Mating (39 page)

There was a roaring overhead I could hardly credit, and then the rain smote us—there’s no other word for it. Nelson gave a cry of utter joy as the blast hit. He was overcome. He swung his arm in a circle like a demented softball pitcher winding up. Then he froze, spun around, and dashed past me into the house, shouting something over his shoulder.

He had remembered about the roof. When I got inside he was manically unfurling plastic sheeting everywhere. Water like a jagged blade was already coming down from the roof join. I helped.

When that was done we went back to huddle in the doorway, jammed
together like people in the hideout cave behind the waterfall in? movies. He was ecstatic, and it was a lovely sight and, to me, proof that Tsau was not just something he was doing with his left hand or in an exhausted or pro forma way or as his final practical joke on someone or other. Come on, he kept saying to the deluge. We all want a passionate man. This may be the man, I thought. I realized you never see a man in a state of public joy except in connection with professional sports, stupidly enough. His arms disappeared to the elbow when he held them out into the solid glassy sheet the rain made, pouring beyond reason, and when water from inside began purling out between our feet he was the happiest yet. I went back in and started peeling up the karosses on the floor before they got too saturated. I heard him singing. He did come in to reascertain that the roof over the radio area was sound and holding.

The rain roared on. Now there was the secondary roar of the flow in the catchment systems above and all around us. For twenty minutes, we watched while the rain went from a sheet, to vertical lines, to diagonals. With his hair matted down, I could see that Denoon had the beginnings of male pattern baldness. For his age it was slight.

There was a certain divergence in our attitudes now that the rain was slackening. It was hard for him to contain his elation at the drenching Tsau had gotten and what it would mean. But I was thinking about the mess our place was in. Water was still coming in from the back someplace. Was this supposed to be my particular province, when I could hardly be said to have even moved in properly? Incredibly he was making as if to go out, leaving me with flood relief responsibilities vis-à-vis all our goods while he went to see about damage elsewhere, how particular sluices or channels had held up. I asked myself what a genius would do in my situation. Ordering him to stay and help on our first night as a ménage seemed dubious. But then so was the idea of my meekly becoming a charwoman while he attended to the putatively greater needs of the populace, then my fixing myself up nicely and then waiting for him to come home so our intimate life could commence. I know myself, and I knew that that experience was almost designed to leave me in a carnally unenthusiastic state.

So I said something on the order of Do me a favor and don’t go off to check things out until we get the basics under control here, and if you do I’ll tell you something interesting about thunder I bet you don’t know. I guaranteed he’d find it interesting.

He went for it. One of the virtues of studying anthropology is that
you collect hoards of information on intriguing subjects not strictly germane to your specialty. He knew this about me already. How many students of computer science or, say, communications know that all over Europe the corpses of hanged men became the property of the executioner until late in the nineteenth century and that executioners conducted a lively trade in bits of flesh, selling them to apothecaries who used the morsels in various nostrums. How can I ever regret going into anthropology? The blood of freshly hanged persons was popular as a medication for epileptics, also. I had leverage over Denoon with informational sweepings like this because his anthropology was out of date and because his, I would say, premature rejection of the discipline meant there was lots he didn’t know, thanks to the information explosion. And not to know something that might be somehow germane to his hubristic project in the world made him alert and uneasy instantly. He knew I understood this position he was in, but it was okay.

So as we worked I told him what I could remember about findings showing that infrasound waves just below twenty hertz associated with approaching thunder seem to have strange effects on the temporal lobe in some part of the population, to wit producing feelings of baseless awe and ecstasy. The theory is that certain types of chanting in the special vault acoustics of churches, the sounds certain ritual horns and bull roarers emit, certain organ notes, reproduce the same effect. And then by a miracle I remembered the names of the seven or eight out of ten founders of major religions who were suspected of being epileptics, epilepsy being a temporal lobe disorder par excellence. I have to say he loved it, which was because he loved the idea of a biometeorological cause for the existence of one of his bêtes noires, religion. This was right up his alley, as of course I’d guessed it would have to be. He questioned me pretty closely. My thunder theory immediately ousted the theory he’d previously liked, also biological, which has religion resulting from consumption of the Amanita muscaria or some related mushroom. This was a theory he was glad to relinquish because the case was weak but also because it was the brainchild of a wealthy person whose occupation in life he highly disapproved of. I think he was a banker, or bankster, as Denoon found it amusing to call them.

Then he did go out, but he surprised me by being back in forty minutes, having obviously resisted the urge to wander more exhaustively through his beloved infrastructure. It was because I was there.

All was well, then and almost immediately thereafter.

The next morning when we went down into the village quite a few of the women we saw shoveling and bailing and wringing things out were wearing the peculiar skirts that could be buttoned back into pantaloons, I observed, which prompted me to admit to Denoon that my previous attitude that the design was silly was wrong. This was clearly a practical costume for vigorous manual labor. He was pleased. You take things back, he said. There may have been an implication that not all women did, but I didn’t pursue it.

People seemed to be elated about the rainstorm almost to the point of hilarity. Everyone was out. Everywhere we went I got credit, naturally, allusively, for bringing this fortune of rain, as it was put, by moving in with Rra Puleng. It was genuine. Some of it was fairly bawdy. I forgave Denoon for wanting to get going so early, seven o’clock, so as not to miss seeing the body politic up and mobilized and talking about the great storm. School was canceled. My only problem was that after a while I didn’t know exactly what it was Denoon and I were doing. We just seemed to be making a royal progress, looking into things. Supposedly that was all right because Sekopololo was closed down too. There was a good deal of singing. Two groups were singing hymns. Ke Bona I heard sung a few times.

I can hardly say our first breakfast at home together was intimate, since Nelson ate standing up while I slowly gave up on being fetching in a reclining mode in the face of his determination to get downtown. He thought my calling the plaza downtown was amusing.

The smell of the Kalahari after sudden rain is something you never forget. What blooms up, especially when the sun gets to work, and even in cool-tending June weather, is an odor so powerful and so elusive that you want to keep inhaling it in order to make up your mind which it is, foul or sweet. It seems poised midway between the two poles. It’s resinous or like tar, and like the first smell of liver when it touches a hot pan. It fades as the dryness returns, and as it does you will it to persist until you can penetrate it. It’s also mineral. Nelson thought I was hyperventilating,
until I explained. I think he said he agreed it was remarkable—I had gotten to the point of claiming the smell was red, or maroon, somehow—but that if he didn’t react as strongly as I did, there was a reason. I’ve been here longer than you, he said.

Our mobile dolce far niente continued all morning. I was very conscious of his body as we went around mutedly reveling in the effects of the storm. We had made love twice so far, majorly once and then minorly, so to speak. I wanted him to be as attuned physically to me as I was to him, be in my aura. He was a good lover, a very comfortable lover, and also courteous as hell. In fact he had rather formally thanked me both times, as though there was only one beneficiary in our exertions and not two. I wanted him to be comfortable, now that it was settled that he was fine, and not feel he had to mark our getting together by being nonstop about sex. He was not in the first flush of youth, which I had to be sensitive to to some unknown degree. He was a young forty-six or seven or eight, was my guess, but which was it, exactly? I had a quasi right to know. I suppose I felt this as one of the threshold questions. Some others were What about Grace and what was all the grimness and unpleasantness in their breakup due to? Had he loved her? Also, what had he been doing about sex lo these several years? Had he masturbated, for example, as one answer, and how would I feel about it? I have complex attitudes, not all rational, on the subject. These were questions I could pose only after getting as close to Denoon as I now was. I had to be inside the moat. There was nothing violently preconditional about this. I was not going to rush. But I am at the opposite end of the spectrum from someone I know who, the morning after the first night with whoever her new friend is, says Tell me what I have to do to keep you.

Siesta that day was nice, and showed Nelson wasn’t under a compulsion to complete lovemaking each time certain customary points of no return were reached: he understood about promissory occasions and seemed to like them all right. He had a proposition about cooking. If I didn’t mind, he wanted to cook our dinners unless something came up
or I specifically asked to. Was that all right? I said Does Julio Iglesias own a sunlamp? but I had to explain that this was in the genre of Is the Pope Catholic? Nelson had never heard of Julio Iglesias.

He wanted to go out again in the afternoon and continue exuberating, and he wanted me to come with him. We had already done the few really necessary things like checking on the nethouses and the windmills. People were saying that the rain had been so heavy that standing water could be seen at some low places in the sand river. They were organizing parties to go and exclaim, so we went too. It was true. We had also already toured the few trees, mostly on the summit, that had been struck. There were loaves of sand and silt at the mouths of the main north-south streets, but by midnoon they had been shoveled away. The supports to some of the overhead lattices had slumped, and in places pavings had been undermined. No hail had fallen, luckily. Mainly people were extravagantly occupied with putting drenched mats and karosses out to dry. The day off was an excuse for celebrating this huge influx of water to the community’s supply, essentially. Nelson reminded people about stopping off at Sekopololo for packets of chlorine for their cisterns. There was a moment that took me by surprise as we were leaving to resume whatever it was we were doing. I hesitantly asked Nelson if he wouldn’t wear his kepi when he was out in the sun. He owned one, I knew. He was normally out in the noonday sun bareheaded, except in the depths of summer. He looked at me. The back of your neck worries me, I said. It looked cured. You probably don’t wear the thing so you can avoid looking like the French Foreign Legion, subconsciously, I said. But please wear it. He still hesitated. I want you to last forever, I said, and then my eyes filled up. Chronologically he was closer to death than I was, and the thought was unbearable for a minute. It was not the last time this would happen. He was immediately good about the kepi.

I was trying to be casual and as provisional and patient as I could, but as we continued promenading and visiting a lot with people that day a quirk of his seized me that I felt would destroy me. It was this. When he was given something liquid, soup or a beverage of any kind, he would swill the first sip around in his mouth for a noticeable period before swallowing. It was an unconscious thing of some kind, a tic. I couldn’t stand him to do it. I knew it would be insane to say anything on such short acquaintance, but there was no way not to. I had never previously been with him continuously enough in convivial situations to have this tic impressed on me. Table manners are fraught for me. I resisted my reaction. My mother had made me a demonically fastidious and correct
eater, clearly abreactively to her own inner chaos and loss of control when she was faced with something to eat. There were periods when she would eat out of sight of me and then serve me my food and sit opposite me to monitor and correct my table manners. Up and down Tsau we went, taking tea or juice in various settings, myself embroiled in what to do about this gross thing he was repeatedly doing. I wanted to know where it came from. Even when she was supposedly sated and finished I could feel rays of greed steaming from my mother as I ate. Something rose in her every time she saw food, whether she was full or not, which meant to me later that this was a trait in someone who was definitely not meant to reproduce, because such a trait indefinitely replicated would mean the world gnawed down to its core, but in fact she had managed to reproduce and the result was me. For the time being I conquered myself.

Toward evening there was a general meeting where Denoon announced the readings on the main storage cisterns. The readings were wonderful. Even the men felt free to show they were happy, a mood helped by the fact that a heifer and two tolleys had been killed by lightning and would be donated for a town braai. I stood next to Denoon like a what? a consort? Why was I walking around with Denoon and being gracious instead of attending to things I could enumerate that needed doing? I comforted myself by reminding myself how rare such rain prodigies were.

There was a small hitch, it developed, regarding the dead cattle. Dineo and Nelson met over it, and no one said I couldn’t bystand. The heifer that had been killed belonged to the Baherero. In a slightly anomalous arrangement the Herero cattle, though kept with the municipal herd, were vested in the Herero group separately. There was an arrangement obtaining to defray feeding and veterinary costs, through Sekopololo. In any case the Baherero had decided not to donate the dead heifer to the braai but to sell it to Sekopololo for the purpose. This was rather late in the day. All the animals had been field-dressed by then. Denoon was unhappy and wanted someone to argue with Martha, the Herero spokeswoman, to try to get her to keep to the precedent of making donations in cases like this. I was interested in the way Dineo diverted Denoon from doing anything, which was mainly by patently, to me, humoring him about how unfortunate this was but at the same time stressing that it could be seen as another vindication of her longtime belief that the Baherero would pull up stakes and go back, however they could, to Namibia whenever the government yielded to their insistence
that they be allowed to go back taking all their cattle with them rather than leaving them behind. Someday we are going to wake up to see nine empty houses, she said. This was by way of being a subtle reminder to Denoon that his wager—that the Baherero in Tsau would stay even if the rest of their nation decamped for Namibia—would be strengthened if this small matter was not turned into a cause célèbre. He yielded.