Mating

by Norman Rush

  Something suppressed and burning was going on with Dineo. I had the feeling she never stopped reading me. I felt it all through the cautionary tale she told about Denoon’s enthusiasms for various husbandries, the latest being for ostrich husbandry. One message was that I should rely on the advice of women, certain women, and she named some who were active with the other animals. At one time Denoon had apparently been determined to raise pigs at Tsau. Ultimately the attempt had been given up. The heart of the scheme had been what Dineo called a moving house of pigs—a large, covered movable pen open at the bottom, with pigs in it. The idea had been that the enclosure would be moved around and anchored in different venues long enough for the rooting-around and defecating pigs to turn each locus into potting soil. The trouble was that pigs are very powerful animals, apparently, and also prone to cooperate among themselves. The cage was impossible to anchor satisfactorily, ever, so the pigs would shoulder the thing along over great distances to anywhere they pleased, such as the grounds of the primary school, where the children would see it coming and get hilarious. Not only was it beyond the power of man to anchor the cage, it was also impossible to construct it solidly enough to keep the pigs from, over time, bursting it apart and running off in all directions. Now, Dineo said, Rra Puleng wished to catch and raise ostriches, which were far stronger than pigs. In any case, I should proceed with the rabbits in the way I felt I should.

  The other item to discuss was that I was accumulating a surplus of unused credits, due to my working more hours than were required to cover my necessities. I said I wondered if it might not be possible to donate some of my surplus credits to one of the older senior women, someone not able to work much who might enjoy some luxuries. This was a hit. I could tell because when Dineo was very happy about something she would wince, à la manière de Humphrey Bogart.

  Then what unnerved me began. We were talking generally about how I liked Tsau, and she was, I thought, guardedly probing me by expressing surprise that I had heard nothing about Tsau in, say, Kang, where she knew that people told many stories about Tsau and in fact referred to it as the village where women eat before men do. But right in the midst of this she abruptly got up and said I should follow her to the bathhouse.

  I had only seen the bathhouse from the outside up till then. It was one of the oversized rondavels sited in the broad stony shelving area lower down and around to the east, where the kitchen, the laundry, and the clinic were, as well. Why was she taking me there? Was I supposed to be taking a hint about my person? A facetious thought, but it shows how mystified I was.

  The bathhouse was empty. The floor was stone, with movable wooden pallets scattered over it. You could see fairly decently by the wash of greenish light that came from two wide units of tinted glass brick set into the wall on either side of the door. Dineo pointed out that there were two kinds of tubs to use—standard squat plastic washtubs or tall wooden cylindrical tubs that you had to get into via stepladder and secure against tipping over by means of ponderous hook and eye catches around the bases. The purpose of the tall tubs was to make it possible to have warm water up to your neck. I gathered you sank down until your knees hit the tub side and that then you sat in this cocked position to your heart’s content. All the tubs and pallets could be shifted around so as to bring your particular tub under one of the three spout pipes that supplied water warmed hot to tepid by a solar apparatus on the roof. You pulled your spout down toward you via a rope. You had to pull fairly hard. Three pulls were the limit per individual and would be enough for a good bath.

  Remarkably she began matter-of-factly undressing as she explicated the bathhouse. In fact she handed me her clothes to hold. She kept talking. I should feel free to make use of the bathhouse anytime I was tired of having only the shower at Mma Isang’s. For the present there would always be only women using the place, but soon the men would be given particular times of their own and a cloth would be hung by the door to say so. I should always cover, meaning lather, myself with soap before I pulled the water. And so on. There was no allusion to what she was doing.

  There was no reason that I could detect for this scene to be taking place. She took off everything except her scarf. She pulled on one of the spout pipes enough to get a slight flow, but she didn’t do much more with the water than pat her face and underarms. Her body was very good. Clearly she had never nursed. I think that for a few seconds I literally had no idea where I was. I was intensely uncomfortable. I was seeing something intentional and not casual, but uninterpretable. It wasn’t sexual in any sense I was aware of. There is no serious modesty about the body among Batswana, except as regards the female pudendum, and even then it’s pretty much the introitus soi-même that seems to be what counts. Tswana men aren’t moved by the naked bosom or by female nudity generally to anything like the same degree as makhoa. Was it that she wanted me to know that, for her age, she had a body virtually in the hood ornament class? Her pubic thatch was the narrow and mainly vertical strip, not bushy, that you see turning up more and more in masturbation magazines like Playboy. Hers was natural, but I’m sure the ones in the magazines are artifacts created because the perfect fantasy for the male salariat is apparently a chimera with wetnurse breasts and a waxed and thinned preadolescent escutcheon. Where this leaves us more bouffant types is a question, I suppose, and just one more thing to feel imperfect about.

  I did notice that she had a jagged, rough-textured scar starting at her navel and leading straight down into her escutcheon. This was wrong for an appendectomy, so I figured it meant that she had had a hysterectomy. It occurred to me that she might have wanted me to notice the scar. I was at sea.

  This was not an extended event, interminable as it felt. Dineo got dressed quickly after her mock ablution was done. She never stopped talking. There was nothing languorous about the tone of things.

  As we left, Dineo pointed at a stand of pawpaws next to the bathhouse. They were watered by the graywater from the tubs. People are joking as to the rinsings of women being so sweet and strong, and they say if you want to taste what is a woman, taste these fruits, she said.

  My notion that she was Denoon’s lover seemed vapid to me afterward, although I didn’t know why that was.

  Gaffe Fest

  I treated his four days away as nothing when he came back. The last thing I was going to start off with in our relationship was a thrust that would stir up any phobias about personal restrictions, notifications, freedom of movement. I couldn’t help feeling that in his retreat there had been an intent to test me, to see if I was truly up for such an abruptly and highly mobile character as himself. Also I suppose I was thinking that if we did ever move in together and were going to avoid the inevitable claustral feelings that being confined within socializing on one koppie would entail, then he would—and maybe even I would—need to have recourse to overnights away from the hotbed of interactions Tsau obviously was. He told me that he usually stayed away at most three days on these personal retreats, but this one had been prolonged by being combined with a little fieldwork on an ostrich-ranching project he had in mind.

  We had advanced to the point of his coming to dinner at Mma Isang’s. For the first couple of times Mma Isang was included, but thereafter although for appearance’s sake we would convene in her place, she would take her food and go off into my rondavel to eat. She insisted. She was part of the sector of women whose sentiment was that he and I should get together. I had a straightforward interpretation of this sentiment at the time: I assumed these were people who wanted Denoon to stay as long as possible in Tsau and who saw that ultimately his intimate status—if this was the truth about his status, which I was resisting accepting—his celibacy, not to put too fine a point on it, would drive him to leave town. After all, it was now generally known that he was on the point of being genuinely divorced. So change was in the air. Intellectually I could see why celibacy for Denoon was a plausible choice. Any liaison with a woman of Tsau would have meant compromising his role as above
the battle, would have meant choosing a person from one tribe over all the others, would have complicated both his status and the status of the woman he chose. Also, Tswana women want children and they want them now. To all of which had to be added the question of his professional image as someone who tries to set up and then depart from self-sufficient politico-economic entities not tied to the coffers of the West and certainly not tied to the charisma of one man and a white man at that. Nor in the case of Tsau, where the point was female equality and dignity if it was anything, would it be very palatable to take a wife of convenience, a town wife so to speak, and then either leave her behind insultingly or take her with him when he left, thereby demonstrating to all her sisters that the real bingo in life was to escape to the metropolitan West in the arms of an icon. I could see that from some standpoints I would be perfect for him, if it could be assumed that I genuinely liked Tsau, as I seemed to, and was in no hurry to decamp, and that I was who I seemed to be.

  There was one embarrassing dinner. I inferred that Nelson was feeling carnal by the way he was trying to keep abreast of Mma Isang’s movements and when she might be returning. Patently he was trying to find out, without asking directly, if Mma and I had worked out a specific time when she might be expected back. I was unhelpful. I was teasing, partly because during our moonlight walk he had been so unforward, partly because of his four-day absence. So there was a mild revenge comedy in progress.

  No question, teasing is regressive. I rarely do it, but when I do I justify it with the conceit that there’s some allowable quota per woman I’ve never come close to.

  Denoon was dressed up, for him. He was wearing his ludicrous billowing drawstring pants, a clean blue tunic, and he had shaved just before coming over and so looked rather gleaming.

  The entrée was a baked carrots and groats dish I’d thought up. This was an all-solar production, which he was bound to love if only for that.

  In my travels around Tsau I had heard that Nelson had drifted into the primary school and noticed that in a child’s drawing of a horse tacked up in a display there was a cloud where the animal’s penis should have been. The original outline of the penis was still dimly discernible under the erasure cloud. So Nelson had then established that puritanically a teacher had told the artist that the picture wouldn’t be put up unless the horse was altered. And Nelson had taken the matter up heatedly with the schooling committee.

  Is this really the issue level you want to be identified with? I asked him.

  He said Are you saying I was ultra vires? which was the moment—we later agreed—we discovered we both had studied Latin. Later this was a bond. We both loved Latin.

  I said Hardly, since I have no idea what your limits are institutionally, or rather juridically, around here. You seem to be ex officio on most of the committees I know anything about, or at least you turn up whenever you want and nobody asks what you’re doing there. Also since this place is your idea, you presumably derive some rather indefinable kinds of powers from that. I do have the impression you’re becoming slightly more emeritus, but that’s just my impression. It’s cloudy to me, is all.

  Pointedly, I thought, he declined the opportunity to enlighten me in this area. He went on eating appreciatively, even murmuring that he wanted my recipe. So I just repeated my opinion that it was beneath him to be agitated over whether a teacher tries to keep a child from drawing a horse with a large penis. I in fact was aware that the penis in question had been of caricature dimensions in the original drawing, and also that the artist was King James, no less.

  He said Isn’t censorship an issue we should be concerned with?

  It is if you’re the Botswana Civil Liberties Union. Are you? Or are you more like an inspector general? This led to more silence.

  I got frightened. This was close to nagging and he was uncomfortable. I klang-associated for something light to say and came up with Do you know how the Batswana describe a henpecked man? He didn’t. I said They say he’s a man who eats his overcoat. People laugh when they say this and I even laugh myself, but they can’t explain why this is funny and neither can I.

  I had stumbled on to something that interested him a lot—Tswana humor. Did I know any other Tswana jokes?

  I was relieved that I did. I knew one other joke, exactly one. I do, I said. And then I realized what the joke was, too late.

  It isn’t a joke, I said, it’s a riddle. It’s not a joke, actually, at all.

  He wanted to hear it. I couldn’t believe what I had done. I even tried to instantly make up a joke or riddle to replace the one I was going to have to produce otherwise. My faculties were frozen. He was waiting.

  Well, the riddle is Do you know why the penis always lands up in trouble? You don’t know, and the answer is that it’s because the penis has only one eye.

  He laughed, and nondutifully. But I was mortified. So far everything I was saying hinged on the penis in one way or another. I am such a fool. But I was also gratified at his lovely laugh.

  Brilliantly then I conceived that what I should do to defuse my apparent fixation on this item was show how little the subject meant to me, despite what he might think, by going even more for the jocular. I was trying to show insouciance.

  So I said Along these lines, this might amuse you: when I was in high school and in a timeframe when the first names of my three best girlfriends all ended in the letter i, we used to ask one another if a particular boy we had been, say, necking with, had been sincere. Sincere standing for having an erection, naturally.

  He thought it was funny, genuinely. This is new, he said. This is news.

  How alone are we? he asked. But just then Mma Isang showed up. I maneuvered to let her know she should stay. I felt like a fool and a coquette, but this is where I wanted the evening to come to rest.

  Causing active ongoing pleasure in your mate is something people tend to restrict to the sexual realm or getting attractive food on the table on time, but keeping permanent intimate comedy going is more important than any other one thing. Naturally it was living with Denoon that gave me this notion in its developed form as opposed to the bare inkling I got during the evening in question. I’m not talking about having a sense of humor you apply to the ups and downs of living together. I’m talking about being comedically proactive. Ultimately I was better at this than Denoon was. I don’t know why being funny for someone was such a new idea for me. It had never occurred to me in connection with any other male I had been serious about. Denoon had early on made it clear I was free to include him and his foibles as ingredients and props in my routine if I felt like it, by not objecting when I did. So he was different. Or was it just that I was dealing for the first time in my life with an actual mature male, a concept which up until then I had considered an essentially literary construct and a way of not asking the question of whether or not in fact the real world reduced to a layer cake of differing grades of hysteria, with the hysteria of the ruling sex being simply more suppressed and expressing itself in ritualized forms like preparedness or memorizing lifetime batting averages that no one associates with hysteria. I was surprised at how pleased I felt to get such deep, easy, thorough laughter out of him.

  Nelson was extremely nice when we discussed my penis gaffe fest much later. The way he comforted me was interesting and involved a conceit we used in later connections. He wanted me to know that the penis sequence had been sub-rosaly titillating, particularly so because it had been clearly so accidental. You never tease, he said. He said There is a school of thought, a heresy from the madhouse of heresies in the ninth century, that says God is good and is in control of every individual thing that happens, every event, but that unfortunately the devil is in control of timing. Hence, gaffes. Hence the actually existing world. Between us we could facetiously make use of this conceit, and laugh. Of course a conceit is different from something solid like the Stoic Maxim, Of all things in existence some things are in our power and some not, which is with me forever, also something I got from
Denoon and made him defend as different from the pop variant of it in use in Alcoholics Anonymous groups.

  Courtship

  The below date from the end of our courtship.

  Beware mood in men. N. palpably depressed by a split in some Spanish labor union. He is stalking around cursing a group called the renovados under his breath. His information is from a hectographed newsletter a year old which has just gotten here. It took a certain amount of temerity to extract even this much. All I wanted was to be able to help him reframethis bad news if I could, be less sad over it, be a shoulder to lean on once I had the basics of what was wrong. But I was told I would have to know the whole history of anarchosyndicalism in Spain from the Cro Magnon era, which he would have to take the time to tell me, before I could begin to understand about this. He’s not disposed to do this for me, however succinctly, and the answer to the question of whether there is something around he can give me to read on the subject is no. Apparently he prefers to be down in the dumps about this, without any interventions by dear friends. I think I was brave to ask if there were also other areas in his life where tentacles of depression could suddenly shoot out and envelop him, turning him into a morose dinner partner without warning, to which he says no. My aversion to mood in significant others is overdetermined and reality based. One centerpiece in my history is the three-month-long mood I plunged my mother into by accident one summer. I was going to do something pleasant for her. I had just gotten my driver’s license via a long sequence of beggings and cajolings, borrowing cars, getting guys to teach me. It was a triumph for someone who was practically underclass. The first thing I was going to do with my license and the car I had borrowed was take my mother to a cabin on a lake for the weekend. It was going to be wonderful, one of the best things my poor barge of a mother had ever gotten to do. In any case what happened was that as we backed out of our driveway for our excursion there was a big thump. So I got out to see what was going on, and what it was was that I had backed up over my mother’s suitcase, crushing and ruining it, the very suitcase, I was just about to learn, that meant more to her than any other possession she possessed, as she put it, because it had been a gift to her from her therapist and represented the only decent thing anyone had ever given her, allegedly, never mind my own pathetic outpouring of love objects from drawings to ashtrays to napkin rings to decoupage still lifes. The point seemed to be that the suitcase was brand-new. I assumed she’d put the suitcase in the trunk, and she assumed I would know she’d put it down where I could put it in the trunk, since bending to the degree necessary to stow the suitcase away would have been difficult for her. So then everything was off except misery. She was crushed. She was in mourning for the suitcase for three months at least. She was impenetrable to my apologies or the even more offensive offer that I somehow buy her an even better suitcase as a replacement. How could I conclude other than that emancipation meant liberation from people with moods. About the same time, my best friend Toni’s mother went into a two-week funk because after the kitchen was renovated someone set a hot pot down on the new Formica counter and caused a faint brown semicircle, ruining everything, notwithstanding that Toni’s father had the section of Formica replaced instantly. When later Denoon and I had a vehement contretemps over his assertion, during an up to then placid discussion of differences between men and women, that in contradistinction to men, women experience injury and injustice more strongly than they do good luck or surcease of sorrow, I had all this uneasily in mind but I still won.