Mating

by Norman Rush

  I wanted to see Tsau. I felt it as a physical emergency that I see my destination.

  Up to my left on the flank of a hill was an odd, sharply higher hummock. There were trees on it that looked like parsley: albizzia, I guessed. A path marked with stones led to the hummock and up it, and there was what was clearly a hitching post at the mouth of the path. I tied Baph to it and went up.

  The whole hummock was a devised thing. Chiming sounds came from the trees. The base of the hummock was encircled by a collar of dead broom plants. I could see some sort of furniture under the trees.

  I was in a state of triumph.

  It was clear that this eminence was something amplified by the hand of man and designed to be the place the traveler from the west got his or her first full prospect of Tsau. I gazed at Tsau.

  Most koppies look like rubble pyramids with the apices sheared off and usually just a few bands or pockets of vegetation established on the slopes. The koppie Tsau was built against was different and classic. It was vast. It was a true island mountain rising splendidly alone in the plain. It was evenly and densely wooded almost to the crest, where enormous rouge-red bulbous boulders sat like ruins.

  On the flats a tract of small houses lay like a fan open toward me. There was more housing, more structures in any case, on the lower slopes of the koppie. Not everything I could see was interpretable. I was puzzled by three flickering white bars or slots set in a row high up on the koppie, which would turn out to be the flanged cylinders that are the wind-trapping elements in the avant-garde windmills Denoon had installed in Tsau. I was also puzzled that Tsau looked almost sequined, owing to the profusion of glints and flashes of reflected light coming from all over the settlement. There was an explanation for this too.

  One end of a sweep of fenced fields, all very geometrical, was visible far to the east. Where were the freeform Tswana mealie fields I was used to? I wanted to know. Overall I loved what I was seeing.

  I was not emotionally normal.

  Hanging from a chain in the crown of a large albizzia was the answer to the mystery of the crystalline notes I had picked up during the night. It was a glass bell the size of a half-gallon jug. It was beautifully shaped. I had never seen anything like it. The glass was thick and the same blue-green you see in utility line insulators, and the clapper was like an elongated iron teardrop. It seemed like the most beautiful object I had ever seen. I wanted it. I had to forcibly remind myself that the bell was there for a reason, although what that might be I was unable to imagine. Tsau was eight miles away and the idea that this bell might function in some way to give warning was ludicrous. Besides, it was hung so as to ring whenever a decent wind struck the tree. I shook the branches to make it drop its notes on me. They were like cool water. I must have needed some kind of release, because I went on autistically shaking the branches until I realized the blood was leaving my arms.

  I seemed to see a pair of horns sticking out of the earth fifteen feet from the base of the bell tree, lower down on the Tsau-facing side of the hummock. Skulls of ungulates are common in the Kalahari, so I had barely paid attention. But these horns were too thick and in fact were carved out of wood and enameled white. I thought briefly then that this might be a cult item that would make some greater sense of the amount of work that had gone into creating this shrine area or whatever it might be.

  I cleared the sand away from the base of the U formed by the horns. They were set into a hinged plug that opened on a narrow ceramic tank, glazed, with water in its depths. Resting in the tank was an iron dipper with a shank a yard long. The water seemed fine and sweet. I was out of halazone tablets, so I wouldn’t drink it, but I could wash in it—or rinse off in it, rather, since I had no soap.

  I was curious about this cistern, how it was fed, and went back to look more closely at the tree itself. It was a work of art. The tree had been converted into a device to harvest downpours. The cistern was fed by a system of Polyvinylchloride tubes leading from ceramic basins sunk into sanded-out hollows in the main forks of the tree. All the small tubes were gathered together and stapled nicely out of sight on the Tsau side of the tree before joining at the base with the main collector, which ran underground to the capped cistern. I had no way of knowing it then, but this was my first brush with the jungle of contrivances Tsau so often felt like. This cistern was an elaboration of the Bushman praxis of using hollow trees as rain collectors. In part I was not impressed. The amount of labor involved in creating this thing was what bothered me. Other trees were also ducted into the system. How many people would ever use this? How could the labor of setting it up and maintaining it—presumably the collector basins would have to be cleaned and the tubing purged from time to time—ever be justified? I then proceeded to justify it in my case at least by lavishly using the water, of which there seemed to be plenty, for my purposes.

  First I made several trips down to Baph to pour water over him and try to get him to come up into the shade with me. He balked. I cleaned his eyes and gave up.

  I interspersed my ablutions with periods of gazing at Tsau. I rinsed my face and hands, which felt insufficient, then began sponging myself inside my shirt, which was no better. And so step by step, out in the blazing open, I disrobed and patted this lovely water all over myself. My feet were in unspeakable shape. I loved something about being naked in this place. It was done in contempt of the Kalahari and was a way of saying to it Go back to what you were doing before I interrupted the even tenor of your ways. It was adolescent. I think I also did a passage of invented eurhythmics whose real purpose was to wag my lower self in the face of the Kalahari, which I was letting myself feel fully as the organism that wants you to suffer that it truly is. There was also personal justice euphoria. I was rhetorically thinking How many women could have done this, women not supported by large male institutions or led by male guides? and so on. I had improvised and won through.

  I put on new underpants and a new tee shirt, despite the Potemkin character of my toilette. I put on clean socks. My hair was irretrievable, just a wad on my head.

  I was as restored as I could hope to be.

  So it was time, wreck that I was, to impersonate myself as well as I could for Denoon and to get my husk of a donkey to Tsau and into the hands of others.

  Wayposts, No Garlic

  The path to Tsau was defined by wayposts. Every few hundred yards on alternate sides of the route, a wooden waypost about a yard high was set into the ground. On top of each post was a crossbar, from the ends of which hung clusters of dark-colored disks of glass threaded on fishline. You approached Tsau down a corridor of darling crepitation. I asked myself what the idea could possibly be. Again, all this represented human effort. The standards and crossbars were carved, not elaborately but carved just the same, spiral channels gouged into them, for example. Was the idea simply to go out and interior decorate the howling waste for fun? The wayposts were spaced irregularly, so that no purpose of measurement seemed served.

  The wayposts I found depressing until I realized why, and then I was even more depressed. I realized they had ominous associations for me because, miniature though they were, the wayposts were homologs of the crosses and gibbets set up by characters like centurions to warn travelers arriving at a conquered city that the reigning power was cruel and rebellion not a thing tolerated, as in decline of the Roman Empire and rise of Christ movies. From this follows another perfect example of how marginal my state of mind had gotten in the desert. I suffered an attack of anguish over the amount of time I had wasted in movies as a girl. Getting into movies unaccompanied had been one of the few benefits of being tall for my age. But I thought Wouldn’t I be calmer, and wouldn’t I have less prefabricated imagery inundating me, and wouldn’t I have somewhat less constant hubbub going on behind the arrases lining my mind if I hadn’t gone running manically to the movies as a sop to my preadolescent miseries, as huge as. they were? I could have taken out more records from the library instead, for example, and lost myself in mu
sic and at the same time developed a more systematic knowledge of the great composers, which would also have had the virtue of being free.

  In the next breath it was an entirely new anxiety: I had the conviction, derived from nowhere, that there would be no garlic in Tsau. I felt I had to be able to look forward to garlic, by which I meant fresh garlic, not garlic powder or salt. I do inordinately love that herb. My mother abjured it for us because, she claimed, it didn’t agree with her. But truly it was because the poor she knew best, Italians, ate and smelled of garlic. We might be poor but we would never be accused of smelling of garlic. People would have to divine that we were poor via some other brilliant deduction, like putting together the rents in our garments and my mother’s missing incisor. Personal liberation for me was also incidentally culinary liberation, in which the great central discovery was the glory of garlic.

  Never say I am not mine own social worker. My liberal self now gently tried to lead me to entertain the idea that my garlic urge was homeostasis speaking, my body crying out for phosphorus, say. But then my true self said that if I wanted phosphorus it wasn’t garlic I wanted, it was watercress, and that marching fixedly toward Tsau as if the main point of reaching it was to get a giant helping of boeuf en daube was silly. Denoon was absurd on liberals and had a sulk I ultimately detonated him out of after I told him his aphorism for liberalism—id est To alarm and soothe in the same moment of policy—was a fake and groundless. I think probably we should all be liberals. When things were disintegrating between us, and I regret this now, I even said I will give you a thousand dollars if you show me why you shouldn’t be defined as a liberal, given what we have definitively established as your political baseline. In any case my liberal incubus was now telling me that, la la la, maybe Tsau would be the place, like a spa, where I could stop being operated upon by the buried cultural mechanisms of my adolescence and/or absurd cravings like this one for garlic. I and my rough beast staggered toward Tsau. Meantime the chiming and jinking continued, the accompaniment.

  I still, today, fault myself in the matter of Denoon’s vitromania, which I was just now beginning to endure the fruits of, all unknowing. Nelson adored glass. Blowing it, casting it, it didn’t matter: he loved it. If I had pressed something home on this subject it might have had a clarifying effect. This was an example of something I could have done more with. I don’t know why I didn’t, unless it was because I heard the keystone vitromania stories at a time when I was still grateful just to be receiving this crumb or that from the table of his mind, or because it was a time when he was feeling fragile in some other area and I refrained on vitromania to be considerate. His vitromania was central, somehow.

  What is clearly the core incident involving glass goes thusly. Denoon is a boy, and his father has lately fallen, through alcohol abuse, from the high estate of working in an advertising agency to the low estate of being a salesman for a printing ink and industrial resins firm. The family is living south of San Francisco, on the peninsula. I think Nelson is fairly happy in school, and the house they’re renting abuts some nice ex-farmland or an abandoned orchard in the shadow of the Coast Range. I think their place is near Belmont.

  Two conditions conjoin. Nelson discovers a bottle dump out in the orchard nearby. Secondly he inherits a binful of corks, since his father has backslid from an attempt to control his drinking through oenophilia and home winemaking. Nelson’s father was a devious drinker, a master drunk Nelson called him, who was at this point managing to spirit his empty fifths out into the woods and into this dump. I forget whether or not this might have been a preexisting dump with a trove of empty bottles already present when Nelson’s father began using it. I think this may have been the case.

  Nelson is eleven or twelve and is only in the most elliptical way aware of the extent of his father’s drinking. He is on the verge of discovering how intense the war over his father’s drinking is, but as yet there are only rumors of war, supposedly.

  He saw no secret or unconscious impulse working beneath the surface of what he did. He was certain. His project was aesthetic, accidental. Looking back, he could plainly see the part his project played in proving that the agreement between his parents about his father’s habit was a fiction. The agreement in force was that his father would drink set amounts at set times only. Obviously his father must have been drinking volumes of liquor in secret and using the permitted small amounts to mask his excesses. But Nelson’s proof that the ultimate project was innocent was the ad hoc way he had come to undertake it in the first place.

  Whatever else there was in it, there was an impulse against waste. The child is father to the man. His project revealed him ab ovo as the demon recycler and reuser he would become in adulthood. It occurs to me that one source of strain in our relationship was his aversion to the use of innocent clichés on my part, as in The child is father to the man. He subtly communicated that he wished people would avoid them and talk more individually and aesthetically, like the Irish or his father. When I said that Irish rural speech was in fact full of clichés, but clichés he was unfamiliar with, it annoyed him. I also argued that there is an aesthetic involved in the self-conscious use of clichés, which was the case in my case. He only nominally agreed with me, and I could tell he continued not to like clichés to figure in my presentation of self. I gather his father was a very elegant speaker, even inter pocula. A consequence of his attitude was that I stuffed my inner discourse with clichés from time to time, because he was making me feel deprived of something innocent, and that I got him a few times to engage in a game where we would talk solely in clichés, with the loser being the one who ran out of clichés not previously employed first. I always won, but he never played the game as committedly as I did. The project began with discarded bottles and unemployed corks. I felt like pointing out the interesting fact that a child will take the most monstrous of parents and pathetically ferret out and seize on the one or two things that might be considered conceivably admirable, like freefloating eloquence. But to the bottles and corks he added another waste commodity, crepe paper.

  The family lives near a high school. In the football season when home games are being played, cars and buses arrive wreathed in crepe paper in the visiting school’s colors. The home team is weak and usually loses. The custom is for the winners to drive through downtown Belmont afterward blaring their horns and lavishly strewing their crepe paper decor into the streets to demonstrate victory and contempt. He resents this for Belmont and decides that a response to it would be to go out and strip the parked cars and buses of their crepe paper while the game is still going on. He organizes teams of junior high boys soon to be in Belmont High to do this, including Peter, his brother.

  This is risky, but he continues. He becomes the repository for the expropriated crepe paper, collects it in one of the outbuildings at his place, and then incidentally notices that when rained on, crepe paper gives up its color. So he begins soaking crepe paper in jugs to get different colors. In his mind is the pharmacy his mother goes to, with two giant apothecary jars in the window filled with lovely colored water. I noticed that he seemed to have been forever being dragged along by his mother when she went to druggists and doctors, which was frequently. This caught my interest. Why was he always dragooned? The astounding, to me, answer was that his mother was irresistible to doctors. The family lore, which he as a young boy was included in, was that his mother was so attractive that doctors would lose their ethics and propose things to her. Apparently she was quite beautiful, in a meek and delicate way. She felt better if her son was there, even if only in the waiting room. And she would also take him with her into the examining room if the consultation was for something modest like her chronic rhinitis. I said to him Haven’t you ever pursued the notion that with these doctor visits you were getting a specialized indoctrination in the notion that female beauty was powerful and dangerous? He hadn’t. He was always sorry for his mother, was as far as he had pursued it.

  Nelson’s construct
of his father was of a person using every ounce of his considerable intellect and force to maintain an outwardly middleclass productive exterior while secretly steadily raising the crossbar on the hurdles to accomplishing this by sinking deeper into the grip of alcohol. I granted that his father’s trajectory was not a straight-line descent, but I was hardly able to credit that at twelve Nelson was still so steeped in innocence as he protested. At that age I knew everything that was happening to me in the pathetic matrix I was in. Why did the beginning of wisdom, which Nelson precipitated with his bottle project, come so late?

  Nelson idly started a bottle collection, or more precisely a tinted water collection. He took empty bottles from his father’s bottle dump, soaked the labels off, filled them with colored water of different hues created by soaking crepe paper in different permutations, and then corked them. All this industry was carried out in the depths of the property, not secretly, he said, but privately. At first it was desultory, but he began to work more concentratedly when he saw what the next phase of his project was going to be. These were not only liquor bottles, but any bottle with a mouth he could fit a cork into, such as fruit juice or soft drink bottles. It was a calumny that the bottle structure he made was composed entirely of liquor bottles, and one he would resent forever.

  First there was simply an assemblage of bottles of colored water, an array he obscurely liked to look at. Then he began organizing them according to size and tint, variously. Then enter some stocks or samples of industrial resin made nugatory by his father’s reascending yet again into advertising. Definitely here was something else that shouldn’t be allowed to go to waste. What should be done with them, then? One thing several of the resins could do was bond glass solidly to glass. Out of this discovery came the objet d’art, a construction of bottles like a wedding cake, in tiers. It was open at the back in such a manner that you could install a sparkler or candles or a flashlight, or ultimately a Coleman lantern, into the heart of it, and sit back and enjoy the coruscations or whatever the ineffable effects were of lighting the thing up from inside. Nelson was even thinking ahead and considering introducing a phonograph turntable so that light sources could be made to revolve, producing even more formidable effects. This would be the ultimate. He was already saving his allowance to buy extension cords, of which many would be required. But the ultimate phase of his project was never to be.