Mating (28 page)

The message of the dream lecture was that there was something I had
to avoid. It was a strain to formulate it. There was something I should beware, something that was not good enough.

What was not good enough was the usual form that mating takes.

I had to realize that the male idea of successful love is to get a woman into a state of secure dependency which the male can renew by a touch or pat or gesture now and then while he reserves his major attention for his work in the world or the contemplation of the various forms of surrogate combat men find so transfixing. I had to realize that female-style love is servile and petitionary and moves in the direction of greater and greater displays of servility whose object is to elicit from the male partner a surplus—the word was emphasized in some way—of face-to-face attention. So on the distaff side the object is to reduce the quantity of servile display needed to keep the pacified state between the mates in being. Equilibrium or perfect mating will come when the male is convinced he is giving less than he feels is really required to maintain dependency and the woman feels she is getting more from him than her servile displays should merit. In the dream this seemed to me like a burning insight and I concentrated fiercely to hold on to it when I woke up: I should remember this inescapable dyad at the heart of mating because it was not what I had come this far to get.

It was impossible not to sleep more.

In all I must have slept for more than twenty-four hours.

Suddenly I was slept out. Unfortunately it was still in the middle of some night or other, either the one during which I’d had my homiletic dream or the one following. I lay there staring at nothing, being hungry.

I decided to use my time constructively by trying to figure my way out of the cleft stick of wanting to have Nelson think both that my expedition was a reckless ordeal undertaken under the influence of un-masterable feelings toward him and that an exploit like this was nothing extraordinary for someone of my experience and grit. But there was something amiss in my immediate vicinity.

I could hear someone breathing. This was not Mma Isang: it was
excited breathing. I felt to see that I was modest. I felt around for the thermal blanket, but it must have been on the floor. My shift came just below the knee. I would have been happier with my underthings on underneath it, but this was all right.

I inched up to a sitting position and held my forearms in an X in front of my face. I held my breath so that I could hear where my intruder was.

Someone dove for me and got a hand across my mouth before I could yell. I knew it was Denoon and I was astounded. His hand was very hard and smelled of diesel and smoke, but his person smelled of soap. He had washed up before coming over to assault me, at least. He was pressing me hard against the wall and trying to tell me something in a whisper. My mind was blank with shock, but I remember managing to note that there was indeed garlic in Tsau. His fear was that I would thrash around in resisting and knock something over. He was tremendously strong and I sensed he was trying not to hurt me. He had me pinned to the wall, with his left arm stretched behind my shoulders and left hand gripping my arm at the elbow and his right hand clapped over my mouth. Once he had me bundled together the way he wanted, he held me that way and continued to whisper apologies into my ear, and then entreaties to say nothing, to promise to be silent while he explained something urgent to me.

The proof that I am a basically empathetic person is that I complied instantly. My essential nature is inclined to violence when someone touches me without being invited, and I am also physically strong. There were things I could have done. However, they would have prolonged the wrestling imbroglio we were in, which would have been okay with me except that the male constitution is a problem, or rather friction is a problem for it. The human penis is a thing like a marmoset or some other unruly small pet they carry around with them. An erection would hardly mean Denoon was in love with me or even desired me qua me, in all my wondrous dimensions. I wanted to spare us embarrassment. Also there would have been something faintly promissory in his getting an erection, which would have been unwelcome to me and unfair to him. If I was going to elicit an erection it should be nonaccidental. So in my enormous delicacy I went limp and began nodding violently yes to the question Will you be silent when I take my hand off your mouth?

He got off me like a shot then and slid over and sat up against the wall next to me, half on the bed.

You should be an assassin, I told him.

Even a low voice was too loud. He wanted us to whisper.

First there were more apologies. Secondly, was I all right? meaning all right after my expedition, which he couldn’t believe I had attempted myself. He was not going to ask me to say why I had come to Tsau or how I had found out where it was, but he wanted me to know—and here he became halting—that he was impressed, he was flattered, if that was the right word, and he was glad I was there. We were both uncomfortable during this stanza, but I was also triumphant. As I read it, I was being admitted into a game neither of us could bear to be explicit about, and I had been right that the game had begun at Tutwane’s. I was controlling joy.

There was a situation at Tsau I had to understand, was next. I no doubt knew that Tsau was a project for women. That is, he had started the project with women, destitute women from all over Botswana but mostly from the northwest, women cut off from their families for any one of a number of reasons and subsisting on one sack of mealie a month from the government. So they had been the ones gathered together to make Tsau. I am making this more compressed temporally than it was, because he was pausing throughout to get his breath and to listen to see if there was any sign that we might be being intruded on. But I am not misrepresenting what it was intellectually. What he conveyed in the dark in the time he had was a feat.

So these ablebodied destitute women had been gathered together to make Tsau. All the homesteads in Tsau were vested in women, meaning that the charter women owned the individual homesteads, and he had even worked it out with the government that in Tsau inheritance of the homestead would be restricted to female offspring and female collaterals or designees. Of course I would see men in Tsau, mostly relatives who had turned up miraculously after the fact, but they were a minority. But I should know all this. And there would be more men in the population down the road, of course. But the vesting of the homestead as an asset, and the entitlements that went with it, would always be in the female line. And of course the idea behind that was to demonstrate that at least here something could be done about the economic disenfranchisement of women that was taking place in the society at large as it modernized. Women were being impoverished wholesale because cattle herds, the main productive asset in Botswana, were being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, all of them male, something he knew I had seen for myself in Tswapong and Keteng.

I love a concise mind.

So he wanted to be sure I grasped that there was a certain sensitivity
about the presence of mates, since most women in Tsau either lacked them and were unlikely to get them or were beyond them and had strong feelings about those women still unhappy about the problem. As a matter of fairness he had been living alone in Tsau. He was not going to be seen as inviting special company for himself in the form of women or whites of his particular background. It was imperative that there be no suggestion of a prior connection to him and imperative that it be believed that I had gotten to Tsau sheerly by accident. It was an important source of strength to him that tourists and evaluators had been kept out of the project, and I must not seem to be either one of those things. He disliked dissembling, he said, but a great deal was at stake.

He paused. I was thinking that of course the spiritus rector of a female community would need to be a sexual solitary, at least during the foundational period. But such periods needn’t last forever, it was my humble opinion. I wondered if this situation was the analog of western series on television where the female watchership shrank to nothing when the producers let the marshal get married.

He wouldn’t describe the situation re the shortage of men as a split, exactly. On the whole the younger women were the more critical ones, unsurprisingly but not uniformly, and the older women were solidly on his side. If I could convincingly appear to be a lost traveler everything could evolve. He had no choice but to imply he’d never known me.

The sense of assumed collaboration was thrilling to me. The whole unstated side of our exchange was delicious. I felt brilliant.

I think men hate to whisper, because I noticed he found it necessary every so often to let his natural deep man’s voice show itself for a moment or two before going back into hiding.

Be a lost traveler, he said. Do you have some story?

I told him. He thought ornithology was good and liked my lost donkey and lost scientific impedimenta flourishes. It worried him that I knew nothing—as I confessed—about birds. He would get a field guide to me, he said, posthaste.

Are we a conspiracy? I asked.

He circumvented with They don’t know it, but the reason people are so pro bird is because ninety-five percent of bird species are monogamous.

I’m not, I said. I can do this but I have to overcome a sort of mocking feeling I have about birdwatchers. I figure Let the birds watch
me.
Of course this is me speaking as a higher life form.

Are your hands all right now? he asked. He felt my forehead and said Good. So he had been looking in.

Jesus, what am I doing? he said, I think with genuine feeling and apropos of nothing, to which I said Same here, and we laughed.

This place is going to generate wealth, he said. And men will be welcome, but by then the women will be where they should. You’ll see. I think you deserve to be here.

This isn’t exactly it, but he finished with something like I’m delighted you’re here and now I have to crawl out of here on my belly like a reptile.

There was a brief, whispered exchange with someone, probably Mma Isang, who, I sensed correctly, was a confederate, outside the door.

I was already trying to recollect what little I knew about African birds and reflecting on how perverse it was for me to choose ornithology to misrepresent myself in. After all, I am the daughter of a mother whose humiliating favorite radio program was a thing called the Canary Chorus, wherein a Hammond organ droned for hours on end in a roomful of trilling canaries. She would recommend this program indiscriminately.

In the morning I made a production of being concerned about my binoculars, digging fixedly through my goods until I came up with them—as any shipwrecked ornithologist would.

Mma Isang seemed to like me. It was mutual. She was in her fifties, built very blockily, with an unfortunate face. The root of her nose was sharply indented, her eyes were deep-sunk, and there were marked crowsfeet extending from her eyes around the sides of her face. Her face looked as though it had been crimped. I never learned if this was a congenital defect or just an unlucky but normal featural concatenation. There were residues of a Serowe accent in her Setswana, which I noted and which she acknowledged, impressed with me. All my clothes had been laundered.

I felt absurdly recovered but decided it would be prudent to conduct
myself convalescently for the time being. I got dressed in my bush gear: longsleeved army shirt, jeans, boots. There was a mirror to use. I looked fairly banged up. I did a cursory toilette, which was all any toilette would be until I could get my hair clean. I borrowed a headscarf. At some point in the intervals in my sleepfest, I remembered vaguely I had been promised I could bathe.

We would be having breakfast with some women, Mma Isang said, surprising me by speaking in English. We would be speaking in English also when the delegation came. They would be bringing our food behind them, she said.

Waiting, I sauntered around outside a little, going up the main avenue, Gladys and Ruth Street, as far as the mysterious white object that had frightened me when I first noticed it. The main avenue was named for the wives of the first and second presidents of Botswana. An oddity was that at the gate end the street was Gladys and Ruth, but at the plaza end it was Ruth and Gladys Street. People were touchingly scrupulous about which name order they used, depending on which end of the street they were at. The white object was a gauze shroud covering a flayed carcass hanging from a tree, the meat tree, to age. It was to keep flies off. I had seen meat trees before, but never with this refinement. There was an attendant at the tree, and people were coming up and indicating which sections of the cow they wanted when it was cut up. The attendant, actually the cow’s owner, was taking these orders down in a notebook, and chits or tokens of some kind were being handed to her. I observed all this from a distance, not wanting to overstep.

It was a cool morning, bright, no different than any other morning since Kang, but now I was able to experience the pleasure there was in it. Breathing was a pleasure. I’m sure I’ve never been so pleased with myself. All the innocent industry of the households getting mobilized for the day was a pleasure to see. And I loved Tsau from the compositional standpoint, from the pastel motley feeling of the rondavels to the red rock jumble crowning the koppie. I was already thinking of these rocks as the Citadel, portentously.

Another mystery fell away. Twice I saw children pushing light wooden two-wheeled carts whose sideboards were decorated with simple figures or symbols in enamels in spectrum colors. The wheels were bicycle wheels. In the case of the two carts I got a glimpse of the decor consisted of female imagos with pierced disks of glass screwed into the wood where eyes or a necklace would be. Clearly carts like these, in their shuttlings, were responsible for the vivid blurts of color I had seen recurring
at odd points in the landscape. Why these rococo vehicles were always called dung carts when in fact collecting dung from the kraals and pens was the last and least thing they were used for is something I never figured out. The dung carts did well on the packed earth of the pathways and must have been strongly made, because I saw them routinely bumped very hard up and down the short intermittent runs of steps in the paved routes to the plaza without flying apart. Children personally owned these carts and could earn credits for conveying goods or messages in them. You might see a cart being furiously rushed someplace with a folded piece of paper in it and nothing more. This was not totally laughable, because there was always the possibility that something more substantial might be picked up for the return trip. As I was to discover, the explanation was that there was a greatly indulgent attitude toward the small, petted population of children. People sent the children on perpetual errands, many of them invented or marginal, out of love, essentially. The carts made a contribution to the visual agitation or liveliness you felt in Tsau, which was especially noticeable in late afternoon or during the innumerable holidays when the children were out of school.