Mating (5 page)

Well before you see water you find yourself walking through pure vapor. The roar penetrates you and you stop thinking without trying.

I took a branch of the path that led out onto the shoulder of the gorge the falls pour into. I could sit in long grass with my feet to the void, the falls immense straight in front of me. It was excessive in every dimension. The mist and spray rise up in a column that breaks off at the top into normal clouds while you watch. This is the last waterfall I need to see, I thought. Depending on the angle of the sun, there were rainbows and
fractions of rainbows above and below the falls. You resonate. The first main sensation is about physicality. The falls said something to me like You are flesh, in no uncertain terms. This phase lasted over an hour. I have never been so intent. Several times I started to get up but couldn’t. It was injunctive. Something in me was being sated and I was paralyzed until that was done.

The next phase was emotional. Something was building up in me as I went back toward the hotel and got on the path that led to overlooks directly beside and above the east cataract. My solitude was eroding, which was oddly painful. I could vaguely make out darkly dressed people here and there on the Zambia side, and there seemed to be some local African boys upstream just recreationally manhandling a huge dead tree into the rapids, which they would later run along the bank following to its plunge, incidentally intruding on me in my crise or whatever it should be called. The dark clothing I was seeing was of course raingear, which anyone sensible would be wearing. I was drenched.

You know you’re in Africa at Victoria Falls because there is nothing anyplace to keep you from stepping off into the cataract, not a handrail, not an inch of barbed wire. There are certain small trees growing out over the drop where obvious handholds on the limbs have been worn smooth by people clutching them to lean out bodily over white death. I did this myself. I leaned outward and stared down and said out loud something like Weep for me. At which point I was overcome with enormous sadness, from nowhere. I drew back into where it was safe, terrified.

I think the falls represented death for the taking, but a particular death, one that would be quick but also make you part of something magnificent and eternal, an eternal mechanism. This was not in the same league as throwing yourself under some filthy bus. I had no idea I was that sad. I began to ask myself why, out loud. I had permission to. It was safe to talk to yourself because of the roar you were subsumed in, besides being alone. I fragmented. One sense I had was that I was going to die sometime anyway. Another was that the falls were something you could never apply the term fake or stupid to. This has to be animism, was another feeling. I was also bemused because suicide had never meant anything to me personally, except as an option it sometimes amazed me my mother had never taken, if her misery was as kosher as she made it seem. There was also an element of urgency underneath everything, an implication that the chance for this kind of death was not going to happen again and that if I passed it up I should stop complaining
—which was also baseless and from nowhere because I’m not a complainer, historically. I am the Platonic idea of a good sport.

Why was I this sad? I needed to know. I was alarmed. I had no secret guilt that I was aware of, no betrayals or cruelty toward anyone. On the contrary, I have led a fairly generative life in the time I’ve had to spare from defending myself against the slings and arrows. Remorse wasn’t it. To get away from the boys and their log I had moved to a secluded rock below the brink of the falls. At this point I was weeping, which was disguised by the condensation already bathing my face. No bypasser would notice. This is not saying you could get away with outright sobbing, but in general it would not be embarrassing to be come upon in the degree of emotional dishevelment I seemed to be in.

What was it about? It was nothing sexual: I was not dealing on any level with uncleanness, say. My sex history was the essence of ordinary. So any notion that I was undergoing some naughtiness-based lustral seizure was worthless, especially since I have never been religious in the slightest. One of the better papers I had done was on lustral rites. Was something saying I should kill myself posthaste if the truth was that I was going to be mediocre? This was a thought with real pain behind it. To my wreck of a mother mediocre was a superlative—an imputation I resisted with all my might once I realized it involved me. I grew up clinging to the idea that either I was original in an unappreciated way or that I could be original—this later—by incessant striving and reading and taking simple precautions like never watching television again in my life.

There must be such a thing as situational madness, because I verged on it. I know that schizophrenics hear people murmuring when the bedsheets rustle or when the vacuum cleaner is on. The falls were coming across to me as an utterance, but in more ways than just the roar. There seemed to be certain recurrent elongated forms in the falling masses of water, an architecture that I would be able to apprehend if only I got closer. The sound and the shapes I was seeing went together and meant something, something ethical or existential and having to do with me henceforward in some way. I started to edge even closer, when the thought came to me If you had a companion you would stay where you are.

I stopped in my tracks. There was elation and desperation. Where was my companion? I had no companion, et cetera. I had no life companion, but why was that? What had I done that had made that the case, leaving me in danger? Each time I thought the word “companion” I felt
pain collecting in my chest. I suddenly realized how precipitous the place I had chosen to sit and commune from was. The pain was like hot liquid, and I remember feeling hopeless because I knew it was something not amenable to vomiting. I wanted to expel it. Vomiting is my least favorite inevitable recurrent experience, but I would have been willing to drop to all fours and vomit for hours if that would access this burning material. It was no use saying mate or compadre instead of companion: the pain was the same. Also, that I genuinely deserved a companion was something included. I wish I knew how long this went on. It was under ten minutes, I think.

Who can I tell this to, was the thought that seemed to end it. I may have been into the diminuendo already, because I had gotten back from the ledge, back even from the path and into the undergrowth. It all lifted. I sat in the brush, clutching myself. I had an optical feeling that the falls were receding. Then it was really over.

I hauled myself back to the hotel feeling like a hysteric, except for the sense that I had gotten something germane, whatever it was, out of my brush with chaos.

What kind of person gets into bed still dripping wet from his bath? I had to conclude that this was what Giles had done, from the condition of the bed I now needed to share. I was ready for sleep. I put towels down over the damp on my side. I thought I’d try nudity again.

The most I could distill from my crise was that it was somehow rubiconic for me, that I had passed up an exit and so now more than ever I should fight, fight like a man, fight the world—which I was under the impression I had been doing all along—but fight harder, possibly. This seemed banal to me and probably a self-mystification. There was something far more deeply interfused, so to speak, but I couldn’t get it. Did it have something to do with an association of maleness I had for the falls as an entity? This also led me nowhere, and even now when I raise it it has the feel of a confession. I only mention it because the point is to exclude nothing.

Giles was the first man I ever knew who actively preferred the left side of the bed (as you face the bed). Was it meaningful? I think I consider the right side of the bed, which I always prefer, dominant. In my future of course was Denoon, the only man born of woman with absolutely no preference for which side of the bed he slept on. I watched Giles asleep. In fairness I have to admit he slept quite beautifully, mouth closed, no musicale. It should have been soporific, but an edge of chagrin was tinting my feelings for him. I have always wondered why the fact that men have to sleep has never been really utilized by women, who are basically insomniac, when men transgress. Why have men never intuited that sleeping next to a woman you abuse all day might be hazardous? Drifting off I got into a fantasy of haranguing some feminist friends of mine with: Men sleep! We don’t! Power is lying in the street and nobody bothers to pick it up! But I’m fabulating, because the power part of the harangue is a quote from Trotsky via Denoon.

We woke up in unison at seven thirty and scrambled to get some dinner. Afterward he wanted to read. We both ended up reading something. This time I was the culprit in that I dozed off. I could have been nudged out of it. I slept lightly and brokenly and have a distinct memory of Giles getting up a couple of times, going to the door, and stepping out into the corridor and looking up and down it, presumably for other white people. I fell asleep for good with him outlined that way in the dim corridor.

The next day was all work and no play. He was dead to the falls except visually and was preoccupied with how moist it was around them and what that might do to his apparati and film. He was not his usual perfectionist self. In fact he was slipshod, I thought. We had box lunches and worked straight through to dinner, where again the impression was of a sprinkling of whites and a vast chorus or gallery of black help. Let me pay for all my meals, why don’t you? I said, to see how he would respond and if saying it would key something. But he said No no no. Apparently a deal was a deal.

At bedtime I pressed my availability fairly far. He noticed, and we got into the foyer of something, but there was a sense of his going through with it that was impossible to mistake. He was not getting hard and I wasn’t prepared for heroic measures, nor, to be fair, was he asking for them. We stopped without discussing why we were stopping. The only comment I retain from that night was his saying that there were entire abandoned luxury hotels somewhere in the bush in Mozambique being kept going by former staff and where there had been no guests for years.
He saw them as shrines being kept pristine for a vanished white clientele against the day it might return. Like cargo cults, I said. He looked blank. He was fascinated to hear all I could tell him about those.

In the morning it was more work, quick quick, the last of it. He wanted to shoot other things in the vicinity than the falls. I had absorbed the falls, so I didn’t mind. They were in my list of great sights seen, along with Mont-aux-Sources and Table Mountain.

Then at lunch, which we ate at the hotel, there was a change in the matrix which I thought might prove interesting vis-à-vis Giles. A substantial party of white Rhodesians was eating and drinking. These were diehards. Giles lit up slightly. He wandered over and mingled with them at the buffet and came back saying they were real Rhodesians and still pissing steam about the war. I was astonished at how public they were about the way they felt. Their main man was a guy with a Wild West mustache and a tee shirt with a very congested legend on it saying Rhodesian War Games 1960–1979, Rhodesians 100, Terrs 0, The Winners: Terrs. Giles kept looking their way during lunch. The group adjourned to play cards and drink more on the veranda. They waved to Giles as we left to continue shooting.

See this as perfect was what I was trying to make myself do. But Giles’s physical uninterest in me was inevitably a kind of insult and was also making me feel like an exploitress. There was no question Giles had been normal toward me in Botswana, so I was forced to the hypothesis that it must be the starkness and recency of the overthrow of white power here that had done something to him at the level of the lower self. What a datum! I couldn’t help thinking over and over. Was this an instant new thesis topic presenting itself? I had actually noticed a kind of aggressive sullenness among the white wives of Zimbabwe in several settings. Could this be it and could it be gotten at? You could never get it through male testimony—that I knew. But was this a thesis just going begging, even if it was social psychology and not nutritional anthropology? Couldn’t it be cultural anthropology? Giles had been energized by having the ex-Selous Scouts or whatever they were turn up. If there was anything in this it ought to surface in greater warmth should I return to the attack.

By dinnertime the Rhodesians were gone. It had been a stopoff en route to Chobe. Giles was back to his lows immediately. I didn’t even try to get anything to transpire. I suppose my embryonic thesis was quasi confirmed, but that whole speculation was a little lurid and a sign of intellectual desperation more than anything else. I tried to think of who
at Stanford I could even conceivably give an aesopian hint of a sketch of my idea to, and had to laugh.

We flew back to Gaborone by charter the next day. You go diagonally across the central Kalahari, where there is nothing to see beneath you once you get past the Sua Pan area. Nevertheless Giles had stopped stroking his camera case and was suddenly staring down intently. When I asked him what he was looking for he said there was supposed to be a strange place down there run by an American where women went around naked. I felt like saying What’s it to you? but refrained, sportswomanlike to the end. What was he talking about? Was it some kind of nudist colony? I asked, thinking of his connection with the cheap soft porn magazine in Valletta. But no, it was some kind of project. It was secret. I let him know how bizarre I thought he was being. Now of course I know that this was the deformed version of Denoon’s work at Tsau produced by male gossip, because except for the women of Tsau, and the very few male dependents with them, it was only a handful of prurient men in various bureaucracies in Botswana who knew what was going on.

When we got back to Gabs we lost touch directly. He went to Mauritius, I heard, and was loving it.