The Expedition to the Baobab Tree by Wilma Stockenstrom Page B

where bundles of jasmine bulged over the garden walls and put their scent in service of the dead.
    How did my benefactor come by his wealth? I once asked the stranger, when he and I were all that remained. I stroked the pea-shaped swellings of the scarification marks on his forehead. My finger glided over them. Two mad pioneers that we had become, now two devoted to each other.
    How? I asked again in the intervals between a lourie’s abuse. My finger glided over his lips, purple as a fig. How thin he had become, it struck me. His cheeks so sunken. He lay with eyes closed in a hollow full of soft moldering leaves.
    Busybody, he tried to hush me. I kept on asking.
    Your kind made him the most powerful person in the city, the stranger then said. You ought to feel flattered, actually. Your benefactor was a connoisseur in a class of his own and seldom bought lower-grade material. In your case he was absolutely right. Look, he indicated, your physical proportions are of a rare symmetry.
    He wanted to stroke me. I pulled my arm away.
    How did he come by his wealth?
    Again the stranger came with evasive explanations of aesthetic considerations that had led the benefactor-merchant to seek perfection, a balance between beautiful externals and the intrinsic, and that had also led him to view his slaves as a collection of art objects, meticulouslypurchased with an eye to investment and sometimes disposed of individually at a profit after he had refined them through education, as he had admittedly done in my case. It was then pointed out to me that my benefactor had displayed a remarkable appreciation of my qualities, to such an extent that he had never disposed of me and even allowed me at his deathbed.
    That’s not how he got rich, I objected. He must already have had a lot of money to afford such a hobby. Where did this man come by the means for it?
    And what if I said he was a brigand?
    Then that is what he was.
    A slave raider?
    Everyone is a robber of something. Robbers are all I know.
    Am I one?
    How should I know?
    What if I were?
    Then you are.
    I rob money, I don’t rob people, said the stranger. I rob on the open seas. I rob before I am robbed, before I become booty.
    Like me, I said.
    Yes.
    Did my benefactor hunt us in the interior?
    No, the stranger laughed, that is not how one becomes rich. The outlay is not worth the trouble and the profit. Rather be an ivory hunter, for your product is something dead, more easily transported. People, on the other hand, die like flies, and have to be fed, and tryto escape, and your expenditure on guards, on food, on weapons, is tremendous. Human loss is comparable to capital loss. No, it is the exceptional type who becomes a slave hunter. And then you run the danger too of being killed and robbed in turn. That is how your benefactor set to work. He had spies everywhere, and messengers. Then he ambushed the slave raiders and their convoys somewhere near the coast, when all of them, captives and guards, were tired to death and offered little resistance. That was when he was young. He put together enough to build his house, where he could live peacefully as an established prominent citizen, turned his back on brigandage, and concentrated on gold, ambergris and wood, on copper, to which the rich people of the city attached more value than gold, and on his hobby.
    Then the stranger lay with his eyes shut, silent, as though exhausted by talking.
    I felt helpless with humiliation but tried not to cry, or not to cry visibly or audibly. Possession and loving are concepts that damn each other. I did not want to be as he and the others, all the others in my life, from my earliest memories of huts and mother and security in a misty, sultry forest basin, from my memories of the lascivious man who bought me to deflower me, and the spice merchant whose labors I had to endure grinding my teeth, I did not want to be as they all regarded me, all of them, my benefactor with his fatherliness and this one