Mating

by Norman Rush

  There was a significant amount about Denoon in my journal for me to extract and collate, for which I needed index cards or paper that could be cut up to serve as index cards. There were no index cards available. In fact we were in one of our chronic general paper famines. We had orders in for all kinds of paper, but inevitably they were the items left out of the consignments of sundries the supply plane brought in. In my journal I had no more than forty blank pages left, and these were not expendable because my diarizing was going to go on simultaneously with my anatomy of Nelson. An example of my focus was my strolling in the vicinity of the school one gloaming and being tempted to slip in and pinch one or two exercise books from the handful we had left. But I remembered how proud we all were of the absence of stealing in Tsau and controlled myself.

  It occurred to me I could use aerogram blanks, which the post office had plenty of. In a way, that was perfect. I could appear to be writing to friends when in fact I was doing otherwise. Nelson for some reason liked the idea of my writing to friends, or possibly what he liked was the appearance of my having as many friends as my quote unquote letter-writing implied. Seeing me writing even inspired him to do more than he usually did vis-à-vis dinner and housekeeping, which was already substantial, though, it now came to me, not as substantial as he’d originally led me to expect. He thought I was referring to my journal for current incidents to include in my letters. It was admittedly a little reckless of me. The only drawback to the airletters was their price, but something about that felt right to me. I put fictitious names and addresses on my airletters and even sealed them up, only to have to later open them and cut up the sections for classification.

  It was surprising to see how many sections I had that bore one way or another on Denoon and fatherhood, or more specifically on Nelson and his father. Was this because I was interested in any clue that would tell me whether or not he was germane as a father-of-my-child prospect? There was too much on fatherhood. I had to compress it. For example, I had a surplus on the contention that good father-son relationships are predicated on the father having some expertise or maestria to pass on to the son—nothing about daughters here—preferably something wherewith the son can make money, although sports or philately or hunting and fishing will do. Because his father was in advertising there was nothing vocational to convey, advertising being a fraud and something his father was ashamed of in any case. Pathetically, along these lines, he realized his father had tried to tell him about something he did know, drinking, or rather how to get away with it, as in avoiding hangovers by taking two aspirin and drinking all the water you can hold before going to sleep when you’ve overindulged. This was along with other advice at the time Nelson was leaving for college.

  Religion was another hypertrophied facet. It was everywhere. He was adamant about the Catholic Church. Even if he acknowledged for a second that there might be some progressive Catholics in Brazil, say, his next question was sure to be Why is it it never occurs to the Pope to excommunicate a serial murderer like Pinochet? or something similar. According to the Koran, when Mohammed went up to heaven to meet Allah he asked Allah to reduce the number of obligatory daily prayers to whatever it is today, fifteen or sixteen, which Allah agreed to as a mark of approval. But did this belong under Religion or under Repetition, another very oversupplied category? Or where did religion, the most effective of the placebos, go?: under Religion or Humor? At this point I decided to let the category alone for the foreseeable future, which was, in retrospect, dumb of me.

  Humor was tough for several reasons. Sometimes something I’d collected would seem to me to be humor and other times it would seem merely median sardonica. Did his singing go under Humor? He liked to sing a parody of The Impossible Dream, in which he ate the inedible meal and drank the unpotable beverage, and so on. The question was whether it should go under Humor or a character trait like obstinacy, because while I’d smiled the first two or three times I’d heard him sing this, I finally had to signal that I wasn’t finding it very funny, and finally that I wasn’t finding it funny at all. But he was still singing it off and on, trying to get my approval for ongoing refinements in the lyrics. Other areas of his humor were slightly invasive as well. For some reason he continued to think it was funny to pretend I liked the music of Bob Dylan, when in fact all I had admitted at an earlier point was that I liked It Ain’t Me Babe. He would murmur-sing How many times must the cannon balls fly Before they’re forever banned, and then shout Wuxtry! Wuxtry! Historic Agreement! UN Bans Cannonballs Forever! Flintlocks Next! And of course out of my supposed adoration of Dylan came our longrunning match on why the band can’t play. There were many more reasons than I’d remembered. Mine were consistently more hubristic than his, I noticed. He was not really ever going to evolve much beyond a strumpet stealing the trumpet or Jean Arp stealing the harp. Gender may be involved more than I recognized. He told me something he’d said jokingly, to which his wife had taken exception. Two people they knew had been living together for eight years and had decided to marry. So Denoon said to them Marriage is wonderful, this is great news, I know you’ll find the addition of the sexual dimension to your relationship a great improvement to your life and a real eye-opener. He seemed surprised that I agreed with Grace that this was low-level. I’d put down very few of my own sallies, except when he’d seemed to react inordinately, as for some reason he did to my I’m attracted to you as to a magnate, or you attract me like a magnate. I persevered with this category. And not to venture too far into the underside of our household humor, he also laughed inordinately when I was getting into bed and slightly farted and he said Is that the way you greet me? I replied quick as a flash That’s the only language you understand. Neither of us could figure out why we thought this was funny, but we both did.

  The physical description I assembled is a masterpiece of some kind. I doubt that there is a more minute physical description of one human being by another anywhere. I wish I had never done it.

  I Love a Demystified Thing Inordinately

  I was improving on my texts as I went along, adding asides and priorly left-out associations.

  That the fact that I was creating material almost as fast as I was classifying the material already in hand didn’t bother me meant something—either I was at heart a congenital academic or the prospect of indefinitely delaying coming to a conclusion about living with Denoon was not unwelcome to me. Neither interpretation was flattering. One or both were probably right, but this realization was completely weightless, somehow. I kept on, drivenly, with that mobbed feeling your brain gets when you’re cramming for finals in nonelectives. Meanwhile the issue of the night men was turning crescive without my noticing.

  One morning three women I particularly liked came to get me for an arch raising. They were Mma Isang, Mina Hlotse, who was our best midwife, and Prettyrose Chilume, who was physically so slight that her contribution to the actual labor of arch raising was basically spiritual, even though she pulled and shoved along with the rest of us. I was always asked. That day we were supposed to raise an arch over Our Mother Street, the mother being not the Virgin Mary, as I think I’d been bemusedly assuming, but Mme Mpopo Kalighatle. This was an average arch, about twenty feet high and seven wide, made of gum tree logs enameled red and black in alternating bands, with the street names carved into the crosspiece and painted with tar into which multicolored glass fragments had been pressed while the tar was still sticky. Raising the arch involved pushing the crosspiece up using claw-tipped poles while the uprights were slid into the pits dug to receive them. The main problem was the weight of the poles. You needed a few fairly sturdy women in the crew. These events were largely celebratory. A few words would be said about the virtues of the honoree, which, in Mme Mpopo’s case—I was about to learn—included an unfailing willingness to work wherever she was needed most and an aptitude for intercepting children about to wander out into the desert. She’d died two years earlier. Her name came up often. She had a genuine reputation fo
r great benevolence, and I wished I had known her. A new thing was that men were offering their services at the raisings, claiming that they could do it faster and more safely. In fact there had been a time or two when the arch had not gotten to apogee at first try and had flopped back, narrowly missing someone’s foot. But women are nimble. Whatever we lack in hoisting power we more than make up in agility at getting out of the way of toppling structures. We were perfectly able to manage the raisings on our own.

  I was scribbling away when mes amis said koko. It was a relief to feel obliged to knock off, since I seemed to be in quicksand anyway. One problem I was encountering in making my compilations was deciding when some striking remark of Nelson’s was more than it seemed to be at first blush, determining if perchance it was meant to convey something in an aesopian way to me. I might be looking for something even deeper than that, some warning or cue, some little nothing from the bowels of his mind, something to pay attention to because his unconscious was my friend, because Nelson loved me. Just then I was trying to see the relationship between Nelson’s cynical observation that the meaning of life in every formulation seemed to reduce to finding or inventing a perfect will to be subject to, the relationship of that to scanting remarks about la femme moyenne sensuelle—which we agreed I was not, of course—finding her raison d’être in the love of a male as close to alpha as she can get. Then, to add to that, I had a handful of asides alluding to certain self-evident similarities between happy marriages and socialism, or just between marriage as an idea and socialism. Did he mean the two are similarly impossible, something as blunt and cheap as that? But that led to the bolus of whether he was or wasn’t, himself, a socialist. One, he hated his father for being, merely, a prosocialist, a fan of the concept: that was utterly clear. Two, Nelson referred to himself from time to time as a socialist, but meaning something particular by it: his socialism was closer to the noumen than anybody’s. And in the same jeremiad he could be referring to himself as a socialist in one breath and execrating genre marxists and social cubists in the next. His socialism was socialism, their socialism was militant nostalgia, and so on. Anyway, I didn’t mind leaving all this for the nonce.

  Mma Isang was hurrying us. I asked why and was told it was because a decision had been made to set up the arch without notice, which would prevent certain people, the baruledi, from coming to try and help. It would all be finished before the baruledi were even awake. Since baruledi means roofers or roof repairers, I was at sea. My friends were surprised that they had to explain it to me. The baruledi ba bojang, thatch roofers, were the night men. Thatch repairing was a bawdy if rather oblique euphemism for the service they provided. Clearly, resentment against the night men, on the part of some of the women, was getting substantial.

  They are uprising against us, Mina said. It is all because of Raboupi. They just uprise against us without fear. You can see so many queens just defending about them.

  There are now as many as nine night men. Mina named them. Raboupi wasn’t one of them, but it was suspected he took a cut of the take. I asked more questions. There were some reasonable controls on the practice, at least. Mina said that the baruledi would always, now, bring protection from the clinic. And it was established that they were not to idle forever in order to be invited to meals: they had to leave when they were asked to go. I thought that the objections to the night men might arise from service being withheld from the aunts, generally. But that wasn’t happening, as I should have known. One of the attractive things about African society across the board is how old a woman can be and still be some younger man’s sex pal.

  Apparently what was disliked was a growing blatancy about the enterprise. When I asked them how it was I hadn’t noticed all this if it was so major, they shrugged, saying I overlooked it because it was hidden under a shadow, an ironic Tswanism meaning it wasn’t hidden at all, ergo I was just not paying attention. They grumbled on as we proceeded, but I was relieved, oddly, about the whole thing. The notion that sex was nonpresent as an issue in Tsau, or was being transmuted wholesomely and wonderfully into something neutral and socially positive had always felt dubious to me, not to put too fine a point on it. I love demystified things inordinately. Also I loved it that the whores in Tsau were men.

  The actual raising was very rushed, in fact, and throughout there was a subtle feeling of getting away with something. Several women spoke in praise of Our Mother Mpopo, each one in a very telescoped way—considering what the norm for occasions like this is. And lo just as we finished a little detachment of Raboupists turned up. They were welcome as spectators. Their group demeanor suffered slightly when the group was joined by a copain emerging blinking from a nearby rondavel not his own. We reacted kindly. We were already leaving.

  I ran into Nelson as he was trotting down toward the site of the concluded event, his grapevine having belatedly functioned. I had to tell him it was over. He was genuinely unhappy. He’d prepared remarks a week ago or more. He had been deeply fond of Mpopo. There were things to say about her that only he could have said. He asked me who’d spoken. He’d known Mpopo better and longer than any of them. And so on. He was very distressed.

  He had a right to know why the arch raising had been unannounced, so I told him. I wanted him to know that his not being included was an artifact, not something deliberate. In retrospect this was reckless, I suppose, but in mitigation I think I was under the impression I’d already mentioned the night men to him, however glancingly. It’s possible I had but that he’d been in his occasional, rare actually, though less rare recently, Stepford husband mode, only appearing to hear me. Maybe I hadn’t mentioned it.

  His reaction was beyond disliking being the last one on the block to hear. He was trying to conceal how shaken he was. My thrusts in the direction of levity were a waste. I said he should look on Tsau as finally normalizing, first via the development of begging, thanks to the Basarwa, and now with prostitution.

  We had to sit down somewhere. At first he didn’t want to talk. Then he wanted to know everything I knew. A sure sign he was in extremis was his pressing down on the top of his head with his fingernails, as though a column of force was trying to emerge from his fontanel. He did this twice.

  I Hear the Biography of Edward Lear

  He stayed rattled all day and into that night. I thought sex might help and I showed I was approachable. I don’t remember exactly how that foundered, but it had something to do with my hands, which were pale blue from an afternoon in the fabric printery. We got off the track, although this was far from the kind of thing that would normally derail him. Their heads were green and their hands were blue and they went to sea in a sieve, he started quoting. He loved Edward Lear. So did I. But did I know what an unhappy life Lear had lived, how his homosexuality had forced him to live out his life in places like Corsica? No, and he told me, in extenso. Slowly this developed the flavor of an incident from my past when someone I knew to be personally desperate seized on a book he had been recently reading and I hadn’t read and proceeded to tediously summarize the whole thing as a means of evading the central misery we both knew was there. I never need to read the Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens.

  Why Do You Look This Way?

  I don’t know how long it was, exactly, one day or two or three, three being the most it could have been, until the end of things began in earnest.

  Whichever night it was, at dinner Nelson was silent, which constituted a total prodigy between us. He had been spending time closeted with Dineo, enough time to make me uncomfortable. The word was that he had been making inquiries about the night men.

  I said Why do you look this way?

  How do I look? It took him an effort to say even that much.

  You look dissociated, almost.

  Not that I said it, but my model for the way he was looking was my mother in certain of her troughs.

  Then came a ghastly effort to appear animated and normal, ruined by his voice being sepulchral.

  I finally
got out of him what he had been discussing with Dineo. It had nothing to do with the night men. Hector Raboupi had gotten someone pregnant, a minor.

  He had been planning not to tell me who, astonishingly. I got it out of him by reminding him I had friends who would tell me anyway.

  It was Adelah Makhise. She was thirteen, a child. I loved her. She was darling and very smart. She was preparing to transfer to the government secondary at Kang. I was sick with rage. I wanted something done. There was a complete reversal going on. Now I was marginal with rage over this and he was supposed to soothe me and contextualize, whereas before it had been my role to calm him down over the night men. This had nothing to do with the night men or prostitution. It had been a simple seduction, apparently.

  But Nelson was very wrung out. He had no surplus, nothing to give me. Everything he said was pro forma. And the worst part was that I developed the conviction he was more interested in observing me than in helping me. I felt I was being studied.

  I know how random I must have seemed. I wanted to know everything, but in no particular order. Was Raboupi planning to marry this child? Nelson laughed. This set me off even more. The one place in the world something like this should never happen to Adelah, to this wonderful child, was Tsau. What was Raboupi’s punishment going to be?

  You know the culture, Nelson said. That meant the most that Raboupi would have to do by way of recompense was pay Adelah about forty pula per month, assuming she even requested it. But what are the women going to do about it? I wanted to know. There had to be better answers than the piddling forty pula. Raboupi should be punished, humiliated. There should be something like the practice in ancient Rome of creditors hiring mobs of people to follow deadbeats everywhere and identify them for what they were. I even remembered what that was called—the convicium—thanks to my cryptomnesia. I guess he was used to hits like this issuing from me from time to time, but I took his lack of reaction as meaning something more. My point was that a social invention addressing cases like Adelah’s was lacking here. Who was to blame, if not the person in Tsau whose second name was social inventions?