by Norman Rush
He keeps asking me about morale here, which I tell him truthfully seems good overall as far as the women go, but that how happy the men are is? We were out postprandially repairing antigoat fencing around the poplar plot next to the gum tree plantation. Young poplars are to goats as catnip is to cats. When I said morale among the men was a question, he was dismissive. All he would say was Men are only happy in prison or in the army. I am at a point where I suspect him of producing a few too many of these morsels and tidbits re the perfidies of the male race because he’s under the impression I’ll get off on them. So I’m being rather cum grano salis on these throwaway lines, for a change. How would you know men are happy in prison? I asked, and got I know men are happy in prison and the army because of what they fail to do when they get out. Most of them fail to avoid going back to prison. Second, they fail to say anything negative enough about what they’ve experienced to keep their affines and the young from risking going there. And you know men are happy in the army because when they get out they do nothing to keep younger men from joining up, and in fact they themselves join the American Legion to keep their memories of war and killing as fresh as possible and have circle jerks where they call anybody who’s for peace commies, and a deep calm drenches the male soul when it feels the persona it inhabits being firmly screwed into a socket in some iron hierarchy or other, best of all a hierarchy legitimately about killing. His misandry turned out to be a genuine if sporadic thing and continued, although accompanied by hagiographical asides re certain obviously countertypical men. In our exchange at the goat fence he picked up my skepticism about the sincerity of his attitude and abruptly and sternly went into an anecdote about a street performer who had been a fixture in his arrondissement when he was staying in Paris. This was an African guy, a magnificently muscled Senegalese who Nelson assumed at first was doing an escape act since he was bound up in chains and straining mightily against them. He was kneeling. But this wasn’t an escape act, it was art. The guy straining interminably against his bonds was the show itself. What was interesting was the audience, which was made up overwhelmingly of fascinated men. Women would come by, take a look, shudder, be puzzled when there was no escape, and move on. But men were transfixed, and stayed, and kept putting money in the performer’s skullcap. Explain this to me, Denoon said. Another time Nelson was claiming that there are almost no successful complete poems, that perfection should be looked for in fragments of failed larger structures, and I was suggesting he was conflating a human limitation—the tendency to retain only the more vivid fragments of poems—into a perverse cosmic judgment about poetry itself. In passing he quoted some lines he liked from an allegedly otherwise nongreat piece of poetry. An odd thing is that just hearing them that first time was enough to fix them in my memory. I think this is verbatim: The bald accountant back at his desk from vacation / Takes comfort in the president’s angry order / The exile returning from honors in another nation / Feels a thrill seeing the first brutal face at the border. When I suspected disingenuousness on his part the most was when he told tall tales out of school about his gender and himself in particular. As: he was a freshman in college and he read a story by James Agee told from the standpoint of a cow en route to the slaughterhouse, a tour de force that affected him so deeply that his girlfriend gave up meat over the summer vacation—he kept on eating meat himself. So how to read this? As a confession of fundamental tendencies I should be forewarned about? As a demo of how clearly he grasped and disliked the traditional emotional division of labor between women and men? Or as something tendentious and mixed, ostensibly offered as a warning about even him while secretly intended to get me to appreciate him above all for his sterling evolution to the way he was now? I have fear and loathing of liars. I almost wish this were the nineteenth century so I could say something like You lie to me at your peril, to anyone who tried it. I had a glyph to indicate lying that I used in my journals, a circle with a line across it at different levels for probable different degrees of deception, id est an eye winking to different degrees. I see I even put a nota bene in my journal to watch for any reference by Nelson to himself as being a poor liar, which would be evidence that I was dealing with a real liar, in fact. This all makes me seem phobic on the subject. I was simultaneously trying to keep in touch with the fact that the approach of love can make you paranoid. I may lie when my back is against the wall. Obviously. Lies led to my existence in the world. I wasn’t conceived through the association of ideas: somebody said to my mother that he liked her, was attracted, could be trusted. I think my personal utopia would be nobody lying.
We Engage
One evening after dinner chez moi he invited me to accompany him up to his place. There was a reason for it I forget, but it was really to show me the place: so far as he knew I hadn’t seen it previously. It was changed utterly. He was being a bowerbird homolog. There was more furniture. The windows had been washed. Machinery and parts had been consolidated. Candle drippings had been scraped off surfaces where they had been prominent. There was now a significant water storage tank attached to the bathtub setup. I tapped it: it was full. Inside the house it was a wonderland of karosses, not only on the floor but tacked to the walls.
The song I hate most from the sixties begins I will follow him, follow him wherever he may go, and so on, whiningly sung. It epitomizes something humiliating. The prospect of moving in with someone always raises up fears of being the ignominious one, the supplicant, the camp follower, so it was very reassuring to see how delicately Nelson went about showing me his bower.
We held hands during the house tour and when we came out into nightfall both got the idea simultaneously of swinging our clasped hands in a parody of grade school handholding. Then came the embrace. There are ways to embrace a woman that are standard and there are ways that are perfect. This was the latter. If you’re as tall as I am you begin to notice that men about your height always try to arrange for the first embrace-kiss sequence to take place while both of you are seated, so that they can subtly slide you down and deliver the coup de grace of the embrace, the declaratory kiss, from above, with your head bent back, and your throat exposed so you’re like an animal signaling submission to a larger member of the species. The nice thing with Nelson was that no kiss followed. The embrace was not just the scaffolding for the great declaratory kiss. The best standing-up embrace is like that one, slightly off center so that you have his leg and not his actual téméraire up against you, one hand on the base of your spine, and you are brought in against him but not mashingly. His cheek is at your ear but not occluding your actual ear canal. His breath is in your hair. Then you want to feel him sinking against you, slightly, suggesting relief and repose: the embrace from something, not simply stage one in a campaign of possession.
So we hung against each other. I liked his smell. It was positive and faintly like a veal soup my mother made five or so times in my life when for some unknown reason she was elated about something. It was a trace smell subtending the soap, diesel, and smoke amalgam.
Who terminates the embrace is important also. It was up to me.
Not thinking why, I slid my hands down his spine and through the waistbands of his absurd pasha pants and his underpants. I spread his buttocks apart. I broke the embrace. I think he was amused. He asked me something like where I got to be so playful.
Anyway, there we were with Africa sliding into night, bats starting to circulate, the village turning into a brilliant code message as lights came on. It was up to me if we wanted to go further, but I held back. I would have liked to touch his beautiful sternocleidomastoids as thick as backpack straps. I was happy. I was so happy. The feeling I had was that whatever else we could do for each other, we were going to be physical friends, friendly bodies. I determined when it was time for me to be escorted back home. I made some joke about having to get to bed early because I was probably going to be awake all night. I left him to figure out why this might be the case.
Snake Women
&nb
sp; Some of the intervening steps to my moving in have to be left out, fascinating as every inch of the process is to me still. When we were looking back and talking about his Achilles-and-the-tortoise approach, I made him laugh when I asked if he didn’t think my narcissism was the most interesting thing there was. I got control of my obsession with not exactly having been rushed off my feet as such as soon as I got to Tsau when Nelson said I was becoming a werewife. That is, for long stretches I was a normal companion, and then voilà when the moon is full I am an echt wife nostalgically fixated on the details of our sluggish courtship.
He claimed that it had been a distraction for us both when I became a snake woman. Being a snake woman was very honorific. This group earned huge extra credits at Sekopololo if it came back from a snake alarm bearing the culprit physically intact or, better yet, still alive. Joining the snake women was purely counterphobic on my part. I hate snakes.
The events the plaza bell was rung for were births, deaths, storm and hail, plenary meetings, snake sightings. Everything was supposed to stop and everyone gather.
I got to be a snake woman with very little ado. I was standing around during the shapeup that took place every morning outside Sekopololo. There was a blackboard propped up advertising the most deserving tasks—and the jacked-up credits you could earn by doing them—and there was a woman acting as a barker, touting particularly urgent tasks in a comic bravura style. I became friendly with her later out of sheer admiration. In action she reminded me of the traffic constables in Bermuda. Her name was Leto Mayekiso and she was the ex-household serf of a Bakwena headman. People acted knowing as to the exact manner of her manumission, which had something to do with the frequency of the unexplained minor fires that had seemed to plague her vicinity, although she was always able to show she was totally innocent. She had been freed but had suffered from some kind of informal blacklisting. There could be raillery from the crowd when she was touting work in the kiln or laundry, which she would never fail to describe as hotter than any woman should be expected to endure. In fact one of her main pieces of shtick was to dwell on how physically unbearable certain tasks were, obviously as a dare. The crowd would ululate appreciatively. I loved it all. She was about my age. She was very canny. If she saw Herero or Kalanga women coming to shape up she would dip into their languages. So far as I could tell she was a genuinely happy and satisfied human being. Anybody who can make the dour Baherero laugh has to be a genius. She was single. Happy people fascinate me.
So on a cold morning the bell rang and the scene around me dissolved madly: there was a snake sighting. Leto dropped the flywhisk she used in her performance and shot into Sekopololo. In the normal villages of Botswana snakes are taken care of by men, who go about it, in my opinion, fairly hysterically, their efforts usually culminating in burning down the perfectly good tree the snake has retired to and then hacking the carcass to bits with mattocks. The snake corps was made up of six trained women and two novices, one of them quite young. There was a fixed routine for dealing with snakes. Whoever spotted the animal was to stand there and blow a police whistle. The snake women would rush to Sekopololo and get into special, rather medieval-looking leather gear: there were greaves that you strapped to your shins under your skirt, a pipelike tube you slid onto your right forearm, heavy gloves, and a skimpy helmet or cloche that not everyone bothered with. Your armaments were like hypertrophied fireplace equipment—staves, tongs, long rods with pitch on the ends that you lit to smoke your quarry out of crevices, plus machetes, weighted nets, sacks, a stick with a wire slip noose attached. Dozens of snakes had been caught since the founding of Tsau. Several snake women had been bitten, none fatally. Beside the great aim of bringing the snake back alive or at least intact, there was an additional bonus for snake eggs. The skins were cured and sold, the skeletons were sunk in polymer and sold to biology departments somewhere, cobras and boomslangs were kept and milked for venom, for which there was also a market. The snake meat ended up grilled and cut into fragments and served as canapés at a celebration in the plaza.
On the spur of the moment, apparently, Leto came out and began pulling at me to come with her. She was inviting me to come fight snakes. There was some supportive ululation around me, so I said yes, hardly knowing what I was agreeing to. Then there was an adventure, at which I was essentially a nerve-wracked observer, ending in our trooping back with an only slightly damaged eight-foot-long rock python bound to a pole carried by our youngest novice and the little girl who had discovered the snake. I had been in terror throughout, but my companions claimed I had done a few helpful things, and they said they wanted me to join the group. I said Yes, you honor me.
Afterward I was extremely elated. There was an impromptu lunch set out for us when we got back. Denoon claimed all this happened on the very day he was going to ask me to think about moving in with him but that seeing me so elevated and involved with the group, he had decided to hold off. I think I do recall him contemplating me avuncularly while we were eating and being told how valiant we were. He even insisted he’d felt an extra attraction occasioned by my amazonesque accessories and general look. Only a fetishist would say that, I said. In any case, it would be a few days more until I was asked, and asked poorly, if you ask me.
I Am Asked
I was enjoying working. For one thing, I was very approved of for working more than I had to and for being goodnatured about volunteering my brawn for some of the heavier jobs. I liked being able to skip work altogether if I felt meditative. I especially liked shifting from one phylum of work to another and also that from time to time spontaneous singing would break out during certain kinds of gang work. These songs were real inventions. They were topical. There used to be something like them in rural Mexico. They were far removed from people robotically lip-synching along with the top forty, which was my closest workplace experience analog. Also work was transparent, unabstract. I was halfway into a state at right angles to my usual American median state of being in which you are in perpetual anxiety about the next thing that’s supposed to transpire in your lifeplan, to the point that you can barely enjoy the thing you’ve just done or the plateau you’ve reached. Can you get pregnant? You do, but then will your child be healthy? Will it be popular, productive, and if it’s a girl will she be assertive but not abrasive? And so on unto whether she is going to abandon you or not when you get old and burdensome. It resembles being a writer and having each book you write being judged essentially on how promising it is, what it augurs about how well you might do next time out. In America there are people who spend all year in agony because they don’t know what quality of New Year’s Eve party they’re going to get invited to. Even in summer camp, which is supposed to be a respite, it was impossible to relax, because the Lutherans who were so charitably giving me a scholarship fixed it so that I was striving the whole time to rise into the next and less humiliating grade of the swimming competence hierarchy or be the object of subtle scorn—not that they realized it. All this was falling away. Partly it was just being with Africans, who are so much the reverse of the American anxiety. And who knows how much of my luxe and calme may have been my romantic reaction to the idea of the experience I was having rather than the result of the experience itself, by which I mean reaction to received ideas about the beauty of communal labor, women being in charge, and so forth. Another perfect fragment from a different imperfect favorite poem of Nelson’s describes pretty well the way I was feeling: Zeno’s arrow in my heart / I float in the plunging year. Basically the reason I don’t know why I felt the way I did is because unfortunately we don’t know what we are, anthropology notwithstanding, even though the reason I clutched anthropology to my bosom was because I believed that academic disciplines did what they said they were doing rather than being hotbeds of dominance behavior where disagreeing on the simplest point gets you into a Götterdämmerung with somebody or his disciples. Another layer of it all was the problem of my knowing that Nelson would no doubt love me more if I loved
his system, which Tsau was, tout court. He would be happy if I was happy, he would be seduced if I was seduced, and so on into the night. So it was another bolus.