Mating (64 page)

I was scribbling away when mes amis said koko. It was a relief to feel obliged to knock off, since I seemed to be in quicksand anyway. One problem I was encountering in making my compilations was deciding when some striking remark of Nelson’s was more than it seemed to be at
first blush, determining if perchance it was meant to convey something in an aesopian way to me. I might be looking for something even deeper than that, some warning or cue, some little nothing from the bowels of his mind, something to pay attention to because his unconscious was my friend, because Nelson loved me. Just then I was trying to see the relationship between Nelson’s cynical observation that the meaning of life in every formulation seemed to reduce to finding or inventing a perfect will to be subject to, the relationship of that to scanting remarks about la femme moyenne sensuelle—which we agreed I was not, of course—finding her raison d’être in the love of a male as close to alpha as she can get. Then, to add to that, I had a handful of asides alluding to certain self-evident similarities between happy marriages and socialism, or just between marriage as an idea and socialism. Did he mean the two are similarly impossible, something as blunt and cheap as that? But that led to the bolus of whether he was or wasn’t, himself, a socialist. One, he hated his father for being, merely, a prosocialist, a fan of the concept: that was utterly clear. Two, Nelson referred to himself from time to time as a socialist, but meaning something particular by it: his socialism was closer to the noumen than anybody’s. And in the same jeremiad he could be referring to himself as a socialist in one breath and execrating genre marxists and social cubists in the next. His socialism was socialism, their socialism was militant nostalgia, and so on. Anyway, I didn’t mind leaving all this for the nonce.

Mma Isang was hurrying us. I asked why and was told it was because a decision had been made to set up the arch without notice, which would prevent certain people, the baruledi, from coming to try and help. It would all be finished before the baruledi were even awake. Since baruledi means roofers or roof repairers, I was at sea. My friends were surprised that they had to explain it to me. The baruledi ba bojang, thatch roofers, were the night men. Thatch repairing was a bawdy if rather oblique euphemism for the service they provided. Clearly, resentment against the night men, on the part of some of the women, was getting substantial.

They are uprising against us, Mina said. It is all because of Raboupi. They just uprise against us without fear. You can see so many queens just defending about them.

There are now as many as nine night men. Mina named them. Raboupi wasn’t one of them, but it was suspected he took a cut of the take. I asked more questions. There were some reasonable controls on the practice, at least. Mina said that the baruledi would always, now, bring
protection from the clinic. And it was established that they were not to idle forever in order to be invited to meals: they had to leave when they were asked to go. I thought that the objections to the night men might arise from service being withheld from the aunts, generally. But that wasn’t happening, as I should have known. One of the attractive things about African society across the board is how old a woman can be and still be some younger man’s sex pal.

Apparently what was disliked was a growing blatancy about the enterprise. When I asked them how it was I hadn’t noticed all this if it was so major, they shrugged, saying I overlooked it because it was hidden under a shadow, an ironic Tswanism meaning it wasn’t hidden at all, ergo I was just not paying attention. They grumbled on as we proceeded, but I was relieved, oddly, about the whole thing. The notion that sex was nonpresent as an issue in Tsau, or was being transmuted wholesomely and wonderfully into something neutral and socially positive had always felt dubious to me, not to put too fine a point on it. I love demystified things inordinately. Also I loved it that the whores in Tsau were men.

The actual raising was very rushed, in fact, and throughout there was a subtle feeling of getting away with something. Several women spoke in praise of Our Mother Mpopo, each one in a very telescoped way—considering what the norm for occasions like this is. And lo just as we finished a little detachment of Raboupists turned up. They were welcome as spectators. Their group demeanor suffered slightly when the group was joined by a copain emerging blinking from a nearby rondavel not his own. We reacted kindly. We were already leaving.

I ran into Nelson as he was trotting down toward the site of the concluded event, his grapevine having belatedly functioned. I had to tell him it was over. He was genuinely unhappy. He’d prepared remarks a week ago or more. He had been deeply fond of Mpopo. There were things to say about her that only he could have said. He asked me who’d spoken. He’d known Mpopo better and longer than any of them. And so on. He was very distressed.

He had a right to know why the arch raising had been unannounced, so I told him. I wanted him to know that his not being included was an artifact, not something deliberate. In retrospect this was reckless, I suppose, but in mitigation I think I was under the impression I’d already mentioned the night men to him, however glancingly. It’s possible I had but that he’d been in his occasional, rare actually, though less rare recently, Stepford husband mode, only appearing to hear me. Maybe I hadn’t mentioned it.

His reaction was beyond disliking being the last one on the block to hear. He was trying to conceal how shaken he was. My thrusts in the direction of levity were a waste. I said he should look on Tsau as finally normalizing, first via the development of begging, thanks to the Basarwa, and now with prostitution.

We had to sit down somewhere. At first he didn’t want to talk. Then he wanted to know everything I knew. A sure sign he was in extremis was his pressing down on the top of his head with his fingernails, as though a column of force was trying to emerge from his fontanel. He did this twice.

He stayed rattled all day and into that night. I thought sex might help and I showed I was approachable. I don’t remember exactly how that foundered, but it had something to do with my hands, which were pale blue from an afternoon in the fabric printery. We got off the track, although this was far from the kind of thing that would normally derail him. Their heads were green and their hands were blue and they went to sea in a sieve, he started quoting. He loved Edward Lear. So did I. But did I know what an unhappy life Lear had lived, how his homosexuality had forced him to live out his life in places like Corsica? No, and he told me, in extenso. Slowly this developed the flavor of an incident from my past when someone I knew to be personally desperate seized on a book he had been recently reading and I hadn’t read and proceeded to tediously summarize the whole thing as a means of evading the central misery we both knew was there. I never need to read the
Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens.

I don’t know how long it was, exactly, one day or two or three, three being the most it could have been, until the end of things began in earnest.

Whichever night it was, at dinner Nelson was silent, which constituted a total prodigy between us. He had been spending time closeted with Dineo, enough time to make me uncomfortable. The word was that he had been making inquiries about the night men.

I said Why do you look this way?

How do I look? It took him an effort to say even that much.

You look dissociated, almost.

Not that I said it, but my model for the way he was looking was my mother in certain of her troughs.

Then came a ghastly effort to appear animated and normal, ruined by his voice being sepulchral.

I finally got out of him what he had been discussing with Dineo. It had nothing to do with the night men. Hector Raboupi had gotten someone pregnant, a minor.

He had been planning not to tell me who, astonishingly. I got it out of him by reminding him I had friends who would tell me anyway.

It was Adelah Makhise. She was thirteen, a child. I loved her. She was darling and very smart. She was preparing to transfer to the government secondary at Kang. I was sick with rage. I wanted something done. There was a complete reversal going on. Now I was marginal with rage over this and he was supposed to soothe me and contextualize, whereas before it had been my role to calm him down over the night men. This had nothing to do with the night men or prostitution. It had been a simple seduction, apparently.

But Nelson was very wrung out. He had no surplus, nothing to give me. Everything he said was pro forma. And the worst part was that I developed the conviction he was more interested in observing me than in helping me. I felt I was being studied.

I know how random I must have seemed. I wanted to know everything,
but in no particular order. Was Raboupi planning to marry this child? Nelson laughed. This set me off even more. The one place in the world something like this should never happen to Adelah, to this wonderful child, was Tsau. What was Raboupi’s punishment going to be?

You know the culture, Nelson said. That meant the most that Raboupi would have to do by way of recompense was pay Adelah about forty pula per month, assuming she even requested it. But what are the women going to do about it? I wanted to know. There had to be better answers than the piddling forty pula. Raboupi should be punished, humiliated. There should be something like the practice in ancient Rome of creditors hiring mobs of people to follow deadbeats everywhere and identify them for what they were. I even remembered what that was called—the convicium—thanks to my cryptomnesia. I guess he was used to hits like this issuing from me from time to time, but I took his lack of reaction as meaning something more. My point was that a social invention addressing cases like Adelah’s was lacking here. Who was to blame, if not the person in Tsau whose second name was social inventions?

Then, so amazingly, right in the midst of this he said Sometime we should talk about whether Boswell hated Johnson, which I can prove.

I don’t know if this was deliberate protean behavior à la cornered jackrabbits or if it was simply adventitious. I had to strain to see what it had to do with anything. For a while he’d been teasing me about my Boswellian relationship with him. And lately he’d asked me for my Oxford paperback of
The Life,
which he had never read. In those days I carried my Oxford Boswell everywhere as a fallback in case I broke a leg somewhere where reading matter was a problem. I’d started
The Life
several times, never getting much beyond Johnson tutoring his schoolmates in Latin in exchange for their carrying him on their backs to school. It took three of them to manage it. Then Nelson seemed to be going on about Johnson’s pulling strings at the British Admiralty to get his freed-slave manservant involuntarily returned to him after he’d run away to sea, as an illustration of the nasty side of Johnson Boswell was consistently revealing. I refused to talk about it. It was news to me, if true. This was not what we needed to talk about.

You’re giving me cognitive dissonance, I said, so stop it. What’s going to be done about Adelah?

Organize something, he said, continuing in the distant tone I hated and that felt so hostile.

I’m white, I said. What can I do? What about her mother?

Nelson said the news was that she was not so upset. It wasn’t that
there was great disgrace involved. He said Dineo thought Adelah’s mother might have already gotten a gift of money from Hector which would have reassured her that he was prepared to do his duty. Hector had a surprising amount of disposable income, some of it from the game meat scheme he’d worked out with the Basarwa. Nelson was watching that, he reminded me.

Abortion, I thought. I knew the nurse could do it. There were other women I was sure could do it. But how far along was Adelah?

Around four months, Denoon said, and if you’re thinking about abortion, it can’t be done.

Because she’s too far along, you mean?

It may be less than four months, he said, but it still can’t be done.

You mean because someone has asked her and the answer is that she wants to have the baby? Because if that’s it, let me talk to her before anyone says no on this, please.

No, he said, standing up, very white. No because an abortion is all we need. It’s illegal. We have enemies in Gaborone doing nothing but waiting for us to break the law. An abortion would give them just what they want.

I said Oh, then the little arrangement over meat between Raboupi and the Basarwa, which is an illegality tout court but involving men, is all right. But an illegality by one or two women on behalf of a young girl is not all right—am I following you? How attractive is that?

All we need is the Christians against us, he said. If our game deal gets out it’s not good, but the people who run this country own cattle and they know that the boys out at the cattle posts do certain similar dubious things once in a while.

I said something hotly about realpolitik. Humiliatingly, he corrected my pronunciation, but without responding to whatever my gravamen was. I realized I had never heard the word spoken. I had only seen it printed.

Do whatever you want, he said, being extraordinary and childish, I thought. But remember there are two things Gaborone right left and center never forgives—cattle rustling and abortions.

It was too much for me when he said Of course we could always expose the newborn. I knew it was sheer provocation and was well aware that he was the one who lobbied to get a street named after a woman whose main activity had been rescuing abandoned infants all over West Africa, but still it was insufferable.

I couldn’t stand being in the same room with him at that instant.
Clearly the feeling was mutual. I felt I was doing him a favor by being the first to leave the house, and when I came back almost immediately in order to rummage up a torch, he was clearly getting ready to go someplace himself, lest I come back before he was ready for détente, no doubt.