Mating (10 page)

Anthropologists were particularly conflicted about Denoon because of his celebrated scorn for the field as a whole. But anthropology needs development and gets dragged perforce into taking sides on schools of thought or on projects. There is hiring involved. You need feasibility studies, you need sensitivity monitoring, you need impact evaluation, you need retrospectives of various kinds and degrees of thoroughness. For some reason he had basically a left academic constituency, which was odd because he was notorious for taking the position that marxists had no development theory worth the name: from Lenin onward development was just whatever took place after the spokesmen for the proletariat took power. But still they loved him. How did they like his famous Capitalism is strangling black Africa: Socialism will bury her! I wondered. He was the theorist you hate to love. I had to know how he was doing. Was he still the equivalent in development terms of Orson Welles in the movie world when he was at his zenith between
Citizen Kane
and
The Magnificent Ambersons
? Had he slipped at all, since we all slip? I wanted to see him in the flesh.

Tell me at least if he’s married, I said to Z. He had been, the last I’d heard. I couldn’t help it. Eminence is not the best medium for marriages, is what I was thinking.

I can tell you something about that another time, Z said. It’s an interesting question. I would say yes and no. It’s an interesting story. But there was the question of our um prognosis.

I was slightly unforthcoming.

Well, there was more he could tell me, possibly. Denoon kept his movements in Botswana, when he was offsite, very private. But he thought Denoon was about to be in town for a short while. Z might be able to find out more about that too.

He had me and knew it.

Could we not just go on seeing each other for a time, at a pace of say once a week, since I had gotten him well over the hump with his back? It’s your hands I’m going to miss eternally when you leave, he said, your marvelous hands, your great gift.

Another choppy night ensued after he left me alone with my new fixation. I slept minimally, then got up and cleaned the premises and wrote another lying letter to my mother.

  THE SOLAR DEMOCRAT

I was wound up when I met Denoon. The night was muggy, with freak intermittent blasts and lurches of hot wind, which was fine somehow when I was walking over to the reception with Z but nerve-wracking during the aeon we had to wait in a mob outside the locked gates of the house we were invited to. The hosts who were keeping us in the street were the USAID mission director Arthur Bemis and his wife, Ariel. Apparently we were waiting for the receiving line to complete itself.

Just getting into the AID director’s house was considered a coup, because of the decor. People said it was like being in Asia. From the street the place looked Moorish: there were high pink perimeter walls, polychrome tiles outlining the arch around the locked gates, palm fronds visible lashing back and forth above the walls. There was a huge attendance, half of it Batswana out of the state bourgeoisie. We were very dressy. Z was wearing an actual cummerbund, my first. I was wearing a black skirt with kick pleats and a tank top, also black. I needed a full skirt at that point in time. Cursing was going on in several languages as women hunched and swiveled in the wind while their coiffures came to pieces. We couldn’t see Denoon in the line, which prompted Z to tell me again that it was only a rumor that he would be there at all.

We were let into the grounds but not yet into the house. The walls were no help when it came to the wind. The grounds had a very lunar feeling. Floodlights cast a bleaching glare over everything, and the estate lights dotted about the grounds were so fierce they left afterimages. You had to watch where you looked. Wife Ariel was the leading malcontent in the American community. The watering restrictions that came with the drought had been the last straw for her, and she had had all her lawns scraped up and replaced with beds of white pebbles imported from South Africa. I have removed the brownsward, she is supposed to have announced. There was a paucity of chairs, and the ones there were were metal and forbidding, unpadded. Ariel was identified with Asia, where they had been posted repeatedly. In the receiving line she was easily your
most unforgettable character. She was perfect for the electric-blue Chinese silk sheath she was wearing, being anorectic. She was sharp-featured and made you feel she had been shanghaied to Africa but was making the best of it. When he got up to Ariel, Z looked as though he feared he had gotten it wrong and this was perhaps a costume party.

Bemis was a big soft bankerly man reputed to be very shrewd, which was possibly true because his eyes were everywhere. He and Ariel were in their early sixties. There was some jagged non-Western music coming over the public address system, maybe from a field recording of a gamelan orchestra. Anyway it was vintage and scratchy. Z said there was feeling against Ariel across the board for underentertaining. She would put off entertaining for long intervals and then try to catch up, with mammoth and unsatisfactory events like the one we were at. Word came that we would be outside awhile longer because they were running late with the buffet, which was going to be authentic oriental treats that all had to be done at the same time. We were starving. Wife Ariel was also, Z said, renowned for small portions. He predicted what we were likely to get: jellyfish entrails—a joculism for cellophane noodles—in tiny bowls of acrid broth with leaf shreds floating, and pebbles of meat called saté, in a searing sauce. The saté would get between your teeth. He had toothpicks with him and handed me some proleptically. Z had a fixed bridge of not the greatest quality. There was plenty to drink. The occasion was in honor of the corps of district commissioners, who were in town for a pep talk on the Tribal Grazing Lands Policy. Z said Denoon had been ordered not to say anything on TGLP under any circumstances in public. It figured that he would be against it since it was only the single most important ingredient in the whole land tenure reform exercise the government was committed to.

It became the kind of scene that makes you want to be a writer so you can capture a transient unique form of social agony being undergone by people who have it made in every way, the observer excepted. The bouts of wind continued. Z turned out to be right about the saté, but it appeared during the appetizer phase. Emissaries came out with salvers of skewers of it but never made it to our neck of the woods. Where are these
treats?
a Motswana said plaintively. Overhead there were strings of paper lanterns with real candles in them, a poor idea because the lanterns were jerking around and spilling hot wax on selected prominent people. We joined a move to get into a pergola that had been erected on a platform over a drained swimming pool. AID directors are forbidden to live in houses with functioning swimming pools. Had this thing been
constructed for this number of people? I wondered, thinking I could feel the floorboards yielding. I got out. I pulled Z back out into the teeth of the gale with me.

Everything was adding to the mad hatter tenor of events. In every collation of at least two hundred Brits there will be several people with hysterical surnames. I think this is the result of coming from a culture which has yet to wake up to the fact that it’s a thinkable thing to do to go down to the name-changing bureau and rid you and your offspring of these embarrassments. Or possibly they don’t do it just because Americans do, when they notice that people start falling about laughing when they introduce themselves. Anyway, they were all there: Mr. Hailstones, Mr. Swinerod, I. Denzil Quorme, Mr. Leatherhead, and a plump couple, the Tittings. Anyway, there we were with all the Brits with ludic names all in one enclosure. The feeling of being under guard was enhanced by the presence of lots of actual guards, Waygards in specially cleaned maroon uniforms, spaced like caryatids around the edges of the incipient riot we were becoming. I had to get myself under control. I kept thinking This is the world created for us by grown men, n’est-ce pas? This was the human comedy. I warned myself that a perfect way to go wrong in the real world is to assume that because someone looks like a fool he or she is unintelligent. Someone at this point turned up the PA so that the authenticity of the thing we were hearing would be more unmistakable. Expectations were raised when Ariel seemed to be running for the house. The receiving line had dissolved. But then she was among us frantically on another matter, finding her pet, her dog.

Why would Denoon attend a carnival like this, with not an underdog in sight?

Finally somebody relented and opened the house up. It was all true about the splendor within. Welcome to Macao, somebody to my right murmured. I was staggered by the furnishings and what it must be costing the government to ship them from one end of the earth to the other, because these were massive articles like teak chests, lacquer screens, bronzes, a vast gong, celadon vases. The food was along the lines Z had posited. I ate as I scanned every room in the place, trying to look desultory. Ariel was ubiquitous, cringing on behalf of her possessions when anyone got too close to one of them. I utilized Z to monitor the late arrivals outside, which he was sweet about despite the wind comedy problem. I said to him Explain something to me: this is the second most important representative of the United States in this country, after the ambassador. What does this place say? Suppose you went to the Chinese
embassy and it turned out to be a replica of an American log cabin circa 1830? You’d be flummoxed. Is everything ultimately a camp experience, is that the message? I asked him. There was no sign of Denoon.

I pretended a fixation on seeing every piece of chinoiserie there was, which naturally took me off the beaten track and into the private rooms at the back of the house. Obviously I was drivenly trying to satisfy myself that Denoon wasn’t secreted somewhere. This came to an end when I opened the door to a tiny room and was met with a blast of freezing air-conditioning and the sight of an aged chow on a quilt, an animal never intended for life in Africa. When it barked it was more like a cough than a bark, but it still attracted the attention of a maid who got stern with me and said Mma, it can die. This by the way was the only airconditioning in use anywhere. Everywhere else, massive floor fans swept the different scenes, continuing the meteorological theme of ceaseless wind underway outdoors. All the rippling and undulating produced made for an undersea feeling. It was time for me to circulate normally.

It was also obvious that my usual associates came from a lesser stratum than was being represented that night. I didn’t know many of the attendees, except for a handful, and those glancingly—like the brother-sister act from Montreal who had been brought to my attention a few days previous by the screams of a tot pursuing them through the mall. He wanted his pushtoy back, which his older brother had sold to the Canadians without his permission. They ran a gallery devoted to naive art and were on a buying trip, focusing on the scrapwire toys the children in the squatter sections and the periurban villages make. The one the tot wanted back was a beautiful specimen, complex, a bicycle with wheels that revolved and pedals that rose and fell and a rider devised from a stuffed and twisted yellow hypermarket sakkie with blue text where the eyes should be, saying that refunds were impossible. The legs pumped when the thing was rolled along. The toy was a masterpiece. They were holding it up like a chalice while the tot leapt at them. I meandered after the brother and sister into their bolt-hole, the British Council reading room, and watched while they tried the toy out and exclaimed about it until some Batswana began politely hissing. We chatted at the fête. They were in Botswana on a mission. They had reason to believe that somewhere among the squatters in the Old Naledi section was a blind child who was an artistic genius who made things out of scrapwire not to be believed, such as radios, locomotives, dirigibles, large scale things. Had I heard of him? So far they hadn’t found him, but they were certain he
was there. I left open that I might be able to help them: they were an example of the clientele I was reposing on in those times.