Mating (22 page)

The grass thinned and gave way to patches of hardpan and bare sand. The trees began to be fewer. I passed my last attended cattle at ten and by midafternoon I had seen my last stray cow. The boys seemed fairly catholic about the available kinds of grasses, which was a relief. Toward evening I found my first water point exactly where it was supposed to be, although I had to do more digging in the bed of the sand river than I’d
expected. I finally got visible seepage in the trough I’d dug. We stopped there. I tethered my animals and uncorked my pop-up alpine tent and zipped myself into it. I made a meal out of the hardboiled eggs, which was a mistake. I have no idea what I thought about that day. I think I was subsisting mentally on the singing feeling you get from beginning a great action. I was even too tired to write anything. I sank like a stone into sleep.

At two a.m. I awoke, my mind on fire with the question of lions. I knew I was supposedly safe, myself, in my tent, because there were no cases on record of lions actually forcing their way into a closed one. Also the game migrations were over with, which were what drew lions, and the migration routes in any case went in a curve deep to the west and north of my itinerary. But of course now in the small hours I was asking myself how much of everything you’re told in Africa is folklore. I might be safe, but what about my boys? In Gaborone there was a public attraction, a lion park socalled, and what the tourists came to watch was fresh donkey meat being flung over a chainlink fence to a couple of lions at feeding time. Was the lion-tent copula a piece of folklore? and were lions really so strictly nocturnal in their hunting? There was a man in Gaborone I had had drinks with, the lion man. He was one of my sources. He was one of the people who had been reassuring. But he himself had started out as a student of lions and had been turned into an obsessive on the subject. He was a bar character you bought drinks for. I remembered his descriptions of lions bringing down gigantic Cape buffalo: one would swallow the buffalo’s snout, suffocating it, while other lions tore at the buffalo’s legs. The lion man never wanted to see another lion. It was pointless, but I spent a good part of the rest of the night listening.

The next day I got up tired and swearing that from then on every night I would do the prudent thing of building either a perimeter fire or at least a large campfire and staking the boys next to it. I was annoyed at myself for gorging on eggs and naturally getting constipated. So it was onward.

It was a long time before Denoon really took my vocational crisis for anything like the real thing. The world was my oyster if only I got organized, was his initial thrust. Why couldn’t I write about travel, for example. I loved travel. Need Travel Constipate? could be a selling article in something. All this was in the context of his proposal that I should found a magazine called True Travel analogous to True Crime or True Detective. I should found a travel magazine that would tell the absolute truth, for a change, which would lead to more people staying home, a consummation devoutly to be wished, according to him. Tourism corrupts, was his tune. I would be perfect for True Travel because according to Denoon I had never been in a country I really liked. America the Beautiful included.

Of course I proposed my share of alternative careers for him. One of us would be depressed and the other would say Well, you could always do such and such, and it would be off to the races. This began as a benign device for getting out of moments of discouragement. It evolved. The concept was that the one who noticed the other was depressed was thereby authorized to select a new vocation the depressed person would be forced to follow thenceforward, and in the pursuit of which depression would perforce not be logical. This jeu maintained its facetious character, but there came a time when I began to resent it as a concealed way of short-circuiting my episode of depression, because he preferred me to be merry, naturally. Finally, when I’d had many more vocations imposed on me than I was ever likely to be able to impose on him, it was enough and I made us discuss it, with the interesting result that he realized our jeu was probably vaguely filial to a species of game he’d enticed his unfortunate younger brother into playing when they were on boring car trips as children. He would get his little brother to agree that each of them would have the right to pick out, from the array of housing they would pass as they drove, the house that the other would have to live in for the rest of his life. The idea was to saddle the other with the worst-looking, worst-circumstanced hovel they saw on that particular trip. But of course Denoon, being older, had more patience and knew his younger brother would choose precipitately, and that by biding his time he, Denoon, would find something infinitely more humiliating for his brother than his brother would for him. He always won. He found houses on eroding cliffs and frightening little houses in cemeteries, for example. Denoon always won, but he also won the more important metagame, which was to get his brother to play another time, and another. Nelson wasn’t proud of this. Looking it in the face even interested
him. Through talking about it he remembered a parallel game he had gotten his brother to play, out of his brother’s desire to be in his zone. Peter was four years younger. This was not a car game, because it involved recourse to lists and books. You’re really good for me, Denoon would say when we got into these purlieus. You amaze me. Nelson would propose to Peter that they each have the power to name the other’s firstborns, always assumed to be male, interestingly. During these accounts I felt fortunate having no siblings. I was seeing something foreign. The name would have to be documentable, either by appearing in the sorts of lists of names that are appended to big dictionaries—which Peter was more or less restricted to by reason of youth and lack of imagination—or by appearing in some other printed text. Again he could count on his brother’s being premature and going with something like Percy, something that sounded unmanly, which in the early games Denoon might counter with something like Uriel, thusly bringing bodily wastes associatively into the picture. So Denoon would win and his brother in frustration would scream that all right then he was taking back Percy and somehow was going to make Nelson call his son Shitler. Denoon was always on the lookout for humiliating names. In the last game in the series, Denoon’s greatest triumph, his brother was forced to accept naming his firstborn Dong, as in Dong Kingman, the painter, dong of course being slang in those days for penis. The protocol in these games and the bait that kept getting Peter to play was that each new game would allow the players to wipe out the results of the last preceding game in the genre. I was seeing a true vortex of oppression. When they played cowboys, for instance, Denoon would inveigle his brother into calling himself something like Roy Mucus, Sheriff of Scrotum County, when these words meant nothing to Peter. The games could go on for days. Where were your parents during all this? I wanted to know. They were otherwise beset, he said: beset is Afrikaans for occupied, and you see it on the restroom doors on South African Airways planes.

On the second day the terrain changed. There were long dips and rises. I let the boys graze liberally anytime they seemed inclined. Around noon I had my first phenomenological oddity, having to do with light. It came suddenly. There was a surplus of light. I felt I was getting too much light, despite the fact that I was wearing sunglasses that were practically black. The sky was cloudless. An irrational sign or proof that there was too much light was that I thought I could detect a barely visible flicker in the sky just above the horizon. I tried to push this whole subject out of my consciousness, but it persisted. I thought it might be low blood
sugar speaking, so I ate some raisins. Peculiar ideation about light continued.

My sunglasses began to feel heavy and irritating. They were preventing something significant from happening. I developed the conviction that they were keeping me from seeing the real colors of the Kalahari and that this was hazardous for me. I would be in danger unless I recharged my sense of the real colors of things by taking my glasses off at some regular interval. I yielded to this notion, mainly in order to exhaust it, but each time I pushed my glasses up onto my forehead I had a stronger sense of some suppressed vibration going on in the landscape which I would be able to see clearly if I looked more intently and for a longer period the next time. This is brain chemistry, I said, and squatted down and hung my head between my knees. I got up, pulled the visor of my kepi down tight, put my glasses back on, and thought about the hunchbacks of Kang.

I was then all right for twenty minutes, until the mania came back reformulated as the proposition that if I actually got rid of my sunglasses, and only if, I would be able to see the true and fundamental color of nature. I was to understand that what we perceive as beautiful individual colors are only corruptions and distortions of the true color of reality, which is ravishing and ultimate and apprehensible only in extremely rare circumstances. This was not a question of hallucination. It was analogous to dream knowledge, but different. I knew that for some reason at some deep level I was doing this to myself. But still I was tempted to act. I said aloud things like This is about self-injury, This is about self-worth, What are we to ourselves? and other pop-psych trash. The experience was strange in every way. Was I trying to get myself to turn around and go back to Kang before it was too late, because navigating in the Kalahari without sunglasses is one thing for Bushmen who have presumably been adapting their vision to a surplus of light for millennia and another thing for a lakhoa already in a state of anxiety? On any trip like mine there’s a point of no return. So was this some ideational response to the fact, which I was already having to fight to repress, that I was over my head? Had my brilliant unconscious chosen the one thing that if discarded would virtually disable me for making the long trip to Tsau but be manageable for a quick retreat back to Kang and safety? I think what broke the grip of this mania on me was firstly just hearing my own voice, whatever it was saying, and, secondly, remembering reading about someone who had been lost in the Kalahari and survived it reporting that he had had to get past a point when he experienced the desert as an organism
or totality trying to get him to become part of it, as in surrender to it. This would make my sunglasses mania an analog of the feeling people lost in the Arctic get that they would be more comfortable if they took off their caps and mittens. The mania left, also suddenly, and we went on uneventfully.

That night I did everything right. I wore myself out collecting enough wood for a ring fire, got us all set up inside it, went into my tent, and closed my eyes, and immediately there were lions in the neighborhood. There may have been only one. I heard a roar like no other sound on earth. I felt it in my atoms. This is my reward for taking precautions, was my first thought.

I made myself emerge. I peered around. My boys were standing pressed together and shaking pathetically. I looked for glints from lion eyes out in the dark but saw nothing. Everything I did I managed to do with one hand on the flap of my tent.

Again I went through my lion lore. Lions roar only after they’ve eaten, for example. The paradox is that ultimately I slept better that night than I had the night before. I fell asleep clutching my bush knife.

In the morning I found it hard to eat. There was terror in me. I could die in this place, it was clear.

I dawdled breaking camp because I wanted to give any lions there were a head start at getting torpid. Lions are torpid during the day, was a key part of my lore package.

Anyone who thinks crossing the Kalahari by yourself is boring is deluded. It’s like being self-employed in a marginal enterprise: there’s always something you should be doing if your little business is going to survive. For example, you should always be lashing a stick around ahead of you through the thicker grass to warn snakes to get back. But this isn’t enough, because there are adders, who pay no attention to noise and just flatten themselves when they hear you coming, the better for you to step on them: so you have to be persistent about watching where you walk. Then you have to be careful not to walk directly under tree limbs
without looking keenly to see if there are mambas or boomslangs aloft. You also have to keep resetting your level of vigilance, because your forearm muscles, the extensors in particular, begin to burn, the lashing motion being one you’re totally unaccustomed to. In addition to which there is the sun to be careful about. I was keeping myself smeared with something I bought for three pula at Botschem that was supposed to be a strong sunscreen, but I was turning red in strips and patches anyway. And you have to be watchful for ticks. In only one way was I in luck, and that was in regard to dehydration. This was mid-April, that is to say mid-autumn, and perfect walking weather. In summer you could expect to lose about three pounds of water in a day of walking in the full sun.

You do need mental self-management, though, as I’d already partially learned, to get through solitudes like the Kalahari successfully. Fear itself is not enough to fully sustain and occupy you. On the whole I think I did well, which would have amazed certain lightweight women at the American embassy whose name for me, I learned much later, was Party Lights, based on their interpretation of my way of life—lifestyle to them, no doubt—in Gabs.

I was nervous and so were my animals, postlion. I stumbled on singing as a means of calming them down. I was singing for myself, initially, and then noticed that it seemed to help the boys too, especially Mmo. This is ridiculous, but they seemed to prefer complete songs to fragments of songs strung together with humming. I discovered how few songs I knew in full and how few songs of the ones I did know I knew more than one verse of. I think I must have a more complete sense of my total song inventory than anyone else has of theirs, except for professional singers. I know roughly which songs I know only the choruses of. I know which songs I know but discovered I couldn’t stand to sing in the desert, You Are My Sunshine being a prime example of a song I loathed suddenly to which I had never had any objection previously. And there are other songs you have sung only halfheartedly in the past which in the desert suddenly give you peace and seem indispensable, like Die Gedanken Sind Frei. You are astonished at the number of separate songs that have gotten fused together in your mind in some manner that makes it impossible to separate them, à la What do you want for breakfast my good old man? What do you want for breakfast my honey my lamb? Even God is uneasy say the bells of Swansea. And what will you give me say the bells of Rhymney? And there were songs I knew in full and perfectly but which I had no recollection of ever paying attention to when they were popular, like Heart of Glass, now a favorite of mine forever. Songs help when
you’ve under duress, which is undoubtedly why the Boer geniuses of cruelty forbid people in solitary confinement to sing.