by Norman Rush
I must have said This is too much, because he said What is too much?
Nothing, I said. I realized I was doing something women did only in nineteenth-century novels. I was wringing my hands.
I should tell you about the lion, he said. I think you heard a parody of what it was like.
A lion found me, a male, a rogue, solitary, as the sun was going down that night.
It came toward me after nosing around what was left of my horse. By the way, streams of ants as big as my thumb were covering the carcass, and more were coming all the time.
The male was advancing on me, then I felt the presence I told you about behind me. This upsets you.
Well. At the same time from a tree off to my right a horde of bees came out and formed an arc in the air between me and the lion. They made a sound louder than I’ve ever heard bees make in my life.
I know this is amazing. I have no proof the whole thing wasn’t a hallucination. And I know you never see bees around at sunset.
The thing is that the lion surprised me and terrified me so much I had no chance to go into the interval. I was pumping out fear.
The lion came close to me twice. Within six feet. The second time he was stung around the eyes. I passed out. I woke up in blackness later and I think I still heard the bees. That was the night before the day the Baherero found me. I woke up, and the scene was quiet. And there was another odd thing. The stench of the carcass had been torture. That morning it was gone. In fact I thought I smelled something almost like cosmetics, if I smelled anything at all, coming from that direction.
You agree everything could have been a hallucination, in theory, the lion, everything, don’t you? I asked him.
Certainly, he said.
I could tell from his expression that this admission was pro forma, which took the heart out of me. This amounted to saying whenever it was convenient, Of course, anything could be hallucination. If that was the plan, then where were we? Nothing was going to be scrutinized. I had the sensation of my chest cavity filling up with gravel.
I said But the feeling you have about consciousness, this is not a hallucination.
No.
So it must mean something about the other events that went with it.
It may.
I said Do you think the world should be taught how to achieve or at least know about this kind of consciousness you have?
He said Not necessarily.
I was flailing around. I was coming from different directions. I asked him if he thought he was normal, considering how little he was doing in the course of a day.
He thought so.
I knew he wasn’t normal in at least one respect because of an unconscionable thing I’d done the night before. I’d gotten into bed naked and we’d begun embracing, all in silence—which was atypical. And I’d discovered what I wanted to discover, that the same things made him sincere as always. But then I’d stopped and moved away to my side of the bed. I moved away gradually enough for him to protest. But he let me slip away without any semblance of pursuit whatsoever. This was accommodation gone mad, at least in terms of our protocols. This was the man I’d learned the phrase A standing prick has no conscience from. Why had I done it, when I was fifty percent certain the outcome might be what it had been? It was plucking at an old generic fear of mine about marriage in general, maybe my most fundamental fear. What happens in a marriage if your husband is no longer sexually compelled by you? What happens in your heart when you sense he’s pretending to want to do it? How old are you when this happens? The whole thing is unbearable.
I said And you think your going back to Tsau is what everyone there wants. You have no suspicion they might not mind so much having two fewer faces, white faces, hanging around?
He was never more puzzled. Why, what did I mean? Almost everyone at Tsau came to him before he left to say he should come back as soon as he could once he was rested.
More than came to me, then, I said.
You were included, he said.
I don’t know why this delusion or fiction in particular so undid me, but I went into a mad scene so embarrassing in retrospect that I’ve repressed half of it.
I was manic and global. Everything was a last straw. I went up the hill on passivity and down again. How did he define love, in his present state? Did he deny he was insanely passive? Also did he think the capacity to get pleasure out of sheerly being awake was something: (A) everybody had at one time had but they’d lost? (B) animals had but we didn’t and he like a shaman had gotten from his experience and a little help from the eternal feminine? (C) something that people like me could be taught and would he teach me? or (D) if he tried to teach me and I failed to get the hang of it would he or would he not say that might create a hairline crack in our relationship? granted that he loved me more than life itself. Did he think I enjoyed being driven out of control like this? Or suppose all this was quote unquote real, did he imagine I wanted to spend the rest of my life with someone marching in the direction of total perfection as in the case of someone so homeostatic he had the eating habits of an angelic being of some kind? I think at this point I compared him to an exotic flower, a bromeliad, because during his time in the wilderness he had lived on light and air, virtually, the way they do. I had added up the food he’d had available and it was negligible, so he was a bromeliad and not a human being.
I was circular. In my display the pattern that developed was that I would say something irrational and then walk away, then come back, be irrational and circular again, then drift away, slightly farther each time, finally finding myself going into the house at one point. The help was transfixed, but I hardly cared. I kept going farther afield and coming back to see if he was all right and if there was any change, had he thought of anything to say to me to stop all this from uncoiling this way. There was nothing I could do. I said to myself I could have fallen in love with a Catholic, whose beliefs were more outré and more numerous than anything my poor Nelson seemed to be believing lately. But of course I couldn’t have unless he was presented to me in the costume of someone else, a rational person, unless I had fallen strictly through the commands of the flesh, which can happen but more with men than with women, no matter what the conventional wisdom says. But always he was just still sitting there, his hands tented. Think what you’re doing, I said to myself. Was I showing him madness, my madness, my worst self opposed to his?
He pointed out, on one of my return swings, that my period was showing on the seat of my skirt. That I attended to, and when I returned he was rising, not abruptly or in any way dismissively to me, to go in to take a nap. It made me feel more epiphenomenal than ever.
I followed him into the bedroom.
Can you see in any way that this is hell from my standpoint? I asked him.
Yes.
But is it making you personally suffer, to any degree, through your bliss?
Certainly. This answer followed a long pause.
I left him to his nap.
I went to the hideous mall and to the main shrine of the expatriate depressed, the Botswana Book Centre. Mordant whites went there more to touch books than to buy them, the exchange rate being what it was. I’m thinking particularly of Peace Corps volunteers, I suppose, with their limited living allowances. There was a huge staff at BBC. The Batswana at the cash registers were the swiftest in the world. The rest of the staff, in blue dustcoats and carrying feather dusters, was the reverse, more like a functionless chorus grouped along the back wall, chatting and sitting on books. It was hectic when the Rand Daily Mail and the Johannesburg Star came in but otherwise the place was quiet and dreamy, just what I wanted.
Someone that everyone was talking about was in the next aisle from mine, her head down as she studied a book I saw was the paperback Development as the Death of Villages. This had to be beautiful Bronwen Something, a State Department intern who was over in Gaborone short-term to work on the trade fair held every summer. It was a customary position, and since the Amer
ican participation in the exercise was fairly nominal, these pcps, as they were for some reason called, had rather little to do. She wasn’t the first pcp I’d seen reading at three in the afternoon in the Botswana Book Centre.
I recognized what Bronwen was immediately. She was my satanic miracle. I knew it. Her image seemed to leave a print on my sight when I looked away from her. She was reading Nelson’s book with ferocious concentration. I could tell she was believing it.
Ripeness is all, was Bronwen. People had said you would know her when you saw her because she looked like the ingenues in the Coke ads of the nineteen forties, the perfect blond ones. She must have been genuinely beautiful, because fluorescent light, which makes the rest of us look cadaverous, only made her look luminous. She had hair the color of custard. I doubt that she was twenty-six. She wore absolutely no makeup. Conceivably her underlip was a little overfull. She was shorter than I am.
I got interlocking satanic inspirations. This woman would be awed to meet Nelson. He would love her for her honey-colored hair alone. She could have Nelson. I had had the Nelson she was reading the words of. What there had been of him I had in my mind, in my memory, in my notes. Maybe she would love the present Nelson even more than she would have loved the original. We could see. We could find out. I could bring them together. This led to my second inspiration. I could bring them together at a celebration for Nelson he would never forget. I would open the floodgates. Something had to change in my life. If I was unable to get him back to himself singlehanded, then maybe the curious descending all at once on him could do it, along with Bronwen Something. He wanted to be Adamic, then okay, leave it to me to round up an Eve. He hated surprise parties, and he hated birthday parties. His birthday was in the wrong part of the year, but this could just be my mistake. I could orchestrate this. It could be done. I had been kept from taking any kind of real action for too long. Now I could act. It was intoxicating to think of all this. She was the right one: unknown to her as she plowed on through Nelson’s book, she was the center of a web of male glances, black and white male glances. Some of them even saw that I saw, and it meant nothing to them. They kept staring, so what was I? People were arranging what they had to do so they could rest their eyes on her. I was nothing. I was nothing despite my superior bosom, and she was some pure flamelike thing with her part perfectly straight and perfectly white, her custard-colored hair up in valences behind her absolutely perfect ears. I felt almost simian. I have definite down on my arms, no more than average but it is a little darkish, and her arms were like polished dowels of some kind. I would drop her in his lap. He would have the option to ignore her. He would have the option to be enraged, to accuse me of anything, pimpery. That would be something. We would see. There was a suppressed furor going on over Nelson’s sequestration. Everyone would want to come. Let them, I thought. She never looked up. She was not a rapid reader.
ABOUT THE FOREGOING
The Call
I don’t like it here in Palo Alto. For a while I was able to sustain myself by self-congratulation. Severing myself from the spectacle Nelson had become to me had been a success, as I read it, a stupendous thing. It gave me strength. Everything worked for me. A way I could contrive a thesis out of my Tswapong Hills data and some haphazard data from Tsau came to me. I have an extension. The department was delighted to see me. I went to see my mother and controlled everything. I was never insulted once. The most partial of answers satisfied her for a change. She is in the bosom of a Lutheran cult and likes it: they operate a nursing home on a freezing peninsula, where she works in the mailroom for room and board, essentially. She can stay there forever if she wants to, she says. She considers she has her first white-collar employment ever. Everything was yielding to my hand. I kept saying Freedom. I was riding a wave of fire at first. I went to a parasitologist, who said I was cleaner internally than the average middleclass American.
Of course this demonic phase had to end sometime, and it has. The wonder of my escape from Africa, as I so often couched it for myself in the beginning, is less sustaining to me. Now, apparently, I would rather think circuitously back and imagine ways that the necessity to sever us could have been avoided. Or I have time fantasies. Supposing we had met in the eighteen nineties, say, when there was nothing ambiguous about socialism being the answer to everything. It would have been obvious that the collective ownership of the means of production was all that was needed to make us happy. That would have been a medium for us to embrace in. We would have been perfect militants. I come out of fantasies like this furious with actually existing socialism, vacuously enough.
The demonic phase was on an adrenaline continuum with my lutte finale surprise party for Nelson. It almost arranged itself. Everyone wanted to come, the extraordinary Bronwen most of all. She was on the qui vive re Nelson after picking up on all the speculation at the embassy concerning him. That was why she’d looked up Development as the Death of Villages.
As an infernal device the party was perfect. Once I’d started issuing invitations the die was cast. I had to go through with it, however fainthearted I got. I’m not sure now what it was I really wanted, other than to see him either alter before my eyes or be confirmed as what I was afraid he had become. Just to have him infuriated with me, in a personal way, would have been a treasure. In the beginning I tried to honor my promise to Dineo to protect him from certain unfriendly characters in the donor community. But ultimately there was no way I could. They all heard about it—Brits, Boso people, a closet Trotskyite in the Friedrich Ebert Foundation. The Libyans call their embassy the Jamahiriya, meaning nonembassy or people’s bureau or whirlwind, I forget which: two of them were coming. Apparently Qaddafi had pervertedly incorporated some anarchist tenets into his political bible, The Green Book, an act which Nelson had found extremely offensive, so perhaps those embers would have a chance to reignite. I realized the guest list was very light on anyone who might be called Denoonisant, except for lustrous Bronwen. So much the better, I thought. With Bronwen I played a complex game of self-presentation intended to lead her to think of me as someone not necessarily happily associated with this great man, someone possibly coarse, possibly uncaring toward him, someone not legally married to him, in any event. I thought so often of Grace, Grace pushing me toward Nelson. There was even a full moon the night of the party.
One thing I made sure of was the alcohol supply. There would be ample hard liquor, good brands. The cook-maid who came with the house would emerge, in her green uniform, with salvers of samoosas and drumsticks from time to time, in the style usual in top-dog socializing.
At the lutte finale I was invisible, or, more accurately, visible only at the margins, never at the center. That was for Bronwen. Nelson came out from his late nap. The forty guests erupted from behind things, shouting what they were supposed to.
Of course all of the above is really about the phonecall and the What is to be done? question. Somewhere in everything I remember lies the answer to how I should decide. At this point, oddly enough, I have the money to do whatever I decide is required. Of course a month has passed since the call, and I haven’t decided. Instead I’ve done what I do best, made an academic study of myself centering on the last two years, made myself a field of academic study with only one specialist in it. The lutte finale was about resolving doubt, I thought, but it would be exactly doubt that could wrench me out of here one more time. The reason Achilles can never lay hands on the tortoise is the same reason a month has passed while I’ve studied the question of why I have yet to act. There is always new material to be integrated into the study of me. Each moment of thought demands multiples of moments of classification, analysis, parsing. I tried to suppress the gravamen of the phonecall, which was so interesting of me, wasn’t it?
Nelson’s conceit about god being in control of the content of life and the devil being in control of the timing is so useful, especially as applied to the question of what to do about my phonecall. Normally my slender means would have decid
ed for me. For most of my life that would have been the case. But right now everything is working for me, and paying too. I got a TA-ship right away. The Association of American University Women chapter in San Mateo heard about me and asked me to give a little talk. But I have no slides, I said, and I’m so busy that if I do it I’ll have to have an honorarium. Gosiame! They loved it that I had no slides, that I could paint word pictures and induce people to experience Africa the way I had, viz. not as a picture-taking robot only there to reduce everything to visual documentation while the gists and piths of authentic local life evanesced unnoticed. Other clubs are burning to get me. I attacked tourism, à la Nelson Denoon: Your warriors shall be bootblacks, your potmakers shall be chambermaids, and so on. Gosiame! I was quoting Nelson up and down. He sounded fascinating. He was still known. When I left the U.S. for Africa he was probably about even with Ivan Illich on the clerisy’s fame meter. The clerisy is a word I got from Nelson which turns out to be indispensable, like others of his. Now Denoon’s probably a point or two lower than he was, but his name still resonates nicely.