Mating (34 page)

In addition to the usual shooting the breeze, another thing that went on during corso was a scene that was a good deal like testifying, as it’s called in fundamentalist Protestant churches. One woman might tell her tribulations up to the time of coming to Tsau and the listeners would chorically moan along, often making the speaker repeat the most painful episodes a few times. Many of the stories were genuinely harrowing, but there was something formulaic about the way they got told.

That evening I was in a house on Slessor where a woman lived whose name was Mariam Nene. She was under forty and seemed young for the chronology implicit in her story. She was the daughter of an accused witch. She had been fourteen when her mother died—poisoned, Mariam was sure—and it was widely assumed that Mariam had been initiated into witchcraft as a matter of course by her mother. So she was persona non grata, very, in her village near Pandamatenga close to the border with then Rhodesia.

She had an uncle on the Rhodesian side of the border in a village near Plumtree, and she set off on foot to find him. At this point Denoon slipped in and sat down. Members of the same tribe lived on both sides of the border, which meant nothing to them and which has still never been completely demarcated. I only remember the centerpiece of her story, which was her arrival in her uncle’s village just in time to witness him being murdered. He was a herbalist but was also clearly believed to be a sorcerer. He had gone to a pond in the bush to dive for calcified lark dung, a powerful ingredient in magical concoctions, and enemies of his had been lying in wait. Mariam arrived at the pond and saw from the bushes, where she stayed hidden, her uncle being prodded with long
poles to the center of the pond and then forcibly kept under until he drowned. This was a favored way of killing sorcerers because it left no marks. White administrators would never bother about deaths that looked natural. Denoon seemed to be strongly affected by her story. Mariam started to tell this horrific part of it again, and Nelson got up and stepped outside. I followed.

He was wiping his eyes. We walked around wordlessly. I felt close to him.

I decided not to intrude on his state of being unless he made some move to show that that would be welcome. He dropped me at Mma Isang’s and went off. I was being extremely careful. I think this was the beginning of our courtship.

Of course, life being what it is, in fact the thing that moved him in Mariam’s story was not what I had thought. It was something more abstract that her story had suggested. Much later I somehow brought this scene up, and he, on his own, straightaway corrected my view of what he had been feeling that night. I was saying, I think, how much it had moved me that he had been so moved by Mariam.

The more abstract thing was manmade violence in general. Before going to Mariam’s he had been writing poetry, or rather trying for the thousandth time to turn a very clear concept that he had into a real poem. There had been an overflow of emotion at Mariam’s because the subject matter of her story was an example of what he had been trying to get into his poem. He explained it to me. He wanted to write a poem that would make the point that anyone who embraces violence should be seen as an ally of all the inescapable natural enemies of humanity, from earthquake through the panoply of diseases. It was so clear to him. He obviously thought that if he could get this into a halfway decent poem it might have some effect. He let me see some of what he had done. It was Whitmanic. He was working with titles like Allies of Famine and Victualers of the Maggot or Votaries of the Maggot. I remember that Claymore and Gatling were characterized as allies of the maggot or the blowfly. You’re not a poet, I had to tell him. This is not a poem. A genius could do it, he said. We laughed over it. Your problem is that you want to be everything, I told him. That isn’t the worst, he said.

I asked him what the worst was.

The worst was that in the course of things he had gotten to know pretty well a couple of authentic poets, people whose names I would know but which he was too ashamed to tell me. He had actually sent them each a précis of his poem idea, in an attempt to get them to write
such a poem. One had never responded. One had responded politely. He seemed not to be friendly with either of them anymore.

You must be the greatest believer in the power of poetry there is, I told him.

Substantive courtship went on for a month, with me ultimately forcing the pace when I felt the balance between our public and private gettings-together was not improving. Public occasions far predominated, where we would find ourselves together at corso or some performance or other or at the movie. Our private occasions tended to be chaste long walks in the gloaming, which frequently turned out to end at some utilitarian destination such as a windmill in need of a touch of maintenance. Until the very end, there were no declarations toward me.

The studied pace of all this was something to be borne. I was working with the rabbits. On the few occasions Denoon and I were alone together I felt that he was more interested in how it was going in the rabbit pens than in getting to know all about me. He was always keenly interested in whatever I had to say analytically about Tsau, which served to confirm my notion that it was my reading of the place that he really wanted from me. We were going so ploddingly through the stages of courting—from handholding to a little mournful standing-up necking—that I for one found it embarrassing. It was quaint, not to say retrograde, for people our respective ages. But I went along with it, accepting the sickeningly familiar vigil for cues from the sovereign partner as to when it was time for the next plateau. There were great things at stake, I told myself, and his grasp of the ramifications of our getting together was greater than mine.

One thing I now know I was misinterpreting was Nelson’s taste for bouts of self-communing, which I mistook as being longeurs for him just as surely as they were for me. He liked us to walk around together in total silence much more than I did. When we finally discussed it I made him laugh by saying I get bored when I’m not talking. I remembered that he had mentioned to me that a normal social occasion for his parents
might be to invite friends over and sit around with them, nobody speaking for hours, while a recording of the Missa Solemnis was played. His mother and father, just the two of them, would often do the same thing. Mightn’t seeing that kind of thing have had something to do with the development of your taste for silence? I asked. No, he said, because by the time he might have been influenced by it he had figured out that the scene was really only another device of his father’s for having an apparently normal social evening while in fact being drunk: it was a sham, an excuse for sitting on a sofa with his eyes closed, only nominally present, making it to bedtime with the amount he had gotten away with secretly drinking going undetected. It was a con in every respect. For instance, his father’s record selections ran heavily toward sacred music, a lot of Bach, which Nelson saw as a transparent inducement to his mother to partake.

Can’t anything be innate? he wanted to know, objecting to my probing into his childhood yet again. Does everything have to be an exfoliation from the minutiae of our miserable childhoods? I happen to love silence, he said. Why do we have to be swamped in narrative? Our lives are consumed in narrative. We daydream and it’s narrative. We fall asleep and dream and more narrative! Every human being we encounter has a story to tell us. So what did I think was so wrong with the pursuit of some occasional surcease of narrative?

In retrospect I suppose I could have pursued the reasons for his bouts of indwelling, but when you’re being courted you develop such a gooseneck persona, even if only temporarily, that you’re out of position to catch clues that would normally alert you to things you need to pursue. But of course nothing is more profitless than going back over what interventions might have changed the shape of things to come. I want to scream at myself when I do that.

I realize that I may have contributed to his wanting to be silent during our walks by my too concentrated and cathected soundings re the books in his life. I was groping gingerly for his intellectual keystone, but not gingerly enough. There are certain quagmires to be avoided with people. You can find yourself liking someone who appears intellectually normal and then have him let drop that his favorite book of all time is
The Prophet.
That wasn’t the particular danger with Denoon, but there were others. A guy who tells you the best novel ever written is
Clarissa,
which also happens to be the first or second novel ever written, is also not unlikely to tell you that the only music he likes to listen to is motets and that art has never really advanced over the cave paintings at Lascaux. I
suppose I was on the qui vive for some variant of this reflex because Denoon had said his favorite novel was
War and Peace,
so I was thinking, Oh no, it’s going to be Beethoven for music and Shakespeare for plays. It isn’t that these positions are not defensible, but taking them may mean someone is not very individual. One thing you distinctly never want to hear a man you’re interested in say softly is that his favorite book in the whole world is
The Golden Notebook.
Here you are dealing with a liar from the black lagoon and it’s time to start feeling in your purse for carfare. Anyway, when I sensed the depth of Denoon’s desire for a little silence, I desisted. What I got out of this first attempt to look at his literary underpinnings was a paperback called
L’Afrique Noire est Mal Partie
to read and comment on.

Denoon was abruptly missing for four days, having said nothing about going anywhere.

Unbeknownst to me, there was an innocent explanation for his absence. He had a custom of retreating once a month to a lean-to a mile down the sand river for reading and reflection. The date had crept up on him. He’d discovered it was time to go by turning a page in his daybook. He’d looked for me, hadn’t found me, hadn’t wanted to leave anything in written form for my information—the problem being, I was nonplussed to hear, that written communications in Tsau weren’t necessarily that secure—and most of all he hadn’t wanted to put off doing something that everyone knew he had always done religiously, like clockwork, up till then. These scruples related to his delicate stage-management of our relationship in terms of the way it was important for it to appear to the watchership of Tsau. Everything in our getting together had to appear to be the result of accident and natural evolution. Everything had to be convincingly gradual.

I couldn’t ask where Denoon was because I felt I had to be wary about the undoubtedly larger than suspected percentage of women in Tsau who privately assumed I had come there with premeditation to chase Denoon. So I couldn’t ask, but what I could do was instantaneously
convince myself that Denoon was involved in a covert liaison. Somebody must have given him an ultimatum and forced him to go away for a confrontation. There must be a grotto someplace, I thought, or some other hideout where they were meeting. Who might my rival be? I instantly had two candidates—Dineo, and Kakelo Modise, our surly nurse. It seemed to me that both of them had been out of the public eye sufficiently during Denoon’s absence to make either of them plausible. I, at least, hadn’t seen much of either of them lately, insofar as I could reconstruct.

It had to be Kakelo, probably. She was less than twenty-five and had a very cute figure, which she tailored her nurse costume to exploit. She went everywhere in full kit—always including her miniature toque of a nurse’s cap—lest we forget who she was. She had a beautiful au lait complexion. In her presence you were never unaware that here was someone in no doubt she was wasting her fragrance on the desert air. She was in fact the sole user of perfume in the entire village, to my knowledge. I had sympathy for her, but I was never able to exercise it. She was tremendously rude. There was a protocol obtaining in small groups in the event someone wanted to start speaking in English. It was more pro forma than not, because I never saw anyone give the decline signal. If you wanted to go into English you were supposed to lock your little fingers together for a moment to give people the theoretical option of signaling no with a thumbs-down. But whenever she had intersected any group I was in she had tramplingly ignored the protocol and gone straight into clipped, rapid English. Naturally if she was Denoon’s secret inamorata her rudeness toward me was more than explained. She was clearly seething over something. And any lonely male would be interested in her, if she was interested, it seemed to me. I constructed a complete psychology for her. I imagined myself in her place, nubile and posted involuntarily to a city of women: what would make more sense than trying to go sexually for the indirect author of my distress, to wrench him down? Folklore vis-à-vis young nurses from my adolescence helped me along. Thanks to the amusing reports on the male world I extracted from a gay male friend, I knew what high school guys in my day thought about nurses. My high school had been located two blocks from a college of nursing. My friend described a locker room scene in which a letter man, a lacrosse champion, becomes unhinged and begins pounding the lockers: he has just gotten the news from the team physician that he has contracted a social disease. His worldview is crumbling because he has contracted it from a nurse, or nursing student, rather.
Nurses were assumed to be sexually active both out of horniness—they lived under parietal rules—and because they knew all about hygiene and were contraceptively astute and could even give each other abortions if something went wrong. Nurses were supposed to be sexually sanitary in every way. And here a
nurse
has gotten him infected.

My suspicion of Kakelo was shortlived, though. I had a look around in her office and couldn’t help noticing the thickness of the file of carbons of savingrams she had sent to the Ministry of Health appealing for transfer before her tour was up. Many of the appeals were recent. If she had ensnared Nelson, why would she be pressing so insistently for reassignment? Also a little inquiry revealed that her nonattendance at the health post recently had been due to bronchitis or hypochondria, both of which she had had spells of in the past according to everyone. And, finally, it was brought home to me that she bullied everyone about speaking English, whether I was in the group or not. Her first name translated into Obedience, funnily enough.