slowly raised his head. A pair of depthless brown eyes blinked and focused on Flood.
–
Alam…
. Yes. She whispered it, my name, like a secret, in the garden of the English consul. Her lips on my ear. The Jacaranda petals were about to fall.
The old man’s head drooped again.
THE TALE OF THE TANNER’S FATHER-IN-LAW
He was the chief huntsman of the white overlords. She was the governor’s neice. He circled her noiselessly, as if she were a wild animal. One evening after the hunt he was invited among the pavilions, to tell the quaint old stories. She was there, reclined on dark silk laid on the cool, wet grass, a little brown monkey playing about
her white arms. Her eyes were upon him as he told of Prince Rama and loyal Hanuman. How they built a bridge of stones across the sea to Lanka, to rescue lovely Sita from the ten-headed Ravana and his demons.
He told of Hanuman’s monkey army, dying in their thousands on the bloody field of battle, and how their grieving commander, to save them, fetched an entire mountain from the far Himalayas. A mountain on which grew a herb that cured all sickness and restored life to the dead.
Does that mean, she asked him, that my little friend here, being one of their descendants, is immortal?
They all laughed at that. He answered before he could relax the bowstring of his anger.
You should ask the people of the forest, he said. They were here before any of us.
They watched him more carefully after that day, but in her eyes he saw that only she had guessed the truth. The secret he had kept from his new masters, the name a seed wrapped in betel leaves.
She came to him, and he told her his hidden name. They fled together to the forest of his people. He found their way by the trees that held the ancient tattoos. Eyes and arrows. In the forest she gave birth to their child, but there was not enough life in her for both of them.
After she died he killed the monkey, the beloved pet she had not been able to leave behind. He roasted it, chewed its flesh and fed it to the child. A delicacy among his people. Then he took his bow and hunted its brothers. Old rhymes, nonsense for children, drew them down from the branches.
– I shot them and skinned them, the old man said, and with our child in my arms I came down out of the forest. The Portuguese and the Dutch and the English marvelled at the beautiful skins and bought them, and sent me back into the forest to find more.
The old man fell silent, seemed not to hear Flood’s further questions. Behind them the tanner coughed pointedly.
That evening Flood brought several of the undyed skins back to the
Bee
. He stretched one of them on a board, in preparation for making parchment endpapers. Then he found Darka and had her bring him the sealskin left over from the making of the coats.
From Trincomalee they stood southwest for Madagascar, hoping to pass quickly through the equatorial zone, where the weather refused to obey the almanacs. Day after day they were driven before the wind and drenched with rain. When the storms at last ceased the
Bee
was becalmed under a yellow haze. The sea turned bile green, hardly seeming to stir. In the sultry heat their wet clothing refused to dry. When they took it down from the shrouds in the morning it would still be damp, giving them rashes, and chills when night came.
At noon, not even the merest horsetail swish of breeze stirred the air. They went about their daily chores in a surly silence, avoiding one another’s eyes, their conversation at supper pared down to the mere necessities of table etiquette. Finally Darka stitched some odd scraps of canvas together, and Turini hung the resulting patchwork bag from two spars over the side. Now they had a makeshift bathtub that was theoretically proof
from sharks, and in which everyone except Flood spent the hottest hours of the day.
They sighted the coast of Madagascar, anchored to take on fresh water, and continued south. The nights grew colder, and with the relentless damp everyone, with the exception of Flood, succumbed to fever. The twins were struck the worst blow. They lay in their hammocks shivering and crying out now and again from the depths of nightmares that they appeared to be sharing. At a suggestion from Snow, Turini heated chain shot in the furnace and hung the linked cannonballs in their sleeping compartment, where for hours they radiated a dull flatiron warmth.
A southeast gale blew them into Cape Town, where they lay to for a fortnight while the twins recovered. The weather seemed to come in waves here at the land’s end: a day of heat and unearthly stillness giving way to wind and icy rain.
It was in Cape Town that Flood, who had so far escaped the fever, finally succumbed to the rigours of the voyage. Despite his bad leg, he insisted on climbing with Pica up the side of Table Mountain for a view of the land beyond the colony. To the north all of Africa seemed to stretch away before them, sand flats and tawny hills giving way to faint smoke-blue ranges.
As they were descending, the sky swiftly darkened and they looked up to see a milky cloud pouring over the long flat rim of the mountain. Wet flakes of snow drifted around them as they scrambled down the path. Flood stumbled several times and Pica had to help him down the rocky slope.
As they reached the road back to town the sun splintered the clouds and birds rose everywhere from the steaming grass. Rounding a curve, they glimpsed a group of what looked like children in ragged sheepskins flitting across the road and disappearing into the bramble hedge on the other side. The last of
the children paused at the edge of the impenetrable green wall, glancing over her shoulder as they passed. Pica saw that she was a young woman. Under the brim of her goatskin hat her buttery skin gleamed.
She turned to her father to tell him what she had seen and found him lying face down in the road.
They were rescued by a Dutchwoman who happened to be riding past in her carriage. She took them to her house on the outskirts of the colony and had Flood out to bed and tended by her Hottentot servants. Pica rode back to the ship in the Dutchwoman’s carriage to let the others know what had happened. She returned in the evening to find her father awake and seemingly recovered. They were sitting together, chatting, on the enormous whitewashed verandah. As Pica approached she noted that the Dutchwoman had a frontage every bit as impressive as her house.
– Your daughter, the woman said, is a rare blossom. She would be married by now if she lived here.
– I would not, Pica said.
The woman laughed and touched Flood on the shoulder.
– They all say that at her age. I certainly did. But I grew to love my husband in time, more than I thought possible.
THE CURIOUS CONFESSION OF THE WIDOW JANSSENS
When he retired from the ivory trade, her husband had set off one last time to fulfil his dream of finding the source of the Nile. Like so many of his fellow hunters, he was convinced the headwaters of the great river
had to lie not much farther north than they had already ventured from the Cape. How vast, after all, could Africa be?
She was born in this country. She knew that it bred men who made such journeys. Her father had been one of them. It did not matter where they thought they were headed or what direction they took. The destination was always the same.
One of her Hottentot women came to speak with her a few days before his expedition set off. She gave the widow a little grey egg-shaped stone with a hole in either end, and told her about the little animal that lived inside it.
Her people kept these stones with them whenever a loved one went on a journey. The insect inside them, the
kamma
, spun its own thread from the thread of the loved one’s path through the world. A thread as difficult to see as the Hottentots themselves could be when it suited them. One of them could be standing at your elbow for hours and you would not be aware of it.
– The people with shiny skin, Pica ventured.
The widow sipped at her coffee and nodded.
– They grease themselves in sheepfat. Stinks to heaven but keeps the fleas off, and believe me, you want to do that here. They’re the most practical people in the world.
While the loved one was away, those left behind wove the thread of the
kamma
into their clothing, their hair, sometimes their skin. In this way they bound the wanderer to their lives, their bodies.
Without saying anything to her husband, who despised heathen customs, she tore out the stitching of her wedding gown and after he was gone replaced it slowly, a few stitches each day, with the thread of the
kamma
.
For a while he was able to send back letters with those among his party who gave up the search and returned. She learned that they had travelled for weeks and weeks, and there was always more veld, more deserts and more mountains, with rivers flowing from them to the east and the west. Never to the north.
Then the letters stopped, and she had only the thread of the
kamma
to tell her that he was alive.
As the weeks and months wore on the thread grew thinner and she knew that, one by one, his companions were leaving him. In the trembling of the gossamer filament she heard the thunder of sudden torrents down dry streambeds, sweeping men and horses away. When the thread made her fingertips itch, she saw bodies blackening in the sun, half-eaten by carnivorous ants. A prick of the needle showed her a vision of men lying naked, quilled like porcupines with Xhosa arrows.
Then the thread of his journey thickened again, as through it twined another thread, hair-thin and black. She guessed that someone had joined him, and that this someone was a woman. When the end of the thread slid out of the stone and there was no more, she knew that he would never return.
– I hated him then for betraying me, the widow said. But over the years I understood what I had done. How I had
betrayed him, too. I had bound him to me with the finely spun guts of a continent. He was not leaving me so much as joining an endless web.
As it was dark by the time the widow finished her tale, she convinced Flood and Pica to stay the night. In the morning she treated them to a vast breakfast, again on the verandah, and insisted they remain with her for a few more days before setting off again on so long a journey.
The widow Janssens leaned across the breakfast table and held Flood’s wrist in her hand.
– Your father’s pulse, she said to Pica. Still fluttering like a bird’s. You cannot let him leave.
