by Norman Rush
It was public when Nelson asked me to come and live with him. He chose a cream tea which happened to be particularly well attended. I’m still annoyed. He strode over and drew me to my feet as in some period movie. It was done to be observed. I suppose I betrayed myself to some extent, because I could have said We should talk this over later, but in fact my relief that the moment had arrived was too much. I did want it. I’d sought it. It could be seen as just one more instance of Satan controlling the timing. I accepted with a nod. Some women at my table said Ow! which signified surprise, pleasant surprise, and was just short of ululating on the applause meter.
We embraced. On my part it was dutiful but numb, and brief. A kiss, which I was in no mood for anyway, would have shocked the Batswana, who still mainly regard the act as outré.
I brought up his peculiar choice of venue much later. Horrifyingly his shortlived initial position was that he had chosen the moment on impulse and not out of any public relations consideration. I controlled the rage I felt, but I said You are a liar. It was over almost instantly, with Nelson admitting everything and apologizing and concluding by saying what a bad liar he had always been.
You are? I said in a tone that must have been more underlined than I intended. It made him look warily at me for a long time. He sensed something.
A Deluge
Nelson came to dinner that evening, bringing gifts for Mma Isang that served as a sort of joke surrogate for lobola. It was a nice touch. There was a small crowd hanging around. Individuals wandered in and out, giving good wishes.
The joke brideprice Nelson brought consisted of various delicacies of which I remember particularly a can of mandarin orange segments and a jar of marmite. He was trying to promote marmite as a spread. I had intimated to him that it would be advisable for there to be a general increase in B-complex intake. Marmite is yeast, so Nelson was reviving an earlier failed effort to get people to like it. He would say things like This is very popular in Australia. At our little leavetaking ceremony he was eating marmite demonstratively himself on water biscuits and buttering biscuits with it and passing them around the way hostesses do at parties where they’ve put hard work into a gourmet dip that isn’t going over at all well. Mma Isang told me emotionally she would always be my mother.
We had a friendly entourage all the way to the octagon. King James made a thing out of saying the dung cart service was free. All my things were in his dung cart.
I thought I heard some distant ululating vaguely below us and assumed, wrongly, that it was just more good wishes for the hymeneal party. You get very used to ululating being the normal expression of high spirits and best wishes in Africa. In fact after you adjust to ululating as the norm, it makes applause seem strange and less delicate. Denoon agreed. Once during rest and recreation he had been privileged to hear Vladimir Horowitz playing sonatas in London, and it had been sublime. And then the applause had begun and he had experienced the bashing together of hands as a way of expressing appreciation as being animalistic, crude. In all my time in Africa I never learned to ululate, but not because I didn’t try. Self-consciousness blocked me. I took the ululations I was picking up as equivalent to scattered applause for our getting together, leftover enthusiasm like the firecrackers you hear being set off at wide intervals on the fifth of July. Nelson stopped our progress a few times to look and listen. He had a different idea of what was transpiring, clearly, and so apparently did our entourage, which departed rapidly once they got us to our doorstep. What’s going on? I asked him as we started my moving in. Maybe nothing, he said.
We kissed a bit, and I complimented the way things looked. The interior was changed utterly. I was extremely happy. He had applied himself to making the house something that would be more amenable to my needs, as he conceived them, down to placing little bouquets variously about. He was happy too, but I sensed I was holding him indoors and was proved right when he said Just a minute, and went out. I followed and found him standing at the edge of our terrace, gazing north.
All at once I was aware of the thick feel of the night. Denoon pointed: the stars were disappearing on a broad front north of us. A feeling like the one you get descending in an express elevator came over me. My shins prickled.
He said Do you have any idea what everyone is going to think if we get rain tonight? It would be the best omen you could imagine. He was elated. It was June and not a time when rain should be expected. Good, he said, they see it. The plaza bell had rung to warn people to get things covered up in case of hail.
He wanted to watch the storm descend, if it was indeed going to. The distraction was fine with me. We were shy. We had both been very shy discussing the bed. He had been apologetic. The mattress was new, double size, but it was still maize husk and not foam. There were a few foam mattresses in the stores house, but new households had a claim on them. I had insisted the mattress felt fine to me and that he should stop going on about it. What we both knew was that we had the moral equivalent of a wedding night looming. We were volatile. Our feelings, my theory is, were exceeding what we’d expected them to be. Mine were.
We got footstools and sat touching, facing the storm. The first lightning, like filaments, shone far away.
I took his hand. Are you willing the storm to come this way? I asked him. He smiled and said Of course. I am too, then, I said.
It crawled toward us, magnificent and immense. It looked organic, I thought, more like an electrified placenta than anything else. The breadth of the lightning display was amazing. It was transfixing. Earlier it had been cool, but now for long moments it was tropical and there were hot surges of air in the trees. The magnitude of the storm had not been lost on anybody in the village. Doors were being slammed, there were outcries, commands were being shouted.
Never have I seen any natural event like it. I shuddered and had pop philosophical insights, viz. human beings are microcosms of this vast oncoming system in that the thing that allows us to salivate and think and embrace is also electrical, in essence. We were related, this behemoth air beast and myself. I was its pale affiliate. Also I felt I was being acted on at some constitutive and possibly electrical level. I was terrified and wanted to get out of there, but something was preventing me from doing that, I mean besides Denoon’s presence.
Tremendous thunder was involved, guttural at first but like metal ripping as it got closer. We stood up. Denoon put his arms around me. I happen not to be one of the many women who find thunderstorms sexually arousing. My associations with thunder, or more specifically long sequences of thunder, are, for some reason, with experiences in which you are helpless, the involuntary in general, and throwing up in particular. I’ve always been more or less phobic about vomiting: having to vomit, feeling it coming on, being in the grip of something wherein you’re a bystander at some animal internal event, some overriding need of the systems that constitute you and that aren’t your mind. As a child I resisted throwing up when I was ill, and regarded anyone who told me just to let it come as strange. If they went further and urged me to elicit the gag reflex, I knew they were insane. I would keep my head between my legs until my face turned black rather than surrender. During my first adventures in overconsumption of alcohol, when I realized that vomiting was frequently among the sequelae—which others might accept—I became pretty much a lifelong abstainer. Thunder is obviously a metaphor for something happening that no one can stop, which a good number of women I’ve talked to admit they find erotic, the idea of being overwhelmed, as by passion, notwithstanding how counterrevolutionary they know that whole thing is. But so are we made, some of us.
For me another link to vomiting is the destruction of my mother’s last best chance to secure a better life for us. Through a friend my mother had gotten recommended for a job as a receptionist, with the prospect of moving up to bookkeeping. She was prepared to demonstrate that she knew bookkeeping. Her friend had coached her for a month. Concurrently my mother had been crash dieting in a pathetic attempt to get within armslen
gth of normal overweight. My mother is not stupid. She is accursed but not stupid. She learned bookkeeping. But on the eve of her interview she had lost a trifling amount of weight and was still, by any standard, terribly fat. So in a moment of hysteria she decided that the thing to do to get the last ounce of fat off her that she could would be to induce vomiting. So she had gone into the bathroom and stuck her finger down her throat and, because she’d eaten virtually nothing, got almost nothing up. So she had performed the act repeatedly, enough times to burst every capillary in the whites of her eyes, thusly guaranteeing that she would show up at the interview as a certifiable movie monster with eyes like embers. In the morning, there she was with this condition. So it was her one big chance, she just knew, down the drain. After that it was aide positions in playschools. Don’t miss your one big chance, was the message to me my whole childhood. Of course the one-big-chance-lost proposition is often a lie. Nelson’s father had a one-big-chance story too, which was supposed to explain his ending up in advertising. He had been given a partial scholarship to a place called Brookwood Labor College, which had he gone to it might have changed his life. Other people who came out of Brookwood had gone on to do significant things in the labor movement. But his mother had either refused to give him the little extra he needed to support himself at school or in some even more insidious way had put a spoke in his wheel—she was a follower of Father Coughlin—so that naturally he had been forced to drink his way through life thereafter and apply his genius to being a brilliant sellout in advertising, the obvious antiprofession to leading labor for a living.
The storm was a cage sliding over us. I wanted to retreat to the octagon, but Nelson wanted to stay put until he felt rain. Staying there was ridiculous. The thunder was so shattering you wanted to get down low. The ozone smell was cutting, a stench and not just the usual tinge. I relinquished our embrace and decided it would be better to annoy him by pulling him back with me than see him electrocuted before my very eyes after I’d come this far. Lightning was streaming over us and striking the summit of the koppie. I swore to him I could hear rain coming.
There was a roaring overhead I could hardly credit, and then the rain smote us—there’s no other word for it. Nelson gave a cry of utter joy as the blast hit. He was overcome. He swung his arm in a circle like a demented softball pitcher winding up. Then he froze, spun around, and dashed past me into the house, shouting something over his shoulder.
He had remembered about the roof. When I got inside he was manically unfurling plastic sheeting everywhere. Water like a jagged blade was already coming down from the roof join. I helped.
When that was done we went back to huddle in the doorway, jammed together like people in the hideout cave behind the waterfall in? movies. He was ecstatic, and it was a lovely sight and, to me, proof that Tsau was not just something he was doing with his left hand or in an exhausted or pro forma way or as his final practical joke on someone or other. Come on, he kept saying to the deluge. We all want a passionate man. This may be the man, I thought. I realized you never see a man in a state of public joy except in connection with professional sports, stupidly enough. His arms disappeared to the elbow when he held them out into the solid glassy sheet the rain made, pouring beyond reason, and when water from inside began purling out between our feet he was the happiest yet. I went back in and started peeling up the karosses on the floor before they got too saturated. I heard him singing. He did come in to reascertain that the roof over the radio area was sound and holding.
The rain roared on. Now there was the secondary roar of the flow in the catchment systems above and all around us. For twenty minutes, we watched while the rain went from a sheet, to vertical lines, to diagonals. With his hair matted down, I could see that Denoon had the beginnings of male pattern baldness. For his age it was slight.
There was a certain divergence in our attitudes now that the rain was slackening. It was hard for him to contain his elation at the drenching Tsau had gotten and what it would mean. But I was thinking about the mess our place was in. Water was still coming in from the back someplace. Was this supposed to be my particular province, when I could hardly be said to have even moved in properly? Incredibly he was making as if to go out, leaving me with flood relief responsibilities vis-à-vis all our goods while he went to see about damage elsewhere, how particular sluices or channels had held up. I asked myself what a genius would do in my situation. Ordering him to stay and help on our first night as a ménage seemed dubious. But then so was the idea of my meekly becoming a charwoman while he attended to the putatively greater needs of the populace, then my fixing myself up nicely and then waiting for him to come home so our intimate life could commence. I know myself, and I knew that that experience was almost designed to leave me in a carnally unenthusiastic state.
So I said something on the order of Do me a favor and don’t go off to check things out until we get the basics under control here, and if you do I’ll tell you something interesting about thunder I bet you don’t know. I guaranteed he’d find it interesting.
He went for it. One of the virtues of studying anthropology is that you collect hoards of information on intriguing subjects not strictly germane to your specialty. He knew this about me already. How many students of computer science or, say, communications know that all over Europe the corpses of hanged men became the property of the executioner until late in the nineteenth century and that executioners conducted a lively trade in bits of flesh, selling them to apothecaries who used the morsels in various nostrums. How can I ever regret going into anthropology? The blood of freshly hanged persons was popular as a medication for epileptics, also. I had leverage over Denoon with informational sweepings like this because his anthropology was out of date and because his, I would say, premature rejection of the discipline meant there was lots he didn’t know, thanks to the information explosion. And not to know something that might be somehow germane to his hubristic project in the world made him alert and uneasy instantly. He knew I understood this position he was in, but it was okay.
So as we worked I told him what I could remember about findings showing that infrasound waves just below twenty hertz associated with approaching thunder seem to have strange effects on the temporal lobe in some part of the population, to wit producing feelings of baseless awe and ecstasy. The theory is that certain types of chanting in the special vault acoustics of churches, the sounds certain ritual horns and bull roarers emit, certain organ notes, reproduce the same effect. And then by a miracle I remembered the names of the seven or eight out of ten founders of major religions who were suspected of being epileptics, epilepsy being a temporal lobe disorder par excellence. I have to say he loved it, which was because he loved the idea of a biometeorological cause for the existence of one of his bêtes noires, religion. This was right up his alley, as of course I’d guessed it would have to be. He questioned me pretty closely. My thunder theory immediately ousted the theory he’d previously liked, also biological, which has religion resulting from consumption of the Amanita muscaria or some related mushroom. This was a theory he was glad to relinquish because the case was weak but also because it was the brainchild of a wealthy person whose occupation in life he highly disapproved of. I think he was a banker, or bankster, as Denoon found it amusing to call them.
Then he did go out, but he surprised me by being back in forty minutes, having obviously resisted the urge to wander more exhaustively through his beloved infrastructure. It was because I was there.
All was well, then and almost immediately thereafter.
After the Rain
The next morning when we went down into the village quite a few of the women we saw shoveling and bailing and wringing things out were wearing the peculiar skirts that could be buttoned back into pantaloons, I observed, which prompted me to admit to Denoon that my previous attitude that the design was silly was wrong. This was clearly a practical costume for vigorous manual labor. He was pleased. You take things back, he said. There may h
ave been an implication that not all women did, but I didn’t pursue it.
People seemed to be elated about the rainstorm almost to the point of hilarity. Everyone was out. Everywhere we went I got credit, naturally, allusively, for bringing this fortune of rain, as it was put, by moving in with Rra Puleng. It was genuine. Some of it was fairly bawdy. I forgave Denoon for wanting to get going so early, seven o’clock, so as not to miss seeing the body politic up and mobilized and talking about the great storm. School was canceled. My only problem was that after a while I didn’t know exactly what it was Denoon and I were doing. We just seemed to be making a royal progress, looking into things. Supposedly that was all right because Sekopololo was closed down too. There was a good deal of singing. Two groups were singing hymns. Ke Bona I heard sung a few times.
I can hardly say our first breakfast at home together was intimate, since Nelson ate standing up while I slowly gave up on being fetching in a reclining mode in the face of his determination to get downtown. He thought my calling the plaza downtown was amusing.
The smell of the Kalahari after sudden rain is something you never forget. What blooms up, especially when the sun gets to work, and even in cool-tending June weather, is an odor so powerful and so elusive that you want to keep inhaling it in order to make up your mind which it is, foul or sweet. It seems poised midway between the two poles. It’s resinous or like tar, and like the first smell of liver when it touches a hot pan. It fades as the dryness returns, and as it does you will it to persist until you can penetrate it. It’s also mineral. Nelson thought I was hyperventilating, until I explained. I think he said he agreed it was remarkable—I had gotten to the point of claiming the smell was red, or maroon, somehow—but that if he didn’t react as strongly as I did, there was a reason. I’ve been here longer than you, he said.