Mating

by Norman Rush

  Denoon gave a puzzling performance. He tried to convince Mma Sithebe that this would blow over, that he had heard only fine things about her. He seemed to want to say that these actions were not really directed at her, they were directed at him, through her, but he put it all so vaguely that even I had difficulty getting his drift. Why did I feel the three women were much more militant about this than he was? There would be an answer, he kept telling her, and people might change their minds. He would think of something to do. It was a weak performance by Nelson, his weakest, and so felt we all, I was sure.

  LOVE ITSELF

  This Is How Depraved You Can Become

  Nelson began looking peaked, then got lethargic. I knew something was definitely wrong when I invited him to not come to the table once or twice and he let me bring him his dinner to eat propped up in bed. I thought this was the consequence of overexertion resulting from a day of work grooming the airstrip, which was something supposed to be done periodically by a levée en masse, like a quilting bee. There had been a decent turnout, I thought. But he wanted to have it all done within one day, as apparently it had been in the past, and he had driven himself too much in order to attain that, raking and grading late into the evening with only a few hangers-on for company, finally.

  I was taking his soupbowl away and handing him a damp cloth when he said, astounding me, I would never leave you. There was no context immediately evident. As a stone neurotic I naturally fastened on why I was hearing would instead of could: didn’t this mean there was a trailing clause lacking, like a phantom limb, which would reduce to his saying he would never leave me once some as yet unattained level of intimacy was reached? Wouldn’t could have been preferable, more definite, more present-based? I was agitated.

  I was agitated because what we were both trying to do, I think, was arrive at love manifest—that is, love being established between us to both our satisfactions without anyone having to go through the horrible bourgeois ritual of declaring love, he for his reasons, I for mine. He was sensitive and knew that the last thing I wanted was a horrible sotto voce I love you and then on into a flurry of hungry kisses to bury the robotic nature of what he’d felt he had to say. I assumed that of course he had declared his love to Grace at one point. Inescapably declarations precede not only the few marriages that make it but also all the farces and divorces there are. Judging by British television, the practice has been given up on over there by now except in situation comedies and among the rural.

  He closed his eyes and began to writhe and mumble and sweat almost immediately. It was a plunge into another state. His brow was hot. He was having an attack. Already he seemed to be in the outskirts of delirium. And this is how depraved you can become: I bent over him for a minute listening to see if something about love might not escape—or anything that might shed light on how to interpret his I would never leave you, anything to show me if that statement itself had integrity or had only been a first spattering from the storm that was now on my hands. Might he repeat the phrase, but with could instead of would, showing me I’d misheard?

  I got badly frightened and tried to wake him up. I shook him, which instantly seemed wrong. I think I pulled on his ears, I was so distraught. He would rally, but only for a minute, then flop back comatose. It was unplanned, but in my fear I told him I loved him, fairly loudly, a few times. Nothing was helping. I ran out to get the nurse.

  Dineo was already occultly in our house and taking care of things by the time I got back with the nurse in tow. I must have attracted more attention than I thought during my search, stopping people and so on when there was no one at the infirmary. Word had reached her and here she was. Nelson seemed better too.

  The nurse was very good. I tried to be helpful and brisk, but I was fighting surges of feeling faint. I felt incompetent. I know first aid and I know a fair amount about the body, but all of that had left me, apparently because the patient was Nelson. I felt like a peasant next to these two women. Dineo was in a beautiful caftan decorated with ankh symbols. The nurse was thin and strong without being overbig, unlike me, with my big shoulders and all. I had to hide that I was in terror that Denoon was slipping away. He was clearly very sick and might be sicker than they were saying. He was sick, someone I had never seen sick, and what had I been doing with my life lately except parsing everything going on with us like a maniac?

  I wrote down what they said I had to do—there was in fact some medication in the house—and lo, my handwriting was the handwriting of someone else: my mother. This was more proof to me that I was doomed, metabolically doomed. Living with Denoon had already made me fatter than I’d been for a good while. And now abruptly it was intolerable to have these two women, these in particular, in our house, in our privacy, witnessing but not understanding that there was an unresolved war going on between two different aesthetics of what comfort was, for one thing. I wanted them to leave and said No in a virtual scream when Dineo said she was going to send someone to stay with us.

  I’ve been overwrought in my life, but this was a revelation. The culmination was my rushing out to catch them before they left our patio to tell them both, sobbingly, that I loved Nelson, which I wanted them to know, and that I would do everything, everything.

  Then it was all right. I was with Denoon for forty-eight hours straight, reading to him and doing as I’d been told and jumping under the covers to hold him when he began to vibrate. His malaria dated from Tanzania, and these bouts were infrequent, never more than one per year, he said. He was back to his lucid self permanently by midnight the first night, although a few times he came out with aperçus not clearly related to anything going on around him.

  Everything was all right. I’m convinced I was drawing power from some new source. I fought off three serious attempts by women to come in in numbers to stay with us while Nelson recovered, which is the Tswana way: the more people there are in the sickroom with you while you convalesce, the less likely it is the badimo will snatch away your soul. But I managed to get rid of everybody without offending anyone and began to feel that if I could manage that situation I could manage the world. Someone as a treat brought cold Pine Nut Soda, innocently. Nelson drank it and said it tasted beautiful. I had news for him I had to withhold: Dineo wanted me to be the one who let him know a rule had been adopted saying that he was welcome to come to committee meetings only when he was specifically invited, except for the committee as to names, to which he could come anytime he pleased. He was being rendered emeritus whether he liked it or not, I gathered. It was interesting that I was chosen to be the messenger for this news, and I even wondered if the change would have happened at all if I hadn’t been there to convey it, the ideal conduit, although I may be inflating myself here. It was nothing when I did break it to him, seemingly. He was gazing at me with love following some ministration or other, and the gaze continued while I gave him the news, and afterward, such that I was able to believe him when he said it was nothing. I was everything, or we together were everything, was the implication. Every day was soft.

  A Reduced Footing

  Once he was restored I was free to have an attack of urticaria. I felt hideous not only because my face is always the first thing affected when I get these attacks but because my mother also gets hives, so it seemed like another gratuitous foreshadowing. But the outcome was something only possible between people in a state of love in that Denoon really seemed not to notice. And it certainly had no effect on his physical interest in me. When I finally noted offhand that he seemed not to have any particular reaction to my eyes having virtually disappeared thanks to adjacent tissue swelling—I was overstating—or to blotching on some of his favorite parts of mine, he admitted that in fact he had noticed but it had led him into thanking god I was a skin reactor. Humans react to stress in three ways—through their organs, their muscles, or their skin—he informed me, only gradually picking up from my hyperpatient attitude that I was fully up to date on this piece of pop psychosomatology. But he went on wi
th it. The luckiest are the skin reactors, because the range of topical medications they qualify for is so huge. So he was relieved that I was in that category. Inter alia he was letting me know he appreciated that my stress was probably his fault, or his malaria’s fault, and he was grateful for what I had done for him more than very much. Concluding, he said My category is organ reactor. I’ll say, I said, attempting a lewd reference. It went past him. He was all concern. He took my hand. The treatment for urticaria is the same as for malaria, he said—that is, the passage of time.

  I think he was almost disappointed when my hives faded as precipitately as they did. He wanted to reciprocate my taking care of him. The irony was that the hives cleared up after his suggesting that I might speed up their exit by willing them to go, in a conscious way. He suggested I visualize my body as a paper doll with blotches and then as a paper doll without them, blank. He even made some joke mesmeric passes over me while I carried out his mental exercise to humor him. In the morning I had to laugh, the improvement was so distinct. We were both surmounting everything, it seemed, without strain, with a feeling of automatism, almost. Even his being put on a reduced footing with the committees wasn’t affecting him to the naked eye, although all the news of the day for the period when he’d been out of it had to be gone over and nailed down, to be sure there was nothing included that was something from his deliria. I think he thought his removal was something he’d imagined. He appeared unworried about it, though. There were going to be elections soon, and then a general meeting, a plenary, where everything always got settled. For myself, I wasn’t unhappy feeling that the forces of circumstances were moving him toward thinking of a future in someplace less remote, although I kept this strictly to myself.

  I can’t say I was perceiving any serious ambivalence in him about someday leaving Tsau. Or possibly if I was seeing any, I was dismissing it as my mistake. When I praised Tsau once, over something I forget that impressed me, he went into a sort of aria asking how Tsau could fail to be terrific, since it was the pyramidon at the top of all his prior failures, socalled. He gave the entire sequence of truths learned, project to project, such as controlling the scale, working in the vernacular, cutting expatriate staff to near zero, locating yourself remotely enough to avoid premature disruption, balancing collective and individual incentives, basing your political economy on women instead of men—his theme song, Every female is a golden loom. I had heard it all before, but this time it was put together in a lighthearted way. He did tack on, of course, that if Tsau were really perfect the proof of the pudding would be its originator being unable to give up living in it, but then he went on to say nothing is perfect, so that if this was significant in a precursory way, I missed it. I read it as valedictory.

  Accouchements

  Among my mistakes was going twice to accouchements.

  I went out of curiosity initially, and to sharpen up my midwifery, in which I have an actual certificate. I no sooner set foot in the birth house than I was deluged with complaints about Nelson, making me wonder if this wasn’t the real reason for my being invited to attend. He must remain away, was the main demand. Apparently he haunted the environs of the birth house during accouchements, in a proprietary way understandable to most of them but still a thing they could do without. In fact it was an improvement on his earlier conduct, which encompassed attempts to be present during births and to urge fathers to be present during births. His will may have been good, but I was amazed he would run headfirst against so fixed a tenet of Tswana culture as the belief that if the male eye landed on a newborn’s head the baby’s fontanel wouldn’t close. No one but me knew how apprehensive he got when a delivery was due. He was overflowing with horror stories about mothers typically getting to the hospital too late, after the child had turned in the womb, the child having to be decapitated to save the mother, about caesareans resulting in death owing to wretched aftercare, stories relayed by a woman who had been a maternity nurse at Jubilee Hospital in Francistown and told to him primarily, I think, to induce him not to want to insert himself into such gruesome scenes.

  In Tsau you gave birth sitting up in a massive peculiar wooden chair with raisable stirrups to hold you in a knees-up position. The chair was a beautiful piece of carving and joinery, and there was something about the fact that all the babies in Tsau descended into the world via this chair that was extremely moving to me. I kept thinking that this was how things became sacred. Also I had a fugitive feeling of wanting to sit in the chair sometime just to see how it felt, particularly how it felt when the trap in the seat was unlatched beneath you. I supposed I was lacerating myself. I felt both that I wanted to sit in the chair and that I had no right to do it. The chair was set up on a U-shaped platform so that the attendants could get on their knees and slip under the mother to help the baby out, with or without employing a wooden chute that locked into place to guarantee against the child being fumbled and dropped. Tubs of flowers were always moved inside the birth room on the principle—as I understood it—that the first things the eyes of a newborn saw should be beautiful. I was told that sometimes the mother would supply a particular piece of printed cloth or weaving or picture she loved and that it would be held up for the baby before the child was held near the flowers. The room was immaculate, red tiles with a hatched surface on the floor and slick red tiles halfway up the rondavel walls. There was another of Denoon’s notional crank-system fans high in the vault, but I never saw it used. Everyone was barefoot, always, for deliveries.

  I don’t know what I found so wrenching about the experience. It wasn’t the pain and mess of childbirth, which I was already familiar with and which at Tsau seemed so much less anyway. Childbirth in the vertical position went so straightforwardly and apparently so much more easily for the mothers that I felt essentially like a bystander. An hour or two was the longest any recent delivery had taken, and there was some amused conjecture that the mother had prolonged the action in order to get some dagga to smoke, which was allowed. Even the nurse who supposedly hated Tsau was heard to say once that she wished she could come back when it was time to deliver her own child. There was a little ceremony after the umbilicus was cut, in which each woman placed two hands on the child and told it that it had landed in freedom and that everyone there was the child’s mother. This was not an overpowering ceremony in any way. It also contained the wish that the child’s mother should never falter. When it was over, the team went in a body to the bathhouse to clean up. That was all. But both times I left feeling depressed and hostile and labile.

  After the first delivery I went home and yelled at Denoon when he did nothing worse than ask for reassurance that the baby was normal and healthy: he was obsessive, he should stop haunting the birth house, he should stop being impossible and prepare himself for a different report someday because that was in the cards, undsoweiter. After the second I was as bad. I forget what set me off.

  There was no point in being emotionally riven every few weeks, so I said I was going to stop attending, which seemed to relieve him, which set off another surge of feeling against him.

  At no time was Denoon less than understanding and consoling. He was loving, whatever I did, even when I wanted to rant about my life being difficult, my feeling disadvantaged even though I came from lefatshe la madi, the country money comes from, my hating being self-evidently pitied by women who had so much less.

  Chez Raboupi

  Nelson was convinced Raboupi was using the Basarwa to screen what he called private-property hunting. It was true the Basarwa were coming up with considerable game lately, wildebeest in particular. And the rifle had been checked out ostensibly for use in lion watches. Nelson was certain that wildebeest killed at the nearest pan were reaching us after Raboupi and his men carved out the bullets and gave the liver and tongue and the fat around the heart to the Basarwa. He was convinced it was true because Raboupi had definitely been missing from his usual workplaces, the tannery and the blockyard. Nelson hated to admit it, but Raboup
i was a demon worker and his absences made a difference in the amount of work done.

  I was with Nelson when on impulse he stopped one evening at the Raboupi place to have a word with Hector. There were people in the house, among them the batlodi, whose hard loud voices were distinctive. It was dusk, early dusk, not late enough for us to be considered uncivil for knocking at a household where the welcome light was unlit. He wanted to thank Raboupi for something, was the unlikely story he gave me.

  We knocked and at first there was no response. Then we heard suppressed talking and an evil laugh, and then Dorcas came to the door barebreasted, a towel around her neck but the ends pushed between her breasts so that everything showed. There was no excuse for it. The nights were cold. Tswana women go barebreasted in the countryside when the weather is hot, or they may do it en famille more than I’m aware of. But this was a mixed lot of people crowding up behind her to see how Denoon would react. Also Dorcas was very westernized. It was done to affront. She was cheaply asserting her crude version of Tswana earthiness and disdain.