by Norman Rush
I did errands that week—shopping, going to Immigration to cement relations—at a run. I ran because I was so unsure about Nelson. I was perpetually afraid I’d come back and find him gone, recovered in my absence and gone. He was essentially doing nothing that I could see. People who wanted to see him he referred to as the curious. He got up late. He walked around the garden. He ate small meals. He bathed or showered a couple of times a day. He napped. He would listen to music if I suggested it and set up the stereo and chose something. The only basic change was that he was reading again, which was the good news. The bad news was that he would only read one book, the Tao Te Ching, which he had brought with him, that book and only that book. I had begun to hate Lao Tzu. It was impossible to get a discussion going, however tangential, relating to the Tao. I gathered that the whole thing was too sacred, too central to what was distracting him. We slept in a vast bed. He went to sleep every night at eight o’clock. Sex was not rearing its lovely head.
I wanted to supply just a little in the way of delicacies available only in the capital, but Nelson was showing a marked preference for the food of the people: bogobe, other porridges, maas, all the staples of our existence at Tsau. He never told me to stop getting the Wensleydale cheese or the occasional cup of crème fraîche, but he took only token tastes, mostly, then asked for his porridge and maybe a piece of fruit. I wasn’t made to feel guilty about my European eating propensities. I could do what I liked. I was eating a little too much at first because I felt I ought to finish up what he was declining to more than taste.
That week yielded exactly one unsolicited comment or statement from him, although he continued answering everything that was put to him. That one unsolicited comment was, I think, Time is an ape. I think this is what he said. I asked him to repeat it and he just said Never mind. I would have pursued it except that I’d sworn off all pressure for the week, just to see if he might slide back toward normalcy.
After the embassy nurse came over I was depressed, as depressed as I’d been. She took him into the bedroom and I could hear the repartee. It sounded completely normal. It would, naturally, since it was just Q and A. I had told her point-blank that I wanted something from her that would let me refer him to a psychiatrist somewhere. At least I wanted her to see if she could get Nelson designated a stop on the circuit the embassy medical officer in Pretoria made from time to time. She came out effusing about him, apparently not only because he was healing so wonderfully but because he was himself such a wonderful person. He had been using a knobkerrie as a crutch, and he could stop that anytime he wanted. She would schedule him for x-rays but only because I seemed so determined on it. She wished she could find more Americans his age with his blood pressure. Psychologically this was just a man who was relaxing in order to heal. He was fine. His reflexes were like an adolescent’s. All this was conveyed to me with an unsuppressible, wistful, jealous but still Christian look that said what a lucky dog I was to have this man. She went on to show me that she fully empathized with how it must have been for me when he was missing. She was about forty. She was unmarried. By the time she was leaving she was more concerned about me than about Nelson, with my incomprehensible fixations and misinterpretations, as she obviously saw them. I wondered that she didn’t find it odd that Nelson never joined us but stayed sitting on the bed where he’d been left, thinking about something or other, deeply. She gave me an over-the-counter sleeping pill that was risible. I did confirm that the only psychiatrist in Botswana was still the Italian in Lobatse, with this addendum: he was a Yugoslav, who mainly spoke Italian. Her look confirmed everything I had already concluded re hopelessness in that direction. After she left I felt like killing myself for not mentioning that the only thing Nelson had volunteered all week was the sentence Time is an ape, and how would she like that in a boyfriend? Why could I not bring myself to say the words nervous breakdown?
There was one false dawn that week, when someone turned up at the gate whom he seemed to want to see. Nelson was sitting embowered in the blazing jacaranda. He recognized the face at the gate and got up with alacrity, actually, to stop the yardman from sending this guest away.
I watched from the kitchen. The visitor was a pathetic fixture in downtown Gabs, a refugee from Lesotho, a high school teacher who had been tortured after the Chief Jonathan coup in the seventies. He was in his forties and he was a gargoyle. One eye was half closed with scar tissue and there were terrible scars on his neck and down his chest, which you could see because he never buttoned his shirt. He walked with one leg dragging. Torture had made him a gargoyle. Apparently Nelson had known him. Hiram was his name. He got a little stipend from the UN High Commission on Refugees and lived in a shed behind a Canadian’s house. He was always being stolen from. Expatriates would take pity on him and give him food and clothes, especially when their tours were up, which the local thieves had figured out. He forgot to lock his place up half the time, so he was always being robbed. Mentally he was not quite right. He was always smiling. He wrote things, strange manifestos and so on, in Sesotho. You would see him circulating around Gaborone, and occasionally he would beg. He would go into an office or a shop and beg for writing paper, never money. Children were afraid of him. He was usually wearing rags.
In came Hiram. They sat down facing, knees almost touching, on lawn chairs, myself thinking that now I was going to see my love galvanized back into himself by this icon of man’s inhumanity to man. I was willing to bet on it. This would remind him. This was his walking and talking raison d’être.
One thing about Hiram was that he was voluble. He had a strange, hissing voice, and he was voluble in a way you could hardly make out, but once he had your eyes he kept talking, soliciting you, nexing with you.
But lo, not at all, this was real! Hiram was silent. This was like the exchange of benevolent glances between the Pope and the Dalai Lama. Neither party said a word. Nelson rested his hand on Hiram’s shoulder for a long time, then took it away. At the beginning of things, Nelson had made me write down the name of a book, The Power of the Charlatan, from which had come a phrase he’d used a couple of times and that I’d inquired about: e nosatu et sta ben così: I’ve smelled him and now I feel so good. At some point in Italy there were charlatans who sold sniffs of themselves. I crept out to hear if they were talking at all. It was still silent benevolence. After fifteen minutes Hiram got up to go. The event was over. I sped back into the kitchen to throw food items into a sakkie for him and grab one of Nelson’s better unwhite shirts, and I managed to catch him just as he was turning the corner at the end of our street. Nelson was back in his bower.
This also was the week I found my first four or five indisputably gray hairs. I was shocked. I thought they were supposed to come in by ones for a while, then twos, and then much later in threes and genuine arrays like this. I blamed my surprise on a certain inattention to my appearance that had taken root in Tsau, and on the bleary inadequate mirror and lighting I had available for my toilettes there. One of the hairs was oddly coarse and semicorkscrewed, and I pulled it out, but then stopped. There is the joke about finding a little golden screw in your navel and unscrewing it and then having your anus drop out onto the floor. My equivalent of that, after I tugged my premier gray hairs out, was the descent of a pseudo insight that gripped me for a day or two until it disappeared. The insight was that Nelson’s whole mien was an act intended in a kind way to get me to relinquish him, go away on my own initiative, because he was too old for me and in fifteen years there would be trouble, pain, however we parsed it, wherever we went, whatever we did: there would be inevitable tragedy, it was a terrible idea, like marrying a Negro was supposed to be in the forties. So it seemed brilliant just then to let the gray remain, to not look any younger than I had to.
I was being driven to the edge by Nelson’s seeming normal, for one reason or another, to everyone but me. The nurse, Rita, had given a religious interpretation to his experience, I was sure of it. I knew she was Catholic. I knew they’d
murmured back and forth about the meaning of life during his socalled examination. This was not someone who could tell the difference between enlightenment and a nervous breakdown and elucidate it to me while she was at it. Then as to his stasis and dolce far niente: Europeans will go into villages in Africa and not infrequently see people not at work at anything discernible, not doing a task or hurrying en route from one task to another. There is what to us looks like lavish standing around, alone or in silent groups, people sometimes but not always leaning against a tree or a wall in a sort of self-communing state. And then you have the ultrarural population, people on cattle posts tens and hundreds of miles from anywhere, without amusements of any kind that you can imagine other than listening to Springbok Radio or Radio Botswana if they’re lucky enough to have a radio. When you see them these are not depressed or unhappy people, or bored people, insofar as anything like that can be determined from the outside. So to the Batswana all Nelson would seem to be doing would be partaking subtly in that particular lifeway. Nothing odd about that. Of course the premise of Tsau was to break poverty in the village by replacing stasis with its opposite, contests and meetings and inventions and dynamism. But nobody around here was thinking about that.
No, he was just all right, meaning just fine, to the locals. The resident help had almost nothing to do, we were so undemanding and so few, so they leapt into the breach and devoted themselves to his wardrobe, starching and ironing and bleaching his vanilla costume, for example, into a blinding state of perfection. He didn’t object. This was slightly a judgment on me by all concerned, I felt. Why had I let him go around in so much lesser a state of splendor? He looked so splendid, groomed up this way. It helped that his weight was perfect. He was growing a beard, but shaving meticulously every day, so as not to let beard shadow creep up into his cheeks. I waited out the first week. I gathered that what he anticipated was going back to Tsau, soon, apparently, and presumably with me.
The first week was up and I was inwardly girding my loins for strife, uprooting his mode or making him say what it was, making me understand it.
We were having mint tea at the dining room table when he said, almost as an afterthought to my questions about things that needed to be done in Gabs, We can be married.
Then he said it again: We can be married here. And then he added And we can have children.
I burst away from the table and went off to our room. I wept but I was enraged. I left the door open to give him the chance to come normally after me and see what was wrong, what he could do.
From where I was I could see him still sitting at the table, looking vaguely after me but not rising. What was this? Was it a byproduct of collapse and regression into a kind of simpleminded protohusband role, or was it enlightenment and his inner self telling him it was time to multiply with me, or was it the last worst slash of the knife at me, a trick to disorient me and make me let go? Was he incapable of seeing this as an act of force against me, this reversal of every position he had ever had on the subject and an exploitation of what he certainly knew was a highly particular vulnerability of mine, in my situation? He had torn me away from midwifing in Tsau in order to help me keep my natalist impulses from starting to churn, which incidentally would have run athwart his bias against having children, there being so many unwanted ones in the world. And now this.
Anyway, with that he had unnerved me and I was in no condition to start on the interrogation I had been preparing myself for. Could he have done this deliberately to derail me?
Psychology
I think it was weakness that made me want to reknit for a couple of days before I made the assault on whatever his new belief structure was, that and the news that there was an actual trained psychiatrist briefly in town, a Sri Lankan on consult at the Ministry of Health. Nelson had been willing to see the nurse. But there was no question of his going to Pretoria or Johannesburg, because that was South Africa. So mightn’t he see Dr. Pereira if I could arrange it? Pereira would come over. Nelson wouldn’t have to leave the house.
At breakfast I went at it obliquely.
I mentioned that there was a Sri Lankan psychiatrist in town.
He said Sri Lanka, that could have been a paradise after the English left except for two mistakes. One was canceling English as the official language, which drove the Tamils wild because they were having enough trouble in the civil service without having to learn to write their memos in Sinhalese. The other mistake slips my mind.
I was alert, waiting for more, but he fell into silence again.
Having gotten Dr. Pereira’s name into the atmosphere, I swung into some overkill on psychology, remembering Nelson’s hostility to the discipline and his hatred of clinical psychology in particular, a specialty he thought of as about as respectable as colonic irrigation. I may have played a role in exacerbating his feelings here—not that much help was needed—with the horrible true story of something that had happened when my mother and I lived in the gatehouse of an estate a clinical psychologist couple had rented the rest of. One of their patients, a woman being treated for shyness, had frozen to death in their parking area one winter. She had had car trouble and hadn’t wanted to bother anyone. She’d been in treatment with one of them for five years. Also the psychologists were cryptosurvivalists, and we would see vanloads of canned goods and staples being delivered in the dead of night and stuffed into various outbuildings. Nelson and I had been peas in a pod on the subject. I’d torn out an item in the Economist to show him, reporting that the two hundred top psychologists, department heads and deep thinkers and top-dog practitioners, had been asked to list the most important theories or discoveries in the field in the last twenty-five years. And there was total disagreement among the lists, no consensus anywhere, absolutely the only uniformity being that if they’d discovered or proposed something themselves it would likely appear on their list of the top five advances. So now I was about to beg him to let himself be psychologized for my sake.
I did a roundabout rehabilitation of psychology. Had I ever told him, I asked him, about my discovery in my mid-twenties of why doing mental work would suddenly become much easier for me at about three in the afternoon? I had been talking about grammar school with someone, and how much I’d hated it. Then through that the click had come. Everything in grammar school had been coercion and boredom, which ended at three when school let out. After that my concentration was the same morning, noon, or night: all I had to do was remind myself that I was no longer at Horace Mann.
And then there was the story of my aversion to supermarkets. I would always become faint when I got up to the checker, slightly faint. My aversion cost me money, because it was so distinct a thing I’d go long distances and be willing to spend more in order to shop in little mom and pop places. Then one night when I had no choice I went to a Safeway. As I got to the checkout a woman going out the main door changed her mind and came back in my direction. She was an older woman, dressed in a particular way, and I was already in the penumbra of feeling faint, which seeing her deepened. She came back and got whatever she’d left behind on the counter and left. Her face was obscurely terrifying to me, like a death’s-head. But then I relived a moment when I’d been on line in a supermarket with my mother and a neighbor woman came up and made a furtive urgent gesture for my mother to come aside so she could tell her something. And as I watched them go I knew what it was. I must have been ten. This woman’s son had obviously ratted on me about some sexplay I’d initiated. I was known as the Fig Tree Girl among the little boys I preyed on and delighted in the shelter of a particular fig tree. Testicles fascinated me. Then there was my mother coming back looking like the most revengeful and, worst of all, most disappointed monster in the world. It was her disappointment that slew me, because she was seeing me as not normal, me her darling. Once I recaptured that moment of shame I could shop anywhere.
Light from the caves, Nelson said.
I got back to Pereira. Would he see him?
Certainly, Ne
lson said.
Dr. Pereira Attends
In came Pereira—a Tamil, from his coloring. He could give Nelson twenty minutes. Going in he was very brisk.
He had been totally unwilling to have me tell him what I thought Nelson’s situation was. I had barely gotten the words hyperpassivity and decompensation out of my mouth when he reminded me that he was very well used to diagnosing any kind of personality inversion.
The twenty minutes stretched into more like ninety minutes.
I could not believe the outcome. I felt like shaking him. He was small.