Mating (9 page)

I’m not good at being rueful, so I curtailed things. I made myself say the whole thing was about being open, and I nearly gagged. The world is what it is, I said, and you are what you are, and if I’m a neurotic about the fact that men have all the secrets and I have an impulse and want to get one, then that’s what I am. I said I’m not saying to tell me the worst thing you ever did, although who wouldn’t love to hear that, or tell me something filthy about the queen or something defense related or something that puts perfidious Albion in a bad light—did I say that? I wanted to get a smile out of him before he left.

You thoroughly confuse one, he said. He left, thinking.

Once he was gone I felt like a lunatic. I was engaging in something deluded and worthless. What was I doing? How stupid a goal could you set for yourself?

I suppose I had a dark night of the soul. I had no relation to anything that had meaning. It was like an experience Nelson would tell me about that was similar. He was in New York, where he had a couple of hours free between appointments or appearances. He was in the vicinity of the New York Public Library so decided to stop in. It was going to be an enormous pleasure to be there. I don’t know where he’d been living just before that, but it had been remote, someplace without libraries, and he was famished for print. He was filled with anticipation, he would be flooded with choices of things he wanted to look up or catch up on. He stepped into the main reference room, a vast place where every wall was lined with banks of card catalogs, where he would have access to every written thing in the Western world that was worthwhile, virtually. He steps into the room and begins to sweat from every pore, as he put it.
Nothing interested him.
Not only had he forgotten what it was he’d intended to follow up on,
there was nothing of interest.
He called it the abomination of desolation.
There was nothing he wanted to read.
He felt cold but not faint. He felt he was real but that the material of the world had changed into something like paper ash that would disintegrate if he touched it. Paper ash was all he could compare it to. He was in terror. He felt he had to walk carefully in leaving, not touch anything. Then he left and it stopped. I walked him through it again when he told me about it because I thought the paper ash was a clue. It may have been. One of his chores as a boy was to endlessly burn newspapers and periodicals in a backyard incinerator. His father subscribed to everything, but by the time Nelson was fifteen or so his father’s reading had become haphazard and was in the process of stopping altogether, so Nelson would be burning a lot of periodicals unopened, in their mailers. And it had been painful for him, and he had a strong image of stirring the ashes and of
whole intact pages reduced to black or gray ash with the print still readable. He denied there was a connection.

Finally I got myself in hand. Not proceeding would be even more demoralizing than seeing where this would come out, even if it was ridiculous. And so to bed.

He came in glum. I was rehearsed.

I saturated the first half hour with protestations that I repented the whole thing, that I had been incredibly jejune, that the little nips of Mainstay I had taken while I was massaging him had been part of the problem, that I was distraught. I looked the part thanks to my dark night of the soul. My plea was that we forget it. It was just that when he had said Please let me do something for you it had been the equivalent of someone inviting you to make a wish, no more. Also I didn’t want things to end uglily because I had to start thinking about getting home and I wanted to not leave a stain behind.

Also, I said, I know you can’t help but worry this is something that however circuitously could endanger your job. I want you to know I’m not cavalier about jobs. You can fall into a fissure between jobs and never be seen again, because of your age, for instance. My antecedents are one hundred percent working class, I said, by which I mean just barely arrived there and glad of it. Here I was exploiting my having gotten him to let slip that he was Labour, which people at his level in the ministry he was in are supposed to reveal only on pain of death, I gathered.

I forget what I made for dinner, but I remember he toyed with the entrée. Not the bread, though. He could never keep his hands off my baking.

We sat in the heat. I was supposed to pick up that he’d made some brave decision that rendered all the preambling I was doing irrelevant.

Might we talk as friends, or family? he finally asked. He was going into a role.

I know what you’re doing, I said: You have an instinct for the avuncular. But go ahead anyway. He smiled.

Well, there are so many things of interest, aren’t there? The Bushmen. Let us say you were concerned with the Bushmen—everyone here is, it seems. The fate of the Bushmen. Sad, isn’t it, that the South Africans are turning them into trackers to hunt down guerrillas in Ovamboland?

This annoyed me no end, because it was such common knowledge. But I just said that I knew about this because it had been in the Rand Daily Mail, and it was more than sad. Patronize me at your peril, my attitude said, and he got it.

So sorry, he murmured. I could feel him punching the reset button.

Then, Um, did I think there was anything to the stories that the South Africans were bribing certain Kwena chiefs to get them interested in joining up with the five million Kwenas the Boers already controlled through their thug Mangope across the border in Bophuthatswana, thusly threatening to partition and wreck Botswana for being so uncooperative? Mangope’s agents were working everywhere. I am summarizing. Halfway through this I started finishing his sentences for him. I read the Economist too, I said. But I didn’t need to read the Economist to know about Mangope. I reprised how serious I was about forgetting the whole thing, how embarrassed I was that I had ever said anything, especially if this was the outcome.

Next I got a disorganized series of asides, essentially, to the effect that I was really a rather terrifying person and did I know that? I seemed to be a sort of monster who remembered everything—an allusion to something that happened rather often where I would quote him to himself if the situation called for it. Did I also remember lines of text, as I seemed to? But then I was also an angel. I was saying all was forgiven, but I was not projecting that. It was pro forma. He was no fool.

I briefly considered showing him I could tell him a thing or two myself. I knew from my time in Keteng that the South Africans had spies and stooges absolutely everywhere and were behind the big abrupt movement among the Herero to go back to Namibia and take their cattle with them. They had come over with nothing after the German massacres in 1905, and they had built up their herds from scratch, being genius cattle raisers. The government was saying begone but leave your herds. But this kind of thing is what the Boers do for fun. There’s nothing surprising about it. They are breeders of strife. But I held myself in because I could tell by his expression that something new was impending.

Well, he could pass on something he would wager I hadn’t heard of. Possibly this would come under the heading of scandal. Someone rather famous was in Botswana incognito, so to speak, and had been—off and on, but now on—for some years, eight to be precise. He paused to see if this was going to be old news again and was relieved when it was clear I had no idea what he was talking about, unless he meant Elizabeth Taylor and her putative hospital project, which would have been completely risible.

I wasn’t to think that this was by any manner of means an official secret. It was more a gentlemen’s agreement among people who had to know about this person’s presence. This person had exacted highly unusual conditions from the government of Botswana, outrageous conditions, in setting up his project, which was what he was doing in Botswana, something very avant-garde, supposedly very major and massive, a whole new village built from the ground up, in point of fact, somewhere in the north central Kalahari. Clearly he hated whoever this was. Did I still not know? He was surprised.

Go on, I said.

Well, what else could he add? He considered. This was an American, a difficult individual, and there was division in government vis-à-vis all the latitude granted him, particularly in the matter of oversight. His idea was that evaluators and visitors were parasites whose only function was to deform and corrupt the development process. Some unspecified day this New Jerusalem would be complete and only then would the world, including the donors who had financed it, be allowed to see what they had wrought and carry back the secret word that would put paid to poverty in Africa. There was even a Tswana code name for the project, which was Sekopololo, which no one could pronounce. I knew that Sekopololo translated as “The Key.”

When he said Nelson Denoon I could hardly believe it. Denoon was a bête noire of mine, in an abstract way, from the first of my endless years at Stanford. Initially I associated him with earlier tribulations at
Bemidji State, but that was wrong. I had been tantamount to a fan of this man’s work. There were several of us. He had come to Stanford to run a colloquy on the etiology of poverty. Too bad, it was restricted to faculty and a select few students. You had to have passed your quals and or you had to know somebody. You could get in if somebody liked you. When we were noninvited we even went so far as to appeal to him directly via a fanlike note. No reply. Naturally afterward all the attendees reported a truly scrotum-tightening experience. Their worldviews had changed. One woman couldn’t get over his voice. It was a voice you could eat, she said.

It all came back, the bathos of trying to be nonchalant about trying and failing to get at least a glimpse of the great man. He had written a classic that undergraduates loved and most of the professoriat hated:
Development as the Death of Villages,
with its jacket portrait of someone reminiscent of the white actors they use to play the Indian chief’s headstrong eldest son in westerns. You couldn’t tell in the photograph because it was full face, but he had his sleek black hair in an actual ponytail. He was wearing it that way when he came to Stanford, as I learned from one of my female colleagues who attended the audience and whose name I forget but whom I think of for some reason as Whoreen, which is close. Whoreen is at the University of South Dakota, but on tenure track. Colleague is of course a misnomer: you only have colleagues once you get hired. As of early 1981, Denoon would be mid–late forties, I calculated.

So it was none other than Nelson Denoon! He was so famously sardonic! So heretical! He was so interdisciplinary! Economics, anthropology, economic anthropology, you name it in the policy sciences, not to mention development proper and being in actual charge of a sequence of famous rural development projects in Africa! In fact, he was supposed to be in Tanzania at that very moment or until just recently and arguing with Julius Nyerere, or was I out of date or was he just everywhere?

Here was someone at the level of Paulo Freire or Ivan Illich, but nonreligious, totally, therefore not dismissable as a mystic. Here was the ultimate beneficiary of the academic star system and a star himself, who was somehow against it and reviled it at all times, which only made him more of a star, more in demand, more invited to conferences, always a panelist, never a rapporteur. Here was the acme of what you could get out of academia: teach where you like, get visiting fellowships and lectureships, grants, get quoted, jet around, rusticate a few years in the bush if you felt like it. This is how I saw him. I remembered that in fact
I knew he had left Tanzania after—what else?—a famous harangue against the revered head of a sovereign country that was the left’s darling, a polemic that—what else?—had been published in hard covers, something that was essentially a pamphlet. Which had been met with the most pleasant eruptions of praise and rage, per usual.

He was at the pinnacle of whatever vineyard I was laboring in as a groundling. I’m not proud of the vibration the image I had of him created in me. It was a textbook example of ressentiment. I was thirty-two and a woman and no doctorate yet, no thesis even, and closing in on my thesis deadline. I had been working my tits down to nubs in the study of man, with the result that my goals were receding farther the faster I ran. So it seemed.

Z sensed he had something I wanted more on. He was acute. I was so labile it was ridiculous. It would be about as hard to read me as being in the kitchen and noticing when the compressor went on in the refrigerator.

Did I know the party, then?

Only by reputation, I said. What else could he tell me?

Now he was cagey. He was adamant that he had no idea where the project was, exactly. That was very closely held. But he held out the faint possibility that in a pinch he could find out. Ho hum, I thought: for a consideration, he means, and what might that be?

I was having the berserk and faintly triumphant feeling of having cornered Denoon, just because we both happened to be in Botswana. This was not absolutely stupid, because for the white presence Botswana is like one big very dispersed small town. There are only a million people all told, black and white together, in a country the size of Texas or France, as the intro paragraph of every project proposal on Botswana reads. But Denoon’s being there felt like providence. I was certain I could get his attention this time. A king can look at a cat for a change, I thought. This shooting star had apparently been sedentarized in my bailiwick—so, good. I wanted to see him in the flesh, see how he was holding up. Was he the same black Irish kindly Satan persona with hair like a Sioux, black as night, dispensing piercing glances left and right, or not?

People felt so strongly about him. When he was the topic of conversation you got sick of hearing the cliché that either you hated his positions or you loved them, there was no middle ground with him. Friendships had broken up over his book. The development business is full of suppressed hatred between schools of thought, and the passion
arises because money is involved. Developmentalists are competing tooth and nail for project money to enact their theories someplace. This is the only way to know you’re on top. It isn’t like English History, say, where the prize is getting into every bibliography until the end of time because what you figured out about Tudor statecraft subsumes and overturns everything anybody else wrote, up until you. Development is more like research medicine, where you rise and fall according to the grants you rack up. In regular scholarship what you get is the joy of subsuming your predecessors and peers: they thought they were rivers but you turn them into creeks, tributaries to your majestic seaward flow. And Denoon not only pierced competitive theories on paper, he did live projects, lots of them one after another.