He has owned hundreds of kelp horns since his first. But this one that he holds so lovingly against his chest is the best of them all, for it is the horn that first introduced him to Sharisha. He closes his eyes and is sucked by a whirlpool into a dreamless sleep.
When he wakes up the next morning there is already a trickling of whale watchers on the cliffs above him. They are watching the horizon with their binoculars. He is slightly embarrassed that he became hysterical in his confession to Mr. Yodd last night. What will Mr. Yodd think of him? He promises himself that despite the feeling of wounded rejection and his fears for Sharisha he will maintain his calm dignity at all times. He will swallow whatever pride he might have and go back to Mr. Yodd to apologise. He stands up. His muscles are stiff. He takes the few uneasy steps back to Mr. Yodd’s grotto.
Hoy, Mr. Yodd! It was a joke… last night. You thought I was being serious, did you? You thought I meant it. Last night. All the hysteria about the Japanese eating Sharisha. And all the insecurities about her deserting me. I must have sounded pathetic. I admit I was a bit rash last night, Mr. Yodd. Accusing you of things you are not capable of… such as twisting the knife in my back! I am sorry. Fortunately you do not hold a grudge. That is what is beautiful about you. A grudge can take its toll on your health. It is like a parasite that feeds on you. At first it gives you a feeling of warmth. The thought that you will get even gives you comfort. Then the ungrateful guest begins to eat your insides. It gets fatter while you are gradually reduced to a bag of bones. It destroys you. That’s what a grudge does to one, Mr. Yodd. You thought I had lost control of myself, hey Mr. Yodd? It was the kind of night that brought hallucinations to the sanest of minds. To the soberest. It must have been the fumes of death that permeated the air. Decay. Death. I could smell it from the sea. The wind brings it from the western coast. Yes, you told me many times before, Mr. Yodd. These are not today’s smells. They have lingered for more than two hundred years. A two-hundred-year-old stench from the slaughter of the southern rights by French, American and British whalers at St. Helena Bay in 1785. Five hundred southern rights in one season! They harpooned the calves in order to get their mothers who would come to the rescue of their little ones. Seasons of mass killings! The smell still haunts these shores. Yes, they are protected now, Mr. Yodd. But only since 1935. The whales have come back since then but I cannot presume that Sharisha will be safe on her voyage from the southern seas. There are pirates and poachers! What if… There I go again with what you refer to as hysteria. I apologise, Mr. Yodd. It was not me talking last night. All right, Mr. Yodd. Go ahead and laugh. I don’t mind at all. Laugh at me as much as you like.
He is mortified as he walks on the pavement near the parking lot. And it shows in his gait. The crowds have already gathered. They are the usual tourists with floral shirts and funereal faces. As if someone forced them to come here. Binoculars and cameras weighing down their necks. Sandals flip-flopping like soft coronach drumbeats as the feet trudge in different directions. Fat Americans, timid as individuals, but boisterous and arrogant in groups. Puny Japanese, excitable and fascinated by the most mundane of things. Inland South Africans who look apologetic and seem to be more out of place than the Americans and Japanese. All clicking away at the slightest provocation. Following everything that moves on land and sea with camcorders.
They are in greater numbers today, the whale-watching invaders. The town is celebrating its annual Kalfiefees — the whale calf festival. The locals, who don’t usually care much for whale watching, are also out in throngs. Some are out to flog their wares. The parking lot has been taken over by stalls and tables displaying Cape Malay delights, candyfloss machines, ostrich biltong, citrus preserves and whalebone jewellery and toys. Spicy and sweet aromas intermingle with the compound smell of salt and dead kelp that is brought by the heat from the sea.
Many have come just to watch the spectacular street performances of jugglers, mimes, banjo-strumming buskers and dancers in grotesque whale costumes. Or to hold their collective breath as adrenalin junkies bungee-jump down awesome cliffs only to be pulled back seconds before their bodies hit the rocky shallows of the sea. Pallid boys from Zwelihle Township perform the haka, the ceremonial Maori war chants accompanying a fearsome dance learnt from the New Zealand rugby team. Others sing Shosholoza, the work song that has been adopted by the South African rugby team as its anthem, while performing an out-of-step gumboot dance. Processions of tourists go through the ritual of dropping coins into enamel bowls or cold drink cans without paying much attention to the performances of the boys. There are those who prefer to make offerings of fruit and sweets, ever suspicious that the boys may use the cash for such narcotics as glue, benzine or even mandrax pills.
The Whale Caller negotiates his way among the rainbow people. People of what is fashionably referred to as the new South Africa, even though it is ten years old. Ten years is a second in the life of a nation. Rainbow people sport rainbow hairstyles. Heads looking like frosted birthday cakes. Black hair with silver stripes. Orange and blue hair with golden stripes. Peroxide blondes with black polka dots. Leggy model-types and stout granny-types. Broad-shouldered bare-chested men in wet Bermuda shorts, wearing green, blue, black, purple and yellow serpent or dragon tattoos on golden brown tans.
Hair. It is a blight they must carry on their heads, exposing the position each head occupied in the statutory hierarchies of the past. The troubles of humanity are locked in the hair. Yet the people have managed to disguise their shame by painting it in the colours that designate them all a people of the rainbow. Without exception. Without a past. Without rancour. Without hierarchies. Only their eyes betray the big lie. In these eyes you can see a people living in a daze. Rainbow people walking in a precarious dream that may explode into a nightmare without much warning.
He looks at the colourful hair of his compatriots and he is thankful that he was liberated from his quite early on in life — in his mid-thirties — long before there was any notion of a rainbow people, when his hair fell out, at first gradually as he brushed it, then furiously even as he slept. He was still a wanderer from one fishing hamlet to the next on the west coast when the rude Cape-of-Storms storms blew strands of it away. Until his pate was smooth and shiny. He compensated with a rich crop of beard and a bushy chest. Silvery grey.
The whales do not disappoint. It is as if they know that the citizens of Hermanuspietersfontein — as the town was originally known — and their visitors from all over the world are out celebrating their return from the southern seas. Incidentally, the lazy tongues that have reduced his town to Hermanus irritate the Whale Caller. He resolves that from now on he will call it nothing but Hermanuspietersfontein. Even when its name is changed, as it is bound to in keeping with the demands of the new South Africa, he will continue to call it Hermanuspietersfontein. The southern rights don’t bother with the politics of naming. Two thousand of them will migrate annually from the sub-Antarctic to the warmth of South African waters whether the whale-watching town is called Hermanus, Hermanuspietersfontein or something new South African. Five hundred of them will converge along the south coast, and some of these will be seen from the shores of this town, as they are seen on this day of the Kalfiefees. They congregate here in greater numbers than anywhere else because this is a sheltered place. They stay for long periods here because the sea is quiet. There is not much activity of ski boats or even whale-watching boats. Almost all whale watching is done from the land. The boerewors-roll-chomping tourists, mustard and ketchup dripping from their fingers and chins, train their binoculars in the direction of a group of southern rights — mothers and calves languidly sailing in the grey distance. The Whale Caller does not need binoculars to know that none of them is Sharisha.