Mating (27 page)

The closer I got to Tsau the more I decompensated. The eight miles felt interminable. I was feeling much worse. I lost all patience with my animal and abandoned him a mile from the gateway into Tsau. I wanted to run. I tried to, a little.

There was an actual gateway. The path I was on led straight to a crude square wooden arch about twenty feet high. It was a gateless structure like a torii, painted in alternating red and black bands like a coral snake and fringed across the top with bigger and better wind chimes. It was carnivalesque. Dark green waist-high rubber hedges straggled away from the arch to the left and right as far as I could see. In a yard to the right of the arch was a compound in which were two very tidy rondavels with peculiarly glossy thatch and other odd features I was too ragged to attempt to parse. This would have to be the gatehouse compound. I could see a kgotla chair set in the shade of a gigantic cloud tree in the yard, and I knew I had to get to it immediately.

I wanted to rest, but I also wanted to see everything. The path through the arch became a roadway leading to a complex of much larger buildings halfway up the koppie. In the flatland between the arch and the slope were neat identical rondavels in oblong fenced plots. There were thorn trees throughout. The scene was very busy in the sense you apply the term to a piece of printed fabric. There were novelties in the scene before me. There was the ubiquitous flashing and glinting, coming, it seemed, from all over and due, I was already assuming, to the various mirrors and solar instruments and other glass oddments that seemed to be specific to the place. There were repeated clicks of brilliant color observable at points along the upper paths: I had no idea what was causing them. I wanted to see everything at once, especially an ominous thing, something white and shrouded, hanging from a tree near where the roadway began to rise. Body, I thought. I was frightened and felt that at least I had to see what this was. In fact I was having a regressive recurrence of a feeling from kindergarten. I painted a sheet of newsprint
with blue calcimine, solidly blue. I had never seen such a sublime blue and I had kept trying to fill my eyes with it by staring at it and by holding it close to my face. My teacher made me stop.

Goats all seemed to be either tethered or in pens, which I had never seen in an African village. There were no stray dogs. I could hear poultry but not see any—that too meant pens of some sort. The rondavels were not the usual monochrome red brown: they were painted in bright colors, sky blue being a dominant choice. There were people, but they were looking at me from around the edges of things.

The rondavel closest to the arch was magenta with a canary door. This door was flung open and a woman ran out toward me, stopped, turned and went back inside, and came out again with a police whistle in her mouth, on which she blew three skreels. Someone farther up the slope repeated the signal. This didn’t strike me as unfriendly. The person approaching me with the whistle was a motherly older woman. I see that I’m using Denoon’s or my neologism for the sound a police whistle makes, which was a byproduct of one of our personal games, called Filling in the White Spaces in the Dictionary. We satisfied ourselves that there was nothing in English for the sound except shrill blast, which was two words. Everything should have a name, according to Denoon. Decadence is when the names of things are being lost. He could be eloquent on this. He loved the Scots, who had had more names for everyday things in the eighteenth century than we do today. Greece was in terrible shape. He showed me an article in the Economist proving that groping for words among the general population was becoming a serious issue. On it would go.

Here things begin to fragment on me. The woman addressing me was in anxiety. Her costume, a gray tunic and long skirt and a white headscarf knotted to produce collapsed rabbit ears, struck me as beautiful. She was stocky. I believe I said something about vegetables or possibly even something about garlic. I know I sensed it wouldn’t be against my interests to be a little incoherent for the time being, until I could see more clearly what kind of place I had come to: I was especially determined not to let anything slip suggesting a prior association with Nelson. I was going to present myself as a derelict traveler whose excursion had gone wrong. My story would have me doing ornithology. Tsau was a closed project, with an automatic exclusion rule for uninvited visitors. I would outwit this.

I knew she was afraid I had something to do with the Boers. The South African Defence Force does as it pleases in Caprivi and Namibia
and if they one day decided they wanted to drop down into the central Kalahari like the wolf on the fold, there would be nothing to prevent it. She had active eyebrows, but she calmed down once I convinced her I was an American. I was sitting down and drinking broth by this time, and fading badly.

I didn’t want to fade out before I knew what this place was, or if not what it was, what it was like, at least. In its symmetry and neatness and Mediterranean color scheme it looked like a town in the Babar books, but in its atmosphere there was something operatic or extravagant. I had no referent for it.

Then two women were insisting I come inside and lie down. I communicated about my animal: someone had to be sent for him. They were quick to arrange that. So I went inside and lay down on a platform bed in a clean white room. There was some cool tea, my face was sponged, and then I slept.

They woke me up to get more soup into me, a more substantial soup, with macaroni in it. It was evening.

My hands felt huge. They had been taken care of medically, the splinters extracted, and rather excessive bandaging wound on. I had been cleaned up. They had done everything but shampoo me. I was wearing a garment like a shift, very lightweight.

I was led into one of the wonders of the world, the Denoon outhouse, and left there awhile. I used the facility correctly. When I came out I was shown that normally I should dip my hands in a bowl of weak antiseptic fluid on a stand next to the outhouse door. Because of my bandages this was impossible, but they did somewhat brush and press my bandages with a damp towel anyway.

Baph was safe, was the good news.

I was in a regulated place. They had put some kind of unguent on my lips.

Being in this place and in the hands of women ran counter to my main established refuge fantasy, wherein my father or uncle is a retired judge or captain of industry with a giant Victorian house in an area like Bucks County. He is there off and on. You can go to this house anytime and collapse there for as long as you like, no questions asked. There would be a staff. My father or uncle is powerful but also good, which is one reason the place is so safe. He has goodwill extending to him from far and near, either because his legal judgments were so wise and beloved
or because of unspecified other benefactions touching everyone in that county. The food would be simple but good. There would be a farm attached to the house. My protector is very diversified economically, so that no depression would wipe him out. I could be a spinster if I wanted, live in my beautiful room, use the extensive library and the piano, or if I chose to I could moon around in my room and only come down for meals. There was no mother in this. My uncle, though, would be devoted to the memory of my mother. I once said to Denoon, after he denied he harbored any refuge fantasies whatsoever, I don’t believe you, but if this is true it’s because the thing you as a white male will carry to your grave is the feeling that you’re safe anywhere in the world, in essence, unless you have some particular physical handicap. I suppose my position was that everyone has refuge fantasies. I said Saying you have no refuge fantasies and even believing you don’t is not the same thing as really not having them in some way, shape, or form. He got mad. Was I saying he was lying? he wanted to know. Only partially, I said. Then god damn it, he said, I’ll tell you again I don’t and that I also doubt that any fully mature human being does and also that if you do, you belong to the one tenth of one percent of the female race who construct this refuge fantasy because the automatic marriage fantasy, which is the real refuge-fantasy people have until they try it, is repugnant to them somehow.

I scanned around. The furnishings were restful. There was a reed mat on the floor. I could see a wooden table, a cupboard, a wardrobe, all highly polished. I was covered with a cotton thermal blanket, light but warm. My pillow was possibly a little on the hard side. My attendant was sitting in a wooden armchair, reading by the light of candles burning in a holder with winglike mirrors folded out from a spindle attached to the base of the fixture. There was a heat source somewhere. All my goods were laid out along the base of the wall where I could see them.

Just as I began to drift off again, it came to me that I had yet to ask this woman in loco parentis over me what her name was. I was ashamed of myself. I asked, and it was Mma Isang. Here I had an inappropriate internal reaction. The fact that she was identifying herself in the completely traditional way as the mother of whoever her firstborn was, in this case a son, should have produced no reaction in me whatever. It was ordinary. But I wanted to shake her. Women were saving me, and why wasn’t this motherly woman more a separate being? I seemed to be wanting to say. Somehow it brought up the totally unrelated contempt I have for all the apparatus of seconds and thirds and juniors specific to the patriciate in America and applicable only to sons and never to daughters.
Denoon called this scionism. Also I wanted to know if Nelson Denoon had so much as looked in on me. He had to know I or someone very much like me had pitched up in his forbidden city. I had trekked across the plain of the abyss for a purpose. Where was Denoon? Who wants to feel like a tart, and an unsuccessful tart to boot? I felt like one of the loser sperms you see in Swedish documentaries shot inside the reproductive tract, one of the members of the shining herd, who only gets halfway up a fallopian tube when the Time Gentlemen bell is rung announcing that some other particle has made it to the ovum and the game is over. You aren’t yourself, I told myself. Mma Isang saw I was agitated, and I believe I was then handfed some segments of orange, and then it was on to a marathon sleep.

I awoke in total darkness in that state of intellectual fatigue that means you’ve been working things out violently and exhaustively in your dreamlife. I had had a dream—whose outlines I atypically still had hold of—with stature. I may have had six or so like this in my life, always at rubiconic junctures. My normal dreams are worse than run of the mill. But clearly you symbolically harangue yourself in your sleep when your inner self perceives looming danger. But was I in danger, or rather was I in any danger greater than making a fool of myself? Something in me seemed to think so. I felt as though I had just been excused from an excruciatingly long but absolutely essential lecture which I had had to listen to while standing up.

In fact the dream revolved around a lecture, and I knew who the lecturer was. She was a woman I’d known in California whose fate had made an impression on me. Initially she was interesting to me purely because she was a French émigré, of which there are not so many, nothing like for example the number of Israelis piling up on the two coasts. She was also interesting because she was in a ménage in which the union had to be based entirely on an uncanny parity of physical beauty. Her lover of many years was handsome and perfectly proportioned, the kind of type who models Norfolk jackets and handcarved
pipes, but an absolute jerk. She was both beautiful and substantive but, hélas, nearly forty and therefore in terror of finding herself alone and having to start over in the search for companionship. She was an accomplished paste-up person and very much in demand among people who put out newsletters in the days before desktop publishing. He was intermittently a cad toward her. He was vaguely a creative person in magazine publishing. He had lost his touch. His career was disintegrating when I got to know Yliane, although he was disguising it by being on the phone interminably, talking to contacts and lining up minuscule freelance projects at greatly separated intervals. Maybe a bond between them was that he was Francophile. He was sickeningly Francophile, to the point that one of his projects was to write a uchronia based on the premise that the Louisiana Purchase had fallen through. This project meant that whenever she asked him where he had been when she needed him for something the answer was The library. How this most appeasing of women managed to irritate him so badly that he drove her out of their apartment in her bathrobe while lashing her with a straightened coathanger I have no idea. Drink played some role. Possibly one of her superb culinary efforts came in below par. It was the middle of the night and she was driven out without a sou, and ultimately she had to let herself be fucked by the cabdriver who took her some distance to a friend’s house where she had expected to borrow the fare but where nobody was home. She spent the rest of the night cowering and crying in the rhododendra, waiting for her friend to return from the Mi Carême Ball or wherever she was.

So they stayed apart for a while. Then he showed up abject and swearing he wanted her back, would contain his drinking henceforward, would be decent. So he talked her back in. But there was just one thing he asked, as they were setting the ménage up once again, which was that she give up recycling for a month. She was a forerunner in ecological sensitivity and was serious about recycling. This would somehow make everything perfect between them. It had nothing to do with anything except power. He had no objection to recycling—not that he would ever bother with it himself. He sprung this codicil on her after she had already moved back in and he had begun being decent, so she negotiated. She wouldn’t recycle for two weeks. That would do, he decided. Then things continued as horribly as before. I pondered this transaction inordinately at the time. She bore him a child, a boy, angelic-looking and destined to be a burnt offering if I was any judge. I lost touch with Yliane after this.