Father, those teeth! It wasn’t us, Father! Dirk shouts as he runs.
Gawie clings to me. I release myself. I scold them. Dirk is eight already, he should have known better. He must go and fetch the cane. They know very well one doesn’t tease baboons. When the two have calmed down and have done with admiring the welts on each other’s backsides, I send them bustling to round up the Buys clan.
I reload the gun. Even the baboons are going berserk in these kloofs. The rampant boredom. I thank the Lord for my wives. A bored man feels lonely very quickly. Here among the kloofs there are quite a few old bachelors. And on the frontier women were not always to be found for the asking. There were stories in the more remote areas of a gentleman or two who took tips from the baboons and sometimes anointed a sweet melon as wife. Like the baboons these Lotharios, according to report, also ate the evidence afterwards, either from shame or hunger. And in those parts there was a farmer – not to name names – but they say that he never took a wife. Never even a bit of up and over on the sly. Visitors started remarking that the little orphaned baboon he’d adopted was prancing about the yard sporting a starched white bonnet.
The book is lying open on a map of the interior. I know it’s a map, because I’ve seen the previous ones. Saw how the landscapes with each successive map dematerialise further into hallucinations. The maps of somebody who should rather have stayed at home.
The hassle with my neighbours was merely the spark in the powder keg under my butt. My arse had been itching for a long time to trek. It’s as if my guts and my arsehole throb along with all the world; the contractions and then the expulsions, the coil and release. The whole world breathes in and out and I along with it; I can no longer hold my breath. How can a man sit still if the peristalsis of God’s creation makes his rear end crawl with all the cramping up and letting go? My houses, my farms, my citizenship of the Colony, all of it frames the wild wide chaos out there. The stone markers at the corners of my farm, the house walls of my families, the beds of my wives – all frames. You stake out the boundaries of your house so that you can have a view of the stars. Provisionally. Until one day the frame of the house explodes with the movement it cannot contain.
This morning I call a meeting of all my people.
I’m trekking tomorrow morning at daybreak. Those of you who want to come along, stow your stuff on the wagons if there’s space for it.
Where are we going, Father?
We’re blundering north, my child.
I sit at the table and watch the yard starting to teem. Around me at first the botheration and altercation; then my people start scurrying to get their belongings onto a wagon. I write letters to my comrades to go with me, into the wilderness. It is the year 1814. Eleven years is a long time, but at times it feels no longer than a sweaty morning.
My wife comes walking towards me. She comes to stand in front of the table, her hands and eyes on the table, then she walks around to where I’m sitting and comes to stand next to me, doesn’t make a sound. I get up. She presses me to her.
Are we coming back?
No.
My wife’s name is Elizabeth. She wears a white woman’s frock. I love my wife. We are married. Yes, I, Coenraad de Buys, two years ago went forth to get married in Swellendam in the sight of the Lord our God and the minister and congregation. I gave her a name and recorded the name in the register: Elizabeth born 1782 in the land of the Makina, behind the Tambookies. She has a way of looking at me. Her mouth and eyes and rounded blushing cheeks compose in a way that makes her at such moments the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. Oh, her mouth.
You’ve not missed all that much in these eleven years. When Kemp decamped for Graaffe Rijnet I went back to Ngqika to sort things out between us. In Caffraria rumours arrived, roundabout and richly embroidered, that the Christians who had lived at Ngqika’s place with me had once again become a nuisance in Graaffe Rijnet. Once again the stories that I and thousands of Caffres were planning to drive the English into the sea. My son, the king of the Rharhabe, received me with open arms; his mother was less overjoyed to see me. I wasn’t sure whether we were still married; I wasn’t sure whether she hated me or whether I was merely nothing to her. I went to sleep with her one night, and we performed sexual acts because there was nothing to be said. Her arms were even fatter than when I’d last laid eyes on her. She sat on top of me and her upper arms flapped like the wings of a wounded bird and she was thinking of other things. I don’t think she noticed when I spurted in her. It was all over between us. Even that night I was jealous. I had been Maria’s first and only. Nombini had from time to time had to lie down under old Langa and had also treated herself to Windvogel. But those two pricks I’d known and those I had brought to account. My women were my women. The other little Caffre maidens over the years had been mere lumps of tender flesh. Yese was as old as I and she lusted as strongly as I and she lay with whoever she wanted to lie with, as I did. I can never forgive her.
My people and I left the place with the blessing of the king. We trekked eastward for weeks as far as the Mambookies behind the Tambookies, and there I saw Elizabeth. She then had another name; don’t ask. It’s her name. Let it be. She played with my children as if she were a child again herself. I was in love. She immediately made friends with my Bettie and she constantly said her name: Elizabeth. Elizabeth. She liked the way the z and the th tickled her succulent red tongue. I spoke to her father and cast before him beads and cattle and tusks and hides and everything his wrinkled heart desired and took his daughter and named her Elizabeth. I moved back to my son, the one and only king of Caffraria.
When my shaft is inside my Elizabeth and her hands claw at my back, I whisper that first name of hers. The sounds throb like sighs and sobs in my throat, as if her name could only be sounded from the mouth of somebody who is coming.
What do you want to do with the stuff that doesn’t fit onto the wagons? Elizabeth asks.
Not my worry.
We must burn it. We must burn it all down. It will look so beautiful.
Oh, her mouth.
While gathering my stuff before daybreak and loading it onto the wagons, I once again come across the traveller’s book at the bottom of a wagon chest. Fish moths have been eating at it. Something wet has leaked onto it and permeated it. The pages are swollen like carcases in summer. I set the book aside and finished packing.
The first few pages cling together. I carefully ease them apart. On the first page is the title, Het reizen door het binnenland… Travels in the Interior. The rest has been scratched out, and underneath it, where the name of the author would have been, something seems to have gnawed a hole in the paper. At the top of the page a second, later title has been written in large, hurried letters: Flatus Vocis. I wish Kemp had been here to translate. When I’m not writing letters, I page through the scribblings of the madman while my family is packing and carting out furniture.
The book is full of maps. The first few are meticulously drawn. Around the Cape the scale is accurate, the mountains and rivers traced in different-coloured ink, every name of town and landmark written in and the red line of his route dotted eastward. The road ahead is white and empty. It must be difficult drawing a map of a region belonging to no one. The rivers still floweth where they listeth. They don’t yet bear names: they only make noise. On the dotted line a small figure on horseback, the traveller himself also part of his own map. Further along in the book the maps become fewer and stranger. The man is travelling up his own arse; on the later maps, north is always ahead of the little horseman, no matter which direction he’s travelling in.