Leviathan or The Whale

together that they might push each other out of the water in their frantic efforts to feed.

    Belly to belly, head to head, they were gathering up the bait as if they were afraid the food might run out. I could even see the sand lances leaping out of their mouths, in a futile bid for freedom. Delumba’s father, who has fished these waters for forty years and has the missing digits to prove it, had never seen so many whales, too many to count or record. All we could do was to stand and stare as flukes broke the surface in every direction, leaving no square metre of ocean untenanted by a whale, each animal moving independently and yet in unison.
    What struck me then, and does so even more as I try to reimagine what I saw, was the
surroundness
of it all; the fact that we were incidental to this act of ancient choreography; not so much spectators as prisoners, unable to move as we were encircled by the whales and their proprietorial blows. It was as if humans had never happened, as if the ocean had reverted to another Eden. We had to wait while they got on with the business of eating, of laying comprehensive claim to the world on which we merely floated. In their rising breath and dying fall all the power and poignancy of life seemed wrapped, fraught with dramatic suspension; an exchange of exhalation and inhalation which scares me to think of it. Yet that sound, which I can replay in my head even as I write, is also oddly consoling, a reminder of our common ground, a reassurance that everything will be all right, even if it will not. Perhaps whales will teach me how to live, just as my mother taught me how to die.
    The same symmetry that had drawn me out of the city and back to where I was born had drawn the circle to a close: from the then when I needed my mother, to the now when she needed me; although she would never admit that she did, not in public, anyhow. She was fiercely independent, and would never submit. But I heard her on the phone to my sister, bemoaning her situation, and as creeping arthritis, which no amount of whale medicine would mend, added to her long list of ailments and her retreating senses, its crippling lock took hold of her legs and her fingers and her spine–even as I felt it in my own fingers. I overheard her, lying alone in bed, telling herself she would never walk again. She had always told me that at the end, when she was no longer needed, she would go down to Weston Shore, and just keep on walking. Now she couldn’t even do that.
    That September, soon after I had returned from the Cape, I was summoned by an early morning phone call to the hospital. My mother had suffered a severe heart attack. For a week, she lay there, slowly ebbing away on a hospital bed, with her family around her. At one point, I followed her as she was wheeled into intensive care, an air-locked, semi-darkened chamber where the blips and beeps of the other souls caught in limbo lay between life and death, emitting their own forlorn sonar. Only weeks before, I was a patient here, albeit for only an hour, my body sent through the claustrophobic scanner which knocked loudly like a poltergeist as it analysed my brain, trying to find the source of the eternal ringing in my ears, as if I were listening to some distant machinery. Now, in the same building, my mother lay wired up to her own machine, spread-eagled like an animal in an experiment, her long grey hair pulled tight by an elastic band. Her eyes never opened or closed, but she called my name.
    In those days, the details of which only now seem to come back to me, I lived in the hospital, wandered its corridors, sometimes walking in the cemetery set, with shocking efficiency, across the road, where the early autumn sun shone low through the trees, their fading leaves filtering the light. Then, in the dark hours before dawn, as I awoke suddenly on the camp bed made up by her side, I heard her breath slow to an imperceptible halt, from being to not being, leaving me, another orphan. And as I bent over the bed–so quiet as if not to wake her–her mouth let out a final little gasp, just as mine gave its first fifty years ago.
    For now he was awake and knew
No one is ever spared except in dreams

    W. H. Auden, ‘Herman Melville’

XIV
The Ends of the Earth

    The inhabitants are mainly of Portuguese descent, indolent and devoid of enterprise. Principal exports: wine and brandy, oranges, maize, beans, pineapples, cattle. The climate is recommended as suitable for