Mating

by Norman Rush

  Entertainments. A woman, a Morolong originally from Mafikeng, will come and stand outside your house and for scrip the equivalent of twenty-eight cents will play keening versions of Lady of Spain and Die Stem and a few other tunes on her violin. Her name is Prettyrose Chilume and she dresses up in tartesque town clothes to do this, eschewing the local sandals in favor of the towering platform shoes just going out of style in Gabs. She is very frail-looking, in her middle thirties, and was at one time a prostitute. Preceding that, she had been a kind of household slave to a Boer rancher, who taught her the violin as a joke. There are two choirs, one all queen and one all auntie, which are very rivalrous. Children get into traditional undress and do line dancing or have praise-poem-shouting contests. There are chess tournaments and speed contests with the abacus, which Denoon has introduced and popularized. There are reading circles, including several strictly for Bible study. In fact a surprising amount of reading goes on, in English and Setswana. People doing repetitive work can have someone come and read aloud to them. There are classes. Denoon lectures on almost anything. Afterdinner household intervisitation is somewhere between extremely popular and totally out of control. Since I moved to my own rondavel I’ve felt a certain pressure to light the welcome light each night, because if I don’t I’m denying people access to a curiosity: myself. But I also feel compelled to preserve time for myself. This is a physical life and by nine I’m already falling asleep. Also I felt it incumbent on me to try to memorize as much as I could from the Field Guide to the Birds of Southern Africa, for which I needed privacy. I think I have never hated a subject more. I feel guilty when I hear people coming by, clearing their throats, milling around, and discussing why my light is off. People do have radios, but the reception from Radio Botswana is very weak here. There are tape players. Copies of the government newspaper arrive about a month late and are circulated, but we get only a sampling of issues. Illiterate people get read to. I said something that led Denoon to feel I was being clinical or superior to what people did for entertainment in Tsau, which I denied. I said I fully appreciated that eight tenths of what our set did for entertainment back home we could do in Tsau. I meant reading, listening to music, going occasionally to a movie. I omitted eating out, which is in fact a major form of entertainment but which my circumstances had always kept me from doing very often, and shopping. My concertgoing and playgoing had always been pretty much limited to amateur and college-level productions, so there was no great loss there. Movies came in once a month from the British Council via the Barclays plane. He grumbled about showing movies, and at first I thought it was out of irritation at having to start up the big diesel generator with its inky smoke and general balkiness. But it was deeper. After all, he had to start the generator to run his radio transmitter occasionally, or for welding, and he did that without complaining. Gradually I extracted the bases of his objection to movies. His mind wandered during them, he said. He only liked black and white. He only liked certain recherché classics by Carl Dreyer and a few other early masters. He was always aware of a blackish flicker: the frame speed was too slow for him. Movies were ludicrous objects because background music told you how to feel about everything. But even worse, movies were things that made you passive, somehow. They happened to you. You couldn’t make them go faster, get on with it, even to the degree that you could with actors in a play—by groaning, say. In any case, for the time spent, he would always rather be reading. He never said so, but I think he hoped Tsau would someday be above moviegoing. I treated all this as an eccentricity, but I think now it was a form of puritanism coming from god knows where. I told him I thought he liked reading because it was more like work. He said something passé like touché. He wasn’t annoyed. All this was much later. He would say only slightly facetiously that the main effort of arranging your life should be to progressively reduce the amount of time required to decently maintain yourself so that you can have all the time you want for reading. There was irony here, because until I came and superintended some small upheavals in his use of time he was always falling behind in his beloved reading and having to put it off, falling months behind in the case of the Economist, which mounted up in a stack that was always collapsing until I got an agreement out of him that I could pull out and discard the bottom oldest few copies when the stack got too high. That was fine, but I had to show him the copies I was discarding. I would, and then and only then would he read them. Our true entertainment was arguing, which we both loved. We liked to stay up late and argue. If we started arguing while we were lying down, I could always tell we had reached a serious point because he would want us to proceed in a sitting position. He never knew I noticed this. We argued about everything, but a lot of it devolved into arguments about his basic philosophical anthropology. His assumptions were too romantic for me. I wanted him to grasp something I thought I saw clearly, or to confute me. We had various climactic arguments. I made some headway with him with my notion that, along with getting food and keeping warm, male competition for females and female reproductive power as a commodity is at the root of the hideous hypertrophied structures that keep renewing themselves and reappearing unstoppably in human affairs. Survival of the species is served by the best males getting to reproduce the most, tout court, was my point. So we are placed in the position of hating and trying to undo the results of something obviously imposed on us from the depths of our beings and, sub specie aeternitatis, a good thing. This is my definition of original sin. I am convinced that everything we really hate in society derives ultimately from this. Denoon would seem to grant me everything but then say something like You may be right, but it can still be defeated. He would say it passionately. I wanted to shake him on this and once said I doubt you’d be quite so sanguine about how much we can change things if you knew anything about fraternal interest group theory, which is a school of analysis in anthropology you only have glimmerings about due to your long absence from the groves of academe. Give me a syllabus, then, he said, mad at me. Besides, I read two or three years of Man at a time whenever I get near a decent library. They have it in Gaborone. No good, I said, because this school is American and Man is British. So then it was Then give me a syllabus, to which I had to say I’m not in a position to do that right away, obviously, but as soon as I can I will, I promise. Our arguments could get heated, which was all right, and once when he was becoming more recalcitrant than I had intended to make him I said, to close it off, Well, you can lead a horse to the river but, you can’t make him admire the view. I think this was one of the first times he looked at me with intellectual appreciation a cut above just letting me see he thought I was adequately smart. Another was during an early argument when I was defending Samuel Beckett. Death and approaching death are about as interesting a literary subject as peristalsis, was his position. But I said The fact is that people don’t live as if death made any difference. There are innumerable institutions set up to encourage them in this, they spend years of their lives specifically defending against thinking that death is real and devoting themselves to the contemplation of various fictitious afterlives. But, I said, the world would be better if people incorporated the apprehension of death into the way they run their lives. Beckett makes you want to do that. Therefore he’s a moral writer and important. He looked at me as if to say I had a point, and then said That’s a very decent point. He would try Beckett again, he said.

  Individual plots are roughly 150 by 100 feet, generous, but they feel crammed—what with two rondavels and a privy on each, plus chicken coops, animal pens, beehives, solar ovens, food dryers, composters, salad gardens, truck gardens, tub plantings, ornamental flowerbeds, maybe a parked dung cart or so. Plots are laid out in arcs along the ways, with dooryards facing, for neighborliness. There is something I am resisting about Tsau. Is there too much symmetry? I asked myself at first, but then asked Too much symmetry for whom? When you go into a real village everything is laid out otherwise, stragglingly, derelict compounds mixed in with thriving ones
, stumps of rondavels next to flourishing setups. Materially Tsau is middleclass. I don’t know what my question is, unless this is it: There are thousands of villages in places as remote as this, villages which are hideous, unsanitary, demeaning, but people are living in them about as cheerfully as the people here, which means what? Am I half identifying with the feeling that there should be more gratitude being manifested toward Denoon and the benefactions he organized to get all this going? This is totally reactionary. Also these women have come from gothic personal situations. I have heard the stories of the lives these women lived, and they have made me weep. This shows my confusion as of then. I think what was bothering me had to do with political economy more than anything else. There was a question of amortization in the air that had to be settled before I could believe in Tsau. Enormous funds had gone into the setting up of the place. Tsau was no self-help settlement, not with slab concrete floors as level as ponds in every rondavel. This was not a perfect yet cheap idea working itself out. This was enlightened surplus capital coming in to lift a whole subclass of people up onto a pedestal and saying Go. What I was thinking over and over was This is all very well—but. Tsau was charity, or a species of it, which Denoon had to turn into something generically different or it was hardly worth doing. He needed more enthusiasm than I felt he was being given. I was very divided. You can only give what you can give. If you know in your heart something is in essence or origin charity you act differently toward it than if it’s utterly your own creation. On the other hand, couldn’t people see how extraordinary this could all turn out to be—in fact already was? I was in both camps at the same time. How happy should I myself be, was of course the unstated associated question. How happy should I be in Tsau? If I was holding that the average person should be more rapturous in this place, then all the eternal questions of what an average person is, what culture has to do with that, came flocking back, id est anthropology came flooding back. What I really needed was to ventilate with Denoon on all this. But where was he? We were having brief, stiff public encounters and no more. Days were passing. The Tswana think you can routinely see ghosts for a second or two out of the corner of your eye. Denoon was ghostly to me. He was at the edges of my vision, always going somewhere else.

  The sexual atmosphere of this place is normal, I think. But how can it be? You do see something covert and baffled in the faces of the men occasionally, which may relate. I would expect Tsau to be like what I imagine convents to be, in short, hells of incessant sexual stimulation and fixation, on the analysis that a convent is an institution devoted to an injunction reducible to Whatever you do, don’t think about an elephant, the analog to the elephant being sex. The relative scarcity of men here should guarantee that, at least for the queens, you would think. I suppose there must be some sexual partnering going on between some of the women. I get the feeling that the only one here not sexually placid is me. I have fantasies in which I am hanging on Nelson’s body like a langur, feeling inside his shirt. I think about his legs and the back of his head, the two main things of his I see as he skirts me and retreats from my vicinity with great celerity. Why is my meeting with the mother committee always being postponed? Why is nothing reaching me from him? Everything was too slow. I hate trendlessness. I began dissecting the question of why Denoon was facilitating my being there. I could hardly attribute it to love, at that stage, or even protolove, or, given the snail’s pace at which everything was occurring, to an opportunistic interest in me sexually. There were self-evident reasons, given his role in Tsau, for his not being sexually involved with members of the local nubility. And somehow he had managed himself sexually to his own satisfaction. I was not inclined to flatter myself that it was the unique charms concatenated in me that had wrecked whatever sexual equilibrium he had been enjoying previously. I asked myself what was the marxian, that is, selfish, interpretation of his apparently wanting me there? Light broke. It was obvious. Denoon wanted to know what he had wrought at Tsau. What was Tsau, really? I was an almost ideal vehicle through which he could find out. He would have had to be unaware of his own inner dynamic here, which meant that the little mating dance I was reading into our meetings in Gabs had been unconsciously allowed by him to ripen into whatever I had the force to bring it to. I was his ideal observer, and once I had been so persistent and brazen as to turn up in Tsau, there would be no way he would want me sent off. As I suddenly saw it, his problem was how to know truly what Tsau was. He was so immersed in the project and so identified with it that his own reading of it would be suspect, to start with. As for the actual beneficiaries of Tsau, there was a divide to cross. Having the language would help only so much. There was the gulf of gender, there was race, there was a culture tending toward evasion and defensive courtesy, and there was the fact that the people of Tsau would be insane to rock the boat: behind them was destitution, cruelty, hunger. Ultimately when professional project evaluators managed to force their way into Tsau, they would be looking for flaws and would be bringing with them the understandable bias of orthodox developmentalists against something like Tsau being a success. Nelson would not be being paranoid to feel this. He was celebrated in his field but not popular. So although he could never have consciously orchestrated my getting to Tsau without contaminating my ability to see things disinterestedly, my arrival must have seemed perfect. Everyone has a demon of pride. His was feeling deprived, and here was someone who could be helpful, who had taken the trouble to cross the desert to get to him, no less. There could, of course, be other motives supporting this one, I told myself to make myself feel a little better. But my insight seemed plausible and made me redouble my efforts to get everything down and achieve an intelligent sense of what Tsau was as a synergy. This felt like an assignment, and that felt comfortable. In any case it was what I had to work with. I find it difficult to probe people in re what they may find unsatisfactory about Tsau. It makes me look ungrateful. But there are certain perceptible areas of tenderness. There seems to be no congregational religious activity of any kind. The Bible study that’s done is very ad hoc and people are slightly furtive about it. Botswana is very Christianized, and very Zionist Christianized: so what is this about? I gather that Denoon is regarded as the village atheist. He is known for his jeremiads against religion, which seem to be regarded as just another of the odd, lakhoa things he likes to do. There do seem to be misgivings over the rule that housing be tribally mixed. Six of the thirteen Tswana tribes are represented here, plus the handful of Baherero. The mixing of tribes in the wards and neighborhoods is for the most part defended as a good thing, and people tend to claim that feelings on it were much stronger earlier on. I’m not so sure. Tomorrow I finally meet the mother committee and get a chance to see how the deception I seem to be embarked on is going over. I hadn’t actually written the word deception in my book, naturally. My surrogate for that was excursus in some places and gavotte in others. Before my past cleverness makes these entries impenetrable to me, I need to make a glossary—either that or forget the whole thing. I am already guessing at what I meant, here and there.

  The Plaza

  With great regularity Nelson would regret and then not regret siting the public buildings of Tsau on a terrace one hundred and twenty-five feet above the plain. Everyone at one time or another would curse Tsau for not being laid out all on one level. I got used to seeing people dragging themselves around strickenly for a while after reaching the terrace, particularly if they’d had to get up to it in a hurry. This came across to me as largely pro forma, though. It was never long before the tonic elements in the setting would take over. The breezes, were lovely there. You could promenade along the terrace rim and peer down into people’s yards. And the actual ascent was very gradual, with benches along the routes.

  The view was dramatic. You appreciated the greenness of Tsau, as against the burning grays and yellows of the Kalahari. When there were cloud shadows, the Kalahari looked like a leopard pelt. People would sit and commune with the view. What Denoon
would say in defense of the location was that civically important events should take place in an elevating setting. I knew he had images of Delphi in mind. I also knew he thought stair climbing was cardiovascularly good for you and I found myself wondering if that had had something to do subliminally with the choice. My bet, still, is that, all things considered, no woman would have voted to have the washhouse, the stores house, the central kitchen, and the Sekopololo offices located at the top end of a long though gentle ramp. We inhabit male outcomes. Every human settlement is a male outcome. So was Tsau, which was seventy percent complete when the first women moved in.

  Gladys and Ruth Street delivers you to the center point of the plaza, which is kidney shaped, half a city block in extent, flagged at the margins and raked sand otherwise. The concavity is toward you. There are several small mopane trees to the rear west side of the plaza, but most of the shade is provided by beach umbrellas, for which there are sockets in the ground irregularly distributed over the open area. Straight ahead of you as you arrive, and set far back, is the stores house, a huge rondavel connected via a covered passage to a cave in the koppie. There are two imposing sister structures, ovaldavels, one at each of the far ends of the plaza. I had looked only superficially into the stores house—the front section of the rondavel and not deeper into the cave—but I had been impressed by the density of the array of goods and tools stacked, racked, shelved, binned, hoisted up and hanging suspended over you, to be found there, everything labeled and tagged, seemingly. You would have to be lithe to get around rapidly amid the profusion of goods in the front room and through the back room and into the cave, where the crowding was supposedly worse. The stores house rondavel and its sister ovaldavels were magnificent buildings, voluminous, with high, open vaults under the steep-pitched thatched roofs. The construction was not mud block like the homestead rondavels, it was concrete block, but you could only tell this from inside: the exteriors were finished in heavy mastic and enameled sky blue. One reason that Tsau gave such a spangled appearance from a distance was that the thatching closure on the roof peaks is always protected by tin cladding, either a conical cap, in the case of the rondavels, or long, pieced shielding like an overturned racing shell, in the case of the ovaldavels.