Mating (54 page)

The idea of a summarist had come to Nelson through contact with one of the down-on-their-luck radicals his father had put up from time to time, this one an anarchist cigarmaker from Cuba whose union had hired unemployed actors to read Calderón and Kropotkin to them while they rolled cigars. The chronology of all this is inexact in my mind. But Nelson’s father during a good patch had been sent as a perquisite to have fun in Cuba under Batista by some advertising company or other, or possibly he had won a prize. In a burst of drinking bonhomie and heavy tipping he had gotten to be friends with some of the waiters he’d met there, who had given him a complimentary subscription to their union newsletter, Solidaridad Gastronómica. He remembers his father looking crushed when what was clearly the last issue came in the mail, the union having been extinguished by Fidel Castro. Naturally Castro hated them because they were anarchosyndicalists. So despite their having fought valiantly against Batista, Castro destroyed them, expropriated their credit unions, shut their cooperative restaurants, and created a diaspora—particles of which turned up now and then on the Denoon household doorstep to be waited on hand and foot by Mrs. Denoon. Nelson liked to call Fidel Fidel Catastro. Nelson described his father as being promiscuously left, a fan of the left generically, in the sense that to get his approval you could be any variety of leftist so long as you were rank and file. It didn’t matter to him that your leftism was at loggerheads with the variant or tendency of leftism of the person he had invited you to take potluck with. That is, you could be an old Wobbly and be invited to dinner with a Stalinist stevedore, your deadly historical enemy. All you had to be was real, not a piecard, meaning bureaucrat, and not an academic, either. I gather that one reason his father had very little use for the Socialist Party was that they were all schoolteachers or pharmacists, supposedly.

Mma Sithebe had a clear, steady voice, she could translate from English to Setswana or the reverse quite decently, and she was uniformly nice to everyone. Her nine-year-old son, Sithebe, was studious and was
also pleasant. There was nothing invasive about Mma Sithebe. Even when she summarized current events at cream teas or other common meals, which she sometimes did, she was almost apologetic before commencing, and she was always brief. She was our town crier. There had never been the slightest sign that anyone was anything but happy with her, even when it was her task to roam around calling out reminders about meetings or classes, or when she named people who were defaulting on inoculation schedules at the clinic, or when she announced deadlines for the multifarious contests always being promoted. Now, we learned, three enterprises had voted against her coming to them in the future, on the grounds that they would rather have conversation among themselves than have makhoa literature forced upon them. The three women had set out to intercept us with this. Mma Sithebe was distressed. They say they have no need of me, she said. Dirang said Dorcas Raboupi was behind it, at least as it touched the laundry and the fabric print house. Idol had defeated a similar maneuver in the central kitchen.

Denoon gave a puzzling performance. He tried to convince Mma Sithebe that this would blow over, that he had heard only fine things about her. He seemed to want to say that these actions were not really directed at her, they were directed at him, through her, but he put it all so vaguely that even I had difficulty getting his drift. Why did I feel the three women were much more militant about this than he was? There would be an answer, he kept telling her, and people might change their minds. He would think of something to do. It was a weak performance by Nelson, his weakest, and so felt we all, I was sure.

  LOVE ITSELF

Nelson began looking peaked, then got lethargic. I knew something was definitely wrong when I invited him to not come to the table once or twice and he let me bring him his dinner to eat propped up in bed. I thought this was the consequence of overexertion resulting from a day of work grooming the airstrip, which was something supposed to be done periodically by a levée en masse, like a quilting bee. There had been a decent turnout, I thought. But he wanted to have it all done within one day, as apparently it had been in the past, and he had driven himself too much in order to attain that, raking and grading late into the evening with only a few hangers-on for company, finally.

I was taking his soupbowl away and handing him a damp cloth when he said, astounding me, I would never leave you. There was no context immediately evident. As a stone neurotic I naturally fastened on why I was hearing would instead of could: didn’t this mean there was a trailing clause lacking, like a phantom limb, which would reduce to his saying he would never leave me once some as yet unattained level of intimacy was reached? Wouldn’t could have been preferable, more definite, more present-based? I was agitated.

I was agitated because what we were both trying to do, I think, was arrive at love manifest—that is, love being established between us to both our satisfactions without anyone having to go through the horrible bourgeois ritual of declaring love, he for his reasons, I for mine. He was sensitive and knew that the last thing I wanted was a horrible sotto voce I love you and then on into a flurry of hungry kisses to bury the robotic nature of what he’d felt he had to say. I assumed that of course he had declared his love to Grace at one point. Inescapably declarations precede not only the few marriages that make it but also all the farces and divorces there are. Judging by British television, the practice has been given up on over there by now except in situation comedies and among the rural.

He closed his eyes and began to writhe and mumble and sweat almost immediately. It was a plunge into another state. His brow was hot. He
was having an attack. Already he seemed to be in the outskirts of delirium. And this is how depraved you can become: I bent over him for a minute listening to see if something about love might not escape—or anything that might shed light on how to interpret his I would never leave you, anything to show me if that statement itself had integrity or had only been a first spattering from the storm that was now on my hands. Might he repeat the phrase, but with could instead of would, showing me I’d misheard?

I got badly frightened and tried to wake him up. I shook him, which instantly seemed wrong. I think I pulled on his ears, I was so distraught. He would rally, but only for a minute, then flop back comatose. It was unplanned, but in my fear I told him I loved him, fairly loudly, a few times. Nothing was helping. I ran out to get the nurse.

Dineo was already occultly in our house and taking care of things by the time I got back with the nurse in tow. I must have attracted more attention than I thought during my search, stopping people and so on when there was no one at the infirmary. Word had reached her and here she was. Nelson seemed better too.

The nurse was very good. I tried to be helpful and brisk, but I was fighting surges of feeling faint. I felt incompetent. I know first aid and I know a fair amount about the body, but all of that had left me, apparently because the patient was Nelson. I felt like a peasant next to these two women. Dineo was in a beautiful caftan decorated with ankh symbols. The nurse was thin and strong without being overbig, unlike me, with my big shoulders and all. I had to hide that I was in terror that Denoon was slipping away. He was clearly very sick and might be sicker than they were saying. He was sick, someone I had never seen sick, and what had I been doing with my life lately except parsing everything going on with us like a maniac?

I wrote down what they said I had to do—there was in fact some medication in the house—and lo, my handwriting was the handwriting of someone else: my mother. This was more proof to me that I was doomed, metabolically doomed. Living with Denoon had already made me fatter than I’d been for a good while. And now abruptly it was intolerable to have these two women, these in particular, in our house, in our privacy, witnessing but not understanding that there was an unresolved war going on between two different aesthetics of what comfort was, for one thing. I wanted them to leave and said No in a virtual scream when Dineo said she was going to send someone to stay with us.

I’ve been overwrought in my life, but this was a revelation. The
culmination was my rushing out to catch them before they left our patio to tell them both, sobbingly, that I loved Nelson, which I wanted them to know, and that I would do everything, everything.

Then it was all right. I was with Denoon for forty-eight hours straight, reading to him and doing as I’d been told and jumping under the covers to hold him when he began to vibrate. His malaria dated from Tanzania, and these bouts were infrequent, never more than one per year, he said. He was back to his lucid self permanently by midnight the first night, although a few times he came out with aperçus not clearly related to anything going on around him.

Everything was all right. I’m convinced I was drawing power from some new source. I fought off three serious attempts by women to come in in numbers to stay with us while Nelson recovered, which is the Tswana way: the more people there are in the sickroom with you while you convalesce, the less likely it is the badimo will snatch away your soul. But I managed to get rid of everybody without offending anyone and began to feel that if I could manage that situation I could manage the world. Someone as a treat brought cold Pine Nut Soda, innocently. Nelson drank it and said it tasted beautiful. I had news for him I had to withhold: Dineo wanted me to be the one who let him know a rule had been adopted saying that he was welcome to come to committee meetings only when he was specifically invited, except for the committee as to names, to which he could come anytime he pleased. He was being rendered emeritus whether he liked it or not, I gathered. It was interesting that I was chosen to be the messenger for this news, and I even wondered if the change would have happened at all if I hadn’t been there to convey it, the ideal conduit, although I may be inflating myself here. It was nothing when I did break it to him, seemingly. He was gazing at me with love following some ministration or other, and the gaze continued while I gave him the news, and afterward, such that I was able to believe him when he said it was nothing. I was everything, or we together were everything, was the implication. Every day was soft.

Once he was restored I was free to have an attack of urticaria. I felt hideous not only because my face is always the first thing affected when I get these attacks but because my mother also gets hives, so it seemed like another gratuitous foreshadowing. But the outcome was something only possible between people in a state of love in that Denoon really seemed not to notice. And it certainly had no effect on his physical interest in me. When I finally noted offhand that he seemed not to have any particular reaction to my eyes having virtually disappeared thanks to adjacent tissue swelling—I was overstating—or to blotching on some of his favorite parts of mine, he admitted that in fact he had noticed but it had led him into thanking god I was a skin reactor. Humans react to stress in three ways—through their organs, their muscles, or their skin—he informed me, only gradually picking up from my hyperpatient attitude that I was fully up to date on this piece of pop psychosomatology. But he went on with it. The luckiest are the skin reactors, because the range of topical medications they qualify for is so huge. So he was relieved that I was in that category. Inter alia he was letting me know he appreciated that my stress was probably his fault, or his malaria’s fault, and he was grateful for what I had done for him more than very much. Concluding, he said My category is organ reactor. I’ll say, I said, attempting a lewd reference. It went past him. He was all concern. He took my hand. The treatment for urticaria is the same as for malaria, he said—that is, the passage of time.

I think he was almost disappointed when my hives faded as precipitately as they did. He wanted to reciprocate my taking care of him. The irony was that the hives cleared up after his suggesting that I might speed up their exit by willing them to go, in a conscious way. He suggested I visualize my body as a paper doll with blotches and then as a paper doll without them, blank. He even made some joke mesmeric passes over me while I carried out his mental exercise to humor him. In the morning I had to laugh, the improvement was so distinct. We were both surmounting everything, it seemed, without strain, with a feeling of automatism,
almost. Even his being put on a reduced footing with the committees wasn’t affecting him to the naked eye, although all the news of the day for the period when he’d been out of it had to be gone over and nailed down, to be sure there was nothing included that was something from his deliria. I think he thought his removal was something he’d imagined. He appeared unworried about it, though. There were going to be elections soon, and then a general meeting, a plenary, where everything always got settled. For myself, I wasn’t unhappy feeling that the forces of circumstances were moving him toward thinking of a future in someplace less remote, although I kept this strictly to myself.