Mating (55 page)

I can’t say I was perceiving any serious ambivalence in him about someday leaving Tsau. Or possibly if I was seeing any, I was dismissing it as my mistake. When I praised Tsau once, over something I forget that impressed me, he went into a sort of aria asking how Tsau could fail to be terrific, since it was the pyramidon at the top of all his prior failures, socalled. He gave the entire sequence of truths learned, project to project, such as controlling the scale, working in the vernacular, cutting expatriate staff to near zero, locating yourself remotely enough to avoid premature disruption, balancing collective and individual incentives, basing your political economy on women instead of men—his theme song, Every female is a golden loom. I had heard it all before, but this time it was put together in a lighthearted way. He did tack on, of course, that if Tsau were really perfect the proof of the pudding would be its originator being unable to give up living in it, but then he went on to say nothing is perfect, so that if this was significant in a precursory way, I missed it. I read it as valedictory.

Among my mistakes was going twice to accouchements.

I went out of curiosity initially, and to sharpen up my midwifery, in which I have an actual certificate. I no sooner set foot in the birth house than I was deluged with complaints about Nelson, making me wonder if this wasn’t the real reason for my being invited to attend. He must remain away, was the main demand. Apparently he haunted the environs
of the birth house during accouchements, in a proprietary way understandable to most of them but still a thing they could do without. In fact it was an improvement on his earlier conduct, which encompassed attempts to be present during births and to urge fathers to be present during births. His will may have been good, but I was amazed he would run headfirst against so fixed a tenet of Tswana culture as the belief that if the male eye landed on a newborn’s head the baby’s fontanel wouldn’t close. No one but me knew how apprehensive he got when a delivery was due. He was overflowing with horror stories about mothers typically getting to the hospital too late, after the child had turned in the womb, the child having to be decapitated to save the mother, about caesareans resulting in death owing to wretched aftercare, stories relayed by a woman who had been a maternity nurse at Jubilee Hospital in Francistown and told to him primarily, I think, to induce him not to want to insert himself into such gruesome scenes.

In Tsau you gave birth sitting up in a massive peculiar wooden chair with raisable stirrups to hold you in a knees-up position. The chair was a beautiful piece of carving and joinery, and there was something about the fact that all the babies in Tsau descended into the world via this chair that was extremely moving to me. I kept thinking that this was how things became sacred. Also I had a fugitive feeling of wanting to sit in the chair sometime just to see how it felt, particularly how it felt when the trap in the seat was unlatched beneath you. I supposed I was lacerating myself. I felt both that I wanted to sit in the chair and that I had no right to do it. The chair was set up on a U-shaped platform so that the attendants could get on their knees and slip under the mother to help the baby out, with or without employing a wooden chute that locked into place to guarantee against the child being fumbled and dropped. Tubs of flowers were always moved inside the birth room on the principle—as I understood it—that the first things the eyes of a newborn saw should be beautiful. I was told that sometimes the mother would supply a particular piece of printed cloth or weaving or picture she loved and that it would be held up for the baby before the child was held near the flowers. The room was immaculate, red tiles with a hatched surface on the floor and slick red tiles halfway up the rondavel walls. There was another of Denoon’s notional crank-system fans high in the vault, but I never saw it used. Everyone was barefoot, always, for deliveries.

I don’t know what I found so wrenching about the experience. It wasn’t the pain and mess of childbirth, which I was already familiar with and which at Tsau seemed so much less anyway. Childbirth in the vertical
position went so straightforwardly and apparently so much more easily for the mothers that I felt essentially like a bystander. An hour or two was the longest any recent delivery had taken, and there was some amused conjecture that the mother had prolonged the action in order to get some dagga to smoke, which was allowed. Even the nurse who supposedly hated Tsau was heard to say once that she wished she could come back when it was time to deliver her own child. There was a little ceremony after the umbilicus was cut, in which each woman placed two hands on the child and told it that it had landed in freedom and that everyone there was the child’s mother. This was not an overpowering ceremony in any way. It also contained the wish that the child’s mother should never falter. When it was over, the team went in a body to the bathhouse to clean up. That was all. But both times I left feeling depressed and hostile and labile.

After the first delivery I went home and yelled at Denoon when he did nothing worse than ask for reassurance that the baby was normal and healthy: he was obsessive, he should stop haunting the birth house, he should stop being impossible and prepare himself for a different report someday because that was in the cards, undsoweiter. After the second I was as bad. I forget what set me off.

There was no point in being emotionally riven every few weeks, so I said I was going to stop attending, which seemed to relieve him, which set off another surge of feeling against him.

At no time was Denoon less than understanding and consoling. He was loving, whatever I did, even when I wanted to rant about my life being difficult, my feeling disadvantaged even though I came from lefatshe la madi, the country money comes from, my hating being self-evidently pitied by women who had so much less.

Nelson was convinced Raboupi was using the Basarwa to screen what he called private-property hunting. It was true the Basarwa were coming up with considerable game lately, wildebeest in particular. And the rifle had been checked out ostensibly for use in lion watches. Nelson was
certain that wildebeest killed at the nearest pan were reaching us after Raboupi and his men carved out the bullets and gave the liver and tongue and the fat around the heart to the Basarwa. He was convinced it was true because Raboupi had definitely been missing from his usual workplaces, the tannery and the blockyard. Nelson hated to admit it, but Raboupi was a demon worker and his absences made a difference in the amount of work done.

I was with Nelson when on impulse he stopped one evening at the Raboupi place to have a word with Hector. There were people in the house, among them the batlodi, whose hard loud voices were distinctive. It was dusk, early dusk, not late enough for us to be considered uncivil for knocking at a household where the welcome light was unlit. He wanted to thank Raboupi for something, was the unlikely story he gave me.

We knocked and at first there was no response. Then we heard suppressed talking and an evil laugh, and then Dorcas came to the door barebreasted, a towel around her neck but the ends pushed between her breasts so that everything showed. There was no excuse for it. The nights were cold. Tswana women go barebreasted in the countryside when the weather is hot, or they may do it en famille more than I’m aware of. But this was a mixed lot of people crowding up behind her to see how Denoon would react. Also Dorcas was very westernized. It was done to affront. She was cheaply asserting her crude version of Tswana earthiness and disdain.

I was enraged, but Nelson was cool. He asked for Hector.

Go and find him in the blockyard, she said.

I am just from that side, Nelson said. Hector has been away from the blockyard since Tuesday.

Is it? she said, pretending to be surprised.

Tell him I came by to thank him for a service, Nelson said, and then we all said gosiame, meaning everything was fine, and the encounter was over.

Actually Raboupi had done Denoon a favor recently.

What’s this? Denoon had said when he saw for the first time one of the Basarwa grandmothers in town, standing like a sentinel near the Sekopololo porch. She was in the usual assemblage of rags and skins, looking ancient and smiling the Basarwa smile of absolute innocence.

I told him that lately they had been coming around and into the plaza one at a time and doing the same thing there that they do at the Kings Arms in Ghanzi—that is, standing around until somebody gives them
some food, and if nobody gives them food in a reasonable time, starting to dance in place with their eyes closed and humming to themselves. That usually mobilizes a donation. They can dance for hours.

He tried not to look at her. Trading is one thing, he said. This is begging. This can’t be.

I asked him why it was a municipal problem here but not in Ghanzi, where they officially just ignore it. No, something had to be done.

So when he asked me who the best Sesarwa speaker in Tsau was I told him the truth: it was Hector Raboupi, far and away.

And now as we were leaving the unpleasantness with Dorcas, I learned that Raboupi had indeed gone down with him to ask the Basarwa not to come into Tsau to beg. Nelson assumed he had made himself understood. He was genuinely grateful to Raboupi.

I heard again that things would get sorted out at the plenary.

One morning at shapeup two women approached me and asked in a hushed way if I would go to see Dineo to say if I would stand in the election for the mother committee. I was incredulous. I told them no one had asked me, to which they said that just now they were asking me. We say you are very pleasant and you are strong for women, they said. I told them how amazed and pleased I was, but that I couldn’t decide such a thing quickly, especially since it would be saying I would be in Tsau for at least one year more. And I would have to speak with Nelson.

I brought the proposition up at the wrong time, I suppose. Nelson had pitched himself into a phase of dawn-to-dusk heavy manual labor. He was working extending the trail grid on the high south side of the koppie. He would come in at night, wash, eat, and sleep like the dead. He felt this was therapeutic for him. He thought it might work akin to Russian sleep therapy, where when you’re artificially kept asleep for a week—through brainwave manipulation, with an IV hookup, naturally—you wake up with your melancholia in abeyance. One of his tests of a sound society was the existence of arrangements letting you switch off into periods of intense physicality when you felt the need. The aerobic
exercise craze in America was something he saw as a sad substitute for this option of heavy work, and wasteful in that you produce nothing socially useful while you do it. I knew he was tired, but I felt under pressure from the mother committee to say yea or nay, so I brought it up while he was nodding over his demitasse.

He was surprised at the offer but, I discovered, absolutely determined to say nothing one way or the other as to whether I should accept. He would discuss neither it nor anything to do with it, not even something so germane as the question of whether or not this was intended to compensate for his having been made occasional at mother committee meetings. No, it was a tribute to me, was all he would say, and it was my affair and something I should decide strictly on my own. I strained to imagine what principle or scruple could possibly be at play in his attitude, but came up with nothing. I really pleaded. We have to discuss it, I said, because everything is connected.

I was left groping. Was the idea for me to make a decision that would tend to settle things re his future without his participation when he felt divided on the merits of competing courses of action, and was this a situation it made sense for me to slide along with? I hate a vagarious temperament in men, which this was not: it was something else, but not necessarily something I liked a lot better. I hated the idea of being ananke for him, or being the shape the yarrowstalks took when they fell and which he had in secret committed himself to obey. Despite my saying it revealed a taste for stasis, he continued at points to quote Zeno’s arrow in my heart, I float in the plunging year—never very relevantly that I could see. What did it mean? Fate is our destiny, was a bétise by some major politician that he had happened to notice. In fact beware being great or important and ever saying anything stupid with Denoon around, because he would remember. The most he would say was Do it or don’t do it. I reminded myself of things he’d said about the ideal relationship between a man and a woman consisting of alternation between who gets to be yin and who gets to be yang, where one partner acts with force when he or she feels it and the reverse when not, whereupon the other picks up the cudgels for a while. American women hate this idea, he’d said. Not me, I like it, had been my position. But why was this sudden attack of laissez-faire of his being stimulated by my little situation with the mother committee? It was beyond me.

I dropped it with him, then, and decided that if he could be inert so could I. It was pique. I said something noncommittal to my contacts on the mother committee, who left me alone afterward on the subject, and
gradually the whole proposition seemed to fade away. When Nelson evinced some mild interest in what was happening I put him off, saying no one had followed up, which was the truth.

A new thing was my sense that the impulse for wordless lounging together was coming as much from him as from me. We had had foreshadowings of this during times together in the bathing engine, but with nudity as an ingredient and the natural terminus put to events by the water cooling, it had been different. Now we would just lie down in the late afternoon or evening, fully clothed, not necessarily—in fact often not—with a precoital feeling going, and not even read or remind each other of things that needed to be done. He gave up always having a notepad and pencil at hand. Our lying down together was noninstrumental. I sensed and he confirmed that he preferred me not to be reading anything too absorbing while we were lying down, because it took me away. Poetry was fine because there were gaps between poems when I was present again. I couldn’t credit this. It was too flattering.