a new life in which I travel all around the baobab and never lose sight of it, since what lies on the road back happened only once, and what lies in whatever direction on the other side is (bitter realization) not intended for me to tackle on my own.
I am a melancholic but I do not stop searching, said my ever-voyaging, ever-traveling, my always charming stranger when the eldest son made him the offer. I like to reconnoiter. I like to discover. I cannot get enthusiastic about humanity, but I do not stop testing and do not stop searching.
No, let me not curse him. He should have known that I had no choice but to follow him, for I was not a searcher, I was one driven from circumstance to circumstance, and whoever bought me had to keep me, and this time would keep me. Sometimes it was pleasantly advantageous and easy to be property. I was simply someone together with someone else.
Even before the death of the youngest son, the eldest son had conceived the fantastical plan and begun making arrangements for a brand new kind of expedition. No one had ever heard of such a thing, and our city dwellers were not uninformed. News from across the seas and from the interior reached them regularly. As wide-awake traders they were skeptical about whatever was supported by nothing but guesswork and whatever was, in their considered opinion, the idle talk of poets. The dream of the unknown. The enticement of the foreign. Playing games with knowledge. For such purposes the city had its marginal figures, the subtle word artists and the storytellers on the squares to whom the children listen open-mouthed and whose entertainment value, including the word artists’, rose and fell according to whether they succeeded in exciting or boring listener and reader. Yes, they, the colorful madmen. And if a rich man’s heir wanted to act stupidly romantic, wanted to prove that an overland route ought to exist, then it meant that there would be opportunities for preying in his absence. It meant that the trade contacts so carefully initiated and forged by his father could now freely be grabbed and taken over by whoever was sly and quick enough. No one expected competition from the middle son, seeing that he had long since settled into a remarkably profitable brothel enterprise behind the glitter and show of the gold-trading business that he had already begun to manage several seasons before the father’s death.
And then there was the unfortunate accident to the youngest son, the carefree one. So many disasters struck this house. On the death of his father there followed the quarrel between the eldest son andthe spiteful unmarried daughter. She left the family home fuming. Now her dried-out spirit nourished itself on thoughts of vengeance. They swelled up her whole existence from early in the morning till late at night as she intrigued and schemed to bring the eldest son to his knees, even if it meant that she and the married sisters and her two brothers should all go under. She had the look of someone on the hunt. She had the smell of someone who had become cancerous, and whatever she came in contact with she polluted with the venom and the cunning in her breath. She was contaminated with bitterness.
I stayed out of the way of her breath and attached myself with softening heart to the youngest son, to whom I had been bequeathed. He was good and kind and not interested in the slightest in the slaves and slave girls and the other duties he had inherited, and went his way unperturbed with an engaging smile and a casual greeting.
No, I did not believe the stories that he sought out his death because of a disappointment in love. Someone who knew the way through the coral reef as well as he did does not simply stumble, so whispered the slaves to each other, and the mourners in the house. Two fatalities between new moon and full moon. How long is the life of a man? From one wink to another of the lightning. From the fuller swelling of the drop to its fall.
I am a melancholic but I do not stop searching, said my ever-voyaging, ever-traveling, my always charming stranger when the eldest son made him the offer. I like to reconnoiter. I like to discover. I cannot get enthusiastic about humanity, but I do not stop testing and do not stop searching.
No, let me not curse him. He should have known that I had no choice but to follow him, for I was not a searcher, I was one driven from circumstance to circumstance, and whoever bought me had to keep me, and this time would keep me. Sometimes it was pleasantly advantageous and easy to be property. I was simply someone together with someone else.
Even before the death of the youngest son, the eldest son had conceived the fantastical plan and begun making arrangements for a brand new kind of expedition. No one had ever heard of such a thing, and our city dwellers were not uninformed. News from across the seas and from the interior reached them regularly. As wide-awake traders they were skeptical about whatever was supported by nothing but guesswork and whatever was, in their considered opinion, the idle talk of poets. The dream of the unknown. The enticement of the foreign. Playing games with knowledge. For such purposes the city had its marginal figures, the subtle word artists and the storytellers on the squares to whom the children listen open-mouthed and whose entertainment value, including the word artists’, rose and fell according to whether they succeeded in exciting or boring listener and reader. Yes, they, the colorful madmen. And if a rich man’s heir wanted to act stupidly romantic, wanted to prove that an overland route ought to exist, then it meant that there would be opportunities for preying in his absence. It meant that the trade contacts so carefully initiated and forged by his father could now freely be grabbed and taken over by whoever was sly and quick enough. No one expected competition from the middle son, seeing that he had long since settled into a remarkably profitable brothel enterprise behind the glitter and show of the gold-trading business that he had already begun to manage several seasons before the father’s death.
And then there was the unfortunate accident to the youngest son, the carefree one. So many disasters struck this house. On the death of his father there followed the quarrel between the eldest son andthe spiteful unmarried daughter. She left the family home fuming. Now her dried-out spirit nourished itself on thoughts of vengeance. They swelled up her whole existence from early in the morning till late at night as she intrigued and schemed to bring the eldest son to his knees, even if it meant that she and the married sisters and her two brothers should all go under. She had the look of someone on the hunt. She had the smell of someone who had become cancerous, and whatever she came in contact with she polluted with the venom and the cunning in her breath. She was contaminated with bitterness.
I stayed out of the way of her breath and attached myself with softening heart to the youngest son, to whom I had been bequeathed. He was good and kind and not interested in the slightest in the slaves and slave girls and the other duties he had inherited, and went his way unperturbed with an engaging smile and a casual greeting.
No, I did not believe the stories that he sought out his death because of a disappointment in love. Someone who knew the way through the coral reef as well as he did does not simply stumble, so whispered the slaves to each other, and the mourners in the house. Two fatalities between new moon and full moon. How long is the life of a man? From one wink to another of the lightning. From the fuller swelling of the drop to its fall.
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