Mating (18 page)

Intellectual love is not the same animal as landing a mentor, although women I’ve raised the construct with want to reduce it to that. I distrust and shun the whole mentor concept, which is just as well since I seem not to attract them. Nelson was not my mentor, ever. I gave as well as I got, with him. But there was intellectual love on my part, commencing circa that night.

Intellectual love is a particular hazard for educated women, I think. Certain conditions have to obtain. You meet someone—I would specify
of the opposite sex, but this is obviously me being hyperparochial—who strikes you as having persuasive and wellfounded answers to questions on the order of Where is the world going? These are distinctly not meaning-of-life questions. One thing Denoon did convince me of is that all answers so far to the question What is the meaning of life? dissolve into ascertaining what some hypostatized superior entity wants you to be doing, id est ascertaining how, and to whom or what, you should be in an obedience relationship. The proof of this is that no one would ever say, if he or she had been convinced that life was totally random and accidental in origin and evolution, that he or she had found the meaning of life. So, fundamentally, intellectual love is for a secular mind, because if you discover that someone, however smart, is—he has neglected to mention—a Thomist or in Baha’i, you think of him as a slave to something uninteresting.

What beguiles you toward intellectual love is the feeling of observing a mental searchlight lazily turning here and there and lighting up certain parts of the landscape you thought might be dubious or fraudulent but lacked the time or energy to investigate or the inner authority to dismiss tout court. The searchlight confirms you. I’m thinking of Nelson’s comments on the formerly famous Norman O. Brown, or on deconstructionism, although all this came much later. Denoon was an answer to something I was only subliminally aware was really bothering me, namely the glut of things you feel you ought to have a perspective on, à la core-periphery analysis or the galloping hypothèse Girardien. You are barely able to take note of the earthshaking novelties people are producing before they are swathed in bibliographies to be gotten through. But paradoxically you also want some tinge of provisionality about the most sweeping or summary judgments offered up for you. There was this feeling in for example Denoon’s fairly straightfaced contention that Christianity was originally a type of police socialism, id est Paul was a Roman imperial provocateur out to undo armed messianic Judaism and replace it with toothless lovingkindness. There needs to be humor, also. And there needs to be unselfconsciousness, some degree of it anyway, about the quality of the propositions our hero is able to produce. Denoon was often quite aphoristic. By my standards he often said publishable things. But there was no great vanity attaching. He said things matter of factly, and he was scrupulous to the point of mania about crediting whoever the author was of something he was using that the hearer might think was his, such as Society—an inferno of saviors,
one of his favorite quotations and one I told him he didn’t have to keep telling me was by E. M. Cioran, a name I’ll never forget.

Nelson was interesting on the Boers, which was our last main topic at Tutwane’s. I was flagging, but this woke me up. In Gaborone, especially within the embassy penumbra, everybody talks about the Boers but nobody does anything about them, as I once said and which went over gratifyingly. The Boers keep coming into Botswana and killing people when they feel like it. They are still doing it. So we were always speculating about when the next raid would be, how far they would turn the screw, when they would close the railway at Ramatlabama, and so on. Anyone who had anything new or acute to say on the Boers was regarded with interest. I in fact jotted down key words from Denoon’s take on the Boer menace as soon as I got back under a streetlight. I might not get invited to the site, but I would take this away with me against a rainy day. Waste not want not is my motto.

The craziness of the Boers comes out of nationalism, he said. The Boers have only had the feeling of being in charge in South Africa since 1948 or 1950, which is recent, when they finally overcame the British. They had just gotten their feet under the table, so to speak, when of all people the
kaffirs
start telling them it’s all over, dinner will not be served. All they get is starters. The Boers reminded him of America, which only got to run a Pax Americana from the end of the Second World War until the sixties. Tantalized nationalisms are the worst. To which he added that, more than in any comparable case, the Boers
are
their state, since over half the adult Boer workforce is state employed.

Secondly, apartheid had to be looked at as an instance of a generically male form of madness having to do with sport. He said You’re looking at a particular game of performative excellence, like the shepherds in Crete who base their hierarchies on successful sheep rustling. Oppressing blacks is a national blood sport. We should consider the handicap the Boers accept. A tiny minority is holding down a gigantic black majority getting larger and more furious by the day. If the Boers can do it it’s better than winning every medal in the Olympics, which the Boers can’t play in anyway. The game is called Triumph of the Will. I know a fair number of Boers, he said, and Boers
want
to go into the SADF and go to the border or ride like lords through the townships. The English speakers don’t and are the ones who are conscientious objecting or slipping away abroad when the draft touches them. The white exiles you meet in Gaborone are English speakers, most of them. You strike up a
conversation with a Boer and the first thing he wants to know is if you’ve done your military service, wherever you come from. Been to the army, then? is the first line out of their mouths. If you haven’t, they’ll still talk to you but from an emotional distance. I know them, he said.

There was no bravura about any of this analysis. In fact I could see he was depressing himself as he went on.

How is it going to end, do you think? I asked.

I don’t know, but it is, he said, and there’s something amusing the Boers have done to themselves that they won’t appreciate until it’s all over. Possibly the dumbest thing the Boers ever did was allow kung fu movies into the townships. They thought they were letting in cultural trash to distract the masses. Mark my words, someday somebody will trace the influence of kung fu movies on the liberation struggle and it will be substantial. Because kung fu movies, which are in fact trash, nevertheless teach over and over again an important lesson: you’ve got to get revenge. Christianity says you don’t, the reverse, and for years the educated black leadership went with that. But here comes something else, a set of brilliant how-to illustrations that says to young men Join into groups, use your bare hands against the enemy—the corrupt kung fu clubs that support the gangsters or the evil dynasty—accept discipline and adversity, team up, never give up, avenge your brothers. And by the way, here and there include women as fighters.

I had done as much as I could for myself. It would be smart to leave before I was dismissed.

I got up and said Do you know the Batswana call the stars the same thing the Sumerians did, the shining herd, letlhape phatsimo?

I went to the gate. I had been a touch abrupt in leaving, slightly disconcerting him, which I liked.

Would he at least think about considering using me as a volunteer?

You tempt me, but I have to say no, he said. Of course what would make you irresistible would be if you know something about cooperage. Or taxidermy, say.

Sorry, I said.

That was all. He asked me if I had a torch, and I said no as if he were asking a silly question, the point being to show how acclimated I was to getting around in the dark the way you do in the village at night. It was bravado and in fact I was afraid. But I forged out into the black labyrinth of Old Naledi as though nothing could make me happier and as though I were a person with an actual sense of direction.

I enjoyed this, he said as I left.

All the way home I flattered myself that I had at least gotten into the foyer of his consciousness. Sometimes I believed it. In any case, he would see my face again.

I was feeling tender and valedictory toward Gaborone, and even toward the mall, now that I was going to be leaving. It was set. I was preparing to get to Denoon’s site. I was determined to do it. The surprise would be his.

I liked and hated the mall, a halfway-paved enclosure three blocks long which is the crux of retail and street life in the capital. The shops lining the mall are pseudomoderne, with go-go displays featuring Mylar and pinlights, with Muzak loops droning, and with typical third world inventories: gluts of what you don’t want, voids where the most commonplace necessities—such as tweezers, my then most pressing need—should be. For the most part the proprietors are Chinese or Indians, with a few Batswana fronting for South Africans. The array of businesses is the usual: hardware and clothing stockists, chemists, takeaways, butcheries, a walk-in surgery or two. The only really big buildings are at the ends of the mall—the banks, the embassies. For amenity you have, on either side of the central and widest part of the mall, between the Capitol Cinema and the President Hotel, cement benches with umbrelloid metal canopies. There are thorn trees intermittently. I liked the mall for its comédie humaine but hated it because it so completely incarnates the Western good idea of what Africa should become and because the South African merchandise the shelves are overflowing with is such shit yet so overpriced. South African shoe manufacture is my personal bête noire. It is risible. A smattering of poor devils, mainly women, selling seasonal items like fried mopane worms or maize on the cob spread their karosses under the trees—but only a smattering. When the mall was put up, the traditional farmers’ market was deconstructed and the shards moved into permanent stalls far away along the railway, where the market languishes
but is definitely not an eyesore for makhoa, who prefer to shop in tidiness, on vinyl tile flooring, to the strains of the Melachrino Strings or some other dead orchestra.

I was crossing the mall, just passing the President Hotel, en route to a second attempt to secure a tweezers, which I was willing to be in stock at Botschem. My mode when I want something badly, and which has been known to work, is to proceed up to the absolutely last moment as though there could be no doubt I would get it. In three days of hard work I had succeeded in assembling everything I felt I needed to begin my expedition to Denoon’s site, with two minor exceptions: tweezers and the actual location of Denoon’s project.

I picked up a commotion on the grandiose staircase connecting the balcony of the President Hotel to the mall.

Oh no, I thought, more abnormal psychology. It was Grace, pushing her way roughly down through the ascending lunchtime throng and calling my name.

I stood stockstill to lessen her anxiety, and waved.

If we were going to talk it would have to be someplace else. It was bright and hot and we were already the object of the attention of the mall crowd. The Batswana love it when whites make spectacles of themselves as in fighting or showing affection in public. Grace looked as crazed as before. She was persisting in running, and it was clear she had decided to cast her bra to the winds as part of living life to the hilt for a while in the heart of darkness where nobody knew her, as can happen.

She came up, preceded by the distinct bouquet of Mainstay. She was wearing a different outfit in the same genre as the one she’d worn to the Bemises’. Her undereyes were puffy, but she was neat and clean and all fixed up.

She had to get her breath. Two things told me I was right about some affectional extravaganza going on. She had a leopardskin print ribbon in her hair. And I spotted the notorious extra-large Boer, Meerkotter, proprietarily following her movements from the balcony and holding a drink in each fist, one of them obviously intended for her. He was the local representative for some South African consortium of construction firms, I think. He was a tireless lecher and bon vivant who ate all his meals in the Brigadier Room at the President, usually buying rump steak for one of his various and numerous Batswana teen queen girlfriends. Going jet, as it’s called, was his basic thing, but he embraced all race groups. He was very proud of what Edgar Rice Burroughs would have called his thews. He had forearms like bleach bottles. I immediately wanted to
warn Grace about a couple of dangers attaching to him. I thought he must be infectious. But worse, lately the story was that he was steady with an actual beauty contest winner, Idol Mketa. She was famous for her hairdos, which really were art—the current one was amazing and looked like a suitcase handle display—and her violent jealousy. Meerkotter was considered a prize. One recourse of wronged Batswana women is to scald their rivals. I thought Grace should know these things, if I was right that she was with Meerkotter. There was also the story that Meerkotter’s glass eye was the product of female reprisal, which possibly deserved mention if only as a clue to the sort of milieu Meerkotter swam in.

We greeted each other. She had something she so much wanted to say, she said.

She was wearing a little red scarf knotted around her throat. It made her look like a Brownie. I praised it.

I got it here, she said, as a present. It was a gift from a person.

I wanted to warn her that you get drunker on less alcohol in Gaborone, because of the elevation. She wasn’t leaving spaces for me, though.

I know Nelson likes you, she said.

The sun is eating us up, I said. We should go somewhere, but not the President.

Where we could have a drink, she said. She got a death grip on my elbow and began leading me purposely across the mall as though she had a perfect idea of where to go. This was drink spreading its wings in her mind, which resulted in her walking directly across the mat of a woman selling cowpeas, almost treading on the woman’s hand. Grace had no idea where she was going. I took over. She was odd. She looked labile to me. It occurred to me he had been giving her Mandrax, which the grapevine said he had access to.