Besides dancing at dawn there are other things that Saluni and the Whale Caller do together. They go to the biggest supermarket in town to “window shop,” as they call it, for food. This began as Saluni’s project; her attempt to initiate him into what she refers to as civilised living. It started with decorating the walls with seashells. Then she bought a vase and a tablecloth from the flea market that is held on Saturdays at the parking lot. She brings tulips from the mansion and arranges them in the vase on the wobbly table. She rearranges the flowers every day, according to their colours, and as she does so the Whale Caller feels his own life being rearranged.
Civilised living includes a number of rituals against which his whole body rebels. But he goes along with them, especially because she reminds him all the time that she went along with his waltz at dawn. All of a sudden eating has become a ritual. Before this the Whale Caller used to eat in order to fill his stomach and didn’t attach much importance to the process. He could eat standing outside the Wendy house watching the distant waves, relaxing on the bed or even walking to Walker Bay. Now they sit down at the table. The table itself looks like an altar, with a white tablecloth, flowers and a candle. Although in most instances their diet comprises pasta and cheese, she makes a whole ceremony of eating it, in a number of courses — the same macaroni and cheese served as a starter, entrée and dessert — for she is keen to teach him how to eat a meal of many courses, which she says they are destined to do one day. Whenever he starts mumbling a complaint she reminds him: “We were born for better things. At least I was.”
He learns table manners, although he suspects that the whole ritual is geared towards arousing him. He is well aware that in the “civilised world” the ritual of eating is some kind of foreplay. That is why gentlemen and ladies have candlelight dinners before bedding each other. He remembers from his travels along the coast that in the African languages he came across the crudest word for sex, which literally translated into “eating.” In this garish language of the gutter a man eats a woman. The Whale Caller surmised it should have been the other way round — although that still leaves his body cringing from the rawness of it all.
The eating rituals extend to “window shopping” at the supermarket. This entails strolling along the aisles, stopping at the shelves displaying food they like, and then eating it with their eyes. They walk together pushing a trolley. Saluni stops in front of a shelf containing cans of beef stew. She looks at the pieces of meat, tomatoes, carrots and potatoes swimming in brown onion gravy on the label. She swallows hard as she eats the stew with her eyes. Then she moves on to the next shelf, and this one is stacked with cans of corned beef with a picture of the beef, potatoes and fried eggs sunny-side up. And then to cans of chicken à la king in thick mushroom sauce. Food fit for a queen. She gormandises it all with her greedy eyes. She takes a look at the Whale Caller, who has been staring at canned ravioli in tomato sauce. She is disgusted with him.
“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.