Mating

by Norman Rush

  I was enraged, but Nelson was cool. He asked for Hector.

  Go and find him in the blockyard, she said.

  I am just from that side, Nelson said. Hector has been away from the blockyard since Tuesday.

  Is it? she said, pretending to be surprised.

  Tell him I came by to thank him for a service, Nelson said, and then we all said gosiame, meaning everything was fine, and the encounter was over.

  Actually Raboupi had done Denoon a favor recently.

  What’s this? Denoon had said when he saw for the first time one of the Basarwa grandmothers in town, standing like a sentinel near the Sekopololo porch. She was in the usual assemblage of rags and skins, looking ancient and smiling the Basarwa smile of absolute innocence.

  I told him that lately they had been coming around and into the plaza one at a time and doing the same thing there that they do at the Kings Arms in Ghanzi—that is, standing around until somebody gives them some food, and if nobody gives them food in a reasonable time, starting to dance in place with their eyes closed and humming to themselves. That usually mobilizes a donation. They can dance for hours.

  He tried not to look at her. Trading is one thing, he said. This is begging. This can’t be.

  I asked him why it was a municipal problem here but not in Ghanzi, where they officially just ignore it. No, something had to be done.

  So when he asked me who the best Sesarwa speaker in Tsau was I told him the truth: it was Hector Raboupi, far and away.

  And now as we were leaving the unpleasantness with Dorcas, I learned that Raboupi had indeed gone down with him to ask the Basarwa not to come into Tsau to beg. Nelson assumed he had made himself understood. He was genuinely grateful to Raboupi.

  I heard again that things would get sorted out at the plenary.

  A Proposition

  One morning at shapeup two women approached me and asked in a hushed way if I would go to see Dineo to say if I would stand in the election for the mother committee. I was incredulous. I told them no one had asked me, to which they said that just now they were asking me. We say you are very pleasant and you are strong for women, they said. I told them how amazed and pleased I was, but that I couldn’t decide such a thing quickly, especially since it would be saying I would be in Tsau for at least one year more. And I would have to speak with Nelson.

  I brought the proposition up at the wrong time, I suppose. Nelson had pitched himself into a phase of dawn-to-dusk heavy manual labor. He was working extending the trail grid on the high south side of the koppie. He would come in at night, wash, eat, and sleep like the dead. He felt this was therapeutic for him. He thought it might work akin to Russian sleep therapy, where when you’re artificially kept asleep for a week—through brainwave manipulation, with an IV hookup, naturally—you wake up with your melancholia in abeyance. One of his tests of a sound society was the existence of arrangements letting you switch off into periods of intense physicality when you felt the need. The aerobic exercise craze in America was something he saw as a sad substitute for this option of heavy work, and wasteful in that you produce nothing socially useful while you do it. I knew he was tired, but I felt under pressure from the mother committee to say yea or nay, so I brought it up while he was nodding over his demitasse.

  He was surprised at the offer but, I discovered, absolutely determined to say nothing one way or the other as to whether I should accept. He would discuss neither it nor anything to do with it, not even something so germane as the question of whether or not this was intended to compensate for his having been made occasional at mother committee meetings. No, it was a tribute to me, was all he would say, and it was my affair and something I should decide strictly on my own. I strained to imagine what principle or scruple could possibly be at play in his attitude, but came up with nothing. I really pleaded. We have to discuss it, I said, because everything is connected.

  I was left groping. Was the idea for me to make a decision that would tend to settle things re his future without his participation when he felt divided on the merits of competing courses of action, and was this a situation it made sense for me to slide along with? I hate a vagarious temperament in men, which this was not: it was something else, but not necessarily something I liked a lot better. I hated the idea of being ananke for him, or being the shape the yarrowstalks took when they fell and which he had in secret committed himself to obey. Despite my saying it revealed a taste for stasis, he continued at points to quote Zeno’s arrow in my heart, I float in the plunging year—never very relevantly that I could see. What did it mean? Fate is our destiny, was a bétise by some major politician that he had happened to notice. In fact beware being great or important and ever saying anything stupid with Denoon around, because he would remember. The most he would say was Do it or don’t do it. I reminded myself of things he’d said about the ideal relationship between a man and a woman consisting of alternation between who gets to be yin and who gets to be yang, where one partner acts with force when he or she feels it and the reverse when not, whereupon the other picks up the cudgels for a while. American women hate this idea, he’d said. Not me, I like it, had been my position. But why was this sudden attack of laissez-faire of his being stimulated by my little situation with the mother committee? It was beyond me.

  I dropped it with him, then, and decided that if he could be inert so could I. It was pique. I said something noncommittal to my contacts on the mother committee, who left me alone afterward on the subject, and gradually the whole proposition seemed to fade away. When Nelson evinced some mild interest in what was happening I put him off, saying no one had followed up, which was the truth.

  This Is Intimacy, I Said

  A new thing was my sense that the impulse for wordless lounging together was coming as much from him as from me. We had had foreshadowings of this during times together in the bathing engine, but with nudity as an ingredient and the natural terminus put to events by the water cooling, it had been different. Now we would just lie down in the late afternoon or evening, fully clothed, not necessarily—in fact often not—with a precoital feeling going, and not even read or remind each other of things that needed to be done. He gave up always having a notepad and pencil at hand. Our lying down together was noninstrumental. I sensed and he confirmed that he preferred me not to be reading anything too absorbing while we were lying down, because it took me away. Poetry was fine because there were gaps between poems when I was present again. I couldn’t credit this. It was too flattering.

  About this time the question of true intimacy—how to define it, did we have it or not—blessedly went away. Sometimes as we were resting Nelson would roll over and confront me with a manic smile that made him look like the logo on a funhouse. This was to give me the opportunity to reassure him about his teeth and smile. This is intimacy, I said. He knew that one reason he smiled less than other people was his feeling that his teeth, which were a little jumbled at the sides, were unattractive, and when he smiled his face felt swollen to him, unnatural. This is intimacy, I said, and dredging up vintage fantasies about having sex with identical twins is fake intimacy, although that constitutes ninety percent of the male concept of it.

  Most of the activity around the mother committee elections clearly went on during the afternoons we were engaged in our new extended siestas, because it was almost a surprise when the elections were over. Denoon surprised me by insisting on getting down to the plaza to read the results in the freezing dawn rather than waiting to go by at midmorning. And he surprised me by having no particular reaction to the results. There were a few new women on the committee, but aside from Dorcas Raboupi advancing to the second chair I couldn’t detect any startling change. Dineo was still chair.

  The signs that there was less equanimity in Nelson than met the eye must have been around, but in my flattered state I was mostly missing them. They were wavelets.

  We were in deep winter, but thanks to the incredibly long growing season in the Kalahari were still getting
greens out of the nethouse, albeit only escarole, and only escarole as tough as sacking. Nelson wanted it exclusively in salads nevertheless. He could be insistent. I don’t know how many times I said This belongs in soup, minced, with onions. But no, we had to endure it in salads, and why exactly? Because people should eat something live or raw at every meal. I ascertained that this was something other than an avatar of my saying that the consumption of leafy greens in Tsau needed to be encouraged. He meant something else. It came to me then how unfailing he always was about picking off a cherry tomato or a sprig of parsley from our doorside tubs after a meal, or in seeking out a pinch of whatever we were sprouting that week in the event it hadn’t been an ingredient in our last collation.

  Was it that he wanted to eat perfectly as some kind of moral body English for everybody else in Tsau? Was it magic thinking?

  It wasn’t that. No, he said, what I think is you should eat something fresh—not much, necessarily—just something at every meal.

  Was it a sort of magic thinking connected with the rather uneven appreciation of sprouting manifest in Tsau? No. Nor was it anything I had said about enzymes, our needing more fresh food as we grow older because we produce fewer enzymes physiologically as we age. No, it predated that, he said.

  He supposed this had to be called an intuition. Somehow it had come to him. A noetic experience, not to put too fine a point on it.

  So this tic about always something fresh could be called revealed science, I said.

  I’ve rarely seen anyone so delighted with a phrase. So much so that apparently he was willing to forgo having escarole only in salad thenceforward. Some could go for soup. This was the way it was in those days. We seemed to coast over everything, up and over, a good thickness of rushing water between us and the boulders underneath.

  For me love is like this: you’re in one room or apartment which you think is fine, then you walk through a door and close it behind you and find yourself in the next apartment, which is even better, larger, more floorspace, a better view. You’re happy there and then you go into the next apartment and close the door and this one is even better. And the sequence continues, but with the odd feature that although this has happened to you a number of times, you forget: each time your new quarters are manifestly better and each time it’s breathtaking, a surprise, something you’ve done nothing to deserve or make happen. You never intend to go from one room onward to the next—it just happens. You notice a door, you go through, and you’re delighted again.

  This feeling of progress to better and larger was present in our conversation too. I suppose that in a sense the size of the items of his personalia I could now unreluctantly bring up obscured my view of smaller but still critical subjects that stayed difficult for us. And of course every topic I ventured was in reality a Trojan horse containing the questions What are you thinking of doing next? and when? and where do I fit in? Probably that was why it felt so congenial to get him on to the very large question of what a person should best do with his or her life. He was willing to return to this again and again.

  As a boy and pre-Gandhian he had had no doubt that the best thing you could do with your life was assassinate Franco. Certainly he had had no doubt it was the best thing his father could have done with the end part of his own life. But then in retrospect it was better that Franco had died naturally, with the falangists sated and out of gas, so that Spain could move to normalcy without spasms of reflexive killing on anyone’s part. His intensity about Evasion, about justifying your life, was so unusual in someone at his stage of the game that I was always struck. Of course how it could be that Tsau wasn’t enough of a crown and pinnacle for anyone’s life was beyond me. He was prickly about it and not willing to talk very deeply about Tsau, because, I gathered, it was too soon to sum it up as a success or failure. We talked about peonage in India, which is growing. He listened, but said tackling peonage would mean another physical project probably, and Tsau was his last project, full stop. He bridled a little when I pointed out that in these discussions he always seemed to present himself as someone radically closer to the end of his working life than someone at forty-eight had a right to feel. What about writing? He could tell me about writing. Writing without personal advocacy, if I meant political writing, was pointless. He had written something he would be glad to show me, something he had put into the right hands, something that in retrospect was absolutely correct. It had been an attack on the ANC embracing dual power as a strategy. Dual power amounts to seizing a cellblock while the rest of the prison remains in the hands of the bourgeoisie or the whites or the fascists, whichever. The great apotheosis of revolutionary dual power had been in Italy in 1920 when the workers had seized the factories in the north and held them just long enough to terrify the bourgeoisie into lining up behind Mussolini. There was no second act for the factory occupiers and none for the ANC once they got hold of the townships. Dual power in the South African context was a recipe for repeated decapitation. I could judge for myself how successful his argumentation had been, since the ANC was more yoked to dual power strategies than ever. I didn’t know what was or was not important in discussions like this, so I went off and wrote down what I could in my journal while what he’d said was still fresh. He was still brooding when I returned, but was willing to talk more.

  He said that there was actually one writing project that if carried out successfully would be enough to justify anyone’s life. That would be a convincing essay against violence, against participating in official violence, ever. He had the noumenal form of the essay. It would be brief, it would be secular. The text would be printed on India paper in thirty languages. It would make a book about the size of a deck of cards. There could be a foundation to distribute it to everyone, on the order of the Gideon Bibles, internationally though. Of course the problem was that the essay itself would have to be a thing of genius, of compression, of inspiration. It would be like asking oneself to sit down and write not only a poem but a great poem. It would have to be like Thoreau on civil disobedience or Hume on causality. The fact was, he said, that this essay already existed in him, in his mind and feelings, but that was the problem: it was a conviction about violence, against violence, that overwhelmed any text he had ever tried to confine it in. The text was always pallid and weak compared to what he knew and felt, which was the proof that he lacked the genius to externalize himself on this issue. With this text you could cut the roots of war, of armies, and so on. Telling me this he got slightly flushed.

  I was having trouble being sure how completely serious he was, especially when he seemed to remember that there was one other project that would justify his life however everything else he had done to date got ultimately judged. This would be to do something about flight capital, secret accounts, to do something conclusive to make the banksters stop helping the Wabenzi, the kleptocracy, by making bank secrecy illegal everywhere. I didn’t know who the Wabenzi were: it was what the Kenyans called the African civil servants who drive Mercedes-Benzes. If you wanted to accelerate African development by some unimaginable multiple, bank secrecy reform was what a serious person would put his best effort toward. Of course that would involve lobbying, going through the UN, setting up an organization, and he had sworn an oath to himself that he was never going to sit in an office again in his life. So that apparently was that. How seriously in all this I was being taken was not my question at that time.

  It ended nowhere. In retrospect I regret being so passive. But I wanted to hear everything. I think I tried to be more probing about the bank secrecy idea—it had some feeling of reality and possibility about it—but I was deflected by his asking from nowhere if I didn’t think it was interesting that there was no term equivalent to cuckold to apply to women when they were being betrayed. Was it because the condition was so far from exceptional that no particular term was needed? He knew of no language in which that was not the case.

  I love your mind, I said.

  A Shift in the Scenery

&n
bsp; It seemed we could ride up and over everything, not excluding the to me rather bold maiden decisions of the new mother committee to postpone the plenary and admit men to full membership in Sekopololo. Men could work for credits now instead of only for pula, which was an economic advantage to them, but they were still ineligible to run for any office or serve on committees. And there was no question of any change in the system of female-only inheritance of chattels and homesteads. I tried to tease Nelson by comparing men in Tsau to Jews in the Middle Ages or Indians in Fiji, with respect to land ownership. I was being polemical, and I was quick to add that I appreciated that the difference was that men in Botswana, on past performance, deserved it, unlike the Jews or Indians, obviously. He wouldn’t be drawn. The mother committee was shifting the scenery around quite a bit, I thought, but he was remaining serene.

  Except that he did want to talk, however calmly, about the postponement of the plenary. His point was that there had to be a plenary. It was the custom to have at least one a year. He said more than once We have to assume they’re going to change their minds. Everybody had liked plenaries in the past. It was important to collect the whole social body together periodically. Batswana loved kgotla meetings, so they should love the plenary, which it was just like. He felt strongly enough about this that he had gone to the length of socially letting fall expressions of disappointment that the plenary was being postponed, obviously with the expectation that they would be passed along.

  Letting his opinion be known around the plaza a few more times seemed to be enough for him. He stopped bringing up the plenary altogether, which was what I wanted.

  So naturally I brought it up again myself. I had something to say that I thought might put the whole question to rest in a profounder way.