Mating (42 page)

We lay there silently for a while. Light breaks where no sun shines, he said, quoting something.

Already the feeling in the bath hut was different for me.

Shortly after this I did begin hearing about rifles, in connection with a vervet monkey population explosion in the eastern wards.

I mentioned it to Nelson while we were eating dinner and I was getting him to admit he looked incredibly improved since he’d let me cut his hair. It was short, almost en brosse, parted over the left eye. I had teased him gradually into it by showing him how he looked with his long hair fanned around into pageboy bobs and so forth and calling him Prince Valiant.

He knew about the vervet problem. Male vervets are particularly distracting because their favorite pastime is to sit on your door or windowsill and display their electronic blue or lime green testicles, an act they intersperse with helping themselves to food items. I said that what I understood was being proposed was buying a couple of rifles to have available for hire at Sekopololo for situations just like this. I had been lobbied gently and had expressed myself as thinking it wasn’t unreasonable.

Guns are not a good idea, he said, very curt. Then it was Who, exactly, talked to you?

Reason with me and I might tell you, I said.

He didn’t want to. He wanted me to accept the general proposition. I was firm. I took a lighter tack, telling him about my pacifist friends in Palo Alto who had forbidden their little boy to play with toy guns. By the age of five he was so obsessed with guns he turned everything into a gun.
He would bite his toast into a gun shape. He aimed his banana at you at breakfast. This could be similar.

But it seems I was being infantile. There were serious reasons not to, among them the paranoia about Tsau in certain quarters in Gaborone. Certain people in certain ministries were in the pay of the Boers, who were convinced that somehow Tsau was giving aid and comfort to SWAPO, if not the ANC, or both. Everything that came out on the Barclays plane was monitored. He wouldn’t tell me how he knew any of this. In addition, hunting was illegal where we were, in the Central Kalahari Reserve. Only the Basarwa were allowed to hunt, and then only with bows and arrows and blowguns. He would appear to be getting set to violate one of the founding conditions he had agreed to.

I thought that was all, but in a minute he went on more vehemently. Couldn’t I see how it would go? Suppose we got a waiver and got a couple of rifles in. Then we would need a few more. Then the main thing the men would be doing would be clandestine hunting instead of attending to the heavier work they were doing now. The guns would be checked out by the women for legitimate nuisances like the vervets and they would be passed on the sly to the men. I was an anthropologist, so I must know that the oldest male racket ever invented was hunting, I of all people. Didn’t I know how laughable the nutritional contribution male hunters made to the common diet was, everywhere? Which didn’t stop them from acquiring status with the women in honor of their long hours drinking and lolling around out in the bush. So he was going to oppose it as long as he could. He was very unhappy.

So what were the women supposed to do about the vervet plague?

They should stop taking the line of least resistance and instead think of something. What did they do in the villages before there were guns? There were plenty of predators in the equation, which ought to take care of it over time, if people could be patient.

The vervets will spread, I said. They’re already showing up around the kitchen.

Then poison! There was someone he could write to.

You’re too rigid, I said. You try to preempt everything.

No, what I’m trying to do is preserve for as long as I can what’s exceptional about this place so that something will survive once the hacking and trimming start.

Then I said, which I should not have, People say you have a rifle yourself.

Who told you that? he said, apparently outraged. I hated his murderous
expression with its inner taint of shame. There was something worse in it. It contained the message that I was operating ultra vires. This stung me where I was already chafing.

Well, was it true he had a gun, or not? In fact it was. He hardly even knew why. The construction crew had left it with him, all right sold it to him, rather. It was for some emergency purpose. It was just an ultimate precaution. It was like having a fire extinguisher. And he wanted to know, seriously, whom I had heard it from.

I evaded that and asked him why in the name of god he didn’t just take the thing and appease people by shooting a few vervets. I said Your deus ex machina is sitting on a shelf somewhere and you won’t use it.

He was against shooting things. He tried to make a joke of that instanter, though, saying he kept the rifle around in case somebody tried to rape his mother or sister. In fact he was against shooting anything, against hunting, against killing live things with guns, he personally, and he was not going to loan out his gun, either. He was sorry he had the thing.

This is pure ideology, I said. This is the middle of the Kalahari Desert, where nature presents you with threats that require guns—in this case the vervets—but there are going to be others, believe it.

He was upset, but I admired the efforts he was making to calm himself down, involving structured breathing.

I got up and stood behind him. I said Would it be conceivable to continue this discussion while I was touching you? I put my hands on his trapezii. They were granitic.

This made him practically explode. He shook me off. Who was I to talk about ideology if I was bringing this encounter group crap into everything? This was pure Californian. Probably next I would want us to hold hands.

It was a calumny, of course. It made me mad. He was conflating the normal and friendly practice of calming someone down by massaging their trapezius muscles with an entirely different thing I had mentioned bemusedly and in passing on another occasion—a hostility-reducing technique I had heard of wherein you and your antagonist hold hands while you ventilate something painful between you, some grievance. I’m certain I mentioned it critically, although I may have said I thought it was vaguely interesting.

It’s nonviolent aggression, he said, to which I replied Funny, it seems to me to be exactly in the stream of various little inventions you seem to
have managed to get inscribed in the texture of things here, such as signaling for English, to mention only one. And what you’re really saying is that it’s inconceivable that you, a male, could take the hand of a woman and hold it during a serious argument, not even just to see what would happen. One thing I can tell you, and you can go into your stupid Californiad again if you want to, is that most women would be willing to try it. His riposte was Don’t you want to know which kitchen utensil I feel like right now? By the way I am not from California, I said. I have nothing to do with California, other than attending Stanford.

Then it came to me that I could save him, if he would let me. Stanford had the full panoply of slightly ridiculous upperclass sports including skeet shooting. I had tried it. I knew how to shoot. If there was nothing unusual about his rifle, I could solve the vervet problem for him, he wouldn’t need to apply for a waiver, there would be only one so it would be easy to manage, I would be responsible, etc.

Is that voilà, or not, I said. I could tell he was going to go along with it. He didn’t like it a bit, but he saw it was a way out.

I imposed one condition, though: he would stop asking me for names, because it made me feel like an informer.

The rifle was a magnum seven millimeter, mainstream.

All right, he said, then, compulsively, I don’t kill things.

I do, I said, sometimes.

The vervets are going. Today shot
3
more and Prettyrose and another woman tried the rifle. Faint praise from
N,
ostensibly because there are only soft nose bullets for the gun, which mangle the target, so there is no point in skinning the dead animal, and the fur, which is probably good for something, is lost. My right ear is roaring and hors de combat despite the wadding. My deltoid hurts. Again a gallery developed, primarily male, animated by a Mongwaketse, Hector Raboupi, ca
35,
glittering eyes, signature fur hat with jennet tails dangling in back, cheeks that bunch into knobs when he smiles and wheedles, teeth separated, like pegs. Drops into English without giving the request sign and also spoke
to me in Afrikaans for a little joke. He wanted to shoot and I said no. He said You are teasing on me. Idly unbuttoned his shirt while he was observing, ostensibly to get at something that was biting him but in fact to let show his sculptured torso. Something told me to shoot only the males, which was simple because of their iridescent testes. I disliked the actual killing but liked being part of the solution. Raboupi hates me.

Raboupi again. I answered his English with Setswana. He is the postmistress’s longlost brother. He says he is from Bokspits, which is not where I recall Dorcas being from. HR a migrant in RSA gold mines until, Dineo says, he was thrown out for fighting. He works for cash in the tannery. He thinks the mine compounds are the bright lights. He must hate it here. N is interested in him and concentrates when I repeat anything I can remember Hector saying. Why in the act someone seems to prefer one breast to the other is probably interesting. His foible for the right is not really pronounced. I am oversensitive because my right nipple is slightly higher than the left, making me stand compensatorily when I’m naked and I remember it. This will pass.

I thought it was time to show interest in birdlife again and roamed quite far SW down the sand river, alone, too far. Looking back, there was only the blank side of the koppie, no sign of habitation. Panic came: all the fears I manage to keep separate fused on me: sand will cover Nineveh, Tsau is so strange it can’t last, the land is so fierce, I am not being helpful to?, I should shut up more, something was going to happen to? if I didn’t act perfectly, I am putting myself between him and Tsau, which he will never forgive, and so on. Seizure of hysterical appreciation for my parasol, so beautifully carved, the thong and strut mechanism, the batik chevron motif on the shade. I got parched hurrying back. Something would have happened to Nelson, it had happened, I was psychic, et al. But he was all right, he was preoccupied. I went to the pathetic library and calmed down.

Last night, N: My lower self hasn’t felt so good in years Your lower self, meaning what I think? Below the waist. Why couldn’t you have said ever? I meant ever. Then a silence, and then?: I love having you go around naked in here. I never had that. Grace is uncomfortable naked. Then more silence. N: I probably get this from my father who subscribed to Sunshine and Health for years. It was to torment my mother, who
would never say anthing. He said he subscribed for the poetry. One of his favorites was O how I love to sleep out in the nude, wake up in the morning feeling gude. It was aggression. He got away with it because he subscribed to everything. The only reason he married a Catholic was to have a permanent martyr in striking distance. Nelson, you don’t get it: I walk around like this because I think it’s dirty. We laughed. N: Here is a man with advanced ideas, left, left wing pals, a humanist, and all he could think of to do with his life was see how much some limited woman from a tradition he was part of and hated and had gotten over could be made to suffer. He felt strongly about literature, by the way, and even ended a friendship with a crypto-Trotskyist on the police force over whether James T. Farrell wasn’t a greater writer than James M. Cain. The drinking was also aggression. I like him to praise my body but also hate it because it makes me want to scream that I am going to be old flesh someday and then what?