Mating (50 page)

I think I was tentatively starting to pride myself on having a generally good effect on Nelson. He agreed, at least insofar as his attitude to keeping up with the news was concerned, something he was perpetually striving to keep from turning into a mania. He had conquered it as far as print went, because although he still saved all his Economists, he had disciplined himself to read them in batches, working backward from the most recent issue so that tributary pieces in earlier issues could be skipped. This was an old intention of his that had been honored more in the breach before my arrival. He was spending far less time trying to catch Deutsche Welle or the World Service than initially. In fact we had missed the attempt on Reagan’s life as a contemporaneous thing, about which he was grateful. I can’t tell you, he said, the amount of time I would have wasted, while it looked like he might die, trying to figure out
which clique or faction was going to turn out to be behind this thing. It was all moot when he first heard about it, and he had saved hours of his mental life, indirectly thanks to me.

I also thought he was tending to be more truthful, or rather more truthful more quickly. There was one contraindication to this, when I asked him, lightly and en passant, how old he was, and he palpably hesitated before answering. We were working in the gum tree plantation. I was stunned for a second at his apparently revealing himself to be someone who thinks age is important. No truly adult male does. Then he said the only thing that could have saved him, which was that he didn’t know how old he was. He thought he was forty-seven, but he might be a year older. He had been born at home. His mother had already gotten pregnant, he gathered, by the time she began living with his father. His father had been trying to make a living as an apprentice to a man who sold redwood mulch and made coffee tables out of redwood tree boles and on the side did serious woodcarvings. This was in a collapsing Utopian colony founded by Finnish socialists in the nineteenth century, mostly abandoned by them, and feebly recolonized by Depression unemployed people. It was in Washington State, in the woods. Nelson’s father had delivered him. The birth certificate was gotten after the fact, in fact long after, and his mother’s sensitivity, as a good Catholic, may have had something to do with the date entered.

Then he amazed me by saying I know you think I was about to lie to you on the subject of my age. The opposite is true. The lie would have been just to save mental time, I suppose. But I think we can both stand it if we, if I, stick to the absolute truth from now on. This was said with an undernote of How do you like that? almost, I thought, that was faintly threatening.

It was threatening because it dared me to advance prematurely into questions I knew would be difficult for him. They were inchoate or global, many of them, but they were all pressing to me. Where were we going? was one. What was I supposed to make of his recent allusions to the truism that people who worked in development created situations that were supposed to be good enough for the locals forever but not for their Western animators, who would be leaving shortly for the fleshpots of home, everyone should understand. But did that mean he intended to be the exception? And if so, I had questions about that, because the exceptions to going home were the religious. They were the only ones who fought being torn from their projects in the mean streets of the world, and lurking in their motivation had to be—and Denoon saw it
this way too—something self-punitive. He did seem to be loving Tsau more. In part it was the freak rain, the sense of an unusual surplus making daily life enormously easier. I kept looking at the going-versus-staying conundrum from different angles. Of course I am and was in revolt against the cultural diktat—which is what it amounts to—that women are by nature sessile and men are footloose and that when they find the right man women are supposed to go against their sessile instincts if they can’t anchor their male alongside them and go wafting along after him, to wherever. But here Denoon was being too sessile for my taste. You could say I felt slightly torn.

A paradoxical result of Nelson’s declaration was that I was more reluctant to pursue things with him than before the edict. I wondered what was going on, since I hadn’t asked for anything so drastic from him. But there it was, and also it was supposedly obtaining without my having said Ah, me too, because I’m not a hypocrite.

I was sleeping unusually well in Tsau, as a result, I assume, of the substantial component of physical work I was doing daily, but my underlying insomniac nature still got galvanized from time to time, especially when in the middle of the night I’d discover Nelson gone somewhere, usually briefly, but not invariably briefly. He did go off, as I knew, on personal retreats of a day or two, without much preambling. That was a given with him. But there were more than a handful of times when I would wake up and find him not present.

I made the usual assumptions about where he might have gone, at least for the shorter absences. There was also the delicate matter of our both being pretty much on the sendero leguminoso, dietarily, as he put it, so that there was some flatulence to deal with, simple flatulence. It seemed to be cyclical, but it was definitely there. In our first days together we had individually found reasons to go outside for a minute, especially after we’d gone to bed, to avoid the antiromance of it all. But that got to be too much. We developed a fairly decent modus, I thought. He might say, when I was the author, Also sprach Zarathustra, or Ah, a report from the interior, as though he were an ambassador or proconsul. These and some other coinages evolved as we became more comfortable with each other. This condition does have to be worked through between lovers. I know of a marriage where the first hairline crack that led to full collapse appeared when the husband claimed that flatulence was only a problem when he did the cooking.

A few times I said nothing on his return. Then once I said Where do you go, mostly?

Well, mostly it was to the latrine, but not always. Sometimes it was to muse on the landscape, to moongaze.

I was persistent. I asked But do people come and meet with you late at night ever?

Sometimes yes, he said, but only occasionally. There was some of that—meeting outside of channels—before things settled down at Tsau and we got the committees really working. The Tswana are secretive, in case you hadn’t noticed.

Forget I said anything, I said. But then I said, like a deranged person, Tell me what you did about sex all the years here when you were seeing Grace infrequently, shall we say, what you did aside from sublimating. This question had been en route to my lips from ancient times, and the moment of asking it was like the moment when you know for a certainty that nothing you do, no posture you get in, is going to keep you from retching. I was ashamed, naturally.

I give him credit. He was direct. I masturbated, he said, not as a regular thing, or I went to two or three women in Gaborone who aren’t exactly prostitutes and are my friends, and the real question you want to ask me, and to which the answer is no, is if I slept with any woman in Tsau. So. And the beautiful Dineo is included in that.

Too much is enough, I said. Let’s change the subject. I was overwrought, and it continued, partly because he was showing so much noblesse toward me, and how little if any quid pro quo was expected from my side. This I took as nobly and subtly acknowledging that the storage tank of lies and adventures on the male side is so much larger, generally, than the one on the female side that there was no onus whatever on me to reciprocate. I was thinking Well, masturbation, how not? but how often, on average dot dot dot. But that would have been genuinely too much, so we went on to business as usual, both of us about equally upset.

He was still upset when it was time for my abacus lesson. He was skilled at tutoring, but that day he was impatient and not clear. In Tsau everybody ultimately learned the abacus. Business meetings at Sekopololo were alive with the click of the beads. It was required, like learning to butcher. I loved the abacus and still use it. Why isn’t this amazing instrument taught in schools in the United States? I asked him. Because it doesn’t create dependency, was his answer. No batteries, no electricity, and one abacus is all you need for your whole life. He had plans for an Abacus Society for all of Botswana and beyond into Swaziland and Lesotho. I absorbed nothing during that session.

About here I began to be more fragmentary. I was doing my journal less assiduously, I think because doing it felt slightly counterromantic, although that wasn’t what I told myself. This wasn’t in response to pressure of any sort from Nelson. He had at worst a quizzical attitude toward my diarizing: he was also flattered, at least that was the way I took all his Boswell references. Somewhere shortly before this I’d done something Nelson took exception to, strongly. And that incident may have had some impact on my eagerness to write things down.

I must have been showing what struck Nelson as more than a passing interest in different people’s backgrounds, their affiliations, who were the devout Zed CC’s and who were pro Boso, and so on. I really was doing this more in the spirit of asking myself about women who interested me, trying to get him to confirm the correctness of the croquis résumés which I was amusing myself by coming up with to pass the time when I was working at something dull.

I remember we were talking about the Botswana Social Front. I was curious as to how they must feel about Tsau. The ones I had talked to in Gabs had been for nationalizing everything except cattle and giving a social wage to everybody, working or not. They had a huge youth wing, I knew, and a women’s organization. They had two people in parliament and were, although I didn’t know it at the time, on the verge of electing mayors in two of the large towns. Martin Wade had approved strenuously of them, I hadn’t failed to notice. The Bosos I’d met fell into two categories, those who were nice but fervent in a way it was hard to take seriously and those who were cold, rigid, and eager to be in some position where nobody would talk back to them, ever.

Ah, Boso, ah yes, Nelson said. He went on, copiously, even after I reminded him that I knew somewhat of his attitude to Boso, since he had been debating one of them, Mbaake, the first time we met. I was hearing what I already knew, to wit, Boso was Jacobin, corrupt at the top, the rank and file ingenuous, the top dogs taking money under the table from the tribal chiefs—or giving it to them, rather—and from
the Russians and from De Beers and from the South Africans. Did you ever meet Pamane, the Boso supreme secretary? Nelson asked me. All I knew was that he was a dentist. He said Then probably you don’t know why he’s so revered by the student left, which is because he has apparently memorized the last volume in the Marx Engels Gesamtausgabe, the
Chronik Seines Lebens,
which is a day by day listing of where Marx and Engels were on any given day of their lives and what they were doing. This is what they worship. He’ll even give you the book and you pick out a month, I think it is, and he tells you what Marx was up to, like a mentalist. This is what they worship! Here in the dry heart of dying Africa, in a country famishing for welders, plumbers, borehole mechanics! You talk about savant idiot—he’s it. The students want to be like him. So does the whole industrial-class level of the civil service. And he isn’t a dentist, by the way, he’s a chiropodist, a further irony in that you have so few foot problems in Africa because people still go barefoot a lot and commercial footwear is the main cause of foot problems, so that his medical specialty is probably the least needed one he could have picked out.

He said Anyway I got this up for you. He produced a folio-size sheet of thick paper folded in half or thirds. He unfolded it at me, saying that he had put work into it.

It was a political diagram of the population of Tsau, as I understood it, or more properly an affinal diagram, because families and tribes and other affiliations were among the attributes keyed. It was in several colors.

Something impelled me to make him not show this to me. I violently didn’t want to see it. I hadn’t asked for it.

I pushed it away.

He was stung and annoyed and repeated that he’d put work into it.

Don’t get upset, I said, but I don’t want to see it, that’s all.

I don’t know what my impulse was. It would be facile to say it was pure solidarity with the women, for instance. But I would have left the premises rather than look at this thing. I wonder now if in some oblique way it made me mad that Pamane’s memoriousness had been trashed, since if I have any distinct mental virtue that would be it. What was so despicable about Pamane being able to remember a remarkable amount about someone he admired, rightly or wrongly?

In any case, my saying no provoked a peculiar enraged act that took me totally by surprise. The act was like a strongman performance in the circus, it was so deft and definite, so practiced-seeming. What he did
was, in a lightning way, crushingly fold the chart down into a square packet the size of a deck of cards. Then he dashed out into the yard and thrust the packet into the throat of the mudstove.

I followed and squatted down near him in order to catch what he was muttering to me while he solicited the paper or cardboard or foolscap or whatever it was to burn. He seemed to be saying everything was all right.

I made him out to be saying You identify, which I love. You identify.

I said I don’t know if I identify or not, but in fact I don’t think it’s that. I think your document smacks of something.

He stood up and dusted his hands off, his face very flushed, still. You identify, he said. You’re a woman. You think my chart is manipulative.

I thought this was pretty reflexive of him and told him so. I reached into myself, which being oversimplified by someone else helps with. It’s principle, I said. Your diagram is part of something I don’t like. These people have a right to be anything they want and for that not to be noticed or recorded by you except in passing. Are you an anthropologist? What is this?