Mating (33 page)

With great regularity Nelson would regret and then not regret siting the public buildings of Tsau on a terrace one hundred and twenty-five feet above the plain. Everyone at one time or another would curse Tsau for not being laid out all on one level. I got used to seeing people dragging themselves around strickenly for a while after reaching the terrace, particularly if they’d had to get up to it in a hurry. This came across to me as largely pro forma, though. It was never long before the tonic elements in the setting would take over. The breezes, were lovely there. You could promenade along the terrace rim and peer down into people’s yards. And the actual ascent was very gradual, with benches along the routes.

The view was dramatic. You appreciated the greenness of Tsau, as against the burning grays and yellows of the Kalahari. When there were cloud shadows, the Kalahari looked like a leopard pelt. People would sit and commune with the view. What Denoon would say in defense of the location was that civically important events should take place in an elevating setting. I knew he had images of Delphi in mind. I also knew he thought stair climbing was cardiovascularly good for you and I found myself wondering if that had had something to do subliminally with the choice. My bet, still, is that, all things considered, no woman would have voted to have the washhouse, the stores house, the central kitchen, and the Sekopololo offices located at the top end of a long though gentle ramp. We inhabit male outcomes. Every human settlement is a male outcome. So was Tsau, which was seventy percent complete when the first women moved in.

Gladys and Ruth Street delivers you to the center point of the plaza, which is kidney shaped, half a city block in extent, flagged at the margins and raked sand otherwise. The concavity is toward you. There are several small mopane trees to the rear west side of the plaza, but most of the shade is provided by beach umbrellas, for which there are sockets in the
ground irregularly distributed over the open area. Straight ahead of you as you arrive, and set far back, is the stores house, a huge rondavel connected via a covered passage to a cave in the koppie. There are two imposing sister structures, ovaldavels, one at each of the far ends of the plaza. I had looked only superficially into the stores house—the front section of the rondavel and not deeper into the cave—but I had been impressed by the density of the array of goods and tools stacked, racked, shelved, binned, hoisted up and hanging suspended over you, to be found there, everything labeled and tagged, seemingly. You would have to be lithe to get around rapidly amid the profusion of goods in the front room and through the back room and into the cave, where the crowding was supposedly worse. The stores house rondavel and its sister ovaldavels were magnificent buildings, voluminous, with high, open vaults under the steep-pitched thatched roofs. The construction was not mud block like the homestead rondavels, it was concrete block, but you could only tell this from inside: the exteriors were finished in heavy mastic and enameled sky blue. One reason that Tsau gave such a spangled appearance from a distance was that the thatching closure on the roof peaks is always protected by tin cladding, either a conical cap, in the case of the rondavels, or long, pieced shielding like an overturned racing shell, in the case of the ovaldavels.

The ovaldavel to the right I classified as general administrative, since it housed the post office-bank, the library, meeting rooms for the mother committee, the disputes committee, and the committee as to names. I analogized the mother committee to a town council, although the interlocks between it and something called the sister committee, which had to do exclusively with the economic side of Tsau, meaning Sekopololo, were for a long time obscure to me. Denoon had no office anywhere in the public buildings, I was surprised to learn. There was some mousy shrubbery around the administrative building, and some freesias, I think. A ship’s bell hung from a hook next to the front door.

The ovaldavel to the left was Sekopololo itself—offices, record rooms, a veranda where the morning shapeups took place, and a combination shop and lounge devoted to stocks of the most commonly needed commodities, such as salt, toilet paper, cooking oil, and batteries. There were some smaller buildings behind Sekopololo, in one of which was the largest of the three generators in Tsau.

Wires could be strung across the plaza from high up on the different buildings so that, using support poles and sheets of burlap, large sections of the open area could be canopied for outdoor events in the hot season.
In fact it was possible to accommodate the whole populace under shade in the plaza. Risers would be packed in along the inner curve of the terrace, a canopied dais would be erected out toward the terrace rim, and the fun would begin. It was unique.

I was informed I should report to the plaza at seven in the morning for my meeting with the mother committee. I was prompt. Just off the Sekopololo veranda a circle of chairs had been set up around a low round table with a crockery urn and nine mugs on it. The mother committee was prompt. Just as I arrived the eight members of the committee filed out of the administration building. I was motioned to sit anywhere I liked. They were new faces, only Joyce and Dineo being familiar to me. We all said our names before beginning, but I was concentrating so on what I was going to say that only one of the new names stuck with me, the name of a woman who seemed fascinated with me, Dorcas Raboupi. Her eyes never left me. She had perfectly straight eyebrows, like dashes. She was short, not young but not yet in the aunt category. She was lighter complexioned, almost a coloured, her face lumpy on one side, as though she had a fat-deposition disorder. She sat in a huddled way that I thought showed hostility. The day was cool but not cold. Several of the women had brought shawls with them, and I had been told I could get one to borrow at the counter in Sekopololo. I didn’t need one. Dorcas Raboupi was unnerving. She appeared to be someone’s nemesis, probably mine for no reason I could think of. I was prescient.

I expected Dineo to lead off and handle the meeting, but instead a bag was passed around and people drew disks out of it, with the one who drew a notched disk beginning the proceedings. This was a heavyset young woman, Mma Molebi, evidently nursing: there was a milkstain in her bodice over one breast. Judging by the way she wrung her hands before she commenced, she was uneager for her assignment. My back was to the desert.

Mma Molebi began with the obviously obligatory history of Tsau. As she spoke, the other women got up one by one and served themselves tea. I was struck by this, because it would be usual for the youngest woman present to serve the older women. There is so much reflexively hierarchical behavior in Africa—the young serving the old, women routinely serving men—that this self-service feature of life in Tsau leapt out at me. It reminded me that I had seen something else that was atypical, namely young males willingly shoveling up animal manure to use in composting. Admittedly I had seen this in Tsau only a couple of times. But it was not the Botswana I knew. If manure had to be collected, it
would be usual for women to do it. I knew from my Peace Corps doctor that there was perpetual sturm und drang with the boys the Peace Corps hired as messengers over being required to take sealed packages containing stool samples from the medical office to the lab at Princess Marina Hospital. One of the messengers had quit rather than demean himself so. Finally the female receptionist had volunteered to take over the task herself.

I got the feeling that our meeting was taking place in a circle out in the open so that passersby would feel comfortable in hanging around to see what was going on. People did drift up and listen for a while. I found it both inhibiting and relaxing, more the second as time went on.

Mma Molebi was speaking too softly for the group, and people signaled this to her by holding up their index fingers until she spoke up. She was either concluding or she was losing her way. Tsau was a jewel, she said twice. And then she went into something that moved me, albeit it was rather disjunct from what had gone before. She said Some women in this place have even once been beggars, but never shall they be again, because any woman who chooses to go away from Tsau can have money to take and shall know catering as well as many other kinds of work, and she shall never be seen working as maids or cleaners to others. The degree to which I’m easily moved in the early morning must have something to do with my biochemistry. I remember bursting into tears the first time I heard The Cherry Tree Carol sung on a record by Joan Baez, also at that time of day. And I have had other attacks of piercing feeling in the slot between seven and eight in the morning, including one over Mother and Child Reunion, an incident that let me in for some substantial teasing. People noticed that Mma Molebi seemed to have moved me, and were approving, I thought. The basket circulated again.

The winner this time seemed to have nothing to say other than that I was to be praised for never forcing any sister to speak to me in English.

Dineo signaled that it was my turn to speak, which I did, saying who I was and in essence repeating my pitch about being fascinated with Tsau and wanting to stay as long as that could be permitted, but volunteering this time to work however much I was asked to in order to help with any costs my presence caused. I laid in some filigree, but sincere filigree, so to speak, about wanting to witness the extraordinary things women seemed to be accomplishing in Tsau.

I could tell something was up with Dorcas. She said, out of turn and under her breath, something to the effect that she hoped I would find enough birds in Tsau to please me, and that if I was unable to find
enough birds to please me I should come to the mother committee, who would find birds for me.

Dineo cut her off and proceeded directly to what I took for the vote. She looked at each member of the committee until she got some response imperceptible to me. But apparently the vote was in my favor, because she went into a welcoming speech. A great exception was being made for me, she said, and I would be welcome among them only so long as I was seen as a friend of the struggle of poor women to gather strength and wealth. She put this with emphasis. I could stay where I was now, in the empty rondavel next to Mma Isang, who would continue to see after me and organize my meals, for which I would be asked to work at any tasks I would choose for a sum of fifteen hours each week. They hoped I would be willing to think of helping with teaching English to some of the older children. There was a great need. Finally, they thought it would be good for me to stay awhile because it was always a pleasure to meet persons from one’s own country when one was in a far place, so they thought Rra Puleng would be glad to see me there in Tsau. If ever I wished to leave, it would be three weeks until it could be arranged with the Barclays plane. On no account would they assist me to go off into the desert again, even if I wished to. And as a last thing, was I pleased at how my donkey was being looked after?

I thanked them, then it was over. Mma Isang appeared from the wings and came to embrace me, which inspired a couple of rather more halfhearted embraces from two of the women, not including Dorcas.

I was elated.

Dorcas walked by me, saying musingly to herself the names of the local bird species she could think of, making a production out of not seeming to be able to think of more than six.

A sort of municipal high tea was put out every afternoon around four on the Sekopololo veranda. There would be tea, powdered milk, fruit cut up into small pieces, sometimes bread pudding. Denoon would make cameo appearances at tea, often, but he hadn’t been staying put long
enough for me to get into casual conversation with him. I was tired of this and didn’t understand it, really. My life is taking forever, I remember thinking.

I loved teatime. There was a moral point to it. Some days there would be a generous collation put out, some days it would be sparse. It all depended on what happened to be either left over or in good supply. If there was only a little fresh fruit, it would be cut up minutely and thorn tree spines would be stuck into each chunk, as in hors d’oeuvres. Tea was never intended to be a spread adequate for the whole population, should it choose to turn up. The point seemed to be for people to adjust to what was available each day, holding back from taking any large, personally satisfying amount in favor of everybody getting a little of whatever there was. One custom was for no adult to take any fruit until the children who were around in the first few minutes had taken what they wanted. An undeclared object of the exercise seemed to be for teatime to finish each day with something remaining uneaten on the table, no matter how much or how little had been provided. Everyone seemed to know what this exercise was about and to enjoy being part of it, even the children. You could see them assimilating the rules, deferring to each other occasionally, turning down morsels themselves. I never tired of it.

I managed to be in the right place when Denoon arrived that afternoon. I went up to him and we shook hands. His palms were like planks. We knew everyone was watching.

He had a talent, which was to be able to talk intelligibly while ostensibly merely smiling. It was remarkable.

They want you to stay, he said. Even a faction I felt sure would be against it wants you to stay. It’s very funny. They think you’re a spy sent here to get the goods on Tsau, and that suits them fine. Most people just seem to like you. But anyway keep doing what you’re doing.

I said Yes, everyone was very nice at the mother committee. I’m definitely going to be here awhile.

Congratulations, he said. And then he said There was never any doubt.

I forgave him that evening during corso, which was the correct term for the postprandial walking around and going into houses where the welcome light was on that he had inculcated in Tsau. He had gotten the idea for it out of Tolstoy’s
Sebastopol Sketches,
he told me. It was apparently something done in Russian provincial towns during the nineteenth century, and it had seemed like a good idea, so why not?