1972 - A Story Like the Wind (41 page)

François had to repeat the performance five times before his horse had had enough. Then, undoing the girths of the saddle, he lifted it and the blanket from the horse’s back, laid the saddle down carefully against the wheel of the caboose, led the horse off deeper into the shade of the wild fig trees where, well away from the luncheon party, he took the bit out of its mouth, slipped the bridle off its head and, to the amazement of the onlookers, left it standing happily out of the heat of the day. That he could le, ave his horse standing, untethered, seemed to astonish everybody more than had their unusual arrival on the scene.

The girl was impressed, perhaps, most of all. She had never encountered any person remotely like François. The unexpectedness of his arrival, the originality, if not eccentricity, of his behaviour, the almost magical intimacy between him, Hintza and his horse, as well as the fact that he not only appeared completely at home in the bush but was unusually good-looking, all made her feel that he was a character straight out of a legend. Indeed she was in danger of losing her considerable powers of speech but she did just manage to ask, ‘But can you leave a horse just like that? Won’t it just walk off into the bush on its own?’

François stared at her, amazed. The animals of his world never behaved irresponsibly once they were mature. They felt themselves to be too much a part of the great family that Hunter’s Drift was, in essence, ever to want to leave it or its people for the dangers of the bush. Indeed, François took all this so much for granted that he did not know how to explain. All he could do was to assure the girl that the horse would be happy to wait there until it was wanted for the journey, which he would have to resume as soon as possible because he still had a long way to go before nightfall.

Hearing this, his host took him to a chair which had been set out for him and soon François was sitting between father and daughter answering questions, while the fat lady who had been introduced to him as Amelia looked on. silently but attentively, refilling his plate the moment it was empty and seeing that his cup was always full of hot, sweet tea and condensed milk.

Much as he enjoyed the food, and generous as his welcome was, he was not altogether at his ease. The moment François had heard the name Monckton he had no doubt that this must be the mysterious person who owned the extremely valuable and large tract of land between Hunter’s Drift and the mining city, which Ouwa had always wanted for himself and his Matabele friends. Ouwa, as François knew, had developed an unreasonable and uncharacteristic dislike of the unknown man. Now he felt something of a traitor to Ouwa in being drawn so easily to the Moncktons.

Furthermore, he could not help wondering whether Monckton might not have conceived a similar dislike for Ouwa. François , therefore, was feeling rather uneasy about how Sir James Monckton would react when he discovered François’s name which, in the confusion of their introduction had been overlooked, and which his host now, out of politeness and a desire to see that he was made at home, made no effort to extract. François felt almost as if he were accepting their hospitality under false pretences. He wondered more and more whether he should now make himself known when the girl started smiling to herself again before saying, ‘You know,
Chisai
is only my father’s nickname for me. It’s just one of those habits he picked up in the navy. It’s the Japanese for
little one
. My real name is Luciana.’

François, embarrassed, nevertheless found himself calmly repeating, ‘Luciana’. He found it an unusual and rather attractive name.

‘Yes,’ the girl nodded her head. ‘So please call me by it will you? You see, I’m called Luciana after my Italian godmother. It means Bringer of Light. My patron saint is Santa Lucia. What’s yours?’

Here François was completely out of his depth. In that Calvinist world of the interior one did not have patron saints. Indeed the whole concept of saints was somewhat suspect. They tended to be part of the inherited feeling of horror over the Spanish Inquisition, St Bartholomew’s Night, the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes and so on, which François’s Huguenot ancestors had diligently kept alive in the records of their persecuted’past handed down to their descendants.

‘I’m afraid I haven’t got a patron saint,’ he answered politely, but with considerable reserves in his tone.

‘You haven’t?’ the girl exclaimed, as if he had entered their lives improperly dressed.

‘No,’ he reiterated, somewhat assertively. He was beginning to feel that all this was rather irrelevant.

The girl, however, had not done with him yet. ‘But what’s your name then? You have
got
a Christian name, haven’t you?’ she asked, as if not sure of this at all.

‘François,’ he replied, with great emphasis.

‘What does it mean, François?’ she asked, indefatigably curious.

‘I don’t think it means anything except François,’ he answered. ‘But if it does, I don’t know what it is. All I know is that all the first born male children in my family have been called François for centuries.’

The fact that there appeared to be centuries in support of his name seemed to restore him to some state of grace in the wide eyes of this oddly persistent young girl.

‘Oh,’ she said. Then she paused and asked, ‘But what’s the rest of your name?’

‘Joubert.’

‘Joubert!’ she exclaimed. ‘What kind of a name’s that?’

‘French, of course,’ François replied, for the first time somewhat on the offensive over what he took to be unjustified ignorance on her part.

However the girl, seemingly, did not notice his change of tone, because she said with delight: ‘French? Oh, that’s fun! So you’re a Latin, too.’

François did not realize what she meant by Latin. Latin for him was a painful language inflicted on him by Ouwa as a valuable intellectual discipline and nothing else. So understandably he replied, ‘I’m afraid my Latin’s not much good.’

His answer brought more merriment to the girl before she said, ‘I don’t mean the Latin language. I mean the Latin people. Italians, Spanish, Portuguese and, of course, French.’ Then, in case she might have offended him, she hastened to add, ‘I’m partly Latin too because, you see, my mummy was Portuguese.’

That
was
made no impact at all on François at the time. Feeling he had appeared unnecessarily ignorant, he was too busy answering apologetically, ‘Oh, I see. I’m sorry. You’re right in a way. I suppose we were Latin once, but whether we are still I don’t know. We’ve been in this country for more than three hundred years now, you see.’

‘Oh, that doesn’t matter at all.’ The girl made a face and dismissed the centuries as mere trifles. Her nimble young mind had already moved on to what was far more important to her. ‘How old are you?’ she asked with the utmost solemnity.

With his slide-rule attitude to time, François had to work out exactly how old he was before answering. He was by training rather slow and deliberate in his speech, as everybody in the Monckton camp had already noticed. He was accustomed to think before he answered. Even more than that, thought tended, as a rule, to lead to action rather than words, and if action were not called for, to silence. Something urgent in his character tended to by-pass words. That, perhaps generically, was one difference between people brought up in a wild pagan world, as he and Mopani had been, and people who came out of a civilized metropolitan context as the Monckton group appeared to have done. In that civilized world, people not only appeared to find it necessary to put thought into words before action, but very often seemed inclined to believe that, once they had expressed their thinking and feeling in words, no further action was necessary. It was the other way round in François’s world. Once they had thought and acted accordingly, they tended to leave words aside. Did not the Sindabele after all have the proverb, ‘When deeds speak, words are nought’.

Indeed he took so long in answering that the girl became restless. Drawing on one of her father’s favourite words, she exclaimed, ‘Please, you look as if you were going to quibble, and that would be rather mean you know.’

François knew the meaning of the word perhaps better than she did because it was also one of Ouwa’s favourite pedagogic adjectives. He certainly thought it inappropriate but it spurred him into saying, ‘I’m sorry, but I was working it out exactly in my mind. I am thirteen years, one month and three days old.’

It was on the tip of the girl’s tongue to say that she had taken him to be a good deal older, but she stopped herself, realizing that it would appear too flattering. Flattery, so early in her acquaintance with François, was something her instincts urged her to avoid. Instead she merely uttered a neutral ‘Oh’.

François, who thought that he had begun to achieve some eminence in years, was so taken aback by this cool, reserved acceptance that he was at a loss for words. Indeed he looked so confused that the girl, thinking she might have offended him, hastened to add, ‘Anyway, I’m glad we’re both Latins of a sort.’

By this time the father, who had watched François eating his lunch rather fitfully while dealing with his daughter’s relentless interrogation now thought it time to interfere. He had been quite happy to let it go because it seemed that the best way of getting to know something of this boy who had appeared so unexpectedly in their midst, was to have it elicited by someone who was more or less his peer.

He interrupted with a question based on the fact which had interested him most. ‘You said your name was Joubert. Are you by any chance related to
the
Joubert?’

François knew that he could only be referring to Ouwa, and the reference tended to restore him to the sense of Ouwa’s death which had travelled with him all day and been pushed into the background by this unexpected encounter. He answered rather sombrely: ‘If you mean Pierre-Paul Joubert, yes. He was my father.’

‘
Was?
’

‘Yes,’ François answered, trying hard to keep down the emotion which was trying to blur his words. ‘My father’s dead.’

‘You poor boy. Dead. Just like my mummy,’ the girl answered in a voice so rounded with sympathy that François’s composure was greatly imperilled.

More, as she spoke, the monumental Amelia beside her must have recognized the word ‘dead’ because she immediately broke in on a high emotional tone asking the girl in Portuguese a number of rapid, high-pitched questions. When the girl confirmed that François had, indeed said what she feared, Amelia broke out into a kind of lamentation, sobbing violently, the tears running down her cheeks. Getting ponderously to her feet, she wobbled towards François, started to stroke him like somebody trying to comfort a wounded animal and uttering many sounds of obvious compassion.

Much to François’s relief the girl got up, took Amelia by the arm and led her weeping back to her chair. That done, she turned to François and said: ‘She thinks that your father, like my mummy and all her people, was massacred. Was he?’

‘No,’ François replied, with hesitation. ‘He died a—a natural death.’

As he said
natural
, he could not help feeling how odd a word it was for him to use, considering all he knew about his father’s death. Also how disdainful uLangalibalela and his own Mata-bele friends would be could they hear him giving such an inaccurate definition of Ouwa’s going.

The girl immediately translated the fact for Amelia who at once calmed down. ‘You must please excuse Amelia,’ the girl explained. ‘She’s suffered terribly. All her people were massacred in Angola, where my mummy came from. She doesn’t even know where they are buried. She’s had no funeral for her family at all. I expect your father had a real funeral.’ She said this last as if she believed it would have comforted François greatly.

‘My father’s funeral is today.’

There was a sudden silence.

Then the man immediately exclaimed, ‘How wrong of us to keep you then. I expect you’re on your way to the funeral at this moment. We mustn’t delay you any longer.’

François shook his head sombrely and explained that his father was being buried thousands of miles away to the south. He did not add that it would be surprising if anybody other than Lammie and the undertaker would attend the funeral of someone whose official life had been so unpopular.

The girl had gone completely quiet and was watching François with quite a new expression. The father asked a few tactful questions which led to François explaining at length how and why he happened to be there, concluding that he would have to leave soon if he were to get to his home before dark.

Monckton at once stood up remarking: ‘Well! We mustn’t keep you. But I’m glad we’ve met so soon because from now on we’re going to be neighbours.’

The statement explained a great deal to François, including the noise of the wagons he had heard. It took only one tentative question of Monckton to learn that there were indeed seven wagons full of building materials and other valuable supplies, in charge of a large family of itinerant Cape-coloured artisans and builders travelling on ahead of them and looking for a suitable place to camp before dark. Perhaps, he added, François, who he assumed knew the way well, could advise him where best they could camp?

François immediately answered that it was now too late for vehicles as slow as wagons to make the ancient outspan hard by the ford across the Amanzim-tetse before nightfall. Luckily he knew of a great pan full of water which the wagons could reach before sunset and which would make an ideal intermediary camp for them.

Suddenly it occurred to him, however, that this did not apply to the truck and caboose. Quite naturally he took Ouwa’s and Lammie’s authority upon himself and suggested that if his host broke camp immediately and followed the road, he would be very glad to invite them to stay at Hunter’s Drift until their wagons caught up with them; or for that matter, for as long as it would be helpful to them.

Monckton, knowing they had been on the road for many days would have liked to accept if only for the sake of Amelia and his daughter. But he was not an insensitive person and felt that at such a moment he ought not to impose his whole group on François and his mother. He thanked François warmly but said he thought it too great an imposition.