Mating (59 page)

An epitome of both how conflicted I became and how perfect Nelson was being toward me: I woke up one night at three a.m. and woke him up to tell him he had to stop reading poetry to me as a nightcap for the time being because it was unfair. It was unfair because having poetry read to me is the equivalent of manna and he knew it. We had done it a lot during our first weeks together, then there had been a caesura when it became sporadic, and now he was reading Whitman to me every night, beautifully. He agreed instantly. Anything I could in any way, shape, or form consider coercive on his part was out. In the midst of this I was seized with guilt and wonder over having a man I could safely wake up in the middle of the night with a particular concern and get an agreement or get calmed down and never hear a murmur of objection out of. Every other man I had regularly spent nights with was like a wild animal over his sacred sleep, because—had I conceivably forgotten?—he had to work the next day, in caps, as if I didn’t. I lay there. In Nelson I had someone who would not merely tell me my nightmare was only a dream, which I tended to know, but would to the best of his ability trudge through my attempts at analysis with me. Where was I ever going to find that quality in someone again in my life if I gave him up? He was already asleep again and so crazed was I that I woke him again to apologize and take it back, and even that was all right with him. I told him I felt like pure shit. It was no help reminding myself that men sleep better than women in every culture known. In the morning I apologized again and let him make love to me standing up, my least favorite position, as a treat for him and a penance for me.

I went to a menarche party for Golepe Setlhabi, a girl of twelve. I had been to one before. These were more musicales than anything else, for women only. There was kadi to drink, which was new. I sang By the Rivers of Babylon when my turn came. We gave Golepe a collective gift, a sheepskin. She was overwhelmed, genuinely. So I was overwhelmed. The sheepskin had been my idea. Real gratitude in others for something
you do for them or give them is tonic. I was exhilarated. Of course I’d had some kadi. Here was an unmixed good, it seemed to me. Adolescents in America are so jaded a reaction like Golepe’s would be impossible. Why would I leave a place like Tsau? What was wrong with me? Why wasn’t I more sensitive to the simple pleasures? Was I more jaded than I wanted to admit, and could Tsau be a cure?

I was glad when my inner maundering was interrupted by the summarist’s putting in an appearance. She reminded everyone to be sure to attend the coming great discussion as to god, to see who would gain the prize. This was the first I had heard of this event. Tsau struck me then as very precious and various. I went home to ask Nelson what this event was, very positive for a change, almost hyper.

Now I realize that the first bruitings about the night men occurred at that party. It seemed like nothing to me. Certain men, part of Raboupi’s entourage but not Hector himself, were in effect being prostitutes, spending the night with some of the younger women for gifts. I think I asked if they used contraception, which was the only serious social point of concern that I could see, and was told Yes. Someone claimed the batlodi had conceived the enterprise, although I doubted that. Given the demographics of Tsau, it was not a surprising development. It had started with token gifts from competing girlfriends and escalated. I believe the discussion was truncated when it became clear I was following it despite its being in rapid sotto voce Setswana.

If I thought anything about this it must have been that it made Tsau seem like a slightly more interesting place. I don’t remember thinking anything in particular, nor would the idea that this was a development I or anyone could conceivably intervene in have occurred to me. I remember the brilliance of the stars, my optimism.

I asked Denoon what this function I’d heard about was. It sounded like a debate.

No, it was different. It was syncretic. These were periodic mass free-form
meetings, which he would interlocute. Each one was on a single large subject. Colliding presentations were given, there would be heavy questioning and intervention from the floor, then a prizewinner would be chosen in a novel way: people would shift physically to the side they favored. Another feature was that the entire proceeding had to unfurl with everyone remaining seated on the ground, no matter how heated things got, until the very end, when it was time to shift permanently for the headcount. Staying seated had been taken from the Zulu indaba format. If you got to your feet in anger your side was dishonored, disgraced. Nelson called these things moots. I told him moot was wrong unless an adjudication was going on, which happened to be the one item sticking in my memory from Ancient Law. He was impressed. The Tswana term for these meetings was either parlamente, the loan word for assembly of talkers, or phutego, meaning public meeting. They were apparently leisurely and drawn-out affairs, with people bringing mats and even napping a little at times. Food was provided by Sekopololo seriatim, to encourage people to stay till the end, Nelson finally admitted. He said These things are looked forward to immensely. As to past topics, he mentioned Master and Slave and What Is Work? or How Should We Work? You should have one on Whither the Local Bushmen? I said, thinking of the growing ambiguity of their relationship to Tsau. There were more of them. More and more they were coming to the infirmary. His reply was to groan at me. I’d missed the point about the scale of the questions the parlamente was for.

I was a little puzzled over the choice of the existence of god as a topic for the parlamente. Tsau was average for Botswana with respect to religious attitudes. So far as I could see, there was no problem with excessive religion, with sect competition getting out of hand, no manias breaking out. In fact there was more mild agnosticism in Tsau than anywhere except the largest towns in the country. There were three or four informal Bible-reading congregations. The Botswana Social Front sympathizers could be scathing toward the few devoutly Christian women, especially the Zed CC women, but the logic of their own position was odd: for image reasons they were what they called protraditionalist, by which they meant they were for the herbalist part of the traditional witchcraft belief system but somehow not for its essential element, to wit, the belief that the source of the maladies everyone suffers is hurt feelings or ill will among dead ancestors. There were no religious classes in the schools other than a hair-raising history of religions course put
together by Denoon and emphasizing massacres and anathematizations. Tsau seemed to be secularizing in a trendless way, very gently. Popular science was popular.

All was well. There was no mediumship being practiced. There were no processions. And overarching everything was this diffuse cultus around the wonderfulness of women. Everyone deferred to this. Even the batlodi and Dorcas Raboupi and the other sour cultural reversionaries or dialectical materialists, depending on which camp they were in, partook. The one thing I would have assumed was potentially problematical was something nobody in fact complained about—that is, the prohibition of religious edifices. It had been gotten into the charter, somehow. Any congregation could operate informally but could never have fulltime paid pastors or leaders, nor could it ever have a permanent building devoted exclusively to it. The argument for this had something to do with the notion that churches remained benign when they were informal and in the hearts of their adherents but became aggressive and divisive once they possessed property and officers. This was put in the context of a general prohibition against all clubs and political groups having buildings, for the same reasons. I understood the hubristic but nobly hubristic impulse behind the prohibition. My feeling was that in the heat of the miraculous escape from destitution Tsau represented, women arriving would naturally agree to something like this, barely noticing, but that over time resentment ought to be simmering madly. Yet there was absolutely no trace of it. So to me this particular parlamente sounded either supernumerary or like a deliberate quest for sleeping dogs to annoy.

He said something apropos my obviously overlong meditation on all this.

I explained why I was puzzled.

He was vague. He had had very little to do with the choice. It had come out of the mother committee. It was a useful thing to do because it gave everyone a chance to see what things were breeding in the hinges of shadows, the place where shadows bend, meaning what doctrinal involutions were establishing themselves in the hothouselike recesses of the different Bible groups. Also a tranche of the older boys and girls would be leaving to go to secondary school at Kang, where they would be targets for the Scripture Union. This is like a rinsing, a rinsing off that needs to be done periodically. He said Try to look forward to it.

Different things made me not want to go to this particular parlamente. One was Nelson’s insouciance and generalness about what the event would structurally be: I couldn’t get answers to the questions of whether teams were involved, who would speak when, whether he would be lecturing first or at all. There was too much spontaneous order being assumed. I always want to know the rules, because there always are rules. People who tell you there aren’t tend to be hiding their knowledge of the rules for their own advantage. Then also he was clearly trying to flog up major attendance at this parlamente, or so I concluded from the hyperactivity of the summarist with her incessant announcements. You were almost afraid she would jump out from behind a tree to remind you one more time to be sure to come. But Denoon was telling me that the size of the crowd was a matter of indifference to him. Denoon was in a state I was beginning to think of privately as thick calm. He was seeing everything sub specie aeternitatis, all of a sudden.

I was careful to point out to him that at the same moment he was arranging what would amount to a shot across the bows of undue religiosity, he was, behind the arras, pushing a sort of milky cult of the foremothers, centered on the cemetery. I was sympathetic with what he was trying to get at. I admired him for trying. He was trying to do something about the bottom layer of the Tswana mind, which consisted of the conviction that our ancestors hate us, watch us, and are touchy. Via little picnics and observances in the cemetery, he was clearly trying to propagate the cartoon that the five charter mothers buried there were mothers of us all and were powerful and were loving toward us, the living. Thus he would be crowding out very slowly the main source of an underlying kind of paranoia in Tswana culture, presumably. If you believe that the dead hate you and that all your afflictions come from offending them, this is what
we’d
call paranoia, a structural paranoia: he was right. I said to him Your foremothers cult is mariolatry of a sort, like the way the Catholics use Mary to soften a cosmos run by a punitive god
and his pal Satan. It’s religion, I said. He said No, it’s ideology. He was made extremely uncomfortable. I wanted to say that blaming your ancestors for all the bad luck and illness bound to befall you in a dire terrain like Botswana was probably pro survival, group survival, in that it directed rage and suspicion backward and mostly away from contemporaries, except, naturally, for the occasional unlucky witch.

I understood what he was trying to do, but also Of all things in existence some things are in our power and some not is a truth. You can be only so promethean before the consensus is you’re a nut. What was to be done?

The morning of the day of the parlamente I got a disabling headache. It was a classic. I get headaches, but out of wanting to resist being a stereotype I rarely mention them, so that when I do complain I’m credible. Nelson was attentive and clearly unhappy at leaving me in my duress. But he went. I insisted. I lay there feeling totally razed until, at around three in the afternoon, when the meeting would have been in progress for two or so hours, I was seized with the conviction that if I didn’t go I was going to miss something critical to resolving my feelings about the prospect of staying in Tsau. I took four Compral and went, trying, futilely, to time my steps not to coincide with the thudding in my head.

The parlamente was al fresco. There were about a hundred people packed in a crescent around the porch of Sekopololo. Burlap canopies had been stretched above this area. Everyone was sitting on mats. Denoon was on a strip of mat back against the porch, sharing it with Dineo and a sharp-tongued aunt, Mma Keridile, who was in charge of the municipal herd. Bolsters had come from somewhere. There was food being handed around, bean salads and scones, and hot tea, which was welcome. It was a little chilly. People were bundled up. I found a place to sit where I could lean against the trunk of a thorn tree, at the edge of the crowd, out toward the view of the desert. There was no particular
pattern to the distribution of the crowd, except for the cluster of men around Hector Raboupi directly in front of Denoon. I liked the mixed lolling and disputation idea, and the vaguely Near Eastern feeling coming from being on rugs and under tenting. The tan light was soothing. So was holding my mug of tea against my forehead.

The way it worked, as I gathered, was that beforehand people had submitted statements or assertions on the general subject of god and religion. These were on cards which got shuffled by Denoon or Dineo or Mma Keridile before one was selected to be read out. The writer would acknowledge. Then people would respond, sometimes substantively and sometimes with deprecative shouts. The point in having three interlocutors was to rotate the function of selecting people from the floor to reply. And you were supposed to signal your desire to comment by holding up a twig. Maybe half the audience adhered to this protocol, half the time. Also the chairs were authorized to summarize or supplement contributions and to determine how long a particular point was to be pursued. Clearly also the panel was balanced in terms of viewpoint in that Mma Keridile was a believer of some kind, probably a Zed CC, Dineo was neutral, Denoon was the village atheist. You could tell which chair was in charge of the current phase of the proceedings by his or her tenure of a glass bar like Mma Isang’s and a little metal hammer to strike it with in order to punctuate the flow. Most of the older children were there, looking excited. There was coming and going in the crowd, but not much.