Mating (35 page)

The last day Denoon was missing I went prowling around his place like a nut, very early in the morning. I had my pretexts ready in the event I came to anybody’s attention, including his, should he be in situ. He wasn’t. I got there circuitously, slipping down from the brushy hillside above the house instead of going publicly up the path from the plaza. Denoon had a terrace all to himself, an area about the size of two tennis courts end to end.

The house was a concrete block octagon, formerly the command center of the Belgian construction outfit that had built Tsau. There was something disparate and notional about the tall, double-peaked thatch roof. This was a feeling that turned out to be prescient: I was looking at something that would become a personal material headache. In fact the original perfectly good corrugated iron roof had been taken off at Denoon’s instruction and replaced with this thatch fantasia not structurally appropriate to the shape of the building. He wanted to live under thatch like everybody else. At first my heart went out to Denoon over his having to live in such a peculiar albeit spacious building. It looked vaguely industrial, or even military industrial, like a blockhouse in World War I, or I may mean pillbox, except for the absence of guns sticking out of the narrow rectangular windows set horizontally at a higher than normal level in the walls. But then the more closely I looked at his house and grounds the more interesting and deceptive his choice of domicile seemed to me to be.

It amused me to refer to the whole yard area stretching away from
the front of the house and ending in a precipice as the patio. Nelson never fully got the humor in the term. It came to me during that first reconnaissance. In truth what the yard resembled was a sculpture garden of broken or half-repaired or obsolescent machines and machine elements. In among the machines were other sorts of matériel—vats in which machine parts seemed to be marinating in solvents, piping bundled according to caliber, unopened crates. His yard was an antipatio, although there was a clear space near the outer edge of the terrace where any normal person would long ago have put a table and chairs or a hammock. This spot was shaded by the most perfect umbrella tree in Africa, incidentally. As a gardener, Denoon was nominal. There was a measly presentation of parsley and some other herbs in tubs near his doorstep. More could be done. To the back of the terrace, behind the house, was the privy and a sketchier thatched structure like the places you get drinks from on the beach in the Caribbean, except that it contained a huge authentic porcelain bathtub. The bathhouse walls were litani mats held together at the overlaps by clothespins. I marveled at this facility briefly, noting that here was the only place in all of Tsau where you could stretch out full length in hot water. Later I would discover that there was at least one other English bathtub in Tsau, at Dineo’s. I tried the tap, and nothing. The bathtub wasn’t reticulated to the water system. Water had to be brought in in canisters and emptied into the donkey boiler—essentially an oildrum set over a stone firebox—for heating. Here was exactly the peculiar amalgam of amenity and discomfort that I was picking up as a suppressed motif. You could have your own bathtub, but it would have to be somewhat of an ordeal to make use of it. It’s an unfair simile, but what I thought of in scanning his accommodations was the signs you see protesters carrying in demonstrations in movies where the supposedly homemade lettering is so obviously the art director’s version of what an enraged untrained hand would produce. This thought was unfair but I had it.

What Denoon had was space, privacy, the bathtub, magnificent views—especially the view west toward the red hills and the sand river. But clearly, as I read it, he was uncomfortable about any privilege at all and so the theme of perpetual work and study and basic austerity had to manifest everywhere. I was seeing it in the way the interior of the octagon was set up. Moreover, as he admitted later, he also was under a self-injunction against seeming to be a permanent fixture, against putting his roots down and elaborating his personal environment, because the deal was that he would be going away when Tsau was ready, id est perfect,
which was a day bound to come sometime pretty soon. He had been there for eight years already.

I meant to limit myself to what I could pick up by looking in through the windows. First I had knocked violently enough at the door to be certain no one was home. The interior was divided up into a large cooking-sleeping-sitting front room and two smaller back rooms, one of which was mostly given over to a radio transmitter. For decor it was maps and planting charts. The walls were white, which was a relief, because it would have been totally congruent with the general spirit of austerity to have gone with the same lentil-green paint that was on the exterior, to show how above his intimate surroundings a person could be. I could see a few personal things of Denoon’s in the front room: everything was very neatly kept. His clean clothes were wedged into compartments in a sagging wickerwork construct affixed to the wall. There was a sling chair. The mattress on the platform bed was going to be maize husk, I could sense. I had to go in, if only to get a better look at what passed for a kitchen.

I decided the kitchen was minimal but workable. There was the usual mudstove, and a camp stove with a goodly supply of bottled gas canisters. A surprise was that the tap over the tiny sink was not just an ornament. Denoon had the only functional interior sink I knew of in Tsau. All other houses had outdoor standpipes. I had to prowl carefully. There were neat stacks of books and papers on the floor in untoward places. Tables were in surplus, and they were loaded with more books, papers and periodicals, accordion files, and—in the rear rooms—utilitariana like surveying equipment, hand tools, and paper-cutters. Clearly the living quarters were just another part of the silva rerum the patio was.

Where would I be in all this? was the unavoidable question. I would need a table of my own, for example, at a minimum. How could I insert myself without becoming the longlost eternal feminine whose touch would now make everything cheery and comfy?

It was cold there. The floor needed more than the two or three mats in evidence. Leaving, I doubted myself, until from somewhere an image came to me of Nelson as being like a fig, something heavy in the hand and thickly seeded as opposed to light sweet things like seedless grapes. He was not watery. I had images of him going back and forth from room to room, or really of his burly legs going by me while I sat at my table.

This was the same day. I had decided that my rival must be Dineo. She was someone it was impossible not to picture getting what she wanted and doing it without your noticing. She was purposive. She radiated purpose.

So it was electrifying when, as I was skinning some rabbits my nurturance had failed to save, I got a summons from Dineo to come to see her. The summons was on a slate in a bag in a cart rolled to me by my livewire favorite boy in the world, King James, the one who had brought breakfast to my first mother committee meeting. I was being asked to come to Sekopololo to meet with Dineo after lunch, id est during siesta, which was in itself interesting because, I had noticed, we were the two women who consistently worked through siesta, ignoring it. She had noticed the same thing. I sent back the message that I’d be there. King James seemed delighted to get the return errand. His mother was the young woman who had burned her arm apprenticing with Denoon in the glassworks.

Dineo was nowhere in Sekopololo, so I went searching for her through the stores house and then tentatively back into the cave. Finding her was odd, but only mildly in comparison to what came slightly later.

It was a hot day for that time of year, May, mid-fall in Africa. I was just inside the cave. To my left was what appeared to be a passage but was actually a narrow room out of Dickens, with pigeonhole racks on either side containing I forget what. There was light at the end of the room, which I perceived to be shining on some beautiful but unidentifiable piece of wooden furniture but which in fact was light from a paraffin lantern set on the floor shining off the bent-over naked back of Dineo as she rummaged through something. It was stifling and she had folded down the top of her dress. Only her back was lit: her head was bent down, out of sight, and so were her arms. What is that beautiful thing? I thought, until it moved when she heard my footsteps. A routine thing for women in the villages to do when the weather is scorching is to disencumber themselves down to the waist. There are famous stories of
the consternation of male Peace Corps volunteers teaching in the upper forms of some of the remoter secondary schools turning around from the blackboard to confront ranks of young women allowing their nubile little breasts to show all innocently. This was before the headmasters had been appealed to by the various volunteer agencies to discourage this. Now it was rare. Dineo covered up like lightning, not turning around. She was surprised that I was there so quickly, she said, and asked if I knew the hour. I estimated. Time in Tsau was mostly by rough reckoning. Very few people wore wristwatches. Dineo was one of the ones who usually did. Denoon was sporadic with his.

We went back over to Sekopololo, to a dim meeting room where she motioned me to sit down next to her at a vast round marquetry table. I was very edgy, which I think she noticed and tried to dispel by mock-seriously locking her little fingers in the permission-to-speak-English sign. We smiled.

We talked about the weather, the heat. This sometimes can help us, Dineo said, referring to an overhead fan attached to the beamwork above us and connected by rods to a long box on the wall with a crank projecting from it. The fan ran by some variant of clockwork, some spring mechanism, I gathered. Dineo got up and cranked the thing tight, and the wooden blades of the fan began to feebly rotate. She had my file and started going through it, in the course of which a sheet of paper stuck to her arm. She peeled it off, grimacing, and wagged her hand in front of her face. We had both been doing strenuous physical work.

My interview seemed to be about the rabbits, who were not flourishing. Because of the climate, they had to be reared in small thick cement domes instead of the usual wire mesh hutches. This particular system had been a roaring success in some other arid place, like the Negev, and Dineo knew that Denoon was hipped on generalizing rabbit raising to the individual household level. She seemed relieved when I agreed with her that the idea was premature. The fan had stopped. She looked resigned, got up to recrank, and pointed out what I could already see—that the fan ran pretty briefly considering the effort it took to wind it up. Here was yet one more limb of Denoon’s inventiousness.

Something suppressed and burning was going on with Dineo. I had the feeling she never stopped reading me. I felt it all through the cautionary tale she told about Denoon’s enthusiasms for various husbandries, the latest being for ostrich husbandry. One message was that I should rely on the advice of women, certain women, and she named some who were active with the other animals. At one time Denoon had
apparently been determined to raise pigs at Tsau. Ultimately the attempt had been given up. The heart of the scheme had been what Dineo called a moving house of pigs—a large, covered movable pen open at the bottom, with pigs in it. The idea had been that the enclosure would be moved around and anchored in different venues long enough for the rooting-around and defecating pigs to turn each locus into potting soil. The trouble was that pigs are very powerful animals, apparently, and also prone to cooperate among themselves. The cage was impossible to anchor satisfactorily, ever, so the pigs would shoulder the thing along over great distances to anywhere they pleased, such as the grounds of the primary school, where the children would see it coming and get hilarious. Not only was it beyond the power of man to anchor the cage, it was also impossible to construct it solidly enough to keep the pigs from, over time, bursting it apart and running off in all directions. Now, Dineo said, Rra Puleng wished to catch and raise ostriches, which were far stronger than pigs. In any case, I should proceed with the rabbits in the way I felt I should.

The other item to discuss was that I was accumulating a surplus of unused credits, due to my working more hours than were required to cover my necessities. I said I wondered if it might not be possible to donate some of my surplus credits to one of the older senior women, someone not able to work much who might enjoy some luxuries. This was a hit. I could tell because when Dineo was very happy about something she would wince, à la manière de Humphrey Bogart.

Then what unnerved me began. We were talking generally about how I liked Tsau, and she was, I thought, guardedly probing me by expressing surprise that I had heard nothing about Tsau in, say, Kang, where she knew that people told many stories about Tsau and in fact referred to it as the village where women eat before men do. But right in the midst of this she abruptly got up and said I should follow her to the bathhouse.

I had only seen the bathhouse from the outside up till then. It was one of the oversized rondavels sited in the broad stony shelving area lower down and around to the east, where the kitchen, the laundry, and the clinic were, as well. Why was she taking me there? Was I supposed to be taking a hint about my person? A facetious thought, but it shows how mystified I was.

The bathhouse was empty. The floor was stone, with movable wooden pallets scattered over it. You could see fairly decently by the wash of greenish light that came from two wide units of tinted glass brick set into the wall on either side of the door. Dineo pointed out that there
were two kinds of tubs to use—standard squat plastic washtubs or tall wooden cylindrical tubs that you had to get into via stepladder and secure against tipping over by means of ponderous hook and eye catches around the bases. The purpose of the tall tubs was to make it possible to have warm water up to your neck. I gathered you sank down until your knees hit the tub side and that then you sat in this cocked position to your heart’s content. All the tubs and pallets could be shifted around so as to bring your particular tub under one of the three spout pipes that supplied water warmed hot to tepid by a solar apparatus on the roof. You pulled your spout down toward you via a rope. You had to pull fairly hard. Three pulls were the limit per individual and would be enough for a good bath.