Mortals (62 page)

That was it also for Kerekang’s unfortunate manifesto,
The White Ants
. The copy he had burned had belonged to Boyle, and Boyle’s hysterical underlinings and annotations had been as alarming as they had been amusing. Only the first six pages, out of twenty, had been marked up, demonstrating the depth of his address to the piece. He had misunderstood everything, taking the manifesto as directed against whites in Africa, expatriates, when in fact
White Ants
was simply the translation of the Setswana word for termites, and the termites in question weren’t expatriates but the national gentry, the large cattle owners. Briefly Ray had entertained the idea that the pamphlet was a forgery coming out of South African intelligence and intended to stir up divisions between certain constituencies of the Botswana Social Front, which had been maneuvering to accommodate bits and pieces of the aristocracies of the minor tribes, large cattle owners all of them. But then he had decided it was genuine. It was heated. It was poetic. It was Kerekang. And it was what had earned him the title Kerekang Setime, Kerekang the Torch Thrower. The Boers made trouble all over the region, for their own reasons. They hated the Botswana Social Front because it was friendly to the exiles of the Pan Africanist Congress, which they hated more than they hated the African National Congress.
The White Ants
was Kerekang denouncing in an almost biblical style the folly of embodying human labor in herds of cattle which periodic drought and disease could be counted on to lay waste to. The termites were the gentry. That was his obsession.

He parted the netting and put his head out into the night. He gazed up at the stars. He loved the conceit, conceit being the wrong word, the Bushmen had for the stars … campfires of the dead. He couldn’t get it out of his head. The Milky Way was like a broad stripe of paste. He had been somewhere outdoors with Iris at night and she had said in some connection, “I don’t need to stare up into the firmament in order to be convinced of my own insignificance.” Probably she had been reacting to some dumb musing of his own. My girl, he thought. Saying anything with girl in it, when it came to her, had mostly fallen out of their household discourse in the last few years. But she was his girl, his beloved girl. He would be able to shout it out if he felt like it, after he released Keletso. He felt like shouting it out. He felt like shouting it at Morel.

The fire was on its last legs. While there was still some illumination coming from it, he should grasp the nettle of the mystery paperback. He had to know what he had to look forward to, or not, whatever the case was. He thought, Hell is just another word for nothing left to read. Rex would like that. Or it could be Hell is just another word for nothing good to read.

The book was
Madame Bovary
.

He felt dead immediately. Or he felt killed, struck, killed by a blow to the face. Why had she done this? Why this book?

In a state of developing shock, he examined the paperback. It was the 1943 Pocket Book Eleanor Marx Aveling translation. The translator had been a suicide, Marx’s daughter, one of his daughters. Where was his Modern Library Milton? Why had Iris left that out and why had she put this,
this
, this bomb in his net bag?

Iris was not cruel. She lacked the capacity for it. So why this book, now, lying in wait for him?

He had to digest his shock. He got out of his umbrella-tent and laid it carefully aside so that he could reenter it when he had gotten the Coleman lantern going. He needed light. He needed more light. He had to understand this or die.

He was ready. The lantern was going. He was back in the umbrella-tent. He had put a pillow on the seat of the camp stool. It was necessary to keep the shank of the umbrella clamped between his knees and he had to hold the paperback at a difficult angle to catch the lantern light. He was not comfortable. His back had begun to hurt already. But he had a water bottle. He would be fine.

He thought he knew how she could have innocently put
Bovary
in with
his other reading matter. It could be there because she was scrupulous about keeping her eye out at jumble sales for cheap copies of classics that he had admitted to her he hadn’t for one reason or another gotten around to finishing earlier in his reading life. She had found a
Vanity Fair
, for him, for example, and either
Bleak House
or
Dombey and Son
. She loved him. She wanted him not to have lacunae, was what was behind it. And he had, he knew, mentioned that he had started
Madame Bovary
and not finished it. It must have been in the early years of their marriage. He hadn’t said why he hadn’t finished the book. He wasn’t sure she’d asked. But he knew why. Partly it was because the idea of a wife committing adultery was upsetting to him. But he hadn’t liked the book for other reasons. He had concluded that the main character was an idiot, and that what the book looked like was a beautifully written sequence of repetitions to show how stupid she, and any woman like her, had to be, any woman captured by romantic sentiments. He remembered thinking how smug the book was. He was sure that Bovary was from ovary, not that he could prove it. The book was against women. A woman had given Flaubert syphilis, thus his attitude. The men were fools, too. He had gotten as far as the liaison with Rodolphe and given up.

He began paging along, reacquainting himself with what he had read, the part he remembered. The school business was still vivid to him. Charles Bovary’s first marriage, that too he had clear. His eye snagged on the last paragraph on page 36.

His heart was beating too hard. The struggle was going to be to find out if Iris was speaking to him through this book, and if so, if so, if so, then what she was saying, exactly?

He was going to have to speed-read the rest of this thing, because he had to understand. He had to verify that the story was what he had assumed or picked up through his reading it was.

Emma had been put in a convent where she read contraband romantic novels and poetry. Then she had married a clod who became a successful country doctor doing his best and she had hardly been able to wait to betray him, first platonically, so to speak, with a young clerk, as he
recalled. She was always waiting for something to happen. She has a child by her husband but sends it off to a wet nurse. She had hated the child for being female. She had gone to live in a provincial town, Yonville, inhabited exclusively by fools and jackasses. Over and over human stupidity was presented against landscapes of terrific natural beauty.

Ah, page 116, “What exasperated her was that Charles did not seem to notice her anguish.” And there was no sex in the fucking thing, no described sex. He wasn’t up to Rodolphe yet. Léon, the first guy, had been a tease. Was it possible Iris was saying she was at the Léon stage and she needed to be stopped before Rodolphe? That was probably insane. He didn’t know. He was up to Rodolphe. Rodolphe was introduced as a cad. Could Iris be saying Morel was a cad, using Rodolphe, making a cry? He would hold the thought. He had reached the point at which he’d stopped years ago, he was pretty sure. He mustn’t seize on details prematurely. He had to conclude on the basis of themes, or something. He had to finish reading this thing, at once.

By page 196 she was well into it with Rodolphe.

He was reading furiously.

Rodolphe ditches her. Every line in his farewell letter is a lie.

Madame goes into a collapse. Rodolphe is gone but Léon is back and this time it’s not platonic.

Emma was bankrupting her husband and trying to borrow money from Léon … and then there was this, page 316 …

Morel. Morel! … but it could mean nothing.

Back to Rodolphe. She is desperate for money and can’t get any.

Then death. She takes poison out of remorse at what she had been, a fool. Her daughter ends up in child labor. She leaves a ruin.

He had no idea what to think. His mind was all over the place. There were no checkmarks or underlinings or
nota bene
s anywhere in the volume, no page corners turned down. What was the signal, the message? Was he Bovary, a fool distinguished by the fact he believed every lie she told? Was he on page 363?

In the scene prompting that characterization Charles has construed an explicit love letter from Rodolphe to his wife as probably suggesting a platonic relationship only.

Was
Madame Bovary
a communication to him, was the question. He had to assume it was, since even if she’d put it in his pack by accident initially
something
would have gone off in her mind to say stop, halt, this will cause Ray to freak, what was I thinking?

So there it was. She was neither stupid nor cruel. So there it was. How he took
Madame Bovary
was critical. What kind of book was it? You could take it as a Christian homily if you wanted to, a tract saying marriage is an ordeal but violating your stupid vows is even worse. But that was farfetched. He had learned something by suffering through this book, which was that the
TLS
could be wrong. He remembered reading someone very authoritative writing in it that there was only one major novel, a thing called
The Golovlyov Family
, a nineteenth-century Russian novel Ray hadn’t read, in which every character presented, without exception, was loathsome. Surely
Madame Bovary
belonged in that category, if you didn’t count the poor child. Every adult in the book was vile.

He had to know if he was supposed to see himself in Charles Bovary. Every detail seemed to answer in the affirmative. For example, what did it mean that her husband botched an operation on some poor devil with a clubfoot, making it worse, making him lose his leg? Poor Charles does it out of hubris stoked by delusions about what he was competent to do. So was the analogy the agency, the agency’s interventions, the agency’s hubris, and his part in what she might think the agency was up to? He was
feeling paranoid. He was hoping this was paranoia. He had to get up and move around. His back was killing him.

He walked in a circle around the dying fire. He was still enclosed in the quasi-tent, carrying it with him like a fool of some kind. He needed to list the options he had for interpreting what she had done to him, putting
Madame Bovary
in his hands. But fire interrupted him, a bloom of flame declaring itself around him, dragging the breath out of his lungs. The netting had gone up. He had dragged it across an ember. He pitched the burning mass away. He was all right. He was trembling. His hair had gotten singed in back, was all. He had made a spectacle. Keletso was coming to him.

Nothing in Africa is fireproof, he thought.

It was morning and somewhere in their cargo was a magnifying mirror. He needed it.

He found it in among the first aid paraphernalia. His reflected image was not gratifying. He was less presentable than was good and less presentable than he’d expected. He had a mild burn on the back of his right hand that looked worse than it was because the Vaseline he’d smeared on it seemed to highlight it. He touched it and it hardly hurt. If he ruffled his hair he could still produce a shower of black specks, bits of charred hair. A good shampooing would take care of that. He would never understand why people insisted on saying they had circles under their eyes, dark circles, when what they had were semicircles. No one had circles under their eyes. The lashes of his right eye were mostly gone. He asked himself if it might be a good idea to trim off the lashes of his left eye in the interest of symmetry and the answer was no, it was an extreme idea and in addition his hands were too unsteady. That would pass, like everything. He could keep the idea under advisement.

On waking he had found himself in possession of the conviction that yes, providing
Madame Bovary
had been deliberate, but that the point of doing it had been precisely to show him that she was fundamentally innocent, so innocent that she felt free to include the inflammatory thing in his reading because,
precisely
because,
it meant nothing
and was there only because it was something he had in fact said he hadn’t finished reading. So it had been a deliberate declaration of innocence. But that conviction
had proved to be delicate. He had lost it. He had lost his grip on it during breakfast. He had held it too hard. He had crushed it.

But he had gotten rid of the
Bovary
enigma anyway, another way. He had gotten rid of it the way Johnson refuted Bishop Berkeley, in that spirit, at least. He had been creative and burned the thing, pushing it into the embers of the breakfast fire. He resented mystery and he had dissolved that one by destroying the occasion of it, the object, the evidence. He knew himself. Know thyself, he said to himself, for reinforcement. If he had hung on to
Bovary
he would have returned to it for obsessive research. So he had saved himself. And already it was easier to stay longer with the idea that the whole thing had been a mistake, a bêtise on her part, something she had done automatically in the rush of throwing his personal supplies together for him. He had to focus on how much she wanted him not to limit his leisure reading to crap, even the better sort of crap, vintage Penguin mysteries, Dorothy Sayers and Simenon, and how much she wanted him to use that for filling holes in his lacunae, which was an incorrect construction, a bêtise, like saying someone has a loophole up his sleeve, but not exactly like it. Iris had made up the loophole phrase, being funny. He was losing a funny woman.