Cape of Storms Read online

  Copyright © 2003, 2007 by André Brink

  Cover and internal design © 2007 by Sourcebooks, Inc.

  Cover Image © Getty Images

  Illustrations by Julie Metz

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  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.

  Quotations in Chapter 1 from Canto V of the Lusiads are from the translation by J. J. Aubertin Kegan Paul, London, 1884.

  Excerpt from “Little Gidding” in Four Quartets, © 1943 by T. S. Eliot and renewed in 1971 by Esme Valerie Eliot, reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Published by Sourcebooks Landmark, an imprint of Sourcebooks, Inc.

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  Originally published in 1993 by Simon & Schuster

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Brink, André Philippus, 1935-

  Cape of storms : the first life of Adamastor : a story / André Brink.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-4022-0864-5 (trade pbk.)

  1. Adamastor (Legendary character)—Fiction. 2. South Africa—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR9369.3.B7C36 2007

  823—dc22

  2007020228

  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  Glossary

  Back Cover

  This is the use of memory:

  For liberation—not less of love but expanding

  Of love beyond desire, and so liberation

  From the future as well as the past.

  —T. S. Eliot

  Introduction

  In which, after some critical remarks about early French and Portuguese interpretations of Adamastor, the narrator proposes the terms of his contract with the reader

  Once upon a time there was and there wasn’t. A formula I found in a book I can no longer trace, on the history of narrative forms. An old Spanish tradition, I believe, and particularly useful in the present context, where distinctions between was and wasn’t are rather blurred. Rabelais, to my knowledge the first to introduce Adamastor1 in a story, does not shed much light on the subject. His character rates a mere mention (Pantagruel, Chapter 1) in the long genealogy of giants who begat one another, among them the hundred-handed Briareus, culminating of course in Gargantua and Pantagruel (“…Briare, qui avoit cent mains, Qui engendra Prophyric, Qui engendra Adamastor, Qui engendra Antee…”).

  Camões, who may well have been familiar with Rabelais before embarking on his own Lusiads (1572), places the giant among the Titans who rebelled against Zeus (“Qual Egeo e o Centimano”—the latter once again a creature with a hundred hands). Admittedly, in his version, in the justly famous Canto V, Adamastor is not a giant to be treated without respect. When Vasco da Gama and his crew on their precarious voyage around Africa to the spicy and miraculous East are confronted by this “horrid monster,” he addresses them in lofty rhetoric:

  “I am that mighty Cape occult and grand

  Who by you all ‘The Stormy’ named has been”—

  which resounds even more splendidly in the original:

  “Eu sou aquelle occulto e grande Cabo,

  A quem chamais vós outros Tormentorio.”

  But in the final analysis the Adamastor conceived by Camões is more revolting than impressive, “Of stature all deformed and vast and tall,/The visage frowning, and with squalid beard;/The eyes were hollow, and the gesture all/Threatening and bad; the colour pale and seared;/And full of earth and grizzly was the hair;/The mouth was black, the teeth all yellow were.”

  His tragedy, as explained by Camões, lies in his consuming love for Thetis,2 Nymph and Princess of the Wave, whom he has seen but once, fleetingly and fatally, as she was bathing naked with her Nereids on the shore:

  “…no power my sense could save,

  I felt by love o’ercome in such a way

  That nought I know I’d long for more to-day.”

  It is inconceivable that his love can ever be requited. “What love of nymph could e’er suffice/To cope with that of giant of this size?” asks our pretentious poet. But here I must protest. My own suspicion, the product no doubt of a more cynical and secular age, is that if the lack of response to the poor creature’s amorous advances had indeed been partly caused by a discrepancy in size, this may well have involved only one part of his anatomy. On this, perhaps with the best of intentions, Camões seizes, taking pars pro toto, blowing up, in a manner of speaking, out of all proportion a stumbling block that might well have been overcome with some patience and considerable pleasure. As if that were not enough, he drags the nymph’s mother Doris into a particularly dirty plot to trick the giant.

  In exchange for a promise that Adamastor will cease his war against the armies of the Sea, she undertakes to arrange a nocturnal tryst with her oh-so-innocent daughter:

  “Already fooled, already war denied,

  At last one night, by Doris promised, shone,

  When from afar the beauteous form I spied

  of Thetis white, unrobed, and all alone.”

  But when, “mad-like,” he approaches to take the fair maid in his arms and proceeds to attempt what hopefully seems natural to both,

  “I found within my arms a rugged mount,

  With harshest wood and thorny thickets faced;

  Standing before a rock, e’en front to front,

  Clasped for her own angelic form in haste,

  I was not a man, but deaf and dumb by shock,

  And fixed against one rock another rock!”

  This disillusionment coincides, with Zeus’s decision finally to punish the rebellious Titans. Some of them, as we know from Greek mythology, are buried under huge mountains; Adamastor is turned into the jagged outcrop of the Cape Peninsula:

  “Into hard earth my flesh converted lies,

  My bones are turned to rocks all rough and strange,

  These members and this form ye see, likewise,

  Extended through these spreading waters range;

  In fine, my stature of enormous size

  Into this Cape remote the Gods did change;

  While for redoubled anguish of my woes,

  Thetis around me in these waters flows.”

  Rather exaggerated; but that is what happens to the truth when writers get their hands on it. And all of this is offered as a mere background to the somber prophecy Camões makes Adamastor utter (be
aring in mind that what had been prophecy for da Gama and his crew had already become history for the contemporaries of Camões): shipwrecks, and all manner of catastrophes awaiting the explorers of the Cape of Storms, a litany of destruction, despair and death:

  “And here I hope to take, if not misled,

  ’Gainst him deep vengeance who discovered me.”

  His apocalyptic prophecies culminate in a vision worthy of that age of overstatement:

  “Another too shall come of honored fame,

  Liberal and generous and with heart enchained,

  And with him he shall bring a lovely dame,

  Whom through Love’s favoring grace he shall

  have gained;

  Sad fate, dark fortune nought can e’er reclaim,

  Call them to this my realm, where rage unreined

  Shall leave them after cruel wreck alive,

  With labors insupportable to strive.

  “Their children shall die starving in their sight,

  Who were in such affection bred and born;

  They shall behold by Caffres’ grasping might

  Her clothing from the lovely lady torn;

  Shall see her form, so beautiful and white,

  To heat, cold, wind, expos’d, and all forlorn,

  When she has trod o’er leagues and leagues of land

  With tender feet upon the burning sand.

  “And more those eyes shall witness, which survive,

  Of so much evil and so much mischance:

  Shall see the two sad lovers, just alive,

  Into the dense unpitying woods advance;

  There, where the hearts of very stones they rive

  With tears of grief and anguished sufferance,

  In fond embrace their souls they shall set free

  From the fair prison of such misery.”

  In many ways this is an unsatisfactory translation; yet something of the great original melodrama shines through it, as baroque and exaggerated as the arches and architraves, the sheer excess, the inspired bad taste of the Manueline churches and cloisters in Lisbon or Oporto.

  Bearing all of this in mind—and reacting to the suggestion of eurocentric revulsion implicit in that image of the mighty cape, occult and grand, with its deformed stature, frowning visage, squalid beard, black mouth and yellow teeth—I have been nagged for a long time now by a particular question: from what “raw material” could Camões have fashioned his typically sixteenth-century European version of the story? Is it possible that behind it looms an original, an unwritten Urtext? And if so, could this conceivably be reconstructed in our own time and terms?

  This is the motivation behind my present venture. More precisely, my hypothesis is this: suppose there were an Adamastor, a model for the giant of Camões’s fanciful history; and suppose that original creature, spirit, or whatever he may have been, has survived through the centuries in a series of disparate successive avatars in order to continue watching over the Cape of Storms: how would he look back, from the perspective of the late twentieth century, on that original experience?

  This is the leap I propose to take; and my reader is invited to take the plunge with me.

  1. In Greek, adamastos signifies “wild,” “untamed.”

  2. Her spouse was Peleus, and she was later the mother of Achilles.

  1

  In which the reader encounters a curious kind of bird, nd a woman hatched from an egg

  Now that really was a sight to behold. From the sea, from the nesting place of the sun, we could see two objects swimming toward us, looking for all the world like two enormous seabirds with white feathers fluttering in a breeze that had newly sprung up. Not far from the beach, where our people were gathering mussels from the rocks exposed by the ebb tide, the two birds came to rest and appeared to draw in their feathers. Made no attempt to come closer to the shore. Just stayed there, bobbing on the swell, waiting perhaps for fish, but in that case it must have been whales, they were so huge. After a long time our eyes prised a third seabird loose from the horizon, all the way from where sea and sky lay together in the blue to where it joined the first two. And then, much later, yet another. Then a strange thing happened. While we were still standing there staring, the two birds in front began to lay eggs of a curious roundish shape, and brown in color. (What the two at the back were doing we couldn’t make out; for all we knew they were males.) What amazed us was that these eggs did not emerge, as one would expect, from the tail end of the birds, but rather from under their wings; and soon the eggs came drifting toward us on the tide. They had hardly reached the shore when people started hatching from them,1 not one at a time, but whole bunches.

  Well, people. We’d seen all kinds of human beings before. People like us, the Khoikhoin who’d inhabited these parts ever since the rock time of Tsui-Goab; and San (whom later generations of white foreigners would call “Bushmen”); and high up near the Upper River the Angry People we called the Xhosa had lived for longer than anyone could remember. But people like the ones that were hatched from those eggs we’d never ever set eyes on before. Like birds you might say, all colors under the sun; we first thought it was feathers but then we made out it was a kind of clothing. And strutting about stiff-legged like ostriches, and their heads so overgrown with beards and mustaches you could hardly see their faces. Just as well, for they didn’t seem to have much in the line of skin, all pale and white like grass that had grown under a rock for too long.

  I cannot say for sure today that they were Vasco da Gama and his men on their way to or from the East (on their first journey, or another?); or perhaps their predecessors, Bartholomeu Dias and his crew, who’d rounded our Cape a decade earlier (1488); or others following in their wake. Now I have of course seen copies of paintings and tapestries of da Gama, and that square man in his drapes and embroidery, the puffed striped sleeves, the beard and mustache, sporting on his chest the Cross of Aviz, does look familiar; but can one trust a painting, especially one made so long after the event? Moreover, all those people looked alike to us; if you’d seen one you’d seen them all. Except for the woman, of course. She was different! But even that might have escaped me had I not chanced upon her2 unencumbered by the wad of clothing they’d all wrapped themselves in. Naked, smooth, white, and all alone. Oh yes, she was different, all right; the most different thing I had ever seen. As unbelievable as if she’d just that moment risen from the white seed of our father Heitsi-Eibib, inimitable hunter. Like a thin tongue of fire, a bitter spark released that instant from a flintstone struck by none other than Tsui-Goab. In the course of my lives I have seen, and had, and been had by, innumerable women; but that first sight of the one I later named Khois (which means, of course, Woman), is beyond comparison with anything else. My only innocence, perhaps. So bear with me.

  On that first afternoon there was no sight or trace of her. To tell the truth, those eggs had barely touched the coast and hatched their motley brood when all of us scampered off the rocks, across the stretch of beach, over the first row of dunes, and into the dense bush beyond. The sun was already squatting over its nest before we came to a standstill. And it was a cold and hungry night for us as we’d abandoned all our food and implements among the rocks. All night long we huddled beside our fire listening to the hyenas whooping and the jackals laughing in the dark; not even the deep grunts of a marauding lion could scare us. Not after we’d seen what no human eyes had seen before; and it was only when Tsui-Goab, the Red Dawn, returned, smudging the sky with the blood of his latest kill, that we began to feel secure enough to approach the thing with words. It was I they all turned to for advice. I was their leader. In that life my name was T’kama, which means Big Bird. In normal parlance this meant Ostrich, but in the Khoi language “bird” is also a slang word for the male member; so I humbly trust, as I am not given to self-advertisement, that the reader will draw his (or indeed her) own co
nclusions.

  And so I was known as T’kama, the son of T’kaneep, the man with the bird that never came to rest.

  And he the son of Gubu, whom they called The Man with a Hundred Hands because man alone he could wage war against more enemies than anyone could count.

  And he the son of Aob, who killed the lion.

  The son of Ghaihantimu, who could play the gurah like no one else.

  The son of Goro, who first crossed the Great River and brought back stories nobody had heard before.

  The son of Akambi, who had killed his twin brother inside the womb of their mother and was born with only one ball.

  The son of K’guda, the Gazelle, who could run faster than the West Wind.

  The son of the Great Magician.

  The son of the one whose mother had been a wildebeest.

  And so back, back, back, all the way to the time of Heitsi-Eibib and beyond, to where Tsui-Goab had first fashioned the solid rock bed of the earth and then had broken stones from it and blown breath into them and turned them into human beings. Kanima, the first man, the Ostrich Feather; and his wife, Haunamaos, the Yellow Copper.

  I gave the people my advice. We first went back to the huts we’d set up a mere full moon ago in the opening among the fat-fingered trees today’s people call euphorbias, and which we’d completely bypassed in our stampede the night before to prevent the Beard Men from following us and discovering our place. The predators abroad in the night had caused all our fat-tailed sheep to break from their kraal and it took us all day to round them up again and repair the hedge of white-thorn branches. From sunset, and throughout the night, we sang and made music and danced and prayed to Tsui-Goab; and at dawn we pissed on the dying coals of the fire, and sprinkled fresh water from pots and calabashes at the entrance to the huts. Only then did we return to the beach.

  From the coarse scrub on the dunes we watched the eggs returning to the land (during the night the birds must have kept them under their wings) and the men setting to work on the beach. They fetched water from the shallow stream running into the bay just beyond the first ridge of rocks. They washed their clothes. A group of them disappeared into the bush, to look for food most likely. Some time afterward there was a strange thunderclap in the distance, which we could not explain as there wasn’t a cloud in the whole pale expanse of the sky; and after another while they returned with a dead springbok, carried by two of them, suspended from a pole on their shoulders. The sort of thing we had been doing all our lives. So they seemed like ordinary human beings after all.