Mating (73 page)

No, he was just all right, meaning just fine, to the locals. The resident help had almost nothing to do, we were so undemanding and so few, so they leapt into the breach and devoted themselves to his wardrobe, starching and ironing and bleaching his vanilla costume, for example, into a blinding state of perfection. He didn’t object. This was slightly a judgment on me by all concerned, I felt. Why had I let him go around in so much lesser a state of splendor? He looked so splendid, groomed up this way. It helped that his weight was perfect. He was growing a beard, but shaving meticulously every day, so as not to let beard shadow creep up into his cheeks. I waited out the first week. I gathered that what he anticipated was going back to Tsau, soon, apparently, and presumably with me.

The first week was up and I was inwardly girding my loins for strife, uprooting his mode or making him say what it was, making me understand it.

We were having mint tea at the dining room table when he said, almost as an afterthought to my questions about things that needed to be done in Gabs, We can be married.

Then he said it again: We can be married here. And then he added And we can have children.

I burst away from the table and went off to our room. I wept but I was enraged. I left the door open to give him the chance to come normally after me and see what was wrong, what he could do.

From where I was I could see him still sitting at the table, looking vaguely after me but not rising. What was this? Was it a byproduct of collapse and regression into a kind of simpleminded protohusband role, or was it enlightenment and his inner self telling him it was time to multiply with me, or was it the last worst slash of the knife at me, a trick to disorient me and make me let go? Was he incapable of seeing this as an act of force against me, this reversal of every position he had ever had on the subject and an exploitation of what he certainly knew was a highly particular vulnerability of mine, in my situation? He had torn me away from midwifing in Tsau in order to help me keep my natalist impulses from starting to churn, which incidentally would have run athwart his bias against having children, there being so many unwanted ones in the world. And now this.

Anyway, with that he had unnerved me and I was in no condition to start on the interrogation I had been preparing myself for. Could he have done this deliberately to derail me?

I think it was weakness that made me want to reknit for a couple of days before I made the assault on whatever his new belief structure was, that and the news that there was an actual trained psychiatrist briefly in town, a Sri Lankan on consult at the Ministry of Health. Nelson had been willing to see the nurse. But there was no question of his going to Pretoria or Johannesburg, because that was South Africa. So mightn’t he see Dr. Pereira if I could arrange it? Pereira would come over. Nelson wouldn’t have to leave the house.

At breakfast I went at it obliquely.

I mentioned that there was a Sri Lankan psychiatrist in town.

He said Sri Lanka, that could have been a paradise after the English
left except for two mistakes. One was canceling English as the official language, which drove the Tamils wild because they were having enough trouble in the civil service without having to learn to write their memos in Sinhalese. The other mistake slips my mind.

I was alert, waiting for more, but he fell into silence again.

Having gotten Dr. Pereira’s name into the atmosphere, I swung into some overkill on psychology, remembering Nelson’s hostility to the discipline and his hatred of clinical psychology in particular, a specialty he thought of as about as respectable as colonic irrigation. I may have played a role in exacerbating his feelings here—not that much help was needed—with the horrible true story of something that had happened when my mother and I lived in the gatehouse of an estate a clinical psychologist couple had rented the rest of. One of their patients, a woman being treated for shyness, had frozen to death in their parking area one winter. She had had car trouble and hadn’t wanted to bother anyone. She’d been in treatment with one of them for five years. Also the psychologists were cryptosurvivalists, and we would see vanloads of canned goods and staples being delivered in the dead of night and stuffed into various outbuildings. Nelson and I had been peas in a pod on the subject. I’d torn out an item in the Economist to show him, reporting that the two hundred top psychologists, department heads and deep thinkers and top-dog practitioners, had been asked to list the most important theories or discoveries in the field in the last twenty-five years. And there was total disagreement among the lists, no consensus anywhere, absolutely the only uniformity being that if they’d discovered or proposed something themselves it would likely appear on their list of the top five advances. So now I was about to beg him to let himself be psychologized for my sake.

I did a roundabout rehabilitation of psychology. Had I ever told him, I asked him, about my discovery in my mid-twenties of why doing mental work would suddenly become much easier for me at about three in the afternoon? I had been talking about grammar school with someone, and how much I’d hated it. Then through that the click had come. Everything in grammar school had been coercion and boredom, which ended at three when school let out. After that my concentration was the same morning, noon, or night: all I had to do was remind myself that I was no longer at Horace Mann.

And then there was the story of my aversion to supermarkets. I would always become faint when I got up to the checker, slightly faint. My aversion cost me money, because it was so distinct a thing I’d go long
distances and be willing to spend more in order to shop in little mom and pop places. Then one night when I had no choice I went to a Safeway. As I got to the checkout a woman going out the main door changed her mind and came back in my direction. She was an older woman, dressed in a particular way, and I was already in the penumbra of feeling faint, which seeing her deepened. She came back and got whatever she’d left behind on the counter and left. Her face was obscurely terrifying to me, like a death’s-head. But then I relived a moment when I’d been on line in a supermarket with my mother and a neighbor woman came up and made a furtive urgent gesture for my mother to come aside so she could tell her something. And as I watched them go I knew what it was. I must have been ten. This woman’s son had obviously ratted on me about some sexplay I’d initiated. I was known as the Fig Tree Girl among the little boys I preyed on and delighted in the shelter of a particular fig tree. Testicles fascinated me. Then there was my mother coming back looking like the most revengeful and, worst of all, most disappointed monster in the world. It was her disappointment that slew me, because she was seeing me as not normal, me her darling. Once I recaptured that moment of shame I could shop anywhere.

Light from the caves, Nelson said.

I got back to Pereira. Would he see him?

Certainly, Nelson said.

In came Pereira—a Tamil, from his coloring. He could give Nelson twenty minutes. Going in he was very brisk.

He had been totally unwilling to have me tell him what I thought Nelson’s situation was. I had barely gotten the words hyperpassivity and decompensation out of my mouth when he reminded me that he was very well used to diagnosing any kind of personality inversion.

The twenty minutes stretched into more like ninety minutes.

I could not believe the outcome. I felt like shaking him. He was small.

Nothing was wrong with Nelson, who was in transcendent mental health. And he, Pereira, was going to find some brochures to lend us,
because Mr. Denoon was very very interested in a very fine school of Hinduism in fact created by a woman, the Marathi saint Muktabai. In all the country of Botswana there were many Hindus, but all were ignorant, to his knowledge, of the very fine bhakti school. All the great persons of bhakti were women, or many of them.

Pereira looked sternly at me. I am lacking a wife, he said. And I tell you if this man came to say This woman right here you should marry, I would go straight to her.

He was hoping to find time to see Nelson again.

I gave peace a chance for one more day. War was coming.

There were just a few foreglints of the dies irae. One was I lost patience over his attitude to meals. He had some inchoate idea that meals should be aleatory: there should be an array larger than would be usual of different things to choose from, with an emphasis on cold cooked grains, and one should eat homeostatically each time—a little of this, none of that, a little of this, and so on. Congratulations, I said, you have just invented the cafeteria.

I made myself get ten hours sleep the night before the war.

When I got up, I reassessed. It had to be. He was minimally more talkative, but it was still basically only responsively. He hadn’t made one phonecall. He’d talked vaguely about needing to go to a couple of the ministries but hadn’t taken any steps in preparation.

I fixed myself up more than usual. Breakfast was in silence. I needed protein for what I had to do, and ate eggs and cold sirloin tips.

He was hyperclean and splendid in his white raiment.

I was having my period, a heavy one. I’d stopped taking my pills for a while, why not?

I said You know we have to discuss things. I led him to a round metal table under a big acacia. We sat facing each other across it, in flareback wicker chairs.

First I got his agreement not to leave the table for at least one hour
no matter what I said, how offended he might get. And that if he left for the toilet or a nosebleed he would come back. He was agreeable.

Is this roughly the picture of what happened to you?: you were en route to Tikwe and not paying attention and you rode under a tree and either one or two boomslangs dropped down on your mount.

Two, he said.

You were in black cotton soil, and so when the horse reared up and slipped you went half under him, which is when you broke your arm and ankle. And then the horse struggled up, with a snake still biting into its neck, but it had a broken leg and fell again.

Fortunately you were wearing your canteen—unfortunately in that you cracked some ribs landing on it.

You passed out. But later you came to.

You were unconscious long enough to get a bad burn on one side of your face and neck.

I got upset as I spelled all this out. I had notes on a pad on a clipboard.

You dragged yourself fifty feet to a termite mound that was under and half around a small tree. You saw your horse lashing around and making terrible sounds. You managed to kill it after this. You were in pain. The termite mound was like a recliner, a sloping shape.

At this point he volunteered to narrate, if I would turn the recorder off. This was new and, it seemed to me, positive. He wanted the tape recorder off because it would make him feel he had to go too fast.

I said Go day by day as much as you can.

He would try, but I had to remember it was all a continuum to him.

He put his palms flat on the table as he began, and he told the whole story with his eyes closed. I felt he was rising from some inner depth to do this, that it was painful. At points I could tell he was pressing his hands down hard. I myself was pressing my fists in against dysmenorrhea now and then. It was extremely peculiar. I felt linked to him, as though together we constituted some sort of mechanism.

He went slowly. I am condensing. He said the first scene he has clearly is in twilight, when he first smelled and then saw black-backed jackals converging on his horse. What he got to watch was this beast being torn to pieces. It was like hell. He has fragmentary recollections of having dragged himself back and forth from the horse earlier to get his food pack, in terror of the boomslangs, which had vanished by then, apparently. He was certain the jackals would come after him once they were through with the horse unless he did something.

At first the jackals ignored him, but then two of them came straying over. He had the conviction that terror, his terror, would doom him and that the first thing he would have to do was make himself into a nonreacting entity: that is, stop thinking and make himself as much like the ground or the trees as he could. He had to stop sending out waves of fear and supplication. It was a process of deidentification, he called it. It soothed him to have this task.

He found it hard to talk about how he got into this deidentified condition. It was a formula, a certain order of images he made himself experience. It was an inner contortion. It had to do with making himself not feel the passage of time. In any case the jackals left him alone.

I pointed out that another explanation was that the jackals—there were only four of them—had gorged themselves and that also he wasn’t quite yet their favorite food, carrion.

I could be right, he granted. But he did feel he had gotten into some genuine state. And after the jackals left he continued experimenting with it, thinking that lions might be next, probably would be next.

I was in his mind. He was determined not to die, because of me.

He had set his arm and had tried to set his ankle break. In neither case had the skin been broken.

He had the full canteen. He would limit himself to three mouthfuls of water a day. He had retrieved one of the two food parcels he had brought before the jackals came and ate the other along with the horse. He had mistakenly used up one trip to the horse for the purpose of gathering anything he could use for shielding against the sun. He’d gotten more than he could use. My tent was unworkable and he had torn the canvas off it to use for protection. He couldn’t explain to me why it was unworkable, and I concluded finally that in his pain and panic he’d given up too soon on it.

His supply of food consisted of scones, dried pears, biltong, some mongongo nuts, and one orange. The idea, of course, was to husband this, something made easier by his discovery that when he went into what he was calling his interval state, when he was willing himself to be deidentified, he would lose both hunger and pain.