Mating (23 page)

I was singing so continuously that I began to find I disliked it when I stopped—I disliked that ambience. I was briefly an aide in a nursery school for neglected children, and the best-adapted, happiest, and smartest children in the place were three sisters who had been taken from a mother who kept them chained to a radiator so they would be safe while she was out circulating, and who when I asked them what they did all the time when they were alone said We sang. The inspiriting effect my singing had on my animals was not an illusion, and it reminds me now of the period when I was feeling depressed at how commonplace and rudimentary my dreams were compared to Denoon’s. He claimed to dream infrequently, but when he did, his dreams were like something by Fabergé or Kafka in their uniqueness. He would have noetic dreams, and when they were over he would be left in possession of some adage or percept that tells you something occult or fundamental about the world. One of these was the conviction he woke up with one morning that music was the remnant of a medium that had been employed in the depths of the past as a means of communication between men and animals—I assume man arrow animal and not ducks playing flutes to get their point across to man. Living with me made him more provisional about his dreams, especially after I compared one of his adages to a statement some famous surrealist was left with after dreaming, which he thought important enough to print up: Beat your mother while she’s still young. I would always make Denoon at least try to reduce his insights to a sentence or two. The fact is I laugh at dreams. They seem to me to be some kind of gorgeous garbage. I have revenge dreams, mainly, in which I tell significant figures from my past things like You have the brains of a drum. On I sang.

Is it absurd to be proud of your dreams, or not? Denoon was.

Poetry let me down. I elided into poetry from time to time and discovered that I knew a lot of it. My attitude toward rhymed poetry changed utterly. Respect was born. Except for Dover Beach there was almost nothing unrhymed in my inventory. I know quite a lot of Kipling. I know some Vachel Lindsay. Finally one stanza out of Elizabeth Bishop got hold of me and kept inserting itself between pieces of other poems, truculently. It maddened me both by its tenacity and by what it said: Far down the highway wet and black, I’ll ride and ride and not come back, I’m going to go and take the bus, and find someone monogamous. I used opera to drive this away.

Serious trouble began on the fourth or fifth day out. It happened because I was doing a thing I had been warned not to do in the desert: I was reviewing my life. Actually I was thinking about an aspect of my life, to wit, who would miss me the most if I was reported lost. Also I was thinking in general about how easy it would be to vanish physically in the Kalahari, how quickly you would turn into dust and be distributed, the usual. I had been advised by people like the lion man to keep my consciousness in my superfices, my skin and eyes and ears, my legs, to be a scanning mechanism and nothing else while I was in the desert. Also I had been told not to try to figure out everything that was odd that might happen to me, like an impulse to stand stockstill, which I had in fact had a couple of times but, naturally I need to point out, only after I had been apprised that this might happen to me. The reason I think I was letting my mind drift in these directions was that I was tired of the singing and chanting that had served me so well during the first leg of my madness. Also I had been told to forget all the Bushman notions I knew, the bizarre items. I hadn’t known what these were, but I was curious to know, so I’d bought more drinks for the lion man, whose face was lined so authoritatively you could faint. Apparently Bushmen say they can hear the sun burning, to which I say So what? The lion man had been touted to me as the ultimate authority on the Kalahari. He did look like an authority, but he was an authority who was living to drink, insofar as I could tell. The Bushmen say they can hear a faint hiss from the sun, he said, as I wondered if this was something he had thought up because he had me in front of him squinting for the truth about the Kalahari. There was a woman who knew everything I wanted to know, someone I would have trusted, she had lived in the Kalahari, but she was no longer around. She had become unwelcome to the government. One thing I am sure of is that the lion man dyes his hair. I had been oblique with the lion man about whether I myself was actually going into the Kalahari, but he knew.

Just after breaking camp in the morning and going through agonies
over whether I was giving enough water to the boys—we had missed at least one water point and were doing rations—I thought I heard a short sharp noise that must be a gunshot: like the lion roar, just the one event. Was this an everyday natural thing no one bothers to investigate? We were in a very barren area. When the sound came I felt faint. But then nothing. We proceeded again.

I was trying to buck myself up by reminding myself, apropos the lion man’s stories, that the desire to tell stories is not always the same thing as the desire to convey the truth, when we came to a locale I hated from the outset. It was a grassy, thickly wooded basin. The grass was a coarse gray-green type I knew was unpopular with my boys unless they were at the very end of their tether. I felt I had no choice but to go through this place, which was extensive. The ground was spongeous in spots. The feeling was claustral. The trees, low thorn trees, struck me as very uniform, almost the way trees look in children’s art. The trees were clotted with mud nests, weaverbird nests, sometimes six in a tree. But there was no birdlife. The nests were dead. Not only were there no birds but there was none of the mild almost subliminal background shuffling caused by animals like springhares and lizards you become used to sensing. I kept yawning, for no reason.

To be frank, I think that one thing that led me into the grove was a desperate feeling about my innards. There was a feeling of privacy. We would be out of view in this place. I was hoping and yearning for a sign that this might be the place where I would be restored to normal in this respect at least, that the enclosedness of the scene might summon something. In the normal parts of the Kalahari you are on display for miles in every direction.

There was a sinister gestalt that clearly I began cooperating with and adding to, as in finding the air not only thick but actually fetid, and so on. There may have been a barometric anomaly taking place, it now occurs to me. We went deeper into the grove. My boys were nervous and acting out, and this also affected me. If they’d been placid I could have used that to moderate my readings-in, but they were increasingly jangled and wired-seeming as we proceeded. What was the origin of all the folklore about dogs and horses being sensitive to the presence of ghosts? I wanted to know. It was multicultural, so did it have some basis in reality? The Batswana believed it.

But mainly I wanted to know why my life path had led me into such a frightening place, if I was as intelligent as I was supposed to be. It was
because of a fixation on another human, a male. But why had the conviction that this kind of fixation befalls women much more often than it does men not been enough to deter me a little, stop me from acting so generically so precipitously? Somehow this place was worse than anything so far, worse than hearing the lion roar, which I was already pathetically recasting as possibly having been a dream in any case. Also it was abundantly clear I would never be able to relax enough in the grove to think of my bodily processes.

I was leading Baph by a rope attached to his headstall. Mmo was on a halter tied to Baph’s pannier rack. Mmo was the one who was being the most difficult. I thought I could improve things, as I had a couple of times before, by getting between my boys and leading them as a team. So I untied Mmo and in the process lost him. It was instantaneous.

It happened because I had brought only one compass with me and I had developed a recurring anxious need to reassure myself that it was where it had to be, in my left breast pocket. It calmed me to touch my pocket. I let go of Mmo’s rope for just the fraction of a second touching my pocket took. I must have done this before, without incident. Mmo shot away like a genius. I had never seen him move like that. It was fast and purposive. I was paralyzed. I thought I must have done something to him I was unaware of, hurt him. It froze me. What was he doing and what should I do? I had treated him well, I thought. I lost crucial time trying inanely to think what it was I must have done. There was also the feeling that it was unthinkable that he wouldn’t reconsider in a moment and come back. I started after him, but Baph was only willing to walk and there was no way I could see myself letting go of Baph. The idea of tying Baph to a tree and then running as fast as I could after Mmo was not accessible to me.

I even took time to stupefy myself with a moment or two of class rage. I could never have been one of those adolescent girls who deified the horse family. You had to have money for that. If I had ever been exposed to horses for more than ten minutes in my life I might have had a better idea of what to do now or what I should have avoided doing that led my boy to bolt, which might be dooming me. Probably it would be a wonderfully empowering thing for a young woman to get to clasp her legs around a powerful naked male beast and make it do things, jump over obstacles on command, and so on. This could be one of the sources of the self-confidence you envy in rich women, not that the sources of self-confidence in the rich are not as numberless as the sands of the Gobi. I
had known a few equestrienne darlings in their little caps who rode in shows. Or rather I had been aware of them. In the meantime Mmo was a hundred yards away, looking back over his shoulder at me.

Finally I did tie Baph up and try to run in earnest after Mmo. It was too late. I was now terrified to get too far from Baph out of fear that something might happen to him in my absence. Each sortie drove Mmo farther out of reach. Baph acted frantic each time I left. Worst of all, I realized that I had no idea what the equivalent of Here kitty kitty is for a donkey. There had to be something that Batswana drovers used. In my state of pride and momentum I had never bothered to ask. This more than anything demoralized me. Even if I got inside his startle zone, what then?

Mmo cantered out of sight. I tried to reconstruct what portion of everything he was carrying. It was some of the feed, some of the water, and my tent. Never do this again, was my main brilliant injunction to myself.

I suppose what I should have done was take Baph and trail along in the general direction Mmo had taken in hopes that he would relent and come back. But this was inconceivable. Mmo was going away from Tsau, not toward it. I had no idea how long such a game might go on, either. In any case I was convinced that I would be unable to plan anything until I got out of the grove and into some less accursed part of the landscape.

We got clear of the gray place, as I was calling it to myself, and stopped. I was petting Baph insanely. We had a very modest amount of water left.

I was full of guilt. Whatever risk he had imposed on me by decamping, Mmo was dooming himself. I must have been being too routine toward these animals, not loving enough, not enough in rapport with them. These were beasts of burden whose cargo was my survival. I had failed them, or failed one of them.

Now what would I do, other than what I had been doing, except
faster? It was about now that I noticed with disgust a trace of elation in my reaction to what things had come to. Apparently I was furtively pleased that the level of difficulty had gone up. I reject this tendency in humanity. I had always seen it as a specifically male pathology, yet here it was, even if dilutely. A young ne’er-do-well attempts to kill himself by shooting himself through the head and when he only succeeds in blinding himself is galvanized with determination to get into law school, overcome his new disability, and become a millionaire lawyer, which he does. This was the company I was finding myself in in the Kalahari.

Remember the hunchbacks, interpret nothing, I said to myself. You are going to be abnormal until this is over, because no one crossing the Kalahari alone is going to be normal after the second day. I felt superficially better. It helped that we were back in a more standard part of the desolation.

The thing to do was to get to Tsau immediately. This was my new solution for everything. Nothing interested me but that. Ostriches crossed our path several times that afternoon and I barely paid attention, even though this is one of the few birds I have any kind of curiosity about. One reason we had to get to Tsau faster than planned was because my tent was gone, which meant having to stop early enough each night to collect enough wood to keep major fires going throughout the night without fail. Being lax or nominal about this would not be possible. We picked up the pace considerably, and Baph was good about it at first.

We went too fast. Going faster meant needing to rest more. During one rest stop I fell asleep sitting against a tree and was awakened by being jerked over by Baph, to whose halter I had tied my hand. We resumed. I pressed us. I even got Baph to canter for short stretches.

I never whine but was whining then. We aren’t getting to Tsau, was what I was whining. It was as though I thought that by sheer urgency I could force Tsau to rise out of the ground. It irritated me that we would be unable to go in a beeline for Tsau because the remaining water points lay significantly south or north of our route. Why had I let myself make such cursory calculations of how much time would be consumed in deviations from our route?

Camping that night was macabre, What my map led us to was an abandoned cattle post, probably German, dating from the early protectorate and obviously derelict for years. There were tumbledown pens and stall fencing, a burst and heeling dip tank, piping, remnants of buildings, and at the center of the complex an ox pump, meaning a butterfly-shaped iron rig which two oxen could be harnessed to and then driven
to turn, goaded to plod endlessly in a circle to raise the water. The nails I occasionally kicked up were antique. On the face of it this should have been a more sinister venue than the gray place, but it never registered that way with me. I was totally absorbed in hurrying.