Mating

by Norman Rush

  So what were the women supposed to do about the vervet plague?

  They should stop taking the line of least resistance and instead think of something. What did they do in the villages before there were guns? There were plenty of predators in the equation, which ought to take care of it over time, if people could be patient.

  The vervets will spread, I said. They’re already showing up around the kitchen.

  Then poison! There was someone he could write to.

  You’re too rigid, I said. You try to preempt everything.

  No, what I’m trying to do is preserve for as long as I can what’s exceptional about this place so that something will survive once the hacking and trimming start.

  Then I said, which I should not have, People say you have a rifle yourself.

  Who told you that? he said, apparently outraged. I hated his murderous expression with its inner taint of shame. There was something worse in it. It contained the message that I was operating ultra vires. This stung me where I was already chafing.

  Well, was it true he had a gun, or not? In fact it was. He hardly even knew why. The construction crew had left it with him, all right sold it to him, rather. It was for some emergency purpose. It was just an ultimate precaution. It was like having a fire extinguisher. And he wanted to know, seriously, whom I had heard it from.

  I evaded that and asked him why in the name of god he didn’t just take the thing and appease people by shooting a few vervets. I said Your deus ex machina is sitting on a shelf somewhere and you won’t use it.

  He was against shooting things. He tried to make a joke of that instanter, though, saying he kept the rifle around in case somebody tried to rape his mother or sister. In fact he was against shooting anything, against hunting, against killing live things with guns, he personally, and he was not going to loan out his gun, either. He was sorry he had the thing.

  This is pure ideology, I said. This is the middle of the Kalahari Desert, where nature presents you with threats that require guns—in this case the vervets—but there are going to be others, believe it.

  He was upset, but I admired the efforts he was making to calm himself down, involving structured breathing.

  I got up and stood behind him. I said Would it be conceivable to continue this discussion while I was touching you? I put my hands on his trapezii. They were granitic.

  This made him practically explode. He shook me off. Who was I to talk about ideology if I was bringing this encounter group crap into everything? This was pure Californian. Probably next I would want us to hold hands.

  It was a calumny, of course. It made me mad. He was conflating the normal and friendly practice of calming someone down by massaging their trapezius muscles with an entirely different thing I had mentioned bemusedly and in passing on another occasion—a hostility-reducing technique I had heard of wherein you and your antagonist hold hands while you ventilate something painful between you, some grievance. I’m certain I mentioned it critically, although I may have said I thought it was vaguely interesting.

  It’s nonviolent aggression, he said, to which I replied Funny, it seems to me to be exactly in the stream of various little inventions you seem to have managed to get inscribed in the texture of things here, such as signaling for English, to mention only one. And what you’re really saying is that it’s inconceivable that you, a male, could take the hand of a woman and hold it during a serious argument, not even just to see what would happen. One thing I can tell you, and you can go into your stupid Californiad again if you want to, is that most women would be willing to try it. His riposte was Don’t you want to know which kitchen utensil I feel like right now? By the way I am not from California, I said. I have nothing to do with California, other than attending Stanford.

  Then it came to me that I could save him, if he would let me. Stanford had the full panoply of slightly ridiculous upperclass sports including skeet shooting. I had tried it. I knew how to shoot. If there was nothing unusual about his rifle, I could solve the vervet problem for him, he wouldn’t need to apply for a waiver, there would be only one so it would be easy to manage, I would be responsible, etc.

  Is that voilà, or not, I said. I could tell he was going to go along with it. He didn’t like it a bit, but he saw it was a way out.

  I imposed one condition, though: he would stop asking me for names, because it made me feel like an informer.

  The rifle was a magnum seven millimeter, mainstream.

  All right, he said, then, compulsively, I don’t kill things.

  I do, I said, sometimes.

  Specimen Days

  The vervets are going. Today shot 3 more and Prettyrose and another woman tried the rifle. Faint praise from N, ostensibly because there are only soft nose bullets for the gun, which mangle the target, so there is no point in skinning the dead animal, and the fur, which is probably good for something, is lost. My right ear is roaring and hors de combat despite the wadding. My deltoid hurts. Again a gallery developed, primarily male, animated by a Mongwaketse, Hector Raboupi, ca 35, glittering eyes, signature fur hat with jennet tails dangling in back, cheeks that bunch into knobs when he smiles and wheedles, teeth separated, like pegs. Drops into English without giving the request sign and also spoke to me in Afrikaans for a little joke. He wanted to shoot and I said no. He said You are teasing on me. Idly unbuttoned his shirt while he was observing, ostensibly to get at something that was biting him but in fact to let show his sculptured torso. Something told me to shoot only the males, which was simple because of their iridescent testes. I disliked the actual killing but liked being part of the solution. Raboupi hates me.

  Raboupi again. I answered his English with Setswana. He is the postmistress’s longlost brother. He says he is from Bokspits, which is not where I recall Dorcas being from. HR a migrant in RSA gold mines until, Dineo says, he was thrown out for fighting. He works for cash in the tannery. He thinks the mine compounds are the bright lights. He must hate it here. N is interested in him and concentrates when I repeat anything I can remember Hector saying. Why in the act someone seems to prefer one breast to the other is probably interesting. His foible for the right is not really pronounced. I am oversensitive because my right nipple is slightly higher than the left, making me stand compensatorily when I’m naked and I remember it. This will pass.

  I thought it was time to show interest in birdlife again and roamed quite far SW down the sand river, alone, too far. Looking back, there was only the blank side of the koppie, no sign of habitation. Panic came: all the fears I manage to keep separate fused on me: sand will cover Nineveh, Tsau is so strange it can’t last, the land is so fierce, I am not being helpful to?, I should shut up more, something was going to happen to? if I didn’t act perfectly, I am putting myself between him and Tsau, which he will never forgive, and so on. Seizure of hysterical appreciation for my parasol, so beautifully carved, the thong and strut mechanism, the batik chevron motif on the shade. I got parched hurrying back. Something would have happened to Nelson, it had happened, I was psychic, et al. But he was all right, he was preoccupied. I went to the pathetic library and calmed down.

  Last night, N: My lower self hasn’t felt so good in years Your lower self, meaning what I think? Below the waist. Why couldn’t you have said ever? I meant ever. Then a silence, and then?: I love having you go around naked in here. I never had that. Grace is uncomfortable naked. Then more silence. N: I probably get this from my father who subscribed to Sunshine and Health for years. It was to torment my mother, who would never say anthing. He said he subscribed for the poetry. One of his favorites was O how I love to sleep out in the nude, wake up in the morning feeling gude. It was aggression. He got away with it because he subscribed to everything. The only reason he married a Catholic was to have a permanent martyr in striking distance. Nelson, you don’t get it: I walk around like this because I think it’s dirty. We laughed. N: Here is a man with advanced ideas, left, left wing pals, a humanist, and all he could think of to do with his
life was see how much some limited woman from a tradition he was part of and hated and had gotten over could be made to suffer. He felt strongly about literature, by the way, and even ended a friendship with a crypto-Trotskyist on the police force over whether James T. Farrell wasn’t a greater writer than James M. Cain. The drinking was also aggression. I like him to praise my body but also hate it because it makes me want to scream that I am going to be old flesh someday and then what?

  Doing dishes when N came up behind me and began feeling me up, friendlily. I said You may not be aware of the first commandment of feminism, so may I tell you? By all means. It’s Don’t grab or fondle the beloved’s private parts when her hands are occupied, especially when they’re menially occupied. This is not a rebuke, just a word to the wise. He stopped immediately and apologized. I said Usually it happens that men do it when the beloved is cooking or at the sink, suggesting that the sight of a woman engaging in domesticity is aphrodisiac. He said he thought the first commandment of feminism had to do with never using the imperative form to a woman unless she was in the path of a runaway bus. I was pushing the edges of our paradigm by using the term beloved. It went by unnoticed.

  I told N about the shebeens. He half knew, he said, but he looked surprised to me. We are both sick with kissing. My lips feel bruised. We have been kissing like adolescents for the last two evenings, intensely, to the point where you begin to feel anthropological about it à la an extraterrestrial voice saying Why are those two people mashing their oral cavities together and why is one squeezing the other’s milk glands even when nothing comes out? Not knowing about the shebeens bothered him, or half knowing, to give him the benefit of the doubt. There is no village this size in Africa that doesn’t have one or two, I keep telling him. But there had been an understanding with the charter women. Someone should have said something. So it went.

  He disdains celebrating birthdays. Why? Because they celebrate pure duration. Revolts are all right, though. The Casas Viejas Revolt? and Bastille Day. Don’t you celebrate anything in your life, Nelson? I haven’t done anything to celebrate yet. You floor me. And I named his whole series of projects, names that are famous, listed in textbooks, discussed. He considers them failures. I said What about Tsau? Not yet. We want candor in the men we want, but not bleakness an outsider could easily mistake for perfectionistic posturing. I said You consider them failures? Have you informed your fellow stars in the development firmament or the groundlings who are still studying them in graduate school lo these many years? He could have said more about why he thought these were failures, which I wanted him to do and was inviting. But he fell grim, and I thought Reculer pour mieux sauter if you know what’s good for you. All I added was Do you know how many people would die happy if they could fail at your level?

  2 days tutoring English with the kids, which makes me maternal, which I do not need, so made myself do two afternoons in the laundry. N’s concerned about people settling into doing only one or two categories of work, or only one, like the cronies who rule the kitchen. Raising and lowering credits works only up to a point.? says the phenomenon is mainly among older women and is not some general effect of the principle of least effort—that is, earning credits for the thing you know how to do the best and thus need to expend least effort on—but that if he’s wrong then maybe they should think of some rule or custom that would limit the number of days straight in a row you could do one thing. I said that would be against freedom, unfortunately. Not if a group imposes a rule on itself and understands why it’s necessary. What planet are you from? This is like Russia, where you have to wait fifteen years for a car because it’s to the common good to dig the world’s longest canal before anything else gets done. Also you may have heard of the instinct of workmanship, which is, I think, what I was alluding to priorly. But he was obstinate that Tsau was different. The example of the kibbutz, where the women ended up doing washing, cooking, and childcare, irked him, but the explanation socalled was that males ran the kibbutzim whereas here the base was female. I think I planted a seed, no more than that. A thing that corrupts N’s worldview is his own demonic energy, which is what socalled greatness may in fact reduce to. He’s unnatural. He can work six hours flagstoning or paving, scabs of cement stuck all over his body, a bite to eat, into the bathing engine, and he’s all set to work late into the night reading and writing and using his abacus. But clarity has to go with energy. I think what I want is the feeling I got when I first read David Hume, when I felt something like cold light bathing me. How much of it would I feel reading Denoon as of today? Denoon has no copies of his books here, I discover. He deprecates them. The past is a bucket of ashes undsoweiter. In the morning I feel like a slug at times,? never. I have never been the first one up, to date, which has to change.

  Somehow impress on N he is too fertile with ideas for the assets at his disposal here. Projects within projects yielding other projects. I am cast as the apostle of stasis. How would I like to live in a place like Gumare, and so on. He is only trying to establish a propensity to keep trying things. He is continuing with his ostrich ranching mania. I said You’re going to go out and trap ostriches, but how are you going to get a breeding pair? You can’t tell the sexes at the distances you’ll be working from. You have to get underneath them, practically. They’re immensely strong. There are people here who know how to catch them. Such as the great underemployed hunter Hector Raboupi? Possibly. They said the same thing when I said we could raise guinea fowl. Now that’s thriving. Then he said Would it be a good idea for us to set aside a fixed period every evening for arguing? I let that go. The ostrich idea is with the mother committee.

  Gleanings re Grace. Her great beauty started it. Are you especially susceptible to great beauty? was my question. I must be, he said. She tried repeatedly to live overseas with him and to give up or suspend her career in architectural history and preservation, but he would always urge her to go and curate when the opportunity arose, or to develop as a consultant, the original idea. Her desire to please was excessive: he had to convince her she didn’t have to say she enjoyed sex per anum. She said the only question was if he enjoyed it. It made no difference that women have no prostate and so have greatly less anatomical basis for enjoying it than men. She plainly hated Africa but never said a word against it. She tried to be interested in vernacular architecture, unsuccessfully: her heart and mind were in the Baroque. He thinks two miscarriages in Tanzania, one concealed from him. She was shy about nudity and he loves my whoresque ways, but when pressed, yes, there can be something a little erotic about conventual and hypermodest ways. She was attracted to Vedanta the last he knew. He thinks she may end up religious because of her phobias re cleanliness and contamination. Once they get going, all religions manipulate and pump up human hysteria about contamination, a subject he would appreciate more discussion of with me. I think I know a lot about lustration, if I can recapture it. She had an eyecup and rinsed her eyes with a solution, but not because she had conjunctivitis—to prevent it. She would pore over him for whiteheads. Her first reform for N was to never keep his comb in any pocket he carried money in, for hygienic reasons, and once he’d said no, he caught her subsequently clandestinely scalding his comb. She was obsessed with depilation. Severe menses. An example of how distressed she got around menses: he found her weeping and finally got her to explain: it was because if she lost something he would come to her aid and they would find it, but when he lost things she was never able to add anything to the search that helped. She had no interest in reforming him, the comb mania aside, and she only made the one attempt. My antennae vibrated: what was he meaning to say? Did they argue? Very little, although they once argued over whether dance was a major art form or not, he negative, to a point of hurt feelings. Symphonic music should be on during sex, she felt, especially Sibelius. She was a member of a recorder consort. In sex she had two modes: number one, she is a normal not particularly sexy person being soldierly, trying hard to get into state two where she becomes a
lmost a nut or dissociated person, wild breathing, sometimes fainting, throat sounds: getting from one to two is the eye of a needle, the aperture growing smaller, probably due to their increasing separations, he says. Had he noticed my nipples are slightly off axis? He hadn’t. He denied everything. He said I shouldn’t complain. Why? Grace has a supernumerary nipple. He wanted me to know he was not criticizing Grace, only describing. You can always find something nice to say about a girl, his mother instilled in him. If you can’t find anything else nice, you can usually say she has nice skin. Grace’s very good skin has come up inter alia more than he may be aware of. The skin of the rich is different, I say. Her family is wealthy, so ipso facto she must be too, but he is vague about the magnitudes, which I marxistly interpret as meaning they are substantial and also as one reason parting was apparently mostly such sweet sorrow, his claims to the contrary notwithstanding. He sees his mother’s advice as machiavellian in that the motive behind it was that it would get around the junior high school girls that here was someone who always had something nice to say about a girl and this would mean he had a greater chance to find his right mate, not make the wrong choice, important because divorce would kill her, his mother, for one thing. If you failed to find your true mate it was life in death. Each woman is a copy of the Virgin Mary that the world is smearing and trying to ruin. Grace collects lacquerware and majolica, or did. She is subject to rose fever. When she begins a novel she feels she has to read it straight to the end: he could sleep through her doing it, but in the morning she would be drained. She depended on his literary taste. He bemoaned the paucity of first-rate short novels and novellas in English, which is what her fixated attitude to novel reading led him to search out for her. They tried every variation of interim living together: visits, six months together six months apart, reconciliations, everything. Any cruelty I saw toward her in Gaborone was an act to get her to let go and face the need to find someone appropriate for her while she is still beautiful and possibly still fertile, with luck.