cloth or a musket. By the white men who shackled him and brought him across the sea in the belly of their ship. By the plantation owners who purchased him and set him to work in the fields.” He spread his hands wide, then brought them together as though to gather in the entire world. “Even by this age we are living in, which permits these things to happen.”
“Is that why you do not hate my father? Why you can forgive him?”
“In part, though
“What is, then?”
He made clicking noises in his own language, which made me frown.
“John, you’ve always wanted clear answers, and sometimes there aren’t any.” He grinned, patting my leg. “Your father did not only betray me, but all the world — all men and women and creatures of the forest — even himself. And Mantis most of all. But it was only possible because of forces and powers that went far beyond him. It took me years to see that clearly and to see my own betrayal of him in that light as well. You wish, I think, to hear that I despised him. I shall not disappoint you — I did, and for many years. But I also remembered him fondly. That made what took place between us even harder to live with.” He drew in deeply on his pipe. “We have all paid for our errors, over many years, and now I only wish your dear father were still alive. What a good man he was and how wonderful it would be to see him!”
He left me speechless, and when he smiled at me reassuringly, I knew he was telling me that we would never need to speak of these things again. I knew I would forever owe him a great debt for that alone.
Yet his insights soon turned my thoughts to how Violeta had also been betrayed by the world. His eyes, squinting, began probing me for the cause of my sudden distance, and I told him how everything had gone wrong between us. I tried not to sound heartbroken, but he detected it plainly enough and told me a story I’d never heard before:
“Once,” he said, “there was a shepherd in the north of Portugal who took his flock to the greenest pastures he could find. At night he slept in a wee stone hut nearby. But in the morning, he discovered that one of the sheep had been shorn. He was not happy. And he was very, very bewildered. The next night, the same thing happened.”
I got off my chair then and sat on my haunches to listen more comfortably to his tale. Midnight did the same. We faced each other, only a few feet apart. I felt as though we were in his desert homeland and would never be separated again.
“The shepherd was furious. Being clever, he remained awake on the third night and watched the Women of the Sky descend from the stars along a cord they’d woven from the air. He saw them grab one of the sheep and take shears to her coat. Whereupon he jumped out from his hiding place and ran after them till he had caught the loveliest maiden of all. He took her as his wife. And from that moment on, he had no more trouble from the Women of the Sky.”
“He must have had some or you wouldn’t be telling me this,” I said with a laugh.
“Thank you, John, for pointing that out,” he replied, his eyes radiating joy.
“Now, there was only one problem,” he resumed. “His wife was in possession of a beautiful woven basket, and he could see nothing of its contents because of the lid. Before she would agree to marry him, she obliged him to promise that he’d never lift the lid and peer inside — at least until she had given him permission to do so.” Midnight shook his fist at me. “She warned him that if he were to disobey her wishes, a terrible destiny might await them both. Yet as the summer passed, the need to know what was inside made him restless. One day when his wife was not at home, he — ”
“He removed the lid,” I said.
The Bushman pursed his lips comically, wrinkled his nose, and gazed around as though fearing watchful eyes. Then, after peering inside his imaginary basket, he breathed in longer than seemed possible on his pipe, as though to inhale the words of the story. Wisps of smoke curled from his nose and ears.
“When his wife returned,” Midnight said, “she knew what her husband had done. She began to cry, accusing him of having looked inside the basket.
“The shepherd said to her, ‘How silly you are to shed tears over such a trifle. There was nothing at all in the basket. It was empty as can be.’
“‘What do you mean, empty?’ his wife said.
“‘That is precisely-precisely what I mean. There was nothing there.’”
Midnight clapped his hands together, so that I jumped. “And that, John,” he said, “was the very last word the shepherd ever spoke to his wife, for she reached up into the descending sunset of red and gold, took the end of a heavenly cord, and climbed back into the sky.”
“And …?” I asked.
“And nothing.” He grinned.
“That’s it?”
“Yes, that’s the end.”
While I struggled to work out what it meant, he tapped the floor between us with his foot. “John, do you know why she went away?”
“To punish him for his curiosity?”
“No, no, no,” he scoffed, twisting his lips into a frown. “That is the Jewish story of Adam and Eve. This is a Bushman story.”
When I shook my head, he said, “Not because he had broken his promise. Nor because of his curiosity. The Woman of the Sky was aware of our nature and had expected him to look, of course. Just like the God of the Torah always expects Adam and Eve to take the apple he leaves for them. No, the Woman of the Sky turned her back on the shepherd because he had found the basket empty and laughed.”
“But it
“No, in point of fact, the basket was filled with the beautiful-beautiful things of the sky, which she had placed there for them both. The shepherd simply did not see them.”
Midnight made a circle in the air with his hand. “John, Mantis was once lost,” he continued. “And he walked all over the African desert to try to find his home. Finally, exhausted after many years, he gave up. It was only then he recognized his tree and his leaf.”
“Midnight,” I begged, “I am out of practice, so will you please tell me what you mean or I shall scream and wake the entire household.”
He pointed two fingers at me. “The lid of the basket is your eyes. When I look inside, I see beautiful- beautiful things — all that you have put there in your life. Even the Violeta you knew as a lad is there. She is there for you whenever you want her. But the secret is, she cannot come out into this world. Her destiny is to remain only inside you. In fact, whenever you try to make her come out, she dies.”
The next day, I told this story to Mama. I think it put her in the mood to speak to me of Midnight for the first time. But before that, she played the second movement of Beethoven’s “Appassionata Sonata” with incomparable fragility and thoughtfulness, as though she were creating a new and delicate form of life with the notes — an ethereal being made of music.
I sat down next to her to turn the pages. When she was finished, I was so overwhelmed that I told her she was a genius. She laughed. “John, you are sweet, but you have mistaken me for Mr. Beethoven.”
“No, Mama, you’re wrong. His genius has come through you to me, so there is no difference.”
Her eyes moistened and she said, “That is, without doubt, the nicest thing anyone has ever told me. You know, sometimes I think if we just listened to Mr. Beethoven and Mr. Mozart a little bit more, things would be so much better. But we don’t really hear what they want to tell us. Not really.” She brushed some hair off my brow. “I don’t think I knew what they were saying until I was your age at least.”
“And what is it they’re saying, Mama?”
“It’s a secret,” she whispered, grinning girlishly.
“I’ll not tell a soul, I promise.”
“Well, John, I’ll only tell
