Mating (3 page)

I had the specific wherewithal for this. I spoke good Setswana. I had anecdotes. I could demonstrate that beneath the surface the culture was as other as anyone could ask. I would be being useful. Why did Batswana babies have woolen caps on during the summer? On the other hand, why did some Batswana shave their heads in winter? I knew. Why did Kalanga men let the nail on the little finger of the right hand grow to an extreme length and then sharpen it? Why did the Batswana hate lawns and prefer beaten earth around their houses? Why did schoolgirls so often try to sleep with their heads under the covers? I could also help at the mundane level. What American cut of beef did silverside correspond to? What were the Diamond Police? Did anyone care that not far from Molepolole there were Batswana who had serfs? People would have material for letters. I could bring them a sense of the otherness that was eluding them. It would all be informal. A brunet was stalking me, I noticed.

Bring your wife over, I called to him, which unsettled him. I was standing at the fence, musing or trying to, and realizing that a troop of Zed CC marchers was approaching. He didn’t like going to get her.

The spot where he’d noticed me was rather secluded and bosky. I
remember he had a sleek brown beard and what the Batswana call a pushing face. He brought a little group with him when he came to the fence.

Fifty marchers went slowly by. Men in taut tan porters’ uniforms and garrison caps led. Women followed, all in white. The women wore ordinary sandals. I pointed out the footgear of the men. They wore sneakers that had been cut apart and reassembled around a section of canvas tubing to extend the toe box by eight or ten inches. The purpose of the shoes was to make a thunderous slap when the men landed from the leaps they made during these marches. They would go up and descend en bloc. I also explained that once they started singing they sang without pause for as long as a couple of hours. My group said things like Where do they get the energy? The marchers were through leaping for the day. But I told my group where they could catch them some other Sunday. I knew what routes they took. I explained how the Zionist Christian Church originated, why it was interesting, some of what its adherents believed, how the main body of the sect in South Africa had sold its soul to the Botha regime.

I must have been fascinating. Before I left I’d been offered a very decent leave house to sit, a type two house on the edge of Extension Sixteen. My duties amounted to feeding some budgerigars. I was delivered from my missionaries. Two women wanted me to go with them to the tapestry workshop at Lentswe la Oodi. I had the next day’s lunch and dinner in my pocket.

It became a peculiar time for me. The original conceit was that I was going to be hedonic, think passim about my life and next steps, repose on the white utopia Gaborone was, inevitably use up my savings, fly home. I had my return ticket. So my period of guilty repose would be self-limiting. Barter would supposedly carry me only so far. But something went wrong.

I began nicely. To avoid any substantive contact with my thesis abortion I wrapped up my notes and records in layer upon layer of kraft
paper, tied the parcel with cord, and dropped hot wax on the knots—a thing still done in southern Africa. I left the object in plain view as a memento mori that my academic life was not going to go away but was only lying in wait. My days were fine. There was no typical day. Some days I was up at dawn and watching the sunrise while I sipped rooibos tea. Other days I got up at two or three or worse. Sometimes I played tennis to extinction.

I had never allowed myself this kind of hiatus. I was deliberately planless. I was even able to suppress the vague internalized lifetime reading plan that always nags me when I read trash. I decided to let myself read only whatever turned up in my vicinity. Fortunately the shelves in the house were loaded with Simenon. I think it was Denoon who said that the closest you can come in life to experiencing free will is when you do things at random. There is no free will. Everything is still determined when you make random choices, but you stop noticing. Counterfeit freedom is still something you can enjoy in the right frame of mind. It was perfect being in someone else’s house.

What went wrong was the surplus I began to run. So many things came my way. I had virtually no expenses. I edged toward being extravagant in small ways. When I could get crème fraîche I bought as much as I could conceivably hope to eat before it spoiled. I bought some ostrich-eggshell-chip chokers. I tried to be less driven re eating leftovers. I was still in surplus.

For example: my medical care was gratis. The Peace Corps doctor took a Platonic interest in me. I got a superb parasitology workup from him. It was boring treating volunteers for nonspecific urethritis and sun poisoning and not much else. He felt underutilized and would treat anybody who would let him talk about the medical abysses he had stared into elsewhere in the third world or the shortcomings of the Botswana Ministry of Health. He considered me very clean, based on my having chewed my nails short when I was in the bush. I let him think I agreed with his central conviction that everyone, white and black, was cavalier about sanitation to the point of madness, except the two of us. He lived exclusively on canned food or food that could be boiled. When he went to parties he took his own boiled-water ice cubes. Paper money was infectious because so many Batswana women carried it in their bras, next to the flesh. He lavished free medical samples on me, some of which I still have. I liked him. His name was Elman—after the violinist—Cornetta. He was short, forty, unmarried, normal about sex except for his conclusion—I intuited this—that even the most carefully regulated
intercourse was unsanitary. He was at ease in Africa in a generic way: he felt he was performing in what was essentially a hopeless situation. You see variants of this in whites in other hopeless situations. Elman was a genuinely calm person. I interpreted his coming to Africa to be in the midst of infection, the thing he feared most, as purely counterphobic behavior. That made for a bond between us because I could be considered counterphobic in a way myself. I have topological agnosia, a condition somewhat akin to dyslexia and meaning that I have great trouble finding my way around the topography. And I had come to a part of the world where there are almost no landmarks, “Driving through Botswana one is struck by the unvarying landscape stretching into the distance” is a line from the
Guide to Botswana
expatriates seem to remember and quote.

Elman thought the sanitation problem in the capital was doomed to worsen as the population grew. It would get like Lomé, where the main outdoor sign you see is Défense d’uriner le long des murs. Something needed to be done. I thought I should try to steer his phobia in a constructive direction, and the way that worked out illustrates both how Africa disappoints people and how my attempt at self-impoverishment kept failing. I suggested we produce a comic book presentation on basic sanitation. I would translate his English text into Setswana and find him an artist. He was enthusiastic. We did it. We produced an eight-page black-and-white comic printed offset on newsprint. It was crude but he was delighted. He paid for it himself and he insisted on paying, overpaying, me, which was ridiculous. But he was overjoyed with the thing and it turned out to be a hit. Batswana were dropping by the office and asking for copies. He couldn’t believe it. We had to reprint. For a while he was a new man. Then an enemy of his enlightened him. There are public toilets in central Gaborone but no toilet paper in them. The poor make do with whatever kinds of wastepaper they can lay hands on. Actual commercial toilet paper is a luxury commodity. I tried to comfort him with the news that the same thing was happening to the Watchtower publications the Jehovah’s Witnesses were being mobbed for in the mall. I tried to console him. The money he gave me always smelled sweet. I suspect he swabbed the bills with an astringent before putting them in little plastic bags.

So it went. No one could do enough for me. I would do a favor for a wandering scholar, such as typing or indexing, and invariably I was overpaid. When it got around that I had very good shorthand there was
a surge of offers to send me to conferences and gatherings as a rapporteur. Taping is not appropriate in every setting. When I said no I was just offered more money. I also became a favorite recipient when people came to the ends of their tours and gave away whatever was left in their pantries and liquor cabinets. At some level whites felt sorry for one another at being assigned to a place and a society so unforthcoming, which showed also in the tonus of the grandiose parties thrown to welcome new arrivals or say goodbye to the reassigned. I don’t say that valedictory giftgiving didn’t include Batswana, particularly domestic help: it did, but the degree to which it didn’t is significant. Unstated emotion had a lot to do with it. Anti-makhoa feeling among the Batswana was fairly vocal around then. There were letters in the papers alleging that white experts were misrepresenting their qualifications in order to hold on to jobs Batswana should have. Some of it was absurd. An MP from Francistown was upset that young Batswana were wearing sunglasses in the presence of their elders, which was disrespectful since their eyes couldn’t be seen clearly, and whites were responsible for the vogue of sunglasses. In any case, it wasn’t my reciprocations that made me popular. All told I gave maybe six functions, all of them smallscale, two of them Monopoly evenings that only involved snacks.

It’s an effort to recapture the detail of guilty repose, because what I want is to plunge into Denoon and what followed. But the prelude is important, probably. I feel like someone after the deluge being asked to describe the way it was before the flood while I’m still plucking seaweed out of my hair, Denoon being the deluge. Despite my metaphors, the last thing I want to do is fabulize Denoon and make him more than he was. I hate drama. I hate dramatizers. But it was distinctly like a building falling on me when I met him. Why? Why do we yield, when we don’t have to? I’d like to know, as a woman and a human being, both. What did the sex side of my life in Gabs up to then have to do with it? This is British: Gaborone equals Gabs, Lobatse Lobs, Molepolole Moleps, undsoweiter.
If I seem to convey that everyone I was involved with sexually pre-Denoon that summer was a clod or worse, I take it back in advance. That wasn’t it.

I won’t be exhaustive about my carnal involvements. There were more than the three main ones, but not many more. To start off with, probably I should indicate who I didn’t sleep with—or wouldn’t, rather. It was principled and there were categories. One was Rhodesians and South Africans, nonexiles. Another was anybody I considered wittingly rightwing. Reagan was going to be president and I regarded anybody who was even close to neutral on that as a limb of evil. My final category needs some explication because I feel defensive about it, because the category was African men as in black African. Partly I was being self-protective. Male chauvinism is the air African men breathe. They can’t escape it. They are imbued. They are taught patriarchy by every voice in their culture, including their mothers’. That was a predisposing thing. I was not going to devote my energies to educating a perfectly happy Motswana as to my exquisite basic needs. But beyond that there was the danger of something happening, possibly, that would turn out to be permanent—meaning, for me, staying on in Africa forever. It may seem coldblooded, but if I was clear about anything in my life I was clear about not staying in Africa forever. By the same token I was not going to find myself in the position of seeming to offer somebody a way of getting to lefatshe la madi, the country money comes from. Most younger Africans want to get to America so badly you can taste it, as someone said. I couldn’t help being seen as a potential conduit. I was not going to be involved in raising or blasting hopes, either one.

First was Giles, whom I met at a party given by some Canadian volunteers. He was physically stellar. He wasn’t Canadian, he was British but had lived for long stretches in Canada and America and was very homogenized. His chestnut hair was long and in actual ringlets. It was a hot night. CUSO is very hairshirt, so naturally the air-conditioning was unplugged and we were all outside under the thorn trees fanning ourselves
with scraps of cardboard. Canadians thought it was funny that Reagan was likely to be elected president. We stopped playing Jimmy Cliff records and started a desultory game of proposing the people Reagan was no doubt going to name to his cabinet, all Hollywood stars, naturally. It was puerile. I didn’t distinguish myself. John Wayne was going to be Secretary of Defense and Boris Karloff was going to be White House Science Adviser. I had to explain when I said Lloyd Bridges for Secretary of the Navy. Apparently I was the only one present low-level enough to have spent time watching the stupid television series in which Lloyd Bridges went around underwater. Giles was so thick he proposed Jean Gabin for Director of the FBI. The consensus being that nominees had to be American citizens, Gabin was rejected. Another cinéphile then counterproposed Basil Rathbone, in honor of his long experience as Sherlock Holmes. Giles insisted that Basil Rathbone was British. We were unanimous against him. Basil Rathbone had been naturalized. It was typical that nothing would move Giles on this point. His obstinacy brought the game to an end, but in an unconscious tribute to his physical beauty, we all immediately forgave him. He was a beauty. He was self-consciously leonine. He was wearing a sheer batiste shirt that let his golden chest hair show interestingly through. The kneesocks he wore with his safari shorts were doubled down just where his blocky calves were thickest, for emphasis. He let me admire the camera he had with him at all times. Later in our relationship when I asked him how old he was his reply was
Under forty.
He was what he was. His beauty made him unusually goodnatured. You could revile him and be sure he wouldn’t mind for long because when all was said and done he was still going to be the beautiful six foot plus guy you or somebody else wanted. This was not vanity. It was reality.