Mating

by Norman Rush

  Giles was the first man I ever knew who actively preferred the left side of the bed (as you face the bed). Was it meaningful? I think I consider the right side of the bed, which I always prefer, dominant. In my future of course was Denoon, the only man born of woman with absolutely no preference for which side of the bed he slept on. I watched Giles asleep. In fairness I have to admit he slept quite beautifully, mouth closed, no musicale. It should have been soporific, but an edge of chagrin was tinting my feelings for him. I have always wondered why the fact that men have to sleep has never been really utilized by women, who are basically insomniac, when men transgress. Why have men never intuited that sleeping next to a woman you abuse all day might be hazardous? Drifting off I got into a fantasy of haranguing some feminist friends of mine with: Men sleep! We don’t! Power is lying in the street and nobody bothers to pick it up! But I’m fabulating, because the power part of the harangue is a quote from Trotsky via Denoon.

  We woke up in unison at seven thirty and scrambled to get some dinner. Afterward he wanted to read. We both ended up reading something. This time I was the culprit in that I dozed off. I could have been nudged out of it. I slept lightly and brokenly and have a distinct memory of Giles getting up a couple of times, going to the door, and stepping out into the corridor and looking up and down it, presumably for other white people. I fell asleep for good with him outlined that way in the dim corridor.

  The next day was all work and no play. He was dead to the falls except visually and was preoccupied with how moist it was around them and what that might do to his apparati and film. He was not his usual perfectionist self. In fact he was slipshod, I thought. We had box lunches and worked straight through to dinner, where again the impression was of a sprinkling of whites and a vast chorus or gallery of black help. Let me pay for all my meals, why don’t you? I said, to see how he would respond and if saying it would key something. But he said No no no. Apparently a deal was a deal.

  At bedtime I pressed my availability fairly far. He noticed, and we got into the foyer of something, but there was a sense of his going through with it that was impossible to mistake. He was not getting hard and I wasn’t prepared for heroic measures, nor, to be fair, was he asking for them. We stopped without discussing why we were stopping. The only comment I retain from that night was his saying that there were entire abandoned luxury hotels somewhere in the bush in Mozambique being kept going by former staff and where there had been no guests for years. He saw them as shrines being kept pristine for a vanished white clientele against the day it might return. Like cargo cults, I said. He looked blank. He was fascinated to hear all I could tell him about those.

  In the morning it was more work, quick quick, the last of it. He wanted to shoot other things in the vicinity than the falls. I had absorbed the falls, so I didn’t mind. They were in my list of great sights seen, along with Mont-aux-Sources and Table Mountain.

  Then at lunch, which we ate at the hotel, there was a change in the matrix which I thought might prove interesting vis-à-vis Giles. A substantial party of white Rhodesians was eating and drinking. These were diehards. Giles lit up slightly. He wandered over and mingled with them at the buffet and came back saying they were real Rhodesians and still pissing steam about the war. I was astonished at how public they were about the way they felt. Their main man was a guy with a Wild West mustache and a tee shirt with a very congested legend on it saying Rhodesian War Games 1960–1979, Rhodesians 100, Terrs 0, The Winners: Terrs. Giles kept looking their way during lunch. The group adjourned to play cards and drink more on the veranda. They waved to Giles as we left to continue shooting.

  See this as perfect was what I was trying to make myself do. But Giles’s physical uninterest in me was inevitably a kind of insult and was also making me feel like an exploitress. There was no question Giles had been normal toward me in Botswana, so I was forced to the hypothesis that it must be the starkness and recency of the overthrow of white power here that had done something to him at the level of the lower self. What a datum! I couldn’t help thinking over and over. Was this an instant new thesis topic presenting itself? I had actually noticed a kind of aggressive sullenness among the white wives of Zimbabwe in several settings. Could this be it and could it be gotten at? You could never get it through male testimony—that I knew. But was this a thesis just going begging, even if it was social psychology and not nutritional anthropology? Couldn’t it be cultural anthropology? Giles had been energized by having the ex-Selous Scouts or whatever they were turn up. If there was anything in this it ought to surface in greater warmth should I return to the attack.

  By dinnertime the Rhodesians were gone. It had been a stopoff en route to Chobe. Giles was back to his lows immediately. I didn’t even try to get anything to transpire. I suppose my embryonic thesis was quasi confirmed, but that whole speculation was a little lurid and a sign of intellectual desperation more than anything else. I tried to think of who at Stanford I could even conceivably give an aesopian hint of a sketch of my idea to, and had to laugh.

  We flew back to Gaborone by charter the next day. You go diagonally across the central Kalahari, where there is nothing to see beneath you once you get past the Sua Pan area. Nevertheless Giles had stopped stroking his camera case and was suddenly staring down intently. When I asked him what he was looking for he said there was supposed to be a strange place down there run by an American where women went around naked. I felt like saying What’s it to you? but refrained, sportswomanlike to the end. What was he talking about? Was it some kind of nudist colony? I asked, thinking of his connection with the cheap soft porn magazine in Valletta. But no, it was some kind of project. It was secret. I let him know how bizarre I thought he was being. Now of course I know that this was the deformed version of Denoon’s work at Tsau produced by male gossip, because except for the women of Tsau, and the very few male dependents with them, it was only a handful of prurient men in various bureaucracies in Botswana who knew what was going on.

  When we got back to Gabs we lost touch directly. He went to Mauritius, I heard, and was loving it.

  Martin Wade Leaves a Party

  Except among the elderly you rarely see healthy white people as thin as Martin Wade. He was only in his late twenties. He looked like a Tenniel illustration, with his biggish head. All the diplomatic wives wanted to feed him.

  He was a celebrity among the South African exiles in Gaborone. His nickname was Mars, which was what the Batswana neighbor children in Bontleng called him. Martin Wade itself was a nom de guerre. He had been significant in the National Union of South African Students at Wits and had done something spectacular enough to get himself conscripted out of turn and sent to the “operational area.” Then he had done something spectacular in the army, after which he had deserted and made his way to Gaborone. In Bontleng he lived in a genuine hovel on some kind of subsidy from the Swedes. People still in South Africa got information to him on strikes and jailings, which he published in a little mimeo newsletter that went out to different newspapers in the West, to be ignored. He was said to be ANC but sub rosa. He was myopic and wore glasses, which like his weight had an effect on me. I have a certain inordinate feeling toward revolutionaries who wear glasses, because there is the sense of how easily they could be unhorsed in the slightest physical confrontation with the enemy just by someone flicking their glasses to the ground and stepping on them. So you assume such people have unusual amounts of courage.

  He had crossed my peripheral vision at one or two parties, inspiring in me the universal response: how much was he getting to eat at that particular occasion? Why didn’t he eat more? Was it political, à la Simone Weil? I knew that he was famous for giving away food to the Bontleng urchinry, because one or two hostesses had complained that that was what was happening to food packets they’d put up for him. I thought of approaching him in a light way with something like You give new meaning to the term ectomorph. But then I would have been imbricated with all the other maternal presences i
n what he doubtless experienced as a nightmare.

  The entrée was going to be roast pork the night we finally met. In the universe there is nothing more inciting than pork, garlic, and onions roasting. You could tell he was salivating because his Adam’s apple was on the prominent side and was moving like an animal.

  I was having to control my body language with the hors d’oeuvres when he came near. Of course diet is always with me and the psychodrama of why is not mysterious. The script reads along the lines of needing urgently to know what it was about food that turned my mother into an exhibit and might, unless I prevented it, do the same to me. Everything is an artifact. I was in graduate school before I realized that all her innocence about how little she actually ate was a sustained lie, propaganda. So voilà, nutritional anthropology for me, which combined the two things most compelling to me, food and man. Martin was the guest of honor that night.

  The couple giving the dinner were Americans, decent people teaching on local contract—which is not munificent—at the university. He was biology and Margaret was setting up a pharmacy curriculum, if I remember. They had been there a few years. They had two junior high age boys in a boarding school in Johannesburg. They felt suitably guilty about it, but they had looked at the alternatives in Botswana and decided it was the only fair choice they could make for the boys, who would be going on in science back home someday, the usual.

  Dinner was virtually served. Several of us were commiserating Margaret, who was upset. A couple of days earlier she had picked up the Rand Daily Mail and lo there was a story about St. Stithian’s, the boarding school, to wit, the police had organized a ratissage to drive some squatters out of a wooded area on the school property, with dogs and clubs and all the standard paraphernalia, and they had included boys from the upper forms, including the sons of our hosts. So it had been a tear-stained couple of days and there had been violent phone calls to the school, and so on. It would never happen again. But the boys were going to stay at St. Stithian’s.

  Hereupon Martin joined us, a samoosa half-raised to his mouth. He hadn’t heard about the incident. He put the samoosa down.

  I admired the way he approached the thing. First he made sure he had all the details right, and in particular that the boys were not going to be withdrawn. Then he said You will have to excuse me. The maid came in to say dinner was served just as he walked out. Margaret’s husband tried to fix things by saying they might do something next term, if they could think of something, and reminded us how impossible it had been when they tried correspondence school for the boys. But Martin had picked up his daypack and was gone.

  The only scene like it I had been through involved a dinner destroyed when a guy left abruptly as some veterans of therapy were all agreeing how much they hated their parents. He was European and had apparently never mentioned to anyone present that his parents had died in a concentration camp. It was no help, but anyway I followed Martin out into the street. May I stride with you? I asked him when I caught up with him.

  So then we began bantering. He was very cockney, to my ear. I told him that as a South African male he was better off avoiding a meal that was too fatty anyway. They’re at hugely high risk for heart attack, genetically. He said he knew that South African males up to age forty-five had the world’s highest coronary rate but that his explanation was different to mine, as he put it, he would bet. He said Did you know the rate in South African men is the same to the second decimal as the rate for prison guards as a class around the world, and what does that say to you? I said I wouldn’t deign to reply, it was so obvious. Then I asked him if he knew that the best gene pool against coronaries was living right next door to the Boers in the form of the Bantus and especially the southern Sotho. I mentioned studies showing that a tendency to early coronaries had been concentrated in the Boers by inbreeding but that all around, you had the Bantu tribes, with the lowest coronary rates in the world. Only apartheid stood between them. We agreed on the irony of it all: Boer and Bantu, made for each other. I can eat anything, he said, not being a Boer. He was from Natal. His position was that he was responsible for my leaving the dinner, so he would take me to his place and feed me. He knew I entirely understood why he’d felt he had had to leave.

  His place, his one-room cement hut, was in a poor neighborhood but not the worst. He had his own standpipe in the yard and his own outhouse. He had a paraffin stove, used mainly to burn letters and documents. He had almost no chattels. Everything had to be kept to the minimum, so that he could decamp instantly and so that there would be nothing in the place he would ever have to come back for. This was another world to me. He was a musicologist. He had taken up the recorder, but only because it was portable. He could play beautifully. His real instrument was the viola da gamba. This whole time we were getting acquainted he was looking for food to serve us, including stepping out to check with his impoverished neighbors to see if they could lend him something when he discovered he had nothing except an ancient orange and two cans of pilchards. This was a man who loved to talk. We fascinated each other. Finally he permitted me to take him to a restaurant—only the most nominal, poorest, most working-class restaurant would do—where we talked endlessly some more. It emerged that he had conflicted feelings toward Americans, which I discovered my working-class origins had a slightly mollifying effect on. I highlighted them and it was all right. He came back with me to my place.

  My Mortal Life

  I could never get a coherent relationship going with Martin. I wanted to. I tried different modes with him. I tried just making his life more normal and less protean. He would stay over with me sometimes for as long as three days. But even then the clandestine side of his life would superpose itself and he would have to slip off to meet someone in the dead of night or go somewhere. I was helpful to him in small ways. For instance, right away I discovered he was afraid he was losing his hearing, a tragedy for somebody who expects to be second viola in the All Races National Symphony someday in a reborn South Africa. It occurred to me that he was having an earwax buildup, which is mostly a thing of the past for people who regularly take hot baths and showers. But in Bontleng he was essentially reduced to sponge baths, even though he was methodical about them. I purged his ears with Debrox and he was overcome with the result.

  We could have been serious. It was seductive that he enjoyed sex with me so much. He could be lyrical about my breasts. He was not widely experienced. If he ever got to a normal weight he was going to be striking rather than alarming. We were both starved for talk. I admired him for what he was doing. He was enrolled in a war against something that was totally evil, and he was fighting in a disinterested way—because he was doing it all for his black countrymen, a third party. He thought of himself as a realist and was the first to say he expected that even the whites with the best credentials would go into a period of eclipse once there was majority rule. The question of what I was doing with my life kept coming up by implication more and more overtly.

  This reminds me that later Denoon would say there were only two completely self-justifying occupations in the contemporary world that he had personally run into: one was fighting the Christian fascists of South Africa and the other was being a fireman, because you can never have the slightest doubt that you’re doing something totally socially valuable by pulling people out of burning buildings. Medicine he excluded because people got rich doing it, and anybody who lived a life of service to the church—say in a ghetto or medical mission—also got excluded because ultimately their work was acquisitive and inwardly intended to increase the temporal power of their particular denomination. He said firemen were the only people he knew with no self-doubt and that they went into their vocation knowing they had a thirty percent likelihood of ending up with a damaged spinal column.

  But what was I doing with my mortal life? The question kept rearing up in my mind not because Martin tried to make me feel disadvantaged or trivial but because when you came down to it what I was trying to do with my an
thropology was first to get a job in a halfway decent university and then get tenure. This was a marxist analysis of my situation but it was correct. Along the way, of course, I was going to be adding to the world’s knowledge of man, no doubt. But there was already a lot of that, to put it mildly. Possibly there was enough. The government of Botswana, at least, thought there was enough for a while, it looked like. This was late January, because Reagan had been elected. The government announced a bombshell, a moratorium on all foreign-sponsored anthropological research in the country. Studies were piling up faster than anybody in the ministries could figure out what they were supposed to conclude from them. Most of the projects the government approves have something to do, however remotely, with getting the agricultural economy to work better. My colleagues were in a frenzy. They had had visions of coming back and doing follow-ups into infinity. I found it liberating but kept that to myself. My colleagues were fuming over a threatened investment. Who would ever have heard of Isaac Schapera if he had been permitted to do only one monograph of the Bakgatla? was something said endlessly. I was even in the unfamiliar position of feeling one-up, because my stupid exploded project at Tswapong was considered ongoing and I could stay in Botswana relatively indefinitely. I was grandfathered.

  I was attracted by the intimations of danger around Martin, thinking initially that I was dealing mostly with atmosphere. It was inconceivable that the Bureau of Special Services had nothing better to do than infiltrate agents to harass this aesthete so thin he looked like a weather vane. I was also attracted by the sense he gave me of being able to see into the world of power hidden behind the public world. This was a little addictive to me, and I felt it. The conviction that the world is secretly corrupt is dangerous to certain temperaments because it rationalizes cutting corners and being selfish, an impulsion I was not in need of. But we would sit on the balcony at the President Hotel and a permsec would come by who was a lion of opposition to South Africa in the press and Martin would tell me that this man had children in school in Pretoria in a fancy place like St. Stithian’s and that he owned chicken farms near Mafikeng, which made him in effect a hostage of the people he was constantly attacking. Martin knew exactly who was related to whom in government and convinced me that nepotism is not a useful construct for anthropologists to bring to the study of African government. He knew who all the undercover Special Branch operatives were and who were the intelligence people from the different embassies. In fact, although I had no way of knowing it at the time, he pointed out in some connection the Brit who would turn out to be my next lover. Martin compared Gabs to Lisbon during World War II. He had a pearl of great price: he knew whom to trust. When black exiles came over for a drink, it was wonderful. He was trusted, even by the Black Consciousness people, who are so edgy usually. He knew who was with the Diamond Police, which is almost a state within a state in Botswana. He especially loved pointing out the undercover South Africans, who all looked like burghers or successful farmers, which fed my taste for irony. I have a weakness for irony, and it was supreme irony that if anyone was, in the long run, going to salvage something for the white South African bourgeoisie, it was going to be people like Martin, whom they were, according to him, surveilling and thinking of killing. The future of a few million guilty whites was going to depend on whatever goodwill a handful of decent white colgrads like Martin could generate in the breast of the victorious black masses.