1972 - A Story Like the Wind (59 page)

Meanwhile, François and Luciana, with Hintza as their new frontier scout, would move from bush to river, river to hill and back from the hill to the river again, seeing life in a new way that was a reading of that first magic saga that is called nature.

François, of course, longed for nothing more then than to take Nonnie to Xhabbo’s cave. He would have liked to have made it their first excursion because he had a feeling that she was another vital part of the development in his life started by the coming of Xhabbo. In fact he came very near to doing so, so near that, when alone in his room on the night after their first outing, the thought of how he had nearly betrayed Xhabbo’s secret made him extremely uneasy.

It had happened when they were walking out into the sparkling morning, still some distance from the bush. Nonnie seemed to have taken to the way of Matabele women, walking naturally behind the male and carrying on a conversation without expecting François to turn round as she spoke.

François, who in the past had had trouble with European visitors on such occasions, was considerably impressed by this fact. He himself, of course, was accustomed to carrying on conversations under these circumstances without for a minute taking his eyes off the trail ahead. But the fact that a newcomer like Nonnie could do this naturally from the first moment, struck him as so remarkable that when a moment came for him to call Hintza back and he had to kneel down beside his dog to give him some instructions in Bushman, he could not resist adding, ‘Do your best Hin, because you know, she’s one of us.’

He had hardly finished his exhortation to Hintza when, from behind him, he heard Nonnie say: ‘You told me you’d done some terribly wild things, so awful that you’ve frightened everybody at home. You promised to tell me. Please tell me now, what’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?’

Of course, the most striking example was his adventure with Xhabbo, and the request filled him immediately with acute tension between his growing desire to share everything with Nonnie and also to keep faith with Xhabbo.

For a moment he walked on silently, until Nonnie begged again from behind: ‘Oh, do tell me. People aren’t real friends until they share all one another’s secrets, are they? Besides, I feel a friend is only a friend if you’re sure you
could
do something wicked with them, not that you would necessarily
want
to.’

This last observation so troubled the Calvinist sediment in François that he had another source of tension to add to a struggle that was already great enough. Yet he managed to reply with deliberation: ‘I’d love to tell you about the wildest thing I’ve done, and I promise you I’ll do so one day. But I don’t think I can now, because it’s a secret I share with someone else.’

The words ‘someone else’ sparked off such a fire of jealousy in Luciana that she herself was surprised. It was a good thing that François could not see the expression of anger that made her eyes brighter than ever, although the tone of her voice was uncompromising enough as she said: ‘Oh very well. When she’s been good enough to give you her permission to tell me what it is I may be prepared to listen.’

‘She?’ François exclaimed, surprised. ‘There’s no she about it. It’s something I share with a young man whom you don’t know. I gave him my word of honour that I’d not reveal it to anybody else. It’s a very exciting secret but until I’ve asked him I can’t tell a soul about it.’

Nonnie immediately was ashamed of her involuntary reaction and said quickly, ‘Of course you can’t break your word. But will you ask him tonight and tell me tomorrow? I can hardly bear to wait.’

François shook his head at the bush and the trail ahead. All the longing he had to see Xhabbo again as soon as possible made his voice forlorn and low, as he answered, ‘I’m afraid I can’t ask him tonight. I’m afraid at this moment he’s very far away from here and probably in great danger. I really don’t know when, if ever, I shall see him again. But until I have seen him, or know that he’s dead, I can’t tell even you.’

Touched by François’s tone and reassured now that she knew that it was a man and not a woman who had extracted this pledge of secrecy, Nonnie wanted to console him immediately. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said quickly, ‘I’m certain your friend will be back. Then the moment he is, you must please let us meet and you both can tell me the secret. And by that time you’ll know that there’s nobody who’s better at keeping secrets than I am, even from Amelia. I can’t tell you how I love having secrets to share and I’ve never shared one with a boy before. But surely you can at least tell me his name? And his age…how old is he?’

François repeated his promise to tell her when he could but concluded defensively, ‘I’m afraid I can’t even tell you his name because that would give the whole show away.’

François could not have been more grateful when all she said was, ‘Gosh, I think it must be the greatest secret ever. I don’t know how I’m going to wait until you tell me!’

François would have been even more impressed had he realized that all this air of gay acceptance had not been achieved without a struggle. The fact that once more he had totally ignored in her remarks the importance she attached to age dismayed her afresh. ‘Why, oh why doesn’t he seem to want to know how old I am?’ her heart implored her reason, ‘I’ve given him scores of hints and he’s just done nothing at all about them. I don’t think he can be really interested if he doesn’t care how old I am.’

As a result she heard François say, as from a great distance, ‘But I’ll show you something very secret in a few minutes if you promise to keep as quiet as possible please. I’ll show you a real, high-class baboon finishing school.’

Nonnie may have preferred to start her initiation into the mysteries of the bush with something more glamorous than baboons. But, by the time she had accompanied François and Hintza to the edge of a deep, natural theatre sunk into the summit of one of the rocky hills in the bush, and spent an hour or more lying flat on her stomach close beside François and Hintza, watching a great family of baboons teaching their young how to behave, she could not have been more delighted.

François himself was rather proud of the skill with which he and Hintza had brought her without being seen. They had crawled into position despite the fact that the baboons, on this happy day, while they played and taught, had confided the vital duty of keeping watch on the bush to the greatest of their elder statesmen.

François knew him well. He was at the centre of one of François’s first clear animal memories. There was not a moment when he had not been to François’s recollection a great power in the land of baboons. He had aged, and François, lying there as observant as he had ever been, could clearly see how his auburn hair had gone white at the black temples. But his authority was greater than ever. He sat there on his haunches, high on the rock above the din of the other baboons below, as if he were a baboon Buddha, calmly and serenely surveying the floating world of leaves below him, utterly encircled in a long-term view of life and fate.

‘Look!’—François nudged Nonnie with his elbow as he whispered, ‘You’ve been greatly honoured. Adonis himself has turned up to preside in person over this passing-out ceremony of the young in the academy down there.’

‘Adonis?’ Nonnie asked, putting her head closer to his to hear his whisper. ‘You call him Adonis? Surely Adonis was the most beautiful person? I’d hardly call that old brute beautiful.’

It hurt François to have the old baboon referred to as a brute. But it was not unexpected. He had often suffered from people who had this prejudiced reaction to the creatures of the bush. As far as he was concerned, the greatest ‘brutes’ he had ever known had been the humans who came on safari tours to shoot and kill those same animals. They were the same people too who had killed Ouwa by ‘the turning of their backs’.

He drew back from the thought and hastened to explain the name to Nonnie.

‘You’re right to find it funny,’ he whispered. ‘The name was meant to be funny in the beginning. It was what my father always called ‘a name given ironically’ to male baboons by our early ancestors in Africa. We have been calling all the greatest male baboons Adonis for more than three hundred years now. But it’s no longer a joke. When you live as close to baboons as we do here in the bush, you come to know and see them from a baboon’s point of view. Soon you realize that the old fellow you found so ugly is really a very beautiful baboon man.’

He was so grave that Nonnie felt herself so corrected. Nevertheless she teased him a little to restore the balance between them. ‘You’re talking almost like a baboon yourself. Why, now that I think of it, you could even
be
an honorary baboon!’

The idea so pleased her that she was ready for laughter. But François spoilt her amusement by taking it all seriously.

He replied: ‘You’d be surprised how great a sense of dignity as well as beauty these Adonises have…Look at that young one down there and you’ll see him beating up that young fellow for playing pranks on him. Look. You’ll realize how wise it is to treat them with great respect and even flatter them. You know, !#grave;Bamuthi himself will not pass them in the bush when he knows they’ve seen him without giving them the royal Matabele salute and calling: ‘I see you, great and most excellent baboons. Oh, I have seen you.’ But look there!’

François was pointing out a fine, upstanding young baboon belabouring a youngster with his fists and nipping him smartly with his teeth.

All this, combined with the many curious happenings in the scene below her, was tempting Nonnie to explode again into laughter. But the authority with which François spoke restrained her. François from the start had impressed them all as being an unusual mixture of youth and experience; innocence and maturity. Yet none of it could be compared with the natural authority which invested him here in his own element in the bush.

So instinctively Nonnie accepted it and obeyed characteristically, making a face at him as she did so, whispering, ‘I see you, most excellent baboon. I see you and I hear.’

She wriggled closer to him and listened with growing fascination to his account of why he had never thought of baboons as mere animals but always, as his own nurse Old Koba had taught him, The People who sit on their Heels’. He told her of their great natural intelligence, their capacity for reasoning, for remembering the past, linking it with the present and behaving in the present out of their experience of the past with forethought of the future.

He surprised her by telling her that he thought that they, rather than the lion, leopard, elephant or buffalo, were the truly heroic people of the bush. They were the bravest of all because they knew so acutely what fear was. Once one looked at baboons in that way, and treated them always with respect, there came occasions when they themselves could look straight into the human eye without fear or enmity, and one saw in those hazel eyes, dark with antiquity, a glimmer of awareness of how much nearer they were to one than any of the other animals of Africa. They themselves were highly sensitive in regard to this element of human dignity which they possessed and were there-j fore easily hurt in their feelings. So that it was not just ironical! but extremely wise to call them Adonis and to go on thinking! of them as possessed of Adonis-like qualities.

Indeed they were so human, François stressed, that one of his most terrible memories was of the early years at Hunter’s Drift when they were forced to shoot the baboons who would not leave off raiding their gardens and could be taught only through war. Everybody was extremely distressed then because the wounded and dying baboons made noises exactly like wounded human beings and seemed to die like real people. He could not think of anything more horrible than having to shoot at a baboon himself and he was certain that when old Adonis on that rock up there died, the world round about Hunter’s Drift would look singularly empty.

He glanced sideways at her to see if this all-important fact had been noted and found that she was staring at him instead of at the scene below. He took it as a sign that she was absorbed in listening and prepared to continue, but something in her eyes made him wary of her. He continued to speak but her eyes appeared concentrated on his face. He could not know that his face and quick changing expressions as he talked had become matters of all-consuming importance to her, far more important than the baboons and their school.

‘Why Nonnie,’ he exclaimed, ‘I believe you’ve not been listening to a word I’ve said. You’re not the least bit interested in the baboons down there.’

Ashamed, she came out of the centre of her world to join him in the present, instantly contrite and reassuring. ‘Oh, please. I’ve not missed a single word…I’ve never been so interested in my life or enjoyed myself so much…Please carry on, comrade baboon!’

Reassured, François urged her: ‘If you don’t perhaps believe what I was saying about the baboons being brainy, just look down below. They’re teaching their young ones there how to count.’

Nonnie, however reluctantly, looked as directed. Believe it or not, a number of father baboons were sitting in front of their young with fistfuls of pebbles from which they took one pebble at a time to place it in front of the youngsters: one, two, three at a time, and then taking the pebbles away again: three, two, one, until the earth in front of them was bare again. At each stage of the demonstration they made a different clicking noise to go with it. When a youngster failed to reply with the corresponding noise, the fathers would take them by their necks, whip them round and beat them with their fists until they were shrieking just like children.

‘But why only three pebbles?’ Nonnie asked.

‘Because,’ François answered, ‘they can only count up to three. That’s the difference between their brain and yours. Everything over three is, to them, as you will hear if you listen, ‘a hell of a lot’.’

And indeed from down below, when the stage of more than three pebbles was demonstrated, came a chorus sounding very much like an orchestration of: ‘a hell of a lot’.

Meanwhile, in other parts of the school, some other young baboons were corrected for having tried to cross the path of their elders and betters, the correction again taking the form of more spankings. At the farthest corner two young female baboons were watching exactly how baby baboons should be spruced up and fed by their mothers, and above all how important it was to see that they were adequately de-flead and de-loused.