Zakes Mda - The Whale Caller

“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.