Mating (58 page)

I could through you, he said. It would be like this. As my dependent you could be a citizen and as your dependent I could live here and belong to Sekopololo. It would work. You could be chartered in terms of the rules, technically: you have no money, you’re unemployed, in fact with your student loans you’re a pauper. Your mother is not a resource.

I maintained my neutral to slightly positive attitude façade fairly well until he mentioned in passing that he had recently assigned all his royalties in perpetuity to Sekopololo. We hadn’t discussed that. He described it as only a gesture, but to me it was preemptive. I felt betrayed by it, but equally I felt I was betraying Nelson with my reactions, my apparent grasping at the negatives of staying on in his creation.

I fought myself back to a casual level. I remember Denoon as now back at his workbench and holding a piece of glass up to the light. He looked absolutely beautiful to me at that moment, more beautiful than he ever had. This is a serious man, kept saying itself to me. Other men aren’t. What I was suddenly afraid of was that this moment was our perihelion, the closest we would ever approach or be, and that everything after this would transpire between bodies farther apart. I was thinking that if you looked back over the trajectory of every mating once it was over, there would be an identifiable perihelion. I couldn’t stand the idea
that this was ours. I didn’t know why I thought it was, even. My eyes were hot. I had to leave. This is all hypothetical, I said, keeping it declarative and trying to keep any note of entreaty out. But I knew better.

I wandered out to the kraal. The odd thing about the fait accompli Nelson was covertly presenting me with was that I hadn’t noticed it assembling itself chunk by chunk before my eyes. A case in point was his recent recurrence to the theme of development projects always seemingly being good enough only for the locals to live in and never for the founders and donors, for long. Then there had been the conjunction of his murmurings about how rapidly the surplus was accumulating in Tsau—notwithstanding that it could be accumulating even faster if people would only be a little more ascetic—and the bleak general evolution of Africa over all. Then there had been Nelson’s reversal on the subject of my thesis. Before, he had been saying I should go for something new. But now he was thinking it was salvageable. What did this mean? One thing it meant was that if I stuck with my carcass thesis I wouldn’t have to go back to Palo Alto to negotiate a new one, do new fieldwork, be away from him for a long time and dot dot dot who knows? possibly get interested in someone else. All I had seen, up until now, in those discussions was his flattering interest in my academic tsuris.

Then, irrationally, it was the graveyard, everything about it plus the prospect of ending up there, that chilled me. I knew what I would hear from Nelson if I alluded to it: If you don’t like a particular custom or usage here, you can change it, or try to, you can propose your own. That was the central virtue of Tsau, supposedly. The same applied to culture. Tsau was Paris compared to ninety-eight percent of the villages of the world. I would hear again how deeply he believed in the village qua village. Any book or periodical in the world could be brought into Tsau. There were villages in Austria today less culturally open and advanced than Tsau. I would hear again that in Tsau we had everything we have a right to demand in a continent as abused and threatened as Africa: decent food and clean water, leisure, decent and variable work, self-governance, discussion groups on anything, medical care. These were not lies.

I did something infantile: I let the wind blow into my mouth. I did that and then in the same vein, and feeling like a Chekhov character, I said to Baph My question to you is Who is composing this life for me? I hated being emotionally disheveled so suddenly. I hated my volatility. Was this a form of premature retirement I was being summoned to join Nelson in? How could it be? He was still in his forties, however barely.
But of course everyone reaches that point, some sooner than others. Was he that tired? And what was the name for the madmen who crouched on top of pillars in the Libyan desert in the name of purity, some going blind in the process, and whose name I knew I knew. The name Monachists came to me. Then I put my face against Baph’s neck and stopped talking.

What upset you? Nelson asked when I came back in. Nothing, maybe my mother, I said, evading, when what I really wanted was to shout at him about the gigantic quid pro quo he was presenting, as in We can be together forever but only on the head of a pin, in Tsau. I was tired of the good news and the bad news always linking up. You win a honeymoon but in Beirut, you win a retirement chalet but on top of Kanchenjunga. I wanted to stride around and kick his sacks of rare sand. And I felt I absolutely must avoid getting into discussing the merits of Tsau as a venue according to its position on the depressing spectrum of where the poor have to live worldwide. Or into discussing futures suggesting that his place was anywhere but with the poor forever: that was definitional of him and in any case I respected it, although I reserved the right to adumbrate ways you could be with the poor without necessarily being at their elbow year in and year out. I had a retrograde gust of feeling or yearning toward being religious, so that I would be able to believe that my suffering in itself, separate from anything else I might do, metaphysically lightened the sufferings of the poor. But religion was beyond me anyway and I had been dragged farther away from any berserk clutching at it I might be reduced to, by Denoon’s on and off stream of aperçus and imprecations on the subject. He was fuel to the flame. And his most recent recensions on religion, to the effect that the taproot of religion is perennial irrational individual self-hatred, had been especially trenchant to me. Religion might originate through thunder and lightning and wondering what the stars are, Nelson had been saying, but once it gets rolling it’s about self-hatred, which is why religions crossculturally always exalt and beatify people who continually hurt themselves or allow others to hurt them. I think this had been touched off by a pope recently blessing a devout bathing beauty who had crossed the Alps on hands and knees to see him. Another tack never to take was that Tsau was effectively, by African standards, middleclass, so was his continued presence being justified as necessary to its remaining so? his white presence? mine included.

I thought I was being superbly contained, considering what I was feeling, until Nelson said So this is what one hand clapping sounds like, which was an evident reference to the lukewarmness over staying forever
in Tsau I thought I’d been masking so well. The proposition was serious for both of us, which I could tell in various ways, from the primary to the trivial. Among the trivial was an onset of rather sharp itching in my escutcheon, an established accompaniment to moments of major foreboding. At the same level was Denoon using the amalgam GodJesus in connection with swearing one thing or another. He would never coerce me or anyone, if that was how I was feeling. He was sorry if I thought that. He loved me. I shouldn’t be upset. Then he confessed for the second time he regretted giving me the impression when we were discussing
Middlemarch
that he’d finished it. Before I could remind him that he’d already confessed this he was going further, saying he’d never even begun it, that he knew what was in it only from what he’d picked up from women discussing it. But now he was going to read it, he swore. Here a blur ensues. We went on to other things.

  STRIFE

In retrospect, where was I when strife came to Tsau, and what was I doing? I keep asking this. How inert was I? Could I have done more to deflect the future? I think so. I have no excuse other than my inner absorption with the prospect of staying on in Tsau, wrestling with it, trying to look clearly and deeply at it, find the right and true referents for it, and not keep recurrently seeing it as sheer exile.

I had battles of my own to fight. Statistics such as that in the United States a colgrad needs to be in a city of at least a million in order to be able to count on having five close friends would assail me and have to be countered with reminders that in Tsau I would have one perfect friend, for a start. What city in America could guarantee me that? And repeatedly I had to push back value reversals: things about Tsau that had been giving me pleasure, like the oceanic skies or the quintessence of solitude you attained on the summit of the koppie, were suddenly malign and frightening. Or I had to fight back moments of conviction that this was all coldhearted and a test. And always there was the struggle not to be sordid, not to will myself to be engulfed by blinder love, slave love so strong nothing spatial would matter.

At moments everything seemed like a conspiracy against me, to force a choice, like Denoon’s theory of the characterological collapse of the male in the Western world, America in particular. As women get stronger and more defined, men get more silly, violent, and erratic overall. I more than agreed. I was a walking contribution to the statistics the idea reposed on. But why go on about this more than once, if the inner point was not to get me to feel panic about who else I could get if I abandoned Nelson, the clearsighted man, obviously one in a million, exempt from this piece of sociology? Then, was it only happenstance that he was dropping aperçus about the superiority of small and powerless countries like Botswana or Ireland morally as places to live? However oppositional you are in a superpower, you partake in the routine misery being inflicted through its CIA or equivalents, secret wars, arms sales driving the third world mad and sowing dragons’ teeth unto the last generation. I felt like
saying Ireland, yay! But in the nick of time I remembered the priestocracy.

I knew what I needed was exactly what I couldn’t have here: a woman friend I could discuss Nelson with, confide in. There was the political barrier of my identification with him. That would always exist. Also standing in the way was the Tswana institutionalized madness about secrets. Secrets are for the family only. Outside the family, secrets confer dangerous power to the hearer over the divulger. When I say the Batswana are opaque I mean things like the young woman at the national bank, high level, whose husband had been in England for four years straight getting a doctorate in biology: she was perfectly cheerful, was famous for it and for not having boyfriends. Of course in time every culture will yield to someone saintly enough, supposedly. Of course I had recently been driven to talking to my donkey, and what did that mean? There were two women in the United States and one, possibly, in Sweden I could conceive of making an emergency life and death confessional help-me phonecall to. But there were no phones in Tsau and never would be until I was in cronehood, if then. Would life in Tsau be me forever wandering up and down the interface between the main two races I would never understand, Bantus and the male? This was when I was at my lowest.

I tried America has taught me to overestimate my importance in the scheme of things. I tried this often. I fought off image seizures of newlywed wives in movies confronting more than humble apartments and putting their fists on their hips and saying This place has possibilities, which would lead into surreal fantasies of how I would revise and redecorate Tsau to my own individual taste, long and involved fantasies. Mostly I tried to find some equilibrium around the feeling that Nelson had in fact been talking more exploratorily than conclusively. But then he would unhorse me by reminding himself of dead undertakings he was going to revive—promoting sauerkraut and croquet were two of them. And during all this he was being especially perfect and solicitous.

I think I must have known there was a hump in the arras. Dineo seemed stricken over something private once or twice. Possibly I could have picked something up if I’d lingered in the robing room after a hunt for a rock python, which I joined. But I didn’t stay to socialize. I was in too great a hurry to resume observing Denoon and brooding on the results. And writing my broodings down. And reading what I’d written, back and forth, back and forth.