Mating (69 page)

I was saved. He was alive. These people knew what they were doing, and my mission was not to become a handful and prevent them from doing what they were doing, which was making for Tsau with Nelson as
fast as they could manage. I began apologizing. They began leaving, as a body. I think one was asking me how far was Tsau, but I had no idea. I think one offered to have me ride behind him, but I said no, thinking that I would slow things up, and the best thing was for them to get to Tsau as fast as they could, to our enemy the nurse. I would jog along behind the travois, since it was going the slowest, and with luck I should be able to keep it in sight. I had to jog pretty quickly, from the start, and even then I fell behind, which maddened me, because I wanted to urge the lead rider to go ahead alone, at a gallop, to let Tsau know and get help coming from the opposite direction. I jogged harder.

I was saved, but I was steadily falling behind, courtesy my Enfield, so I decided to relieve myself of it intelligently. The riders were too far ahead of me to signal anything to. They could have taken the rifle for me. But good luck to that, since they were far ahead and I was falling farther back, since the travois was going faster than had seemed likely. So an intelligent thing to do would be to discard the rifle by depositing it in the branches of a tree, a tree in some way distinctive, one of the larger white thorn trees, possibly. The Baherero would stop and look back for me occasionally, which I was desperate that they stop doing. In no time there was the right tree, one I would always remember, smack on the due north heading to Tikwe, nonproblematic, so I stuck the rifle into its branches as high as I could reach and good riddance. I could find it again, no question I could.

I was saved, but had Nelson been conscious or only semiconscious? He had said something when I said his name and my name, I was sure. But had he? He might be saying things no one was paying the slightest attention to as they pulled him along like luggage. I could catch up. In fact I was closer than before I’d ditched the rifle. So now off went my backpack and this and that, everything except for my canteens. I had two. I realized shortly I needed only one. My binoculars were nugatory too now. I dropped them. I drew closer to Nelson. There should be a universal language. English was taking too long. I would tell Nelson this. I had always thought Esperanto and Volapük and all of them, Basic English, were jokes or rackets meant to create sinecures, but that was wrong. I could have been adequate if the horsemen had been able to communicate with me in more than nine words, and I with them. Maybe Esperanto was not the answer, maybe something simpler was. I would never mock the proposition again. It could be made compulsory, universal. I could work on it with Nelson from someplace like Bern or Carmel. I ran toward Tsau.

When my lagging got more extreme, one of the riders was detailed to wait for me and insist I get up and ride with him. The main party, with Nelson, went on ahead. It took awhile for my man to work out the drill. He had to improvise some cushioning for me, using a putrid blanket, since his position was that we couldn’t both fit in the same saddle, which was in fact nonsense. He decided to jettison and cache one set of heavily loaded saddlebags from among the several he was carrying, but then changed his mind and put everything back the way it had been. He was very agitated regarding the whereabouts of my rifle. It bothered him that I didn’t have it, and it was evident he felt it was up to him to do something about it, like going back and trying to retrieve it. It was worth a fortune, of course. All our transactions were conducted ninety percent in sign language, which slowed us seriously. Finally he gave up on the rifle. I think he was convinced I was crazy, not someone he wanted on his docket for longer than was absolutely necessary. We set off and arrived not much more than half an hour after the others.

Nelson was already in bed in a compartment in the infirmary. There was unguent all over his face. He seemed to be asleep. I lifted his sheet and he was naked, which irrationally bothered me. Fortunately his penis was nothing to be ashamed of. His left arm was splinted and bandaged, and there was a shorter splint on his right leg, near the ankle. I’m ashamed to say that his loss of weight was one of the first things that registered with me, not because it was alarming but because now he was perfect, his ribs defined but not overdefined, his belly slightly concave: he was the weight I’d been willing or wheedling him toward since we got together. I went over him again. There were bad abrasions on his right leg and his back and neck. Kakelo, for all her reservations about Tsau, was being impeccable and even slightly tender, I thought, in her ministrations, although her tenderness may have been a cover for the collective guilt they were all going to have to bear for not listening to me about sending help sooner. Everything had been done for him except for cleaning up his feet, which she let me do. I wanted to be reassured that he
could talk, but she preferred me not to press that, saying it was urgent that he be let to sleep. He had taken juice, and he had recognized everyone, was the story. I was very faint and cold and was intermittently under the impression that I couldn’t make out colors. Kakelo read off everything she’d found wrong with him so far. The main injuries were a broken left arm, which he’d set himself very cleanly, and a broken ankle. There was some infection in the scrapes above the ankle, but not very much. There was sunpoisoning. His temperature was just above one hundred degrees. His collarbone might be broken, but perhaps not, we would see.

A chair was brought in for me, and then a pallet, and then beef tea. There was a crowd outside, I knew.

I thought I might lie down for a minute, and did, but wrenched myself up when I realized that before I did anything else I should go to the octagon and bring back a pair of clean undershorts and cover his shame with them. I knew it was ridiculous and I knew all there was to know about Tswana casualness toward nudity of every kind, but I felt impelled, partly because he was too beautiful. His beard was beautiful and when he was well I was going to make him let it grow high into his cheeks like this. He was the Idea of himself.

After I’d reclad his loins my breathing normalized.

I slept fitfully, getting up a few times for the purpose of putting my face against his chest, listening to his heart.

There were birds nesting in the infirmary thatch, something I’d never noticed.

The next day I was an obstruction to everyone. I don’t know if his imago was igniting martyr and saintly prisoner associations in me or what it was, but I was full of fiery feeling for Nelson. I was militant when someone came in with a libation she refused to characterize for me but which turned out to be beef blood, or largely that. It was worse when Kakelo was noncommittal and refused to bar this person or this remedy forever from Nelson’s sickroom.

Also I had an agenda for them: I wanted them to make him awake and alert and talking. I was tired of hearing how well he had talked to everyone last night, before I got there. He had slept enough. While they carried out my agenda I would be there monitoring and managing to be physically in contact with Nelson, by touching him or taking his hand, at intervals of between ten minutes and a half hour. I was overflowing with helpful either/ors, on the order of either he says something intelligent by noon and not just someone’s name or we arrange for a medical evacuation. We had medevaced a woman with bleeding fibroids, I pointed out, but here we had the founder of this place in an unknown condition and were not getting on the transmitter because Kakelo was saying he only had some breaks and exhaustion. She got out a medical book to prove to me that he wasn’t concussed. I wouldn’t read it, not a paragraph, not a sentence. I wanted a rule made that no one could come into the room other than Kakelo or me unless I said all right. This was connected with desperate fantasies I was having vis-à-vis his seed, assuming the worst had happened. It humiliates me to admit that I was wondering if I could get him erect and then get over him and capture his seed. I could only contemplate doing this if first I established I could get him erect. And I could do that only if we had privacy. I would think of a ruse to get Kakelo off the scene.

Now comes the ultimate with me. When you’re on the borders of shock you have waves of intense sense perception, it seems. I had one, and it involved the way I smelled and ipso facto must look. A spear entered my mind. I was too fat, not good enough for him physically, not equal, the way he looked. My triceps were going to hang down like hammocks, about which nothing could be done, it was already happening. Excuse me, I said. I went running to the octagon. People wanted to speak with me, but I shook them off. He was an icon of beauty, and what was I? I got home and found whatever I had in the way of makeup and made myself up, meaning just lipstick and mascara, I hope. I don’t know exactly today what I did to make myself beautiful. My dread was that he would wake up and see me and hate me and either die or turn to someone else. This was the state I was in. At that time I was probably at most ten pounds over my high school weight, to give an indication of how askew my perceptions fundamentally were. Obviously how I looked had taken precedence over how I smelled, because I did nothing about that. Also, walking, or, as I was given to then, running, was extremely painful, because I’d neglected to remove my boots after my excursion, and my feet were swollen because of Denoon’s socks not fitting. The problem
had been that his socks had been clean and mine hadn’t, because once I moved in it became prime for me to see he always had clean things, and I had slipped when it came to myself.

In my makeup I caused a hush.

Nelson had, yet again, been awake, coughing this time, in my absence. But lo, he was asleep again. And in fact they wanted me to sleep or rest or wait in another compartment, if I wouldn’t mind. But first they wanted me to eat and to take something that would calm me. I ate porridge, refusing pills of any sort, but they had outsmarted me and put powders in the malted drink I drank, sleeping powders. I went straight to my new room and had vertigo and was gone.

There he was, sitting up in a chair in the shade outside Sekopololo. He face was still glistening with unguent, but the swelling was much better. He was wearing pajama bottoms, there was a white cotton throw over his shoulders, his chest was naked, his hands were in his lap, palms up, one hand nested in the other in an odd style. You can use the word delighted all your life and never know what it means truly, or inly, as he occasionally liked to say. But then I knew. I ran to him and crouched down and put my arms around him. I was weeping. He looked at me, but nothing more demonstrative than touching my hair was done, I gathered because there was a crowd of fifteen or twenty people around, paying their respects, saying hello, just watching, keeping us company for a while, and he wanted to be decorous. Several women told me to be soft because his collarbone was bruised hard.

Are you all right? I asked, the inevitable question.

I am, he said. His voice was fine, steady and low.

I pressed my cheek against his mouth and he made a kiss, but not right away.

I was stringing disparate questions and sentiments together: Can I get you anything? Thank god, thank god. You look good, you look well. When can we go home? I elicited smiles and murmurs from him.

Instantly it was time for Nelson to go back in. Kakelo was there with Dineo.

Dineo said He has answered every question as to how he comes to us as he is. And when he closes his eyes it means to cease talking while he can rest.

Nelson had closed his eyes.

I let them take him again. I was ready to rally myself, clean up, renormalize. It bothered me that Nelson seemed limited to a purely responsive mode with people. He had initiated nothing. But this must be proof of the depth of what he’d been through, I told myself. In any case I had an audience with Dineo coming, in which she would tell me all she knew and incidentally take up the matter of what was going to be done about the rifle I had lost and the horse that had been taken and was now dead: Dorcas was making an uproar about both, apparently.

Below are three dialogs from Nelson’s convalescence, the first two from different stages of his stay in the infirmary, the last from the first night we were back chez nous. They go in ascending order of normalcy—that is, from the least normal to the most. The first two are reconstructed from notes made immediately after each exchange. The last is actual transcript from a tape. I resorted to taping when I finally sensed the extent of the bouleversement in Nelson I was witnessing, one proof of which was that he had no objection to my taping every word that fell from his lips—quite the contrary, in fact. All his irony about my Boswellizing was gone. Where I say the Smile I mean that his response is a particular smile, very tolerant or forgiving and structurally condescending, but not meant that way. The protocol for an audience with the Dalai Lama involves the audient’s agreeing to a fifteen-minute period for the exchange of benevolent glances before any substantive talking begins. Even the Pope had to agree to this. The Smile is what I imagine people in that situation coming up with. A feature that shows in the dialogs is that I become more upset as he becomes more equilibrized. And throughout I seem to be concealing my decision to stay with him in
Tsau, if that was a bona fide decision, which is explained, I think, by my understandable interest in getting some hint from him that that question was working its way from the depths of his mind to somewhere near uppermost, where it had been before his, to my way of thinking, misadventure. My withholding my inner decision is of course something I look back on with hindsight telling me that my blaring out at some point my yes to staying might have changed the course of events. In fact I couldn’t do it.

The first dialog began after I’d been telling him yet again how I’d gone from hell to heaven, losing him, being in Tsau with Dorcas raising the winds over his absence and what it had to mean vis-à-vis Hector, the main implication being that Nelson was a fugitive from justice, the general seethings over the taken horse, no one listening to me, and then getting him back alive. He was healing absurdly rapidly, his face losing its swelling and joining his body in a perfection I could do without. Even the little lozenge of fat that seems to appear after you’re forty on the side of your nose was gone. His weight loss was anchored by his current diet, which was largely soup, broths. I think I would have made a perfect gay man, my appreciation for the male form being what it is. Nelson was becoming the pygmalion object I would have carved for myself as a physical mate. We were twinned, me with my response to his corporeal self and he with his self-proclaimed receptivity to the female shell, the beautiful ones, that is, naturellement.