Mating

by Norman Rush

  I appreciated what Denoon’s strategy was, and that it was innocent, so that why ultimately I somewhat freaked is hard to explain, even given everything I’ve said. Obviously Part the First of what we’d been treated to you could imagine being entitled A Fiery Raspberry to Decrepit but Still Perfidious Albion, and Part Two, now in the overture stage, The Lamentations, would be a demonstration of the new live post-Albionic culture of liberated Tsau. So what, if through The Lamentations Denoon was skirting making a spectacle of our bodies and ourselves, us women? Why was this so suddenly intolerable for me?

  The Lamentations ritual, which is what it was, was a hybrid thing. It was both artificial and spontaneous, both foreign and domestic. It was ritualistic in that its format was fixed—although the flail was a new touch, an improvement, and I suppose an escalation over the switches or lengths of rope I had seen used in previous outings when the ottoman was being lashed for emphasis at certain junctures in the performance—but the content was only partly fixed. The germ of The Lamentations was notes taken by people attending a set of lectures I am tempted to call seminal, given by Denoon, on the history of the oppression of women. These notes had been expanded by the women to a master list of iniquities, and every household had a copy of the list in a special wallet hung next to the rondavel door.

  The popular attitude to The Lamentations was pro, on the whole. I do know that in the one case of a woman whose wallet of tribulations had been eaten by a goat, I should say allowed to be eaten by a goat by her husband, who was responsible for keeping the goats out of the house, there was a rather severe penalty assessed against him that everyone agreed with except me. People were supposed to bring their lists to sessions of the evolving Lamentations spectacle. Many did. Denoon’s cadre was faithful about it and knew just how to inject historical injustices appositely into the proceedings when vox populi got off the track, got fanciful or notional or brought up injustices not strictly traceable to men or nongermane in other ways. The agon was always the same. A lead woman would start reading out particular injustices, a chorus and the audience would yell out Shame!, the audience would be encouraged to volunteer additional personal injustices—there were some favorites that people wanted to hear over and over—and there would be ululating, the ottoman would be lashed, periodically there would be declarations that such things as were being mentioned would never be allowed to happen in Tsau. Men who came to the sessions were polite but tended, I noticed, to drift home early. The pattern was for The Lamentations to start out in English and then for Setswana to predominate, as emotions rose. As I say, I had nothing against The Lamentations. I embraced them for what they were, for their being didactic and sociocathartic, for the bawdiness that crept in, all of it. But still I wanted to run away. Denoon’s attitude to The Lamentations was too pious. This was going to be evident to Harold and Julia. The Lamentations was deeply amateur, almost burlesque, but Nelson’s demeanor during it was as though he were listening to a tone poem, some sententious piece of music by a composer like Messiaen, like my mother sitting piously frozen while she listened to something by Messiaen once she had decided that of all the phonograph records I had taken out of the public library for her this was the one that was meant for her soul. It was holy. It contained the holy. Once I knew she liked it I saved my allowance and brought her her own copy, one of my worst mistakes because whenever it was on, the whole downstairs was supposed to be frozen in silence, so she could listen correctly. Everything I did made too much noise, including, once, gargling. She listened to the thing endlessly, it felt like, during certain periods, like a drug. I had been trying to impose music appreciation on her, working from some list I had, and then she stopped dead at Messiaen. And it wasn’t anything to do with Messiaen in the sense that she wanted ever to hear anything else by this master of her soul’s heart. In fact she recoiled from the idea. It was just this one religiose perfect endless composition and only this. The look in Denoon’s eye was milder than hers during Messiaen, but it was still cognate. I hated him to be rapt, ever. When he was, I would remind myself that no one is perfect. Christ himself, for instance, never saw his doctrines extending as far as the condemnation of human slavery. My reaction may have been due to feeling totally overbooked on the woman question, especially as it applied to reconciling my supposed nobility and independence with the requirements of my campaign to get Denoon, who was seeming more and more like the store of all value to me, whatever my cavils. I wanted Denoon in an increasingly absolute way I was losing control over. No doubt the last thing I needed emotionally was to be convinced—or reconvinced—that every society you look deeply enough into turns out to be yet another male conspiracy against women conducted with assistance from the victim class itself. I was doing something and I was going to do it and I suppose I felt there was no point in philosophically paralyzing myself. Anyway, the sight of Harold sitting down again like Canute on his throne and looking around for me to explain to him what on earth was now going to happen was too much for me, and I fled.

  I realize now that a thing that happened that morning had put me in a volatile state, quite obviously. I thought I’d conquered it by defining it as pseudo. It’s only recently that I connect it to my bolting act. This was a pseudo epiphany regarding Nelson. I saw the tree of life on his front for a second and got hot in the eyes and weak all over. He had come in naked from sponge-bathing in the courtyard. As he turned in the doorway he was ventrally lit by a shaft of sunlight that made the way his body hairs were matted, chest and belly and so on hairs were matted, look like a perfect tree of life, with the exfoliation on his chest the canopy, the pressed-together belly growth the trunk, his escutcheon and genital area hair—he had quite a bit of hair on his actual scrotum—the root, and the whole genital package the treasure or casket or rare gem the roots of the tree were twined around. I got a grip on myself and warned myself that if I was seeing Nelson’s flesh as a billboard for Yggdrasil, I was having the pseudo epiphany of all time. But we are fools, and the moment was unquestionably a contributant to my hair-trigger state of being as The Lamentations began.

  I retreated as far as a privy in back of the kitchen building. I hid out there. The excuse for my absence was going to be gastric distress not further specified. Why I bothered to sequester myself during The Lamentations is, in retrospect, a good question, since as the event tediously ran its course I began proposing my own tribulations, as a distraction, to fit into the gaps in the cycles of cheering and groaning. This is my way. A lot of The Lamentations I knew by heart. In my own private pageant I had masses of women vilifying the State of Maryland for having Fatti Maschii, parole femine, deeds are like men, and words—weak things—are like women, for its official motto. I was fairly miscellaneous. I ranged from the case of the first woman gynecologist being forced to attend courses disguised as a man, and then having to practice as one, on through the woman who invented the astrolabe being stripped and tortured to death by a male mob led by the patriarch of Alexandria, and when I sensed I was cleaving to a rather elite level I went for the generic class of women east to west in Africa who had routinely been forced to let male relations fuck them in exchange for trifling little loans, not to mention a study I read some years back about the percentage of American women owning small businesses who, credit being unobtainable by them, earned their original stakes by selling their only material asset, their bodies. It was easy to monitor The Lamentations and know where you were, because somewhere toward the end there would be cries in English and Setswana of a favorite line of Nelson’s from Blake: Every female is a golden loom. That moment came.

  It was all dissolving as I approached. Two late contributions that struck me as not quite in keeping with the spirit of the event rang out, one being No more to drink only always bush tea! and the other being No more only to be using block soap! The first referred to Sekopololo’s resistance to stocking socalled white tea, brands like Joko available from South Africa, out of fidelity to the idea that we should continue drinking the loca
lly gathered rooibos tea, which was free and perfectly good, albeit without caffeine. The second related to Sekopololo’s similar chariness when it came to ordering commercially produced soaps, again because we were supposed to be happy with the local homemade soap, its feeble lathering capacity notwithstanding. Somebody was out to provoke a little. That was interesting.

  Denoon was off with the performers. It was truly over. Once again Harold and Julia seemed to be my lot: I was the logical one to do something since no one else was, and here they were, wafting toward me, Harold looking especially superior to everything and Julia looking rather numbly appeasing. Harold had wanted to say something, but, he claimed, only by way of thanks, and that hadn’t been arranged, which increased my guilt feelings, because if I hadn’t sequestered myself I could have seen to it.

  So I said to come to dinner in a half hour, that it would be just entre nous, at which they half melted with relief. In truth I may have invited them because I thought it would be easier than facing Nelson alone with the fund of questions I had built up burgeoning. There was also defiance in it in that I was fairly sure the last thing in the world he would choose to have happen that evening was a prandial confrontation with the people he had been aiming his shafts at, at least in the Perfidious Albion segment. It was defiance saying to me that if I wanted to have people in I should be able to. He would be welcome but not as a boor. He was going to have to be nice as a courtesy to me. He was going to have to be nice out of his best instincts, not via negotiation with me. With men it takes too long for me, as a usual thing, to come face to face with the nature of what I’ve actually gotten into. Is this the man? was the question that was always with me. Nelson would be lovely to people of my choosing as a courtesy to me if for no other reason, or I could draw my own conclusions. Of course in this case I was choosing guests specifically not to his liking. But tant pis. He hated what the British had done in Africa. I appreciated all this and also all his buried anxiety about his origins at every level, from the mother of empires through his mother and father. But nevertheless. Why should I give in to his hysteria over being a created being instead of some self-created neat original? I would love to be original. I would love to. There are things you can do something about and things you can’t. I was determined that Nelson was not going to be someone with a neurotic stance toward his origins. That way lies madness.

  Anyway, Harold and Julia would turn up in no time to partake of I knew not what at that point. But I sped home and began deciding what canned delicacies to sacrifice for the occasion. Our last can of consommé was going to go for onion soup. I was feeling reckless. I pulled down items, like some smoked oysters, I knew Nelson would bridle at laying out. Oddly and to my great relief he was all mildness about their coming for dinner. I sensed he was nervous that I was going to take up the question of the point of the Albion exercise, at least, and that he was glad not to have to look forward to being alone with me, even if it meant more Harold. Combined with any rays of indignation proceeding from me was the symbolism of my having a knife in my hand while I sliced onions perfectly thinly, like a machine of some kind. I slice very thin and I slice very fast. It’s a gift I have. Nelson helped minutely with dinner.

  I heard our guests outside. I said to Nelson The only substantive thing I want to beg you to let alone is religion. The man is an observing Catholic and not an adolescent you might consider it reasonable to proselytize. If you want to argue about England you’re on your own, but do it on the merits and be scholarly, the way you can. He said something like it was never too late for reason, which I took to be apropos my request about arguing religion, but in such a murmur that I took it as compliance.

  This is more a collation than a normal kind of dinner, I said when they came in. In looking at what I had wrought, I realized I had just been putting one thing next to another and come up with something signifying nothing. Also I had concentrated on what was quick. There were chapatis, toasted sprouts, tabouleh, the oysters, the French onion soup, goat’s milk clabber to go with the tabouleh. There was no entrée, strictly speaking. I decided to boil some eggs.

  Evidently Harold had more than one crucifix. This one was silver, also very large, a Maltese cross. Denoon admired it and asked Harold if he knew who had the world’s largest personal collection of crucifixes. Harold had no idea, but when he was told it was Boy George he seemed genuinely delighted to know that, not offended in any way I could tell, and then I saw why: he was just into the foyer of drunkenness. That was also why Julia seemed so scattered and tense, sans doute. In a trice Harold was producing from a knapsack the source of his joy, which was a bottle of rare Scotch, Oban, a little more than three quarters full, a gift. Ah, Denoon said, trying not to look my way.

  Harold seemed very happy. He stalked around our place, peering condescendingly at different things and saying whatever he was saying in a voice audible only to himself. I don’t know what he’d expected, but he was clearly and stupidly pleased to see that technically speaking we were among the poor and that however he lived, it was at a level above this. Julia wanted to be gracious. She followed Harold around and said countering things. But he wanted more to drink. Do you see what this is? he said, holding the bottle up close to Nelson’s face, Oban. I hope you will join me, and you also—he said to me—as Julia will not do, her only fault. But there was a surprise. Her hands were full of mugs. Ah well, this one time, she said. He had begun pouring. He looked blue murder at her and poured a trifling drink. More, sir, please, she said. He complied only barely. He looked at her, astounded underneath. My drink was also derisory. Denoon he lavishly supplied, and himself.

  Denoon hesitated over his huge drink. Here I have some responsibility. I think he was about to give some shred of a piety vis-à-vis not wanting to indulge in something, an evil that he was forever urging the avoidance of in Tsau, but I preempted and said They’re leaving tomorrow, trying to show that a drink tonight hardly mattered. I thought we could all be normal together, just possibly. I think I also wanted to show Julia at least that there was no question of Nelson needing my permission re a drink before dinner. Because I think Nelson had been on the point of looking, in some way he thought would be covert, for my permission, which was not tolerable.

  Julia was looking agony in my direction. The sky at dusk is so luminous, she said, and wandered off and out into the courtyard as though to look at it, despite the fact that night had fallen and I had batteries of candles going. I never drink, Denoon said to Harold, then drank hungrily. He was transformed with his first couple of swallows. I could tell. His sensitivity to alcohol had to be genetic. Julia called me out into the yard.

  Give them some starters, she said. The oysters could be starters, I proposed, but that was no good because Harold disliked seafood unless it was plaice fried stiff. Then she wanted to know when we could get soup out, at the soonest. I estimated it would be twenty minutes and this seemed to send her into distraction. She stood in the doorway, looking in at Harold and Nelson, then came back and went so far as to get down on her hands and knees in order to blow into the firebox of the yard stove, to forward the soup, as she put it.

  Are they getting on? I asked.

  More than well, she said. Then: I think he would eat cashews, if you have some about.

  I didn’t have any.

  Several times she said Well, I must tell you. But she stopped each time before saying anything more. I had to stop her from, in her agitation, pushing more sticks into the fire than made sense.

  I don’t know about your husband, she said, but Harold is very susceptible to drink. This is so wretched for me, but I am very worried. Harold likes your husband very much, and he might say something I am very worried could, er, flow back. To the British Council.

  Nelson is not my husband, I said. I didn’t want to go further into it than that. She gave me a long look, a surprised look.

  How do you conclude he likes Nelson? I asked her. They seem so opposite. Before she could explain, I remembered I had a Gou
da cheese, not too old, sitting in its carapace on a shelf somewhere. Gouda is durable. I ran to get it. This could be the answer to the appetizer question. But something had penetrated its red shell. The cheese was hard, a kernel of its former self, wizened. That was my news for her.

  She said You see, when we finish a booking we have an agreement that, all right, he can—er—be himself, um. But because we like you so very much, well, and this is more drink than he, you see, I worry, we must eat, truly, how are they? She was as disjunct as that.

  I said I was there long enough to hear Nelson explaining the origin of his bête noire World War I, where history went wrong.

  Harold loves history, she said.

  I said Well, he is getting an explanation of why the war that ruined everything began. I had heard this one before. The proposition was that the Czar had caused the war by calling for a general mobilization intended to stop a general strike going on in St. Petersburg. The Germans and everybody else had misread the mobilization, and voilà. Nelson collected historical inadvertencies, the accidents underlying the supposedly inevitable or foreordained. I can’t remember them all. One had to do with the supposed historical enigma of the persistence of Judaism as an entity in a world so hostile to it. There were two parts to this. One was that the existence of Judaism as a distinct religion was attributable to the accident of the Seleucids overthrowing the Ptolemies, because if the Ptolemies had kept control of Palestine the hellenizing process which had already captured the town elites would have worked its way out to the rustics and run its course. But the Seleucids with their fanatical confrontationalism had radicalized the Jews, and the rest is history. The second part of this is lost.

  It’s a very poor idea, trying to instruct Harold in anything, especially the historical, Julia said.

  She was right. I said At this very moment your husband is taking the position that if Nelson is correct about the First World War then it’s the socialists after all who’re really to blame for it by going on strike when they did, which is hardly Nelson’s interpretation.