Mating (68 page)

The weather had been irregular, some days bright and some ominous, with a little rain. I went up the koppie every morning and evening to see where it had rained, where the dark patches were that would turn green first. Also I was looking for Nelson. I tried to remember what he had told me about a Frenchman in the seventeenth century who had had one and only one occult power, which was to be able to predict accurately when ships would be arriving at Toulon. He couldn’t predict or prophesy in any other way. Nelson’s favorite mystics were individuals who had one freakish talent that was fairly pointless. In the fifties there was a character who seemed to be able to get little fragments of scenes onto photographic plates by sheer concentration. Usually Nelson’s heroes ended in poverty and ignominy. The Frenchman who could see ships around the curvature of the earth, which was what he claimed he could do, never attempted to make money from his gift. One of Nelson’s major qualities, all of which I was appreciating strongly in my present state, was that if he knew something you didn’t know, he would tell you all there was, and there was no part of it he would shade or leave out because it fit badly into his own belief system. Why did he know these things? He believed in aleatory reading. Through his academic friends he had stack privileges in all the great libraries—this must be a slight exaggeration—and often when he was back in what I would never dare
to his face to call civilization he would go straight to the nearest university library and stand up for eight hours, wandering and reading until he had it out of his system. Now where was he?

I had been twice to Dineo to try to get her to authorize a party to search for him. She said that they knew him better than I did and that they were aware of many times when he had gone off like this to one of the pans or along the sand river. She was sure he would be back in good time, and in any case there was the complicating matter of his taking the horse. There really was no excuse for it. I spent an entire day on the koppie, with my binoculars. There was nothing to do. Maun and Kang had been radioed. I was the only one who was distraught.

I appealed to Dineo to let me have my donkey back. They could take all my credits. They could set any value on him they wanted. If my credits were short I would owe the rest and work it off nonstop. I reminded her that I had donated Baph to Sekopololo in the first place, which should have counted for something. She wanted to do it, genuinely, but now, especially, she couldn’t approve it on her own. They would have to meet on it.

What enraged me was that everything had to be so consensual, even in what I felt was a crisis. I kept saying Show me the rules that say this or that can’t be done; where is it written down? But there was very little on paper. Everything was inscribed in what people recalled.

In the midst of imploring Dineo I said something so grotesquely stupid it pains me to think of it. I said: You have no idea what you are doing—you are condemning a
delightful person
to death with this. I trailed off because she gave me a look of scorn I will never recover from. I was reaching the point of seeing everything in Tsau as an obstacle to my need to find and save him.

Finally it was nine days. I could find nothing better to do with my funktionslust than go up to the top of the koppie and sit there near hysteria, wondering why there was no way of bringing the Botswana Air Force into this. Why was there no person in a high place who could get
me out of this, no special friend? What lack in me had produced that situation, that my only true friend was out in the thornveld with nobody helping? King James and his sister sought me out and brought me snacks, dried papaya.

I talked to several women who had been part of the grapple plant harvest, and to some of the snake women, to see if they would consider going with me at least part of the way toward Tikwe. None was eager, except softhearted Prettyrose Chilume, a sensitive plant, fine in a group but not appropriate to go in a duo just with me. I needed a hardier companion. All my attempts at finding someone to go with were reminding me of how frightened I’d been during my crossing from Kang and how potent the residue of that fear was.

The radio was impossible. I did get a promise from Wildlife that they would attempt to contact game scouts who had passed through Tikwe sometime in the past week. This was followed by silence.

I read through my compilation on Nelson like a madwoman. It was insidious. All it did was serve to convince me that Nelson was the man, Nelson was the one I should cleave to, wherever he wanted to be. Brilliant, I told myself, how brilliant to come to this conclusion under these conditions. One thing that was absolutely certain was that this was not a man who would let someone he loved go off on an exercise supposed to last five or six days but lasting ten and then not summon up a force to go out and secure her.

However afraid I was, there was no question I had to go out, at long last, to find him. I began kitting up.

People tried to dissuade me. Dineo said an official search party would be going out soon. But she couldn’t say exactly when the party would be ready to go.

I made an abortive effort to enlist two Basarwa men. I couldn’t make myself understood. I cursed myself for not learning Sesarwa. Hector had been the local master of the language.

I got myself as ready as I could. There were no water-point maps of
the area, that I knew of, except for the one I had brought with me and which Nelson had taken with him. I was ready by high noon of the eleventh day.

I was furious with Tsau, furious with the people stopping work to somberly watch me go, furious that they were letting me go off into what was undoubtedly going to be a liebestod if not a farce. Is this right? I wanted to shout at them, along with We’re only here because of you! and This is love!

It was love, but it was also, to some degree, pride. I knew this because I was thinking of my friend Anna as Tsau dropped astern. Anna went to Provincetown in the dead of winter one year in order to rusticate herself in somebody’s unused summer house so that she could finish her thesis before the deadline got her. She was working like a demon but inevitably got a little bored and went out seeking some sort of distraction, something free or cheap, because she was broke. She decided it would be a nice idea to go up the Provincetown Memorial, a thing like the Washington Monument or a minaret, on top of a hill overlooking the Atlantic. It was closed for the winter, naturally. But there was a guard or caretaker there she undertook to presume on to break the rules and let her go up. Go ahead, then, the guard said with an odd undertone in his voice, and he opened the door to the spiral staircase leading hundreds of feet up to a gallery where you could peer through slits at the sameness of the sea in all directions. The desert sea, I thought. So he opened the door for her and said This is at your own risk. She soon saw why. After the first ten or twenty steps the spiral staircase was coated with flows of solid ice, like something by Gaudí. Driven by pride, she climbed this frozen waterfall. She inched her way up in her slippery shoes, clinging to the railings every step of the way, stayed for a second at the top to let sleet blow into her nose and eyes, then inched back down to the bottom, taking forever, hours. Thanks, she said cheerily to the amazed, and by this time anxious, guard. With one misstep she could have ended up an envelope of broken bones. The muscles in her arms and legs hurt for days. This was pride at its most monumental. She had done it, she guessed, because the guard had clearly tricked her and had expected the satisfaction of seeing her do an about-face when she discovered the condition of the steps. Now there are more women working for the National Park Service. Anna didn’t make it academically. I plan to contact her.

I strode due north, desperate under every heading and incredulous that everything in my life, every maneuver, had combined to make it absolutely necessary that I march out directly into the jaws of death, alone, no one beside me, replicating the one experience I had learned was the one above all I should never again undergo—that is, being in a place where you were on the same footing with vicious wild animals, or rather where they are the superior power. I wanted to be out of the reach of the eyes of Tsau, not to be visible to anyone there.

At the last minute a young girl had brought me a rifle and shells, issued just as I was leaving by Dineo. The gun depressed me because it was confirmation that what I was doing was hazardous and because it was heavy. I weighed the idea of sending it back. Slung over either shoulder it was unwieldy and would slow me down. Finally I put it transversely through the top of my backpack, and that was better.

In only two or three miles it was already grueling going. The ground was softer, thanks to the rain, than during my previous expedition, at least in certain tracts it was. I was wearing the wrong kind of socks: they were Nelson’s, not mine, and they had a tendency to inch down into my boots. At least I was away from Tsau, and the world could relax into boring vistas, an occasional baobab constituting an extreme of interest.

I used my binoculars. There were too many inscrutable objects scattered around the landscape. In one case I went a long distance off my route of march to examine something that turned out to be a crumpled sheet of rotting tarpaulin. I was looking for too many different things. The remains of a fire, a body, his, or the carcass of a horse, a tent—he had taken my pop-up tent at my insistence—or some other piece of improvised shelter: these were all the kinds of things I was scanning for. I kept having spikes of alarm each time I thought I saw something. So far everything seemed to be innocent, on inspection, although inspection consisted in too many cases of simply staring harder and longer at the particular thing.

Gradually I became demoralized when I realized I had done my own version of On s’engage et puis on voit. I had no forward plan. This was about as far as I could get from Tsau before I would have to stop and go back, in order to be in Tsau before nightfall. I had no tent. On foot, I could never make it to Tikwe in less than three days, especially with all the scanning I was doing. I wasn’t a Bushman who could sleep in a tree. I had been planning, self-evidently, on finding something in my first thrust. I was a fool. The best that could be said of my mission was that it had been a way of ascertaining if Nelson was lying hurt or dead close enough to Tsau to be recovered from our end.

I was sure he was dead and then alternately that he was alive, lying somewhere with my name on his lips. The impasse I was in led to the bizarre urge to write things down about him that were coming to me now and that I realized were not in my compilation. Of course, this was no time to be writing. It was irrelevant. But I hadn’t gotten down Nelson saying Unhand my behind, followed by Do I have a way with words, or not? Or that when he was in an enamored state over a junior high school classmate, a young woman referred to as the Blond Dago, he had gotten into the shower with his pajamas on. There were other, more intimate things I knew, that I’d left out out of sheer decorum. This had been wrong. Also I had very little in my compilation about marriage. I remembered something that was probably key. He had said I never get married unless someone asks me. I needed to be in a library, the only one at my table, my polished blond parquet table, wonderful light, foliage swaying outside the window with normal birds in it.

I was so self-involved that when an actual anomaly appeared I failed to notice it until it was on top of me. Horsemen came threading through the brush toward me. They had been approaching for some time. There were six of them, coming very slowly. They were Baherero, looking rakish as usual, miscellaneously dressed, some with leather slouch hats, others with fur hats or rag turbans. The lead rider was lapped in cartridge belts about the torso. In fact all of the horsemen were armed. Something
was exciting them: my gun was. I had taken it out of my pack and was leaning on it.

They can tell me something! was my first thought. But that would only be if they knew Setswana. There were enough Herero women in Tsau who would have been willing to tutor me in Saherero, but I’d never taken the opportunity to learn, largely because I thought that when the Herero dispute with the Botswana government over their cattle was solved they would pull up stakes overnight, including our Hereros. The only Saherero I knew was the greeting, Wapenduka. They nodded when I said it, but they wanted something more. They indicated they wanted me to lay my rifle down and step away from it, which I did, not gladly. A seventh rider was bringing up the rear, traveling even more slowly: something bulky was being dragged behind the horse on travois poles. I had to see what it was, even though I was telling myself it would have to be supplies, not to assume more. I was shaking. Two men dismounted. They wouldn’t let me move until one of them had his foot on my rifle.

The dismounted men spoke a peculiar and meager Setswana. I realized why it was peculiar. They had had their mesial incisors knocked out, per the cultural requirement of their tribe. Even before they said the word mmobodi, meaning sick man, I knew what was on the travois. I ran to the travois. I pushed back the flap at the top of the long canvas bundle slung between the poles and it was Nelson, looking inhuman but breathing, his face terribly swollen, sunburned, white crusts around his lips. I had to look away. I looked back at the double track the points of the travois poles had cut in the sand. He must have been immobilized for some time in the sun, but clearly he had found a way to keep his eyes and forehead shaded, because above the root of his nose the burn was less severe. I wanted to unwrap him, feel his limbs, give him water, but just as I was reaching to unlace his shrouding the rider moved, pulled him away. I yelled something. I made them halt long enough for me to see how hot his forehead was. It was not extreme, if my touch could be trusted. But then, amid a lot of shouting, the rider started up again, pulling away from me. They were making for Tsau. With the burden that horse was slow, I gathered they were saying. Gomela go shwa, He is sick but will recover, someone said, pushing me back from the travois. I think this is what they said. I was insane. I wanted to push the travois.