Mating

by Norman Rush

  What tirade? he asked.

  So I answered him in Setswana, very brisk, slightly parodically, saying The tirade about the sun being the cow that nobody troubles to milk. This was another shot meant to hit before the portcullis came down. It had several features. It gave a sketch of one of my powers. I was someone out of the ordinary. It also had the carom quality of indirectly apprising him that in his description of the sun he had missed a bet by not comparing it to a cow. In Botswana the most magnificent entity you can be compared to is a cow. It’s true for all Bantu people, not only the Tswana. The god with the moist nose, is one way it’s put. Also here or later I used the phrase “dry rain” for sunlight, which he loved and which can be found in the Setswana pamphlet on solar democracy that eventually came out. I must have said it later.

  If I overdwell on this it can’t be helped: love is important and the reasons you get it or fail to are important. The number of women in my generation who in retrospect anyone will apply the term “great love” to, in any connection, is going to be minute. I needed to know if I had a chance here. Love is strenuous. Pursuing someone is strenuous. What I say is if you find yourself condemned to wanting love, you have to play while you can play. Of course it would be so much easier to play from the male side. They never go after love qua love, ever. They go after women. And for men love is the distillate or description of whatever happened with each woman that was not actually painful in feeling-tone. There is some contradiction here which I can’t expel. What was moving me was the feeling of being worth someone’s absolute love, great love, even. And to me this means male love whether I like it or not. C’est ça. Here I am, there I was. I don’t know if getting love out of a man is more of a feat of strength now than it used to be or not, except that I do: it is. It’s hideous. It’s an ordeal beyond speech. When I’m depressed I feel like what was meant by one of his favorite quotations: A bitter feast was steaming hot and a mouth must be found to eat it. Men are like armored things, mountainous assemblages of armor and leather, masonry even, which you are told will self-dismantle if you touch the right spot, and out will flow passionate attention. And we know that this sometimes does happen for one of our sisters, or has happened. This comes full circle back to my attitude to kissing, which he never adjusted to. You want kisses, obviously. But you want kisses from a source, a person, who is in a state. This is why the plague of little moth kisses from men just planting their seniority on you is so intolerable. Of course even as I was machinating I was well aware I was in the outskirts of the suburbs of the thing you want or suspect is there. But at this moment in my life I was at the point where even the briefest experience of unmistakable love would be something I could clutch to myself as proof that my theory of myself was not incorrect. Theories can be reactionary and still be applicable.

  Of course, Grace was drunk. It was crystalline. I had led a drunk to this occasion but not seen it until now. How I had missed it was a case study in the effect of motivation on perception. He would have to be feeling that without me she would never have been there. Grace swayed.

  How do you like her? Grace said.

  I thought you were leaving on Tuesday, Grace. It was all set, I thought.

  You thought I was gone, she said. But I found her. How do you like her?

  He ignored that. He said Grace, it was definite when you were going to leave. I have to go back to … I have to go back.

  Ah, but Nel I have a few things to do. He lets you call him Nel. But pretty soon I’ll be gone.

  Well. So when you do think?

  Don’t be so anxious, she said. He’s divorcing me, she said to me.

  He blew his cheeks out.

  Everybody wants a divorce, she said. Why is that?

  This isn’t edifying, Grace, he said, sterner.

  I never am, she said. Oh I know. So you two just talk instead of me. That might be edifying. I think.

  She pulled herself up very straight, in a parody of girlish interest that didn’t work. She tried to go up on her toes for some reason. She swayed badly and we all, reaching for her, somewhat grabbed each other. My elbow went against his midsection but it told me nothing.

  I got a chair for her and she sat down. He poised his right hand over his head and then brought the nails down on his part, a self-calming strategy related to acupressure and something I only saw him do in absolute extremis.

  It was now awkward or impossible for us to say anything to each other, unless I could come up with something.

  Bits of the audience had come back. A nice, very meek, serious young Motswana guy who worked at the Botswana Book Centre was edging deferentially toward our viper’s knot, all unknowing. I knew this guy because whenever I went to the bookshop he was reading Penguin Classics, like The Mill on the Floss, for some reason. His main job was to carry bales of the Rand Daily Mail and the Star up to the front of the shop and then to carry the unsold ones back, which he did. But in the intervals he moved quickly back to his studies.

  He wanted to talk to Denoon, but Grace summoned him over.

  Africa is huge, isn’t it? she said. I find it huge.

  He was dumbfounded, but said it was. Nelson rescued him.

  He wanted to ask Nelson what could be done to stop the Boers. But I suddenly was interested in the question of whether Grace was stupid or just drunk. Was she caricaturing herself out of desperation or je m’en foutisme of some kind? How smart was she? Had her hold on Denoon failed because she was below a certain intellectual level?

  I went over to her.

  It was no use. She wasn’t talking, apparently. It was all nodding or headshaking. She wouldn’t have lunch with me. She didn’t want me to go with her back to the hotel, no no no.

  Denoon was concluding a very succinct proposal on sanctions. The way to produce a white revolt against the government in South Africa was to get the four companies in the world that manufactured automobile tires to make a boycott. South Africa would run out of tires in less than a year.

  The LGL permsec was standing nervously next to Denoon and waiting for enough of the audience to reassemble for him to thank them for coming. Finally he drifted off.

  Denoon went over to organize Grace. He said something, and she said something back like You think I don’t think Africa is pleasant, but I do. I could be very happy around here. Very much so.

  Old Naledi

  I spent the better part of the next day trying to ascertain where in Gaborone Denoon was staying. Naturally I had to hear once again all the antinomies about him I had already heard. He had renounced his U.S. citizenship versus he was on the verge of going back to redeem the South Bronx. He was personally rich versus he had given all his goods to the poor at some point. He was a genius versus he was finished, a crank. His secret project was in the Kalahari versus being in the Tuli Block. His project was self-financing versus he had inexhaustible funds from Histadrut and/or Olivetti. It made me suspicious that there was consensus on only one point: it was all over with his wife, who had made this last desperate expedition to corner him and get him to reconcile.

  In my case I was going to find him and offer myself as a volunteer, for a while, in his project. I had more to offer than he knew yet. When I was in the bush I had learned a few words of Saherero out of boredom. In fact it had occurred to me to greet him with a hearty Wapenduka! the night before, which I had rejected as a totally artificial thing to do, rightly. In any case the only way you can speak perfect Saherero is to have your two front teeth taken out the way they do, which is asking too much. But I knew there were Herero in his project, some anyway.

  By seven in the evening I was brazening it out in Old Naledi. He was staying with a family called Tutwane. There are two parts to the squatter settlement in Gaborone, Old Naledi and new Old Naledi. New Old Naledi is where the World Bank has been razing shacks and putting up site and service shells for their inhabitants. Each shell has a standpipe and electricity. House shells are just that—walls awaiting ceilings, windows, doors.

 
; But naturally Denoon would be staying in Old Naledi, where the mud shacks are falling apart, where holes in the house walls are plugged with wadded rags and the tin roofs are held down with cobbles. I was jumping over ditches and getting hoarse shouting Footsek! at the terrifying roaming ridgeback hounds. Footsek is Afrikaans and is the only thing that gives them pause, somehow. A peaches and blood sunset was over. It was getting dark. Nobody I asked about the Tutwanes would tell me anything. I couldn’t blame them: I could have been anybody.

  I was fairly desperate because I had a plan that required getting to the Tutwane house circa dinnertime to exploit the provision in Tswana culture that if you happen around dinnertime you’ll be invited in. To whites, there is a slight element of scam in this provision as regards them, since it cannot have failed to be noted by their Batswana dinner guests that no white family has ever felt free to utilize it. Besides, the Batswana eat their main meal at noon and dinner is fairly catch as catch can. Nevertheless.

  I was near defeat. There is a pool of woodsmoke from yard fires that hangs over Old Naledi and makes you weep. Any nostalgia you might have about woodsmoke you can say goodbye to after an hour of this.

  Maybe the way I was dressed struck people the wrong way, as semiofficial. I had decided it would be a smart idea to look bush ready, so I was wearing a new khaki blouse and skirt outfit. I would have worn jeans except that the further down you get in the Botswana pecking order, the worse people think it is for women to be seen in trousers. And Old Naledi is traditionopolis, because the squatters are the freshest and rawest refugees from the bush. I think also that the deeper I went into Old Naledi, the more official I acted, out of fear. I realized I was using my skin color more and more, but I couldn’t help it. It was like a horror ride in an amusement park, where you proceed along okay in the dark and then a thing springs up in front of you to terrify you—a snarling ridgeback or an ancient guy trying to get you to buy something he has in a sack but talking in a dialect you don’t understand. People go into their hovels and sit there in the dark and take care of business in the dark, which makes them seem like a different order of being, despite all your training.

  I was in danger of clutching. I was deep in the maze of the bleakest section of Old Naledi, the part closest to Kgale Hill, where quarrying is going on and fine grit floats out over everything until it looks like a painting of bedlam in the sfumato style, where there are no real edges or outlines to things. I had fine grit in the corners of my mouth and in my lashes. I wanted to look decent above all and now this was happening.

  No way can you overstate Old Naledi, which you enter by leaping across a ditch flowing with something black and viscous, probably dumped crankcase oil from the Central Transport Organisation work-yard nearby. No one had heard of the Tutwanes, let alone Rra Puleng. I tried virtually everybody—not excluding a gaunt character hurrying along with a netbag full of bloody cowbones over his shoulder, with blood incidentally soaking into his shirt and with a ball-peen hammer stuck in his belt. Three women were sitting in a dooryard behind a plot fence entirely made out of rusted auto brake-spring leaves sticking up like fangs. I approached them. They did in fact answer me but not without continuing what they were doing, which was simultaneously conversing a blue streak and masticating mouthfuls of sweet reed, id est chewing the strips into pulp and spewing the white waste out onto the ground, as if they were pieces of agricultural machinery. The directions they gave me were internally contradictory: I should be going both bophiri-matsatsi and botlhabats-atsi, west and east. The fact that I spoke Setswana was seemingly not wowing anyone. It only seemed to be making them more suspicious of me. Some even seemed to hate me for it.

  I saw something ahead that looked from a distance like a play yard with blue and white blocks scattered over a wide area. I made for it, until I realized it was a shebeen and the blocks were empty chibuku cartons by the hundred. A couple of the nonrecumbent partakers were showing an interest in me. I would have to detour. A top homily about Botswana is that white women never get raped by Batswana men. This is pure embassy folklore.

  Slips of the tongue are rare with me. When I make them I can be sure I’m under strain. So I was horrified when I was describing to Denoon my odyssey through Old Naledi and heard myself say that when I saw the shebeen I decided to give the guys at it a wide breast. It was performance anxiety. Needless to say, what I did was mix up “give a wide berth to” with “making a clean breast of.” It was a true sign of delicacy in him that he pretended not to notice my gaffe. Neither of us mentioned it, although I was suffering inwardly. At Tsau at one point I thanked him, in effect, for having let it pass and never teasing me about it. In fact that turned out to be like releasing a spring allowing him to tease me forever after with various permutations of the gaffe, à la Would you mind giving me a clean berth, or Let’s have a wide breast, and so on. But it was a proof of gentility that he overlooked my first parapraxis in his presence and is probably even one of the reasons I was moved to persist despite an otherwise not-auspicious encounter at Tutwane’s.

  I was at the farthest edge of Old Naledi, where the shanties stop and the bush begins. A footpath led straight into the bush and along it a kids’ game was in progress. There were six or eight bana arrayed on either side of the path so that each one was facing a clear space. A kid from the foot of the left hand row would go to the head of the path, where it disappeared into the bush where his mission was to roll a paint can lid down between the opposing ranks for them to hurl rocks at. Somebody was keeping score. Everybody would move down a notch after each hit, as in volleyball. These were little kids, between six and ten or so, all male naturally, in ragged school shorts, with three little girls spectating. I had arrived at a key moment. It would soon be too dark to play and they were trying to speed things up so that the championship could be settled before they had to quit.

  Well, I said to myself. And with no ado whatsoever I stepped into their game and like a genius snatched up the paint can lid as it was rolling, before a single rock could be fired, and held it behind my back, thusly amazing them.

  They had an adult reaction. They stood up like soldiers and began to consult. I thought they might scatter at the intervention of this giant white woman. I told them all I wanted was to be told how I could find the Tutwane place. Then I would return their toy.

  I wish I had a videotape of the way they organized themselves. They were very courteous, but then so had I been very courteous, starting out with Dumelang, bo bana and so on. We had a deal in about three minutes. I tried to imagine American kids in a parallel situation. They would go for the police or their mothers. One thing wrong with America, according to Denoon, is that the society is converging to suppress unsupervised mass play, largely through the mechanisms of TV and adult-run sports like Little League. His theory was that if you leave young males alone they will go in play situations from fascism to feudalism to democracy. So now there is a diffuse and thwarted attraction to fascism that is getting played out at the adult level. He was fecund with theories. He also thought the increase in heart attacks in the white West could be traced to the decline in stair climbing, id est to the victory of the ranch-style house and the elevator. The switch from tub bathing to showers was a related public health disaster because tub bathing does something physiologically unique having to do with the vagus nerve. Part of his feeling about gang play for boys came from his own sense of personal deprivation in that area. When he was growing up in East Oakland there were vacant lots all over, and gangs of boys having mudball wars, building clubhouses, forming confederations. But his weekends had been eaten up with compulsory churchgoing and compulsory shopping attendance, which prevented him from engaging fully in these, as he called them, political experiments. His mother was the motive force behind his weekend captivity, and he tried in retrospect to be forgiving. She wanted him with her out of spiritual loneliness, was his guess. But he never forgave his father for not intervening to free him, at least from the shopping.

 
; The Tutwanes were in fact wellknown in Old Naledi. Our deal was that two of the bana would take me there quickly, but first I had to hand over the paint can lid. I acceded, and we went off.

  Intellectual Love

  I hadn’t wanted to offer money for information earlier, just out of prudence. I didn’t want to be seen as a white moneybags careering around out of her depth. But now it was all right and I gave a few thebe to my little escorts as they prepared to flee.

  The Tutwane place was a surprise. It was very shipshape and well-kempt. A low storm fence surrounded the plot. The house was a good-sized ovaldavel, recently limewashed, with a good thatch roof. There was an elephant grass enclosure to one side of the house, from which lustral sounds were issuing. At points along the fence were wooden tubs containing various bushy plants. The yard was beaten earth, neatly swept. And in one corner of the plot was an outhouse, also freshly limewashed. I needed to urinate desperately.

  If I could go back in time and rechoreograph the first three minutes chez Tutwane I would. Of course I would still have to get into the outhouse tout de suite whatever choreography obtained, thanks to the accursed female bladder. If there is an evolutionary justification for the pygmy bladder assigned to the female race I would like to know what it is.

  As I was knocking at the gate saying koko, the solar democrat backed through the elephant grass carrying a basin of graywater, which he began to empty delicately in a line along the edge of the planting. The pouring did it. My situation was extremely urgent.