by Will McGrath
I never knew that ordinary days could bring such happy news until I somehow chose you as my Valentine. Thank you for being a part of my life.
When I read this note aloud in the Math and Science staff room, it elicits howls of laughter from my colleagues. Ntate Baholo, Scrabble victor, and my deskmate ‘M’e Poho snatch the dainty epistle away from me, parsing the handwriting and speculating about specific wording.
Poho rereads the last line. “Thank you for being a part of my life. Ntate Moshoeshoe, is there something you are not telling us?”
She puts the back of her hand dramatically to her forehead, then begins fanning herself with the handwritten note. “Whatever has transpired, you must hide it from your wife, as she may become murderous.”
I show the note to Ellen later that night. She reads it, nodding calmly. As I watch her I am reminded of the time, some years back, when she fought off a bat that attacked us in our sleep. It flew in circles around the ceiling, shrieking, and then dove at us.
I retreated to the corner and huddled, fetal, thinking how darkly apropos this all was—that I should enter the world naked, and now, many years later, exit the world naked, bitten to death by vampire bat. Then I realized that Ellen had, with a certain Canadian equanimity, swatted the bat with a rolled issue of The New Yorker, trapped it under a recycling bin, and released it into the wild. It set out briskly for the tree line.
She looked over at me as she returned to bed.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
Thursday, I receive another love note in my school mailbox:
Hi, Honey, You look sick today, did you take too much beans yesterday? I will like to take you to the Hospital. So tell me when you are free. I think you need an appetizer for tomorrow.
This note receives a more sober reception in the staff room. What exactly can this signify: did you take too much beans yesterday? Is the writer suggesting that I am flatulent? It seems an odd tactic for a secret admirer. The line that reads I will like to take you to the Hospital is perplexing as well—is it seduction or threat? To my American eyes, the hospital is a decidedly unsexy place, but what can I possibly know about the cultural weight of “the Hospital” vis-à-vis Basotho sexual mores?
But it is Valentine’s Day tomorrow, and what can one really know about these matters of the heart? The secret notes that I’ve been receiving are part of the local interpretation of Valentine’s Day—something which I’m assuming was originally transmitted via Christian missionary, and which has now been assimilated in the Basotho style, where any common event can become a multi-day celebration. We faculty members have all picked names out of a hat and have been writing secret lurid notes to each other throughout the week, the first sparks of a love that will burn hotly through the school year. Tomorrow is the big reveal: during lunch we will receive gifts and learn the identities of our innamorati before the real party begins.
When I asked Ellen if she wanted to get married, I gave her a piece of gummi candy rope that I had tied into a ring-like shape. It was an item I had purchased moments before at a 7-Eleven. She looked at what I was offering and she did not say no.
She put the engagement ring on her finger, sized it up, and ate it.
Only later did she explain her actions: she was worried that she would try to save it otherwise. The gummi ring would grow disgusting, a slowly decaying memento mori that had once symbolized eternal love.
As she tells me this, I am picturing her childhood bedroom in Toronto. When she was fourteen, she found a green conjoined triplet gummi bear in a packet of candy, and in a fit of excitement she scotch-taped it beside her bed. It rots there to this day, a thin green stain down the wall beneath it.
Friday has finally come: Valentine’s Day, warm and lovely in this southern hemisphere climate. In the staff room, the teachers are abuzz with last-minute speculation about the identities of their valentines. When the lunch bell rings, we crowd around the windows of the Math and Science staff room. Outside, there is singing and ululating.
Here come the members of the Humanities staff room—the teachers of English, Business, Civics, Religion, and Sesotho—dancing in single file and belting out traditional songs in antiphony. They process across the school grounds, fourteen women with gifts in hand, six men singing and marching beside them. We teachers in Math and Science are cheering and urging them on.
Meanwhile, one thousand students have gathered to watch this spectacle. As their teachers march past, they are collapsing in laughter, struck down with joy, splayed out in the dust—casualties on the battlegrounds of amour.
Once Ellen and I went to a friend’s wedding. Late into the night, she began arm wrestling the partygoers. I had gathered a sizable crowd of mostly strangers and was collecting bets, provoking the challengers, driving up the pot. Ellen bested one woman after another—it wasn’t even close.
Soon the men came on. The first one she dispatched quickly, bloodlessly, and he immediately retired from combat. The next man was defeated with equal vigor—yet he kept coming, losing again and again, unable to process this strange new world he had inherited.
I walked the circle and collected dollar bills from chumps. I would have proposed to Ellen right then, had we not already been married for some time.
As the line of shuffle-stomping Basotho arrives, the Math and Science staff room erupts in dancing. A large stereo system has materialized in the corner and is now blasting American hip-hop. Teachers pull me around in unfamiliar steps, the entire faculty united in this midday nightclub. Students peer through the windows and teachers make no attempts at decency.
After a few minutes, someone turns off the music and a large circle forms. Anticipatory silence fills the room. Then one by one, the teachers go to the center of the circle to reveal their hidden identities, each person presenting a final gift and giving a ludicrously flamboyant speech on the excellence of his or her “vallie.” Each speech is met with wild applause. Teacher after teacher sends forth a paean to love both earthly and divine.
Now my secret vallie is in the center, a shy male math teacher who has been happily listening to the speculation about my note-writer’s identity. He gives me a coffee mug filled with candy and a tentative hug.
We were in Rome when Ellen got pickpocketed. She had gone for the day out to the catacombs, toward the edge of the city, and I had stayed behind to do nothing. She was waiting to buy her ticket when she realized what had just happened, her bag suddenly lighter, then turned immediately and ran, chasing after a departing figure.
She caught them in the parking lot, a standard pickpocket team of three men: one to distract, one to make the snatch, one to receive the handoff. A cloud of dust picked up and rolled across the parking lot, perhaps a tumbleweed too. The men stood staring at her.
“Give me my wallet,” Ellen said.
The men yelled and protested their innocence. Ellen took a step forward. They considered this briefly, having never encountered an adrenaline-dazed Canadian in the wild. Then one man threw down the wallet and they ran.
Even those pickpockets knew better than that poor sap at the wedding, even they did not want to end up like the bat.
The number of speakers is dwindling. I am hanging back, suddenly nervous. But finally there is no one left. People are looking around the room to see if anyone still remains, as one teacher is giftless.
I step inside the circle and clear my throat. I pause for a very long time.
When I begin to speak, my voice is ragged with emotion. “Some of you will know that deep in my heart, in the most secret and passionate corner of my heart, one name is written there.”
A murmur of approval shimmers through the room.
“There is one name,” I continue, “one name that the angels sing to me while I sleep.”
Yes, they are nodding, preach, my brother.
“One name written in fiery love.”
Amen, my brother, amen.
“That name is dearer than my own. Forever on my lips, it is the
name of my vallie.”
I pause to wipe an imaginary tear.
“That name is ‘M’e Poho.”
‘M’e Poho: my deskmate, loud and hilarious, a bullish juggernaut of a woman whose barbed tongue is forever lashing ignorant students.
‘M’e Poho: who said to me on my first day, looking haughtily down at my lunchtime plate of green legumes, “I see you have pea’d yourself at lunch.” She paused appropriately, arched an eyebrow, and added: “Perhaps tomorrow you will beans yourself.”
‘M’e Poho: rumored to be a powerful consumer of alcohol, a woman who once, when I ran into her at one of the local bars, offered me her daughter—her teenage daughter who was standing shyly beside her—as a “conc,” an offer which charted some devilish course between the lands of serious and not.
‘M’e Poho: this giant woman, somewhere in her fifties, screams when I say her name, falls to the floor in a Pentecostal state of ecstasy. She clutches at her heart and her head. She begins crawling across the floor in her nicest seshoeshoe dress, moaning with joy, until she reaches me and—taking hold of my ankles—beseeches me to say that this is no dream but reality.
I can remember well the circumstances of our first encounter. Ellen and I were at a party thrown by mutual friends and we got to talking. It seems now that our paths were bound to cross eventually. A few days later, I called her up.
“Yeah!” she said happily, “you were the guy in the lumberjack shirt.”
“Mmhm,” I smiled through the phone, tight-lipped, nodding in case she could somehow see me. I was not the guy in the lumberjack shirt.
But tonight we are walking out along the gorge, watching the sunset soften the jagged clefts of the earth, the falling light now charging the landscape with strange cryptozoological power. Across the river, the hills have taken on the appearance of massive beasts slumped against the land, dozing in Mesozoic slumber—fantastical creatures with thick furred hides, no known kingdom or phylum.
“Hey,” Ellen says. “Do you want to have a baby?”
A BRIEF PRIMER ON SOME MATTERS OF ETIQUETTE (AS PRESENTED BY AN OUTSIDER)
Touching
Once I saw two male police officers walking down the main road, holding hands. Uniforms crisp, batons dangling, pistols holstered, fingers linked. They looked fierce, hidden behind mirrored aviators, bonded at the fingertips.
I tell Ellen about these policemen. She tells me she rode in a truck out to a distant village. Two men were squeezed into the front seat beside her, and one placed his hand on the other man’s thigh for the duration of the trip. His hand rested there with the casual familiarity of a lover.
Everyone holds hands here. Everyone touches. Men with men, women with women, tough teenage boys with tough teenage boys. It is not uncommon for a stranger to take your hand as he walks beside you, asking where you are going or what has brought you to Lesotho. This type of physical contact can be initially disconcerting, but the beauty of holding a stranger’s hand reveals itself gradually on a stroll across town. Enter with peace. Kena ka khotso.
Staring
Back when I first arrived, I asked Nthabeleng why everyone was staring at me.
“What do you mean!” she yelled, because there is nothing Nthabeleng hates more than direct questions, and nothing she loves more than yelling. “You are always asking these things. Don’t you have eyes or a brain?”
As I turned to leave her office, she yelled after me: “They were probably staring at your pink face!”
The Basotho will stare wherever you go in Mokhotlong. This is fundamental. Men, women, and children, old and young, rich and poor—it doesn’t matter. They will stare and stare hard. They will stop what they are doing, they will freeze in mid-conversation, they will get out of their cars to look.
There is no menace in any of this. The reality is simply that people are interested. If you are white and in Mokhotlong, then you are one of maybe twenty white people scattered throughout a district of around 100,000 Basotho, which means your whiteness accounts for 0.02 percent of the district population. Really, though, your whiteness or non-whiteness is only part of the story. You could be Indian; you could be Neptunian. You are simply Not Basotho in a country that is 99.7 percent ethnically homogeneous.
After living in the mountains long enough, a question will wriggle to the surface of your mind. One day you will think: “What’s wrong with staring?” You will reconsider that long-held injunction of your childhood and wonder: “Why is it so bad to look?”
Eventually you will embrace the stare. You will bask in it, you will wallow in it. And then you will learn to stare back. You will stare at the taxi drivers who hang halfway out their windows, rolling down the road in slo-mo, bleating quick staccato honks as they troll for customers. You will stare at the Sesotho doctors and their unknowable knots of root and bark, their baggies of pale powder. You will stare at the schoolkids skipping by in their matching greens and whites, matching reds and whites, matching blues. You will stare at the two missionaries from Kansas. You will stare at the cobblers and welders, the ditch diggers and accountants and trash burners. You will stare at the jail guards and government agriculture consultants, the man roasting chicken feet, the grandmother selling dense wheels of steam bread, the barbers, preachers, and butchers. You will stare at the cattle (the cattle won’t stare back, don’t care, the dark marbles of their eyes dreaming already). Because aren’t you somewhat curious about your fellow planet-goers? Haven’t you too experienced the transgressive thrill of locking eyes with a stranger and holding that glance too long?
Feeding
We have nineteen in the minibus already—this vehicle designed for sixteen passengers—when we stop to pick up a mother with two small children along the side of a high mountain pass. It is late. There are no more taxis coming this way tonight.
They slide the door open and the mother passes her nine-month-old baby up to me. I cradle her in my arms while the mother wedges beside me and situates her six-year-old daughter on her lap. We sit slotted like an overstuffed box of crayons, shoulders around our ears, twenty-two riders now. In this posture, I pantomime fatherhood, playing peek-a-boo with the baby nested in my arms, curious to see how this new costume might fit. Eventually, though, the child becomes upset and begins to cry, so to stave off commotion in our hyper-condensed state, the baby’s mother unwraps her top, pulls out her breast, and begins to feed the child I am still holding in my arms.
Soon the child relaxes and falls asleep. The mother leaves her breast out of her shirt for the duration of the trip. It is just a few inches from my face and, if so inclined, I too could lean over and sip. I do not.
I must pause for a moment.
We Americans are fearful of nipples. They are terrifying to us, hideous, even. We bundle and conceal and pad them. We airbrush them from lingerie advertisements. We protest and sign petitions against them—they are the Maginot line between a teen-friendly PG-13 and an R rating, that designation of moral bankruptcy. Pop singer Janet Jackson’s nipple was famously the source of a $550,000 fine levied by the United States Government, in a case that spanned more than seven prosecutorial years and eventually involved the Supreme Court. Of the nation. These nipples, they are anathema.
Yet we cannot look away from our American breasts. We package them for public display (not the nipple), we revere them in both the still and moving picture. We prop and inflate them, cantilever them over open space. We harness them as our engine of culture, as our national resource, our nuclear future.
I hope it will not be distasteful to suggest that the Basotho have a more measured approach to breasts and nipples. I hope it will be clear that when one of the college-educated employees on the outreach team undid her shirt and began squeezing the excess milk from her engorged postpartum breasts, it was not considered overly shocking. Nor is it considered odd that the women in the clinics don’t hurriedly cover themselves after having a breast exam, perhaps in the same way that one does not rush to cover one’s elbow aft
er having an elbow exam. Here in Mokhotlong, a breast is a part of the body. A nipple is used to feed children.
In the taxi, people are slowly dropping off. There is still another hour or so before we reach our destination. The baby is drowsing in my arms, the breast close at hand, and the mother looks over at me and smiles. As the taxi jostles along, I see the woman’s head nod briefly, then she rests it against my shoulder and falls asleep.
THE GIRL BEHIND THE COUNTER
I know a girl who works at the local butcher shop. I suppose I shouldn’t say girl, since Limpho is a woman, probably in her middle twenties. But the urge remains. She has a gentleness that makes her seem younger than her years, some bruiseable quality, although she surely knows more of the roughness of life than most. She works in a hog butchery, after all, a barn-like structure humming with bellicose and predatory horseflies that patrol the blood-freckled floor and swoop aggressively in while you eat your meal. It is one of my favorite places in town.
The Thia-La-La butchery is one of Mokhotlong’s premier noon hotspots—is in fact Mokhotlong’s only noon hotspot. Midday at Thia-La-La involves a chaotic press toward the lunch counter, a Soviet-style food rush as the hungry masses of the eastern mountains shove their way forward. They wave for attention and slam money on the counter, while the staff responds with a whirlwind of inactivity, since it is not the Basotho way to rush. Some days—as you press slowly forward, as you observe the glacial preparation of a meal, as an employee scoops chips onto a plate, one by one by one by one, forever and ever amen—some days you feel the clammy embrace of madness closing in around the backs of your ears. It is a singular sensation and thus worth experiencing at least once.
Today, though, I am able to catch Limpho’s eye across the counter. She is attending to someone’s plate with soul-withering fastidiousness, positioning each of the makoenya like she’s preparing a Dutch still life—each fat cake in its rightful place—but when she sees me she abandons her opus and adds more chips to the deep fryer; she knows I like them crispy-crispy.