Baboons! (an excerpt from my novel)

7)      BABOONS :

When morning comes, I suggest: “The other kids have no way to go to school, Mammie, but maybe we could give them a lift? It’s the baboons, Mammie Kassie, êna makula stêrek, they’re really strong! You should see the branches they can tear off.”

            Kassie, her arm gesturing in the direction of the car, begins to speak when Pappie Sarel interrupts. “Jus` don’t tease them, Boet, and I tell you they won’t tease back. I’ll send a kaffir with you kids, starting today. Old M`dhalha will do. He seems to take an interest in you. I’ll give him the shotgun. That’ll scare the hairy-backed buggers off.”

            At 7:00 a.m., this time with M`dhalha standing to one side, I wait as usual atop the big round ‘sleeping-buffalo-boulder’ beside the dirt road, directly across from the van Wyk’s dairy.

            Two other boys, kicking stones, saunter up the road toward me, a roly-poly fellow of eight, and a thin stick-legged taller chap of twelve. “`Lo, Boet,” the chubby one greets me, nudging at his thick glasses.

            “`Lo, Varkie,” I smile. “`Lo Piet,” I greet, and jump down.

            “I see you brought your old kaffir,” Piet teases, then picks up a stone. “Hey, Oink,” he challenges at Varkie, “let’s see if you can hit the van Wyk’s signboard from here!” and he throws so hard that the rock clangs and ricochets.

            “Eina! Wat die hel!” a voice hollers from up the driveway.

            “Sorry, Alex!” Piet shouts back, laughing, as fifteen-year-old good looking Alex, trailed by his reedy eleven-year-old brother, come into view. Meek little Mark holds his neck.

            “You hit Mark!” Alex blazes. “I’ve told you to look before you throw!”

            My head comes up. “Mark? You all right?” 

            Mark rubs at his neck, but turns his eyes away. “Ja man. Jus` nicked.”

          Piet, looking straight at me, teases, “See, if I’m so good with a stone, who needs your bladdy kaffir along, hey, Boet? I’ll get the baboons!”

            But M`dhalha’s quick glance silences me.

            The narrow trail disappears into the seemingly impenetrable curtain of soft fern and ropy lianas and towering teak, but comes out on the broader swath of the natives’ footpath. Even here the treetops inter-link. It’s like walking within a magically paved tunnel of waving delicacies of lace, the leafy canopy pouring down liquid patches of gold from giant slivers of sunbeams. In here we usually meet no one else, since most of the blacks from the Compound leave very early to be at work, but at times a laden-down woman, some with children in tow, or an older man, or even a group of young men would be discovered. They’d stand pressed into the shadows of the leafy undergrowth, saying nothing until spoken to. And always, no matter how rude we whites might be, the blacks were most polite. But of such inequalities between white and black little is ever acknowledged. It comes by way of the birthright of each group, by the way we all are being raised, as it always was, and for some of us, as it always should be.

            But on this day, all we boys meet up with are the baboons. As usual, I am the one who sees the slope-faced apes first. Respectfully, I whisper, “Jambo Umfuzi! Hamba! Hello Grandfather! Time for you to go!”

            Umfuzi, seeming to nod, disappears. The forest goes still. All remains hushed, ominous.

            Piet runs up, demanding, “Where? Where’s the bladdy thing?”

            I point away. “Daar! There!”

            Alex, his voice an urgent whisper, calls, “You kids, wait!”

            We stop up. All around us in the path with its paving stones of golden yellow light that spears down in gothic shafts from the winking canopy of lace, there is a cathedral hush. But there is something ugly about that quiet. Usually when we come across the pack there are about twenty or so of the dusky creatures, chattering and entertaining with their marvelous acrobatics amidst the branches. And then one of us, usually Piet of course, would begin goading at them with grotesque facial gestures and weird noises. The apes inevitably respond by barking back insults and sometimes hurl seedpods and shake the branches with their antics. Ha!

            But now? I feel goosebumps.

            M`dhalha calls softly, “Stay long, like a string. We must be a python, not a puff-adder.”

            Piet spits. “Puff-adders are lethal. Pythons slow. Just shoot the hairy bastards, kaffir!”

            But I’ve had enough. “Piet. His name is ‘M`dhalha’. M’dhalha. Respected One. Hear?”

            Piet advances, hands balling. “Yeah, Boetie? Does it now? M`dhalha this and M`dhalha that! You’d swear that the kaffir was your own fuggen father, you little Back Seat Brat!”

            My eyes firm. He is taller than me, but I stare, determined to show no fear.

            Piet’s eyes glisten with uncertainty, but he goads, “Come on, Boet. Come on, you fuggen little kaffir-boetie, fight!”

            Then the baboons explode. From the sudden maelstrom of the swirling canopy a furious hail of broken branches, bouncing fruit kernels, boomerang-hard sausage-tree seedpods and gobs of smelly yellow raw dung pelts down.

            We rush for cover. M`dhalha snaps the .410 up and an orange belch blasts from it with an echoing Boom! that sends rustling shivers through the leaves.

            A second of silence.

            But the apes, seeing that none among them are actually harmed, begin quickly reappearing. A little chastened, a lot more wary, they perch and chatter and argue over the matter of exactly what next to do.

            A young female, her baby clung tight to her side, descends to within a stone’s throw and commences a screaming lecture, full of insult.

            Spattered in stench, I begin to laugh, but then Piet angrily flings a stone and hits her so sharply that she drops her child. The tiny body, almost naked of hair, screams as it crashes to the forest floor.

            “Los! Leave it!” M`dhalha shouts, reloading, as Piet runs into the ferns, yelling, “Grab it! Grab it!”

            Above us the baboons erupt. They tear off the green and heavy seedpods, break larger and larger branches, hurl things down.

            Varkie, squealing in fear, waddles further away down the path, and breaks into a run. I shout! But Umfuzi, the old watchman, springs.

            Whump! The sound of it is distinct. The impact of some ninety pounds of infuriated menace catapulted from a great height instantly flattens the pudgy youngster. Dust clouds swirl. Even so, on all fours both boy and baboon almost at once back off, the ape to gain advantage, the boy in dazed bewilderment as he scrabbles for his glasses. Wet blood drips from his shredded ear, spouts in raked reds from the gashes to his shoulder and thigh. Strangely though, he makes no sounds.

            M`dhalha tries to trace the circling baboon in his gun-sight.

            I notice the mother, to one side, go quietly to rescue her baby. Her child clutched precariously to her chest, she howls defiance as she clambers back up the tree. Her voice goads the monstrous male into leaping at Varkie’s neck, but just then the boy stumbles for his yet again dropped glasses, and the baboon rips him from forearm to wrist. The ape screeches and howls, bares finger-sized fangs, begins circling again, and looks for the killing leap.

            But then, flashing as it hurtles end over end through the air, M`dhalha’s great knife impales itself in the ape’s back, thwunk! The baboon falls face down, spread-eagled, still.

            “Sawright, Basie. Sawright,” M`dhalha clucks at Varkie, gently prying the heavily bleeding kid up from the dirt. “Bring the knife,” he tells me.

            I somewhat tentatively tug at the heavy steel from the still warm threat of the back of the huge baboon. It is, I realize, the first time I’ve touched the weapon. And from that moment, I want a knife just like it.

            Varkie begins to whimper. M`dhalha wordlessly turns with him in his arms and lopes back toward the van Wyk’s place.

            That night I yet again overhear Mammie Kassie on the phone. “That’ll teach the bladdy kids a lesson! But to think they say we come from those bladdy baboons? Let me tell you, I don’t think so!”

Existential Homage:

A man saw a ball of gold in the sky

A man saw a ball of gold in the sky;
He climbed for it,
And eventually he achieved it --
It was clay.

Now this is the strange part:
When the man went to the earth
And looked again,
Lo, there was the ball of gold.
Now this is the strange part:
It was a ball of gold.
Aye, by the heavens, it was a ball of gold. 

Stephen Crane

Birthday Bounty

Excitement begins early for your birthday. If not in yourself, then in me. Knowing it is your birthday month I watch the calendar and in the background my mind runs a time clock of anticipation and fear of procrastination. Will I make the post in time? Will I get the date right? Will I get the right card or the right present or make the phone call at the right time of an international day? Will I say the right things? After all, thousands of people are having a birthday on your birthday too, so how does one not be platitudinous or vacuous or plain? How to make the moment special? Authenticity of tone and feeling and meaning is not guaranteed in a card; I've received the same card from different people. If there are no unique words within, why, what's so special about that?

Specialness is a feeling one appropriates around a birthday. Many a youngster has proclaimed things such as, "28 days to my birthday!" Many a teenager has mouthed things like, "I'm so glad the 5th is on a Friday, not Saturday; I get to be at school and have the class sing to me, get my locker decorated, have my teachers wish me happy birthday; the party is on the weekend. It's like having two birthdays!" And then of course there is the opportunity to show off the new bracelet, the new watch, the new cell phone or iPod or.... Specialness is the feeling that one is recognized. It is difficult for us not to be recognized on our birthdays. Some are even surprised when it's someone else's too.

Billions of people are birthday people on this planet. Each day someone somewhere is feeling the sense of the date, the magical 26, or 18, or 21, or ... TODAY! It's a magical date in a momentous month to be a marker of years spent living, age proved maturing, or, for some as we get very much older, years left likely to be living. And the specialness we feel is, after all, deserved. There is no one like you. On March 26th the world was invested with your presence. (And if the date is right on your birthday is there not a delightful sense that this indeed was really written just for you?) As such, invested with your unique presence, our planet evolved by virtue of each other person you influenced, impacted, loved, gave of yourself, and contributed toward. Indeed, others have been born through you, in every sense of the word.

To isolate the molecular self in a massive sea of mankind and within the momentum of universal flow thereby appropriate unto oneself a specialness of pinpointed time on a day made differentiated by one's birth in a given month is an essentially human undertaking. (Only man makes birth days.) After all, your birthday may well be half over by the time you read this. And the six months after a birthday is not quite the same as the six months before. Why not celebrate monthly? (Gift lovers like THAT idea!)

Birthdays mark the day on which you were born. So simple a statement. But more than that, they are isolated in the flow of general time to celebrate the very uniqueness of yourself and the great gift of your life to others, to this planet, to our universe. We pause to acknowledge the marker in your life, to let you know we think about you, care for you, love you. In that case then, may there be a birthday bounty of assurances of such for you each birthday, every month, and indeed, every day. But if for today? Happy Birthday!

Deliberating Death

We do not like the subject of dying. A friend told me she had cancer, a long long time ago. She invited me to come sip sherry on her deck. I never went. Another friend told me he was soon to die; I asked him about his symptoms. Angrily, he told me in gross detail. I never visited him either. I was young then, in my late 20's. Already I had seen death, on both sides, in the border war of Rhodesia. I had also encountered death of all sorts as a child of Africa. I was directly responsible for an old servant's death, due to my boyhood selfishness. And then too, not yet a teenager, I was responsible for our dog's death. Death. It hovered in my consciousness as a thing to be feared, a thing to be avoided, guarded against, cautious of, and even hated. Until I grew older. And then one day it all seemed so inevitable, so natural. I wondered why I had not just accepted it as part of what is going to happen to all of us, anyway.

"Every day, have a little bird that sits on your shoulder and asks, is today the day, am I ready? Am I being the person I want to be?" That's what 'Tuesdays with Morrie' is all about. And then there are very many other platitudes we each could bring to the subject, as well as the euphemisms. At issue is the relevance of the immediate. We know we have to die, eventually; it is not the same as being told by some authority, or by one's very disease, that there is only so much time left to live. Well, that's what my friend has very recently told me, and now as his days dwindle down I find myself grieving through the  Khubler-Ross stages: disbelief, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. They come naturally, but not equally. Learning of cancer in a loved one will do that to us.

How to offer anything other than platitudes, especially when far away. I've been at the bedside of some of my dying friends, especially recently. I've heard the last gasp, seen the last flutter of light in the eyes, witnessed the body loose energy. These are very hard experiences to have, especially if one is guilty of the death in some way. My selfish disobedience as a boy, my ineptitude in the army, my.... Easier to accept the death of sick friends, especially if they're significantly older than oneself; they have lived a full life. But my friend who is counting his days, who lives so very far away, happens to have been born in the same year as me. There are too many of my old school friends who have already 'passed on'. At our recent forty-year reunion, sixteen names were read out. Some had been dear to me at one time; all had been dear to others, all the time.

How to reach out across the miles and tell an old friend that you care, that you think of him as constantly as you breathe, yet find yourself almost startled to realize you have happiness and participation in the moment by moment existence of your own life while his is so evidently winding down? Does it suffice to say that you feel regret for his condition, feel loss for his absence, feel concerned that something will be left unsaid, undone, even unfelt? Death is confusing. We can only surmise what it would be like. We cannot empathize with dying itself; we can only empathize with the bereft.

My friend is dying. I write because I cannot reach him, cannot assist him, cannot hug him, cannot get to care for him, cannot give him much more than words. And because this is such a generic essay, rather than specific enough to name actual names, it is about he, she, you, and me. Death. We realize that, uncaring of particulars, an end will eventually reach each and all of us, earthen voyagers; what we do until then... is to live!

Being Bound In Being

All the world's a stage and a person has seven ages, or some such goes. For mankind too. In the long history of mankind evolving from sheer survival, to family groups, to the sway of warlords, to adherence to socio-political constructivism, to commercial lordship, to paradigmatic inclusions, to integration, man indeed performs through seven ages.

First there is the mewling infant. Our dependence on the immediate takes precedence, and we have little empathy or instinct to sustain anything or anyone beyond ourselves. Even at the sinking of the Titanic, men barged ahead of children. But most of us are no longer predominantly affected by survival (until we think of all without, so far from here).

Then the whining schoolboy. We belong to a family, a group, a club, and we abide by its wants and dictates and demands. We will fight the stranger's ways. We will avenge our brother even though he got shot robbing the bank while holding your sister hostage. We will sublimate our individuality and take an oath of fealty; stave off a foreign incursion.

Next is the soldier, he who buys into a greater glory than his family. His ego he crows up against the masses. Unproven, he declares himself victor. He puts down the vanities in his enemies, judges the inferior, the lesser, the weaker, the bankrupt. He is at his most dangerous, invincible; at his most foolish, intractable; at most glorious, unconquerable.

Then the lover comes along, tempers his own vaingloriousness, yields to a greater self, and sacrifices his selfish wants to his self-serving desires. He gives up his personal freedom to a larger group, a larger ideology, a larger socio-political entity, and draws a moral line of affirmation, or of negation, in the sand. He will invest in the culture of his belief system. He fears not being in. He fears being left out. He responds well to fear.

The lawyer is more circumspect. He bends the rules and breaks the bonds and looks for loopholes in the constructs of circumstance and chance. He takes advantage. He yokes the multiplicities of mankind and warps and weaves them to his secular advantage, and hires and fires and judges and condemns those who do not see things, who do not do things, his way. His wit is sharp. His knowledge profuse. His empathy... judicial.

The pantaloon disavows ambition, disavows hierarchy, disavows divisive commentary and fragmentary inequality. Those who are deemed not to agree are fools anyway. The desire is for harmony of outlook, singularity of purpose, honor of action, and integrity of apprehension. For everybody! Fools, idiots are the rest; he'll hoist them on his petard.

But the seventh age of Shakespeare, sans teeth, sans taste, sans ears, sans eyes, sans everything? It is no dolt, no sad Alzheimer's patient alluded to here, but rather the realization of a lack of absolute need, a lack of uttering utter preferences, a lack of myopia, a lack of proving certainty, a lack of being irrefutable. There is certainly nothing that such an one, sans everything, can profess that is totally right, for the world is too full of possibilities. Even heaven, in all its waiting, waits until he's leavened, ready, free.

Perhaps there's then an eighth age, a mercurial infinity, never beginning, never ending? And yes, it's the twist in the middle, the transition through life, 'twould seem, that binds.

Liking Loving

Teddy bears, pet rocks, Barbie dolls, and puppies are not alike. Puppies love us back. In the childlike years of our growing up we learn to like reciprocation, to expect a return, and we make friends, deem our own worthiness, and love more intensely those who love us back. Even mature adults find it difficult merely to give love. We want it back. Parents have abandoned children because the child does not sufficiently contact them; does not show interest. Brothers and sisters become estranged. Friends no longer 'love' because they have lost contact, or the one has somehow hurt the other. Couples no longer love because their marriages are unfulfilled. In adulthood love is no longer an easy feeling given to cuddly teddies and zoomorphized rocks or anthropomorphized dolls; yet it is something we give to the taste of coffee, the look or feel of a car, the house we live in, the clothes we wear, or even the film star we've never met. It is a word we bandy about easily. But when it comes to saying "I love you" to people that we know, whether close to heart or those we do not like, it is a word that can stick in the craw.

How does it go again, Corinthians? If love can be a feeling of unconditional acceptance that emanates from the self, independent of proximity, touch, communication, return, appreciation, approbation, acceptance, or even knowledge by another, then love has a completeness, for it wants for nothing, expects nothing; it is its own source. Love gives.

Liking is another word.

We choose the pet rock, the teddy bear, the doll, the watch, the cell phone, the car, the house, our our clothes based on initial preference. And once acquired, we start to love it if it does not hurt us, disappoint us, cost us discomfort. Then we love the thing. We can feel really sad, upset, at a loss, betrayed, robbed, grieved when the thing is broken, stolen, misplaced. We have a reciprocity with it, a dependence, an expectation, an attachment. It's the way we've been raised to look after things, to value things that cost our parents money, to appreciate things that have been given, passed on, made yet more valuable by history, sentiment, and relevance. A lock of hair. A tea-set. A picture. A ring, broach, or tie-clip. One's cell phone. We are given to love the things that make our lives richer. But for things that distress us, it is most difficult to love, let alone to like.

Liking and loving; they are concepts worth examining. If we accept love as the essence of the universe, the verb that enlivens life, then to like or dislike is a feeling aroused by the many particulars. Love as an essence comes with no attitude, no preference, no expectation. Love ideally is entirely integrative. Whole. Love is what the poets sing, the literature examines, the priesthood professes. Love is independent of the negative. No wonder love is so difficult for us simply to feel. We are quite bound up by, cultured toward, and predicated upon the relevance of negatives. We do not love things we do not like. We do not like too much otherness, too much verbosity (ha!), difference of contention, things that are wrong, abusive, hurtful, hateful, or distasteful. It is natural to dislike. It is not so natural just to love. We are bound up in particulars. We find it difficult to understand the mother who loves her murdering son; the wife who loves her cheating husband; the forgiver of the intentional transgression. To like or not to like is a verb; to love includes all grammatical forms. Love is everything. We are love, like it or not. Ha!

Songbird

Songbirds come with different voices. Jessica Benini arrives with many. Perhaps she is most like a young Joni Mitchell, blended with some Carol King, but comparisons suffer; Jessica Benini has her very own style, her own voice, her own songs. And she's quite naturally beautiful, not just as a female, but as a soul who showed care for others, who is authentic, casually sophisticated, and utterly genuine.

The Italian Bakery, in Victoria, B.C., houses alongside it this wonderfully intimate and cosy restaurant, La Piola. Jessica performed there for us, March 24th, 2012, yet as if just for me, although there were some thirty or so patrons at the tables. Some people came in as though familiar with the place, with Jessica doing her set in the corner. With an air of respect, almost of reverence, the kitchen staff and waitresses wandered amongst us, taking food orders and serving drinks, while Jessica played her guitar and sang, or harped along on her harmonica. And the music, like chords of accord, enveloped us in an atmosphere of camaraderie and well being. Jessica mesmerized our chatter into sustained silences. She plucked at our feelings with her words. She strummed on our consciousness with her guitar. She melded us into a family of friends, though strangers most of us were to each other, with her charm and interest in us, and with the warmth, intensity, and soulfulness of her performance, tune after tune.

La Piola as an eatery enticed us to Jessica's concert following our asking about the poster we saw of the upcoming performance. One of the friendly proprietors, who also doubles as a chef, Kyle, let us know just how gifted she is. Jessica plays a multiple of instruments, takes requests, did some standards, and wowed us with her original material too. And the food also is something to be savored. The menu is diverse enough to suit most palettes, the wine and beer suited to the dishes, and the casual family-style service charming and endearing. Several visits, each at separate times of the day, have pleased us very much. Excellent taste for a great price. But the cap on our experience at La Piola on Quadra street was the evening with Jessica. She treated us as though we were old friends. She came up at intermission, shared some of her story, ensured she repeated our names, and even at the end of the night used our names to bid farewell.

Jessica Benini's CD, available for a mere $10.00 in the basket where she performs, is one of those Canadian treasures. As a first CD is it has a resonance that far surpasses its cost. The original songs, with titles like 'precious time', have a profound reach, a haunting quality that could become as familiar to us as any classic album. She is a star in the making. Imagine if you had been able to go to a Joni Mitchell performance when the twenty-something young Joni was just beginning? Imagine if you still had the first copy of a Joni record before she was "discovered"? That's just one of the reasons why investing in, listening to, and attending and enjoying a Jessica Benini concert is so worthwhile. Canada has produced very many wonderful stars; Jessica shines bright as a new discovery in the firmament.

As a songbird Jessica Benini has a voice with a dynamic and alluring range. Her expertise on the guitar, on her harmonicas, and with people, is superb. You would be privileged to be at one of her concerts; Jessica herself would make you feel that way. Then again, like all events "not to be missed", you would just have to be there. Yes?

Jessica Benini | Free Music, Tour Dates, Photos, Videos

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