The Expedition to the Baobab Tree by Wilma Stockenstrom Page A

So long is the life of man. From move to checkmate. And heads were shaken and hands were wrung – yes, so long is life. And the young tree was chopped down, and the voyage was short and the boat capsized and sank, and the mourners piously got through with all such nonsense as befitted the occasion.
    No, he was not the type who willfully stepped on a stonefish. Perhapsone of his comrades called his name to draw his attention to a school of rabbitfish in the purple deep-sea water beyond the reef, and he looked up and staggered on a sharp coral point and lost his balance. That was more likely. That, too, was what his comrades said. They brought him home on a stretcher, in his death as slender and beautiful as he was when he left the house in the morning to go and catch fish in that remote bay. Helplessly they had had to watch how, after they had carried him back to the beach, he had thrown himself down without control and kicked, and how foam had come from his mouth, and how he had then grown still, glorious again after the brief mad interlude that had helped him from life to death, again in death as perfect and untouched as he had been in life, a youth who was contained in himself, I reckon, and in his self-absorbed charm had never experienced either sincere friendship or sworn enmity.
    I counted up what I stood to lose by his death and what I stood to gain. For the umpteenth time my future was being decided on a whim. I waited tensely. For I knew this fear. Were he and I not old friends? If anyone was ever true to me, then it was he, perhaps because he had become part of me and accompanied my heartbeats as he accompanied my breathing, because he sat in the white of my eye, in the trembling of my fingers. My companion, who had come to acquaint himself with me on my forced march, who had openly made himself at home alongside me and blown his suffocating breath over me – here he was again.
    The day after my benefactor’s death, when I, soggy with love and confused, had gone in search of the stranger, then too the fear waswith me, and it was fear and longing that propelled me forward; and uncertainty, the only certainty I could always count on, led me to streets where mold made the walls break out in multicolored sores and the gates hung askew and rotten and I recognized a building, I recognized some of the slaves who went in and out there with baskets on their backs. It was my previous owner’s spice warehouse and I decided to visit my girlfriend, and I arrived in my splendid silk robe and my new quick way of talking, my precious manners, and there I stood awkward with embarrassment, confined within my affectations.
    She sat with her legs crossed on the ground in front of the dilapidated hut scratching in the sand with a stick. The hens and chicks scoured as before in the yard, around the huts and house, and around the mango trees where fallen fruit stank sourly. She did not seem to mind the chicken shit and the filth. A naked baby with snotsmears on its top lip crept about on one side and stuck filthy sand into its mouth. I asked if it was hers. She did not reply. She gazed at me. I wanted to pick up the baby but thought better of it. I considered what I could give him. My friend gazed at me. When I walked off, I felt that piercing gaze on me. I felt someone throw something that hit me. I turned around. I saw her picking up handfuls of sand and throwing them at me. I called her name. The baby, also hit by the sand, laughed with delight. Then he began to cry. I walked off, overcome. The baby cried with rage.
    I went back past the slaughterhouse and the tall palm trees there that tried not to see anything. I walked past the market women and the slave square and the skiffs drawn up on the beach, their mastssnapped back like comical antennae. I saw the sole dhow frisking on the swell and called out again my shrill inquiry about the stranger and saw again gestures saying no, and I turned back to the great dreary silent house