by Norman Rush
Denoon was impatient. He was conveying the feeling that he expected Dineo to say more.
Enfields! Enfields! Raboupi’s group was chanting. They knew the particular rifle they wanted. Raboupi was doing a recitative on the wellknown incompetence and tardiness in arriving of the government game scouts.
Dineo seemed frozen.
There can be Enfields for hire, Denoon said alternately in English and Setswana, all business.
Still Dineo was passive.
Nelson said, projecting patently theatrically, I thought, all in Setswana, You must meet with the mother committee to see if they say some Enfields can be stored, a small number, and put out for hire when there is some need.
I was electrified at this, because I knew Nelson knew that what Raboupi wanted was for Enfields, or whatever rifle could be gotten, to be regular items in stock at Sekopololo, which would mean they would filter out into general ownership through women to the men who lived with them. So rental was a brilliant idea. Of course it cut against his role as guardian of the social surplus, guns being as expensive as they are. But I knew Nelson, and this was flexibility on the part of the man who liked to say that the best definition of the state was Lenin’s The state is bodies of armed men. The rental scheme would keep the numbers of guns in play finite. He was improving. It was also since me that this guardian of the social surplus had given up his objection to importing bras, when he had previously taken the position that a strip of cloth artfully passed around the upper body like an X was essentially all that was required. I had said to him that his notion of the postlactative breast was so defective it was laughable. His finishing flourish to Raboupi was to say that he was turning his own rifle over to Sekopololo in perpetuity to begin the scheme.
Dineo came more center stage to cheerlead belatedly for Nelson’s proposal, which it was clear Raboupi was surprised by and not enchanted with.
He and his party withdrew pestered by King James, who had turned up complaining that Raboupi had refused his cart services.
I think I felt delighted with the rental resolution. I could tell Nelson had been annoyed at Dineo’s not taking a more forward role in laying things out, but there was nothing reproachful showing as they summed up once Raboupi was gone. Why did I have the feeling that he had partly gotten this proposal going so quickly as a kind of demonstration to me? All seemed well. There might be trouble over how many rifles should be bought, Nelson thinking we might get away with two or three, Dineo thinking we might need to go for five or six, but it would be worked out. We all looked ruefully at one another and that was that, I thought.
Psychisms
In a couple of days Nelson was morosely rethinking the rifle scheme, strictly entre nous, compulsively I thought, adumbrating ways it could be strengthened, rules on how many guns could be out for hire at any one time, and so on. Then it was on toward the dark scenarios that having the guns for hire might escalate to. First the guns would be checked out during lion scares, on anybody’s report that lions had been sighted. Then there would be some incidental hunting of permitted species, like warthogs and rock rabbits. Then there would come a time when a deal would be struck with the Basarwa who were better and better established in their little settlement behind Tsau on the sand river, and the deal would be that Raboupi’s men would shoot impala and wildebeest and the carcasses would be traded to the Basarwa on some basis, with the bullet wounds altered so that the carcasses looked like arrow or trap kills. Everything would appear legal. And then the Basarwa would barter the meat with Sekopololo, but there would be kickbacks to Raboupi. And then we would be well en route to establishing a permanent leisure hunting class among the men, than which nothing could be more traditional, more parasitic. Something like this was bound to happen because only the Basarwa could legally hunt large game inside the reserve. Of course I was thinking that nothing is totally bad. We could use more animal protein. He knew my position on that. The nurse was saying that there was too much anemia. The only exceptions to the severe restrictions on hunting by non-Basarwa had to do with lions and leopards, which could be shot if they directly threatened persons or livestock. The nice thing was that Nelson came to me with his compulsive scenarizing, which in effect was asking me to help him rid himself of it.
First I came up with all the cavils I could think of, the flaws in his assumptions about what would happen postrental. But in fact, underneath, I saw his point. I did come up with one idea he liked: the rule should be that women were always included in any hunting parties and women were to be trained in the use of rifles and incorporated into every facet of what was ostensibly going on. This provision obviously couldn’t stop the particular devolutionary process Nelson was afraid of, but it seemed to me that it might slow it down. I made my case. Do you get it? I asked, when he was taking too long to brighten up.
Gotcha, Buthelezi, he said, a pun on the name Gatsha Buthelezi, and another good omen. He was showing more willingness to be jocular about serious things. Gotcha was another entry in a jeu I had initiated between us when for no reason I had described some position he had taken as Highly Selassie or Fairly Dickinson or that some notion of his was Utter Pradesh. He had been longsuffering at first about this game, but lately he’d been more willing to join in the fun and had introduced inversions, such as Ansermet, Ernest.
But alas, even with good-faith efforts on his part, he resuccumbed to gloom over the rifle question. Again he as much as said Help me with this. Again we sat down together. Before I even had time to try for some new approach, he was saying he thought he knew what it was that he couldn’t overcome.
His problem was, in his words, metaphysical. He was being very confessional. He had a conviction about Tsau that could only be called metaphysical, which was that somehow Tsau would prosper only if it, as a created or guest organism superimposed on a large organism, the desert, an organism that could be hostile, would or could prosper only if it took what it needed from the desert in order to be there, and nothing more. He was the one who described this as tantamount to an idée fixe. I was sympathetic throughout, although a little confused. After all, this was the same man who referred to organized religion as organized superstition. This is superstitious, he said. If rifles came in, the fear was that there would be competitive and unnecessary hunting and killing on behalf of the population that already had enough, the people of Tsau. There was a brief divagation on the Basarwa, pointing out that the only people who had made it in the burning desert for thousands of years were people who always asked forgiveness of the deity of the species they had taken the life of a representative of, and who only and always took as much as and not more than they needed to survive. Very hangdog, he said I have the feeling that I’m right about all this in a baseless way, which I need to expel if I can, and if I should.
He then went on a tack I had difficulty relating to what he’d just presented. There were things about his mother, who was so intuitive. I gathered I was supposed to be the voice of reason on this. There was a story involved that he wanted me to hear.
About his mother: the fact is that he would say she would have to be considered psychic, genuinely, but at a trivial level. As in knowing twenty minutes before guests were going to arrive, when she would begin bustling to prepare, and so on.
I said Totally unexpected guests or expected guests who happened to be late?
Both, he said, both. If they were late, she had started preparing late. She would know. Also she could find lost objects, a useful gift since for his father losing things had been almost a hobby. Nelson said There was a period when the domelight kept coming on in our car when it was locked and parked in our driveway and we knew it had been off the night before. This trivial poltergeist phenomenon drove his father the archempiriocritical materialist crazy, and not because he was worried about the battery being run down. You should have seen it, Nelson said. My father went through a period of damn near paranoia directed at me and my brother. He made sure he had the only keys to the car safely in his possession and went
out of his way to see that the car was locked tight every night and that the domelight switch was set at off. The mystery went on sporadically over a period of a few weeks, then stopped. My father eventually associated my mother with this oddness, and it did seem to be true that sometimes the light went on when my mother was in the vicinity of the car, taking out the garbage or putting mail in the mailbox. Then he had the wiring taken apart, without the garage finding anything.
He said She was clairvoyant, but not flamboyantly clairvoyant, so to speak. She seemed to know where you were when you weren’t home, whose house to call, for example, to locate my brother, who was someone who could be anywhere. She was a sort of physical medium, I think, and ironically enough her attitude to her powers was that they were nothing, they were coincidences. She had the traditional Catholic attitude toward the paranormal—it was illicit and probably demonic. And of course to my father the paranormal was all bunk, all charlatanism. His suspicion fell on me because I was learning to do a few card tricks at the time.
He said The coup de grace in all this came near the end of my father’s life, when he had gone abstinent and become very meek toward my mother. His liver was gone, and he was dying. I think he may have been on the point of becoming actually pious, but he managed to die before that could happen. In any case there was nothing he could do for my mother that was too much, including taking her to Europe so that she could inter alia visit shrines and cathedrals she had read and dreamed about her whole life, including Notre Dame, the jewel in the forehead of her idea of Catholic Europe.
They go into Notre Dame and for the hell of it he decides he’ll buy some of those centime votive candles they sell in racks in the back and take them up and light them and add them to the array already burning that you see up at the end of the aisle. My mother buys a handful of candles, and he does too, and they go up. He stands waiting while she places and lights her candles. And then he takes his out and not one of them will light. Not one of the wicks will take the match. He goes back and gets more, a selection from the different zones of the rack, but the result is the same. He takes some back to the hotel and three candles light right up. She was all wonderment and astonishment, I gather. And when my father asked me how I could explain it and I said maybe it’s a reverse poltergeist effect, that is, instead of repressed feeling showing up in spontaneous fires in the curtains and woodwork, which is the standard explanation of the poltergeist phenomenon, maybe you produced a fire suppression effect. He was very unhappy and he wondered what good a college education had done me, because of the bunk I was coming up with.
This account is something I now associate with another remark of Denoon’s, to which at the time I paid no attention, to the effect that when you’re really happy and doing the right thing with your life, including morally—for example not living in evasion—in that situation you should expect to have repeated trivial instances of the odd happening to you. You’ll have correct intuitions. For no reason an obscure or archaic word will come into your mind and in a week you might discover it’s exactly the word you need for a difficult passage in a piece of writing you’re doing. I remember wondering at the time if he meant to be saying that the more rightly you’re living, the more odd things will be peripherally happening to you, so that as you get to actual secular sainthood you’d find matchbooks levitating toward you when you need a light and your weight going down no matter how much Black Forest cake you eat.
I know now that I should have plunged to the root of all that in the man, because I was the right person to do it, believing in nothing as I do unless it is proved to me to my entire satisfaction, and the first thing to be proved is that nobody is lying, nobody lying, nobody wanting to lie, nobody lying—my utopia and good luck to me.
I thought that by listening to his story of the candles, I’d done all that was expected. But Nelson wanted to know what I thought, seriously.
So I told him I thought probably someone was lying, telling a story. I asked Is it possible this was a folie à deux somehow proceeding from your mother? I have never made a more unpopular suggestion. My idea was to reconstruct exactly and from whom and in what he had gotten the original story, but he was more than resistant.
But who was lying? he said. There has to be a reason for lying!
No there doesn’t, I said, and that’s the problem.
The rifle question then did seem to go away, but whether I had done more than reinforce a certain fatalism he was feeling on the subject, I don’t know. I am exactly the wrong person to discuss the psychic realm socalled with. I have no sympathy. I’d thought, on the basis of everything he’d said up to then, his manifest attitudes to the notional and the church up to then, that we were birds of a feather, but clearly there was an inclusion or residue or cavity of the sublunary in him. I hate the mysterious, because it’s the perfect medium for liars, the place they go to multiply and preen and lie to each other. Liars are the enemy. They transcend class, sex, and nation. They make everything impossible.
The Better Happiness
The question of when you’re living rightly and not in evasion with a capital E, which had emerged proximately to our talk about his mother’s psychiana, began to preoccupy me subliminally because I was feeling very happy, day to day, and I felt Nelson was saying that there was some definable difference between brute happiness, which can occur to anyone anywhere, and this other and better happiness whose reality he had insidiously half convinced me of. The better happiness arises out of a sense of alignment between your powers and the world’s woe, so far as I could tell. Or at least this is a necessary condition for it. I tried to get at this a little by asking if it wasn’t slightly Hegelian. What a mistake. He hated Hegel and told me in detail why. It went deep with Nelson. It even ended with a sort of quiz, he was so anxious that I not in any way mix up his notions with anything related to terrible Hegel.
I was happy. How was Nelson?
One datum I had was that he was having, recently, a recurrent dream he associated with feeling high or very good. I always had to be careful handling his dreams, because I found them so transparent, this good luck dream not excluded. It was a landscape dream. He is at a height above the landscape, either on an overlook or in the air over the main item in it. He’s looking down onto a wooded countryside, a wilderness with a circular lake at the heart of it, the lake featuring a round island at its center, and in the center of the island a circular pond. The unfailing association for this dream was with the good junctures in his life. Could this be anything but a breast analog? I’m sure that’s what it was, because his association for what was going on down on the island and around the pond was, he thought, he surmised, perhaps naked young women lounging or going for a dip. If this scene is anything, it’s a breast inside a moat. The island was described as mounded, not flat. I hinted at my interpretation, but he seemed not to want to go where it was pointing. This is another example of the complexity of his dream constructs: he’s in the Grand Vefour, he’s been seated, but they’ve run out of silverware.
I think what I was experiencing was a period of freedom from basic striving, made even sweeter by small things like feeling freer increasingly to come and go in Nelson’s various realms, such as the glassworks—which since the maiming of his apprentice had been essentially his sanctum sanctorum—and such as certain tenderer areas of his past. There were fewer checkpoints between incidents in the present and interesting nexi back in his personal history. For example, lately he was pleased with himself sexually, especially when it happened that I might have to request him to desist, let me rest. Somehow this led to the evocation of his father as a sort of 1920s armchair sex radical with a locking glass-fronted bookcase containing The Man Who Died, by D. H. Lawrence, about a sex-mad Christ, and Edward Carpenter’s Love’s Coming of Age, a sort of bible of that milieu, and The Body’s Rapture, by Jules Romains, wherein someone’s penis is referred to as The Lord God of the Flesh, which Nelson found hilarious of course. Naturally he found a way to penetrate
this collection. How the sacred reading cache fit with his father’s having chosen for a mate someone so hermetically sealed off from cultural tastes like his was a serious question. It created a bond, was Nelson’s thought, something his father could lacerate himself with equivalent to his mother’s separate and different suffering. Nelson was certain his mother thought sex was strictly for procreation and that any other application was sinful, something to be endlessly atoned for. He was equally sure his father had been unbrokenly faithful throughout their marriage, although I wouldn’t trust an alcoholic to be faithful for a minute. What have they got to lose that they haven’t already lost? We talked about how wonderful it must have been, say circa 1923, to be under the impression that once sex freedom dawned in the world human institutions would relax into utopia.
Another sign of being in equilibrium must be repeated feelings of equanimity about things that would normally bother you. I was enjoying work that was by definition boring, like passing bricks up the hillside as part of a chain of women so that the catchment system could be repaired. Then I even enjoyed some rather grueling forays out into the desert to harvest grapple plant. This was actually one of the sub rosa products of Tsau, and it was another case of being honored by being asked to join the teams, which were made up exclusively of senior—and so presumably more trustworthy—women, and women for the most part without male collaterals of any sort on the scene. Tsau received a huge price for the plant, whose leaves went into a potion supposed to cure impotence. The buyer was a consortium of West German health food stores. The truncate, exoteric name for the teams was Kokotsetsa, the Upholders, but the true, esoteric full name was Upholders of the Far Fallen Down Penises of the Europeans. I only went two or three times on day-trip gathering expeditions; in fact other teams scoured deep into the countryside, overnight and longer. The take for Sekopololo was fairly astounding, which I was delighted to find out because it demystified things and assuaged my drive toward a marxist interpretation of every institution that manages to persist over time, id est where does the money come from? I think marxism should be called cui bonism, from cui bono, which is what it comes down to. That year the harvest was immense. The runs I made were really gleaning exercises, decided on because of the unusual rain, which meant that this late second harvest was a good idea.