Mating (45 page)

I took them into the bathhouse and showed them how it worked. It was reserved for them for a half hour for their exclusive use. Harold was being mysteriously funny and started to say something, but Julia took control and thanked me and led him in. When she let go of his elbow there was a white pinchmark where she’d been gripping.

So where are the foreign bodies? Nelson asked me, later.

Washing up, I said. He had been writing something that he put away quickly when I came in.

In passing he accused me of already starting to sound more British. I denied it, but I know I’m susceptible, and it may have been true. I accused him of already sounding more American, or more prolish, in fact, which meant talking more like the proletariat than usual. This had turned up earlier, when he was telling me with obvious pride how many of his chums had been blue-collar-family boys. He’d denied it. But what I was accusing him of was not a canard. It was real. He was preadapting.

At first at the reception dinner Harold was like a statue. We were gathered in the central kitchen annex, a low-ceilinged but spacious enough room that felt claustral because the ring of tables we were seated around came close to the walls of the room on three sides. These tables were brainchildren of Denoon’s, with leaves that folded out cut in such a way as to make each table wedge-shaped, so that the table ring could be smoothly and solidly effected. I once saw something like it in a King Arthur movie he claimed never to have heard of. Harold’s coldness was very unfair to the mother committee. They had outdone themselves. We had goat curry, coleslaw, red rice—not my favorite, but popular in Tsau, the red deriving from beetroot juice—and a sort of soda bread that was baked on special occasions only. Denoon was being quiet, too. So naturally Julia and I were, to compensate, being overgracious. It was about as I’d expected between Nelson and Harold. Sotto voce earlier Nelson had informed me that Harold was dying for a drink to the degree that he had asked a couple of mother committee members if there was to be wine or not. Also Harold was a vector of empire, he was not to be trusted, and so on.

Julia was digging Harold to get him to participate, which led finally to his blaring out in his rich voice to the table of thirteen women and Denoon Does anyone have a question about Shakespeare the man, of humble origins dot dot dot. He had been told that most of the women understood English but that he should speak slowly, which he was doing, initially.

The women were shy. It was leaden in the room.

Denoon said By Shakespeare you mean Shaxpur, which he said with a flat a, then added insult to injury by spelling out.

You could see Harold bridling.

Denoon persisted. But tell us anything about this man, he said.

I couldn’t believe that this was going to be about the authorship of the plays. There were ways to talk about Shakespeare that would have gradually included the women and conveyed something. It was evident
that Harold was pleased at the turn things were taking. He began to eat the Jell-O he’d been ignoring.

Do I detect a scent of Bacon in the air? Harold said, going into a sniffing routine that was ludicrous and baffling to everyone except the four whites.

The case for Francis Bacon being the author of the plays is better than the case for Shaxpur, as you may or may not know, Denoon said.

Ah, Bacon to skewer! Harold said. What a rarity! What a find! And where else could one find such a rarity? Where else could it survive?

Harold and Nelson were clearly cheered up at the prospect of wrangling over this. They began. Julia made a couple of attempts to torque the exchanges around to a more general intelligibility, but the titans seemed determined not to be more inclusive, no matter what.

I hated to listen to them. In fact I was interested, but by seeming to follow too closely I was afraid I’d be abandoning Julia in her attempts to keep some semblance of connection going via side conversations with various members of the mother committee.

These men were not ignorant. The exchange was civil, at first, but very intense and substantive. Harold conceded it was odd that there were no books or papers of any description included among the chattels in Shakespeare’s will, but not that there was anything arresting about references to the circulation of the blood in three of the plays despite Shakespeare having died twelve years before Harvey published his theory whereas Francis Bacon was an established intimate of Harvey’s and would have known all about this theory. It signified nothing to Harold that Bacon had written as if it were one continuous name Sir Fraunces Bacon William Shakespeare in one of his notebooks. What about the fact that Bacon’s crest contained the figure of Athena shaking a spear? This connected with something I missed re Bacon’s watermark turning up in the paper of some of the first folios and also with Shaxpur never having had a family crest, although the evidence was that he put an enormous amount of time into trying to get one. Nelson presented and Harold refuted each of the reasons a pantheonic member of the nobility would feel the need to disguise being something as lowly as a playwright. I found Harold convincing on this. And so it went. Only once did Harold challenge the factuality of something Denoon was contending. This was that Macbethus Tyrannus! was written in the margin of a history of Scotland in Bacon’s library, in Bacon’s own hand. But then he seemed to believe Denoon and took the position that it was sheer coincidence. Nelson denied it meant anything that when the First Folio came out the
preface referred to the author as dead, whereas Bacon was still alive. A preface can say anything, he said.

We have these lovely plays and poems, Julia said to the table at large, so why does it matter whom they came from since we have them, and wasn’t there someone who proved that Homer was probably a woman?

I think there was more to her point, but Julia never got to finish because the duelists joined together to explode this notion. I for one do not contend that the idea of Homer being a woman was anything but a practical joke of Samuel Butler’s, god knows.

Next Harold was attacking from the rear, after leading Denoon into admitting that there might be something to be said for the candidacy of Edward de Vere, maybe as much as for Bacon. To which the catch was that then Nelson’s choice as the author of the plays was either someone who had defended torture, Bacon, or de Vere, who had murdered a cook in a fit of pique. The idea was that any reasonable person would want the author to be other than a villain or monster.

Mais non, according to Denoon. This was all about abstract justice or truth, I forget which. He wanted Harold to know that he, Nelson, was far from an unqualified fan of the plays, particularly not of the chronicles, which were reducible to royalist propaganda, although they were gorgeous in places. And he would feel the same concerning the authorship of Ralph Roister Doister, or of The Duchess of Malfi if there was evidence pointing away from John Webster.

Nelson flung himself back into what he considered his area of strength—uncomfortable or dissonant facts. He was not reading the tenor of the rest of us. How is it that when Hamlet is accused of being insane he says: Set me the matter to restate, which madness would run from? Wouldn’t this be an unusual conceit or test for a wool merchant and landlord like Shaxpur to know anything about? Of course in Bacon’s notebooks there were pages of entries about mental illness, including a proposed test for madness identical with the one in Hamlet.

Just then Dineo activated a social mechanism I knew vaguely about but had never seen used. At a signal from her, all the women but Julia and me rose. And then we followed suit, bemusedly. The idea was to shift seats, and specifically to shift seats so that Nelson and Harold, who were at nine and twelve on the circle, would be moved next to each other. Denoon realized what was happening, probably not surprisingly, since this exercise had him written all over it. The woman sitting between them withdrew. Denoon shifted over, like a good fellow, and he and Harold were side by side.

The assumption behind the exercise was that disputants made to sit in close proximity to one another would cool down, usually. The principle was identical to the one in the handholding stratagem he’d been so dismissive of, but no matter. And they did calm down that night, although later I found out it was because of something Harold broached during musical chairs. There was supposedly a manuscript of a fragment of a play about Sir Thomas More, author unknown. The fragment itself was in four fragments, each in a different hand, and the last or D fragment was in the hand that wrote Shakespeare’s will. This was something totally new to Nelson. It stopped him. It wasn’t that he disbelieved Harold on this, but he needed more details, time to try to imagine how this datum might be made to fit his anti-Stratfordianism.

The peacock fight apparently having concluded, Julia and I concerted to give a précis of Taming of the Shrew. I translated here and there, to be sure the picture was clear. Scenelets from the play were going to be performed around the village the next day and we hoped the members of the mother committee would do a modicum of audience preparation for us. Harold and Nelson began listening to us, Harold even chipping in, finally.

Getting ready for bed that night, Nelson was generally apologetic about the way the evening had gone, but strewn among the apologies were questions for me as to what I had ever heard in re the More Hand D evidence. Not my field, I told him. I knew nothing about it. The light was only off for a couple of minutes before it was back on so he could dash off an airletter to an academic friend at Cambridge on the subject. His friend must be world famous, because I’d heard of him. Then I fell asleep.

I woke up an hour or so later with the light still on and Nelson still writing. But this was something else, a surprise for Harold and Julia he would prefer I not ask him about because it was going to be a surprise for me too.

Things were developing amiably enough over the next couple of days, I thought. Harold in particular got steadily more accommodating, agreeing to use his rapier in shadowfencing routines when the children begged sufficiently. I was the interlocutor and translator for the spot performances—or suites, as they called them—that we put on before various groups. The costuming and props made a great attraction: Harold wore a jerkin and a doublet, and Julia had a change of gowns and a toy lute she plucked to counterpoint some of the poetry. She also sang Dowland and Purcell. Harold and Julia worked entirely from memory, which was commented on. And I think they were pleased at how closely people seemed to be following, to the extent that there was hissing and ululating from most audiences once they had my translation of Petruchio’s conquest-of-Kate speech. In fact, once he saw the reaction he was getting, Harold darkened his reading of the lines I will be master of what is mine own / She is my goods, my chattels, she is my house / My household stuff, my field, my barn, my horse, my ox, my ass, my any thing. I did begin to notice that certain people whose presence I would have expected at the performances were turning up absent. Circuitously I found out that they were with Denoon, in rehearsals for something, a play to be put on by Rra Puleng and the mother committee especially for the visitors, as thanks. I decided not to know more about this. My plate was full. Nelson would have told me everything that was planned, if I’d asked, I did later establish.

Suddenly the news was that there was going to be an extra day of Harold and Julia. Nelson had arranged it by radio. It had to do with what he was cooking up, obviously. He asked me to inform them that there would be an extra day and not say why, which I refused to do and which Dineo ultimately did.

On the penultimate day of their visit we had their final and biggest performance, for the whole village at once, whoever wanted to come, in the plaza. Essentially it was dinner theater, people sitting on mats and eating mealie while against the backdrop of the darkening Kalahari Harold
and Julia strutted their hour. I translated. I was hoarse when it was over. We were a team by now. They knew instinctually when to pause for me. It was very smooth. Denoon was in and out. I wanted him to dislike Harold less, despite Harold’s provocative tendencies, such as being sure to appear between performances wearing either a crucifix or an ascot with a cross of St. George stickpin. These tendencies predate you and aren’t aimed at you, I tried to tell Nelson. I liked Harold. Earlier that day I had come across him sitting under a tree reading Andrew Marvell.

The thanks and farewells were nicely handled by Dineo.

I became aware of a contained hubbub to the rear left. The audience, which had started to rise to disperse, was asked to sit down again, and people complied. Something had been going on offstage earlier, I realized, which I’d thought at the time was rude, because it had been distracting during the Hamlet and Ophelia amalgam, which you had to follow fairly closely. Anyway, I had returned to the audience and was joined there by Harold and Julia, still in costume. It was a little cool. Not everyone had come prepared with shawls and afghans for this addendum, but there had been forethought: people were passing out shawls and even extra mats. We took some and tried to make ourselves comfortable. An announcement was made. We were going to see a brief program that would show our thanks to Harold and Julia. Harold wasn’t comfortable sitting on the ground. I asked him if I should get him a chair, even though it might make him feel a little conspicuous to be the only one sitting kinglike above the rest. So be it, he said, and also urged Julia to accept a chair, which she declined. They argued a little, and somewhere in the exchange I heard her use the phrase Childe Harold, for my benefit, I think. I got Harold’s chair and he sat in it. The proscenium was suddenly dramatic: we had blazing torches, four of them, on staves set into metal stands, grouped two on each side of the center spot.

I was torn. I knew Harold and Julia must be hungry and that it was up to me to go off and do something about it, but the feeling that I needed to stick close to them was stronger. Baskets of ground nuts were being passed around, which I took as a sign that what was coming would probably be brief, so I stayed put. Julia ate ground nuts, but Harold passed. Nelson gave the signal for the games to begin. I don’t know what I expected. I think I expected something gentle that might be called The Apotheosis of Tsau, something poetical and historical.