Mating (51 page)

He seemed astonished with me.

I said My mother thought Negroes were funny. I’ve escaped from her. She knew nothing. How many black people were there in Minnesota? She got her idea of black people from the radio, Amos and Andy, Is you is or is you ain’t my baby? She’d say that to me when I was being naughty, with a big ho ho.

I was worked up.

I said This reminds me of her and reminds me of dossiers. You think you’re neutral, you think what you do is neutral because you’re not British or a Boer, because you’re American and we never did much in this particular neck of the woods. But it’s the strong and the weak, or that’s what this feels like to me. I’m sorry if I’m being incoherent.

You’re so strict, was his last word on this, turning away deeply unsatisfactorily to me with my need for a cincture at the bottom of every event.

He started to go in but stopped and came back to embrace me. I’m yours, he said, I am.

The only thing I didn’t like about that was the suddenness of the transition from evident rage to this. I hate bouleversements in general.

His I’m yours stayed with me and became more gravid in my mind over the days. I took it as a sign we were close to the point where it would be as painful for him to lose me as for me to lose him. Whenever I felt that that might really be true I tried saying Pride goeth before a fall to myself, sonorously, not with great effectiveness.

Wherever it was we really were, I did notice that I was more interested than ever in the exact terms of his divorce, not that I felt it would be smart to reveal that. And I felt our sex was going differently. Sex can be various things, but in my experience the usual thing it is is considerate work on the part of both parties, with Alphonse and Gaston–style routines—after you, no, after you, mais non—this being the standard among educated people. But then there’s another kind of sex, that’s more like despair on both sides. My own name for it is blank sex. It’s sex without an order of battle. No program goes with blank sex. My closest nonsexual analog for it is from repeated diving. When I was a girl I would go to the municipal pool in the summers and get into uninterrupted diving, off the board and into the pool and back up onto the board again as fast as I could: chain-diving. This was from the low board only, so that the circuit would be the shortest possible. The idea, I think, was trying to link the experience of being in midair as closely to the next moment of it as you could humanly achieve. Or it may have been the moments of plunging I was trying to link up. What you wanted was a certain inner teeming feeling produced under cover of ostensibly testing yourself on the number and quality of dives you could make. I was always surprised that there was no one to notice what I was so manically doing and try to moderate me. But then I used feints so that I could continue. I would sometimes nod or shake my head as though I were responding to someone in the area where the mothers sat, mine not included, to throw anyone who might think I was being excessive off the track. In blank sex everything tangible about your partner is transformed into something that excites and weakens you, seems irreplaceable, his breath, even physical defects, and all these things are somehow necessary for your physical
survival or salvation, and yet you know you can never possess them even as you caress them and try to convince yourself that contact with them in the heat of sex is the same as claiming them, having them forever, which in your heart you know is untrue, and thus the tonus of despair.

Blank sex is only possible between adults—that is, it’s not a reflorescence of onset sex à la adolescence, which is intense but so expeditionary and educational that sadness and intimations of finitude hardly come into it. But then you do get experience and you get older and sex is going to continue and it does continue and then sex is what it is, average, until the time comes when everything about it changes.

There was more blank sex lately, which was wonderful but also not wonderful in that it was enervating. Postcoitum you might be left in a crystalline mental state but with no physical executive power to speak of. We would resume our duties in Tsau, but I was always afraid people would be able to tell, that they’d be able to see through to my essential languor, no matter how hard I tried to bury it in brisk movements and responses. It was a drawback that midday was usually the time this broke on us, because we had to go out and interact so proximately to our occasion. But sometimes I even felt the effects lasted overnight and would be visible to the ideal observer should she be passing through, perchance.

Your hair grows like a fiend, I told Nelson. I liked cutting his hair now that he had stopped being resistant to fairly frequent trimming. He was even goodnatured about letting me take my time about it for the purposes of a touch of art. I was going very languorously that afternoon, a Saturday, for the aforementioned reason. I had gotten him over to accepting a longish crewcut as his style for the present, despite the fact that it did nothing for his incipient male pattern baldness, which the pulled-back ponytail had been made for. But he was unvain, essentially unvain, I was gradually having to admit.

Dineo glided onto the patio, out of nowhere and out of breath, beautiful as always, her image reminding me that I would never be one of the
truly lithe. She was wearing a long white tunic and black wraparound underskirt, very severe for her, and a tight powder blue turban. There were no greetings. She spoke past me directly to Denoon in machinegun Setswana, which I strained to understand, coming up with the unlikely interpretation that someone was coming to us bearing masepa, meaning shit.

Nelson had gotten up so fast at her approach that I had stuck him minorly with the point of the scissors halfway up his neck. Nelson began thrashing at the cut hair on his naked shoulders and telling me urgently he wanted his shirt. I am not going to run like a child for your shirt, I said, or like a valet, unless this is an emergency, which it isn’t. All this was out of the side of my mouth. But I changed my mind when I sensed he was clearly unhappy and feeling distinctly unhorsed over something. I got his shirt, but casually.

Toiling up toward us was a procession led by Hector Raboupi. Dineo said to me in English Raboupi is bringing lion spoor to show.

Suddenly Denoon wanted a different mise en scène than he had just seemed to want. Now he was back to wanting to be sitting down and in the midst of getting his hair cut: he wanted to be interrupted. He slashed my hand away from pressing on the little blood bud on his neck, hurting me with the sharpness of the blow. He threw the shirt I’d just brought him onto the ground. He caught my hand with the scissors still in it and brought it back up into cutting range. He held his hands up and pushed out, hard, toward Dineo, obviously miming her to fade back beside or behind the house, which she ignored, I was pleased to see. Deal with yourself, I almost said to Nelson.

Raboupi and his sister and four other women and six or so men hove into view. He was triumphally dragging a burlap sack.

They arrived.

I thought it was interesting that it was Dorcas, a woman, he directed to bring the sack forward and peel the mouth back, to reveal a few dark spiny clods of supposed lion dung. Dineo went to look.

This was Raboupi triumphant. He was wearing his fur cap, with the tail brought forward over his right shoulder, a signifier of pride or teasement, I’d been told. It was a cool day, but he was wearing a cowhide vest in lieu of a shirt, and the vest was not fastened up. This was winter. He was the only one in the group so lightly dressed. The other men were wearing jerseys and watch caps. I noted that somehow he had acquired a pair of new-looking gleaming black riding boots.

So, my sister, what shall you say? Raboupi said in English to Dineo.

I wondered what tack she would take. There was no question this was lion spoor, because of the quills. Lions are the only animals that eat porcupines.

This is very old spoor, Dineo said in English and then again in Setswana.

If a group can snarl, this one did. Dineo shrugged. Raboupi went passionately into just where and when the spoor had been found.

Denoon twitched to remind me that I was supposed to be cutting his hair, which was difficult for me since it was a done job. But I fiddled on, as instructed.

Denoon lazily asked why they had come to this place when the matter was something for the mother committee.

Raboupi was quick. We are going to every place with this to show, not just this place. After now you will see us roundabout so all can see.

Dineo murmured that then the mother committee would be expecting him to come at the soonest.

Denoon was impatient. He was conveying the feeling that he expected Dineo to say more.

Enfields! Enfields! Raboupi’s group was chanting. They knew the particular rifle they wanted. Raboupi was doing a recitative on the wellknown incompetence and tardiness in arriving of the government game scouts.

Dineo seemed frozen.

There can be Enfields for hire, Denoon said alternately in English and Setswana, all business.

Still Dineo was passive.

Nelson said, projecting patently theatrically, I thought, all in Setswana, You must meet with the mother committee to see if they say some Enfields can be stored, a small number, and put out for hire when there is some need.

I was electrified at this, because I knew Nelson knew that what Raboupi wanted was for Enfields, or whatever rifle could be gotten, to be regular items in stock at Sekopololo, which would mean they would filter out into general ownership through women to the men who lived with them. So rental was a brilliant idea. Of course it cut against his role as guardian of the social surplus, guns being as expensive as they are. But I knew Nelson, and this was flexibility on the part of the man who liked to say that the best definition of the state was Lenin’s The state is bodies of armed men. The rental scheme would keep the numbers of guns in play finite. He was improving. It was also since me that this
guardian of the social surplus had given up his objection to importing bras, when he had previously taken the position that a strip of cloth artfully passed around the upper body like an X was essentially all that was required. I had said to him that his notion of the postlactative breast was so defective it was laughable. His finishing flourish to Raboupi was to say that he was turning his own rifle over to Sekopololo in perpetuity to begin the scheme.

Dineo came more center stage to cheerlead belatedly for Nelson’s proposal, which it was clear Raboupi was surprised by and not enchanted with.

He and his party withdrew pestered by King James, who had turned up complaining that Raboupi had refused his cart services.

I think I felt delighted with the rental resolution. I could tell Nelson had been annoyed at Dineo’s not taking a more forward role in laying things out, but there was nothing reproachful showing as they summed up once Raboupi was gone. Why did I have the feeling that he had partly gotten this proposal going so quickly as a kind of demonstration to me? All seemed well. There might be trouble over how many rifles should be bought, Nelson thinking we might get away with two or three, Dineo thinking we might need to go for five or six, but it would be worked out. We all looked ruefully at one another and that was that, I thought.

In a couple of days Nelson was morosely rethinking the rifle scheme, strictly entre nous, compulsively I thought, adumbrating ways it could be strengthened, rules on how many guns could be out for hire at any one time, and so on. Then it was on toward the dark scenarios that having the guns for hire might escalate to. First the guns would be checked out during lion scares, on anybody’s report that lions had been sighted. Then there would be some incidental hunting of permitted species, like warthogs and rock rabbits. Then there would come a time when a deal would be struck with the Basarwa who were better and better established in their little settlement behind Tsau on the sand river, and the deal would be that Raboupi’s men would shoot impala and wildebeest
and the carcasses would be traded to the Basarwa on some basis, with the bullet wounds altered so that the carcasses looked like arrow or trap kills. Everything would appear legal. And then the Basarwa would barter the meat with Sekopololo, but there would be kickbacks to Raboupi. And then we would be well en route to establishing a permanent leisure hunting class among the men, than which nothing could be more traditional, more parasitic. Something like this was bound to happen because only the Basarwa could legally hunt large game inside the reserve. Of course I was thinking that nothing is totally bad. We could use more animal protein. He knew my position on that. The nurse was saying that there was too much anemia. The only exceptions to the severe restrictions on hunting by non-Basarwa had to do with lions and leopards, which could be shot if they directly threatened persons or livestock. The nice thing was that Nelson came to me with his compulsive scenarizing, which in effect was asking me to help him rid himself of it.

First I came up with all the cavils I could think of, the flaws in his assumptions about what would happen postrental. But in fact, underneath, I saw his point. I did come up with one idea he liked: the rule should be that women were always included in any hunting parties and women were to be trained in the use of rifles and incorporated into every facet of what was ostensibly going on. This provision obviously couldn’t stop the particular devolutionary process Nelson was afraid of, but it seemed to me that it might slow it down. I made my case. Do you get it? I asked, when he was taking too long to brighten up.

Gotcha, Buthelezi, he said, a pun on the name Gatsha Buthelezi, and another good omen. He was showing more willingness to be jocular about serious things. Gotcha was another entry in a jeu I had initiated between us when for no reason I had described some position he had taken as Highly Selassie or Fairly Dickinson or that some notion of his was Utter Pradesh. He had been longsuffering at first about this game, but lately he’d been more willing to join in the fun and had introduced inversions, such as Ansermet, Ernest.