Mating (56 page)

About this time the question of true intimacy—how to define it, did we have it or not—blessedly went away. Sometimes as we were resting Nelson would roll over and confront me with a manic smile that made him look like the logo on a funhouse. This was to give me the opportunity to reassure him about his teeth and smile. This is intimacy, I said. He knew that one reason he smiled less than other people was his feeling that his teeth, which were a little jumbled at the sides, were unattractive, and when he smiled his face felt swollen to him, unnatural. This is intimacy, I said, and dredging up vintage fantasies about having sex with identical twins is fake intimacy, although that constitutes ninety percent of the male concept of it.

Most of the activity around the mother committee elections clearly went on during the afternoons we were engaged in our new extended siestas, because it was almost a surprise when the elections were over. Denoon surprised me by insisting on getting down to the plaza to read the results in the freezing dawn rather than waiting to go by at midmorning.
And he surprised me by having no particular reaction to the results. There were a few new women on the committee, but aside from Dorcas Raboupi advancing to the second chair I couldn’t detect any startling change. Dineo was still chair.

The signs that there was less equanimity in Nelson than met the eye must have been around, but in my flattered state I was mostly missing them. They were wavelets.

We were in deep winter, but thanks to the incredibly long growing season in the Kalahari were still getting greens out of the nethouse, albeit only escarole, and only escarole as tough as sacking. Nelson wanted it exclusively in salads nevertheless. He could be insistent. I don’t know how many times I said This belongs in soup, minced, with onions. But no, we had to endure it in salads, and why exactly? Because people should eat something live or raw at every meal. I ascertained that this was something other than an avatar of my saying that the consumption of leafy greens in Tsau needed to be encouraged. He meant something else. It came to me then how unfailing he always was about picking off a cherry tomato or a sprig of parsley from our doorside tubs after a meal, or in seeking out a pinch of whatever we were sprouting that week in the event it hadn’t been an ingredient in our last collation.

Was it that he wanted to eat perfectly as some kind of moral body English for everybody else in Tsau? Was it magic thinking?

It wasn’t that. No, he said, what I think is you should eat something fresh—not much, necessarily—just something at every meal.

Was it a sort of magic thinking connected with the rather uneven appreciation of sprouting manifest in Tsau? No. Nor was it anything I had said about enzymes, our needing more fresh food as we grow older because we produce fewer enzymes physiologically as we age. No, it predated that, he said.

He supposed this had to be called an intuition. Somehow it had come to him. A noetic experience, not to put too fine a point on it.

So this tic about always something fresh could be called revealed science, I said.

I’ve rarely seen anyone so delighted with a phrase. So much so that apparently he was willing to forgo having escarole only in salad thenceforward. Some could go for soup. This was the way it was in those days. We seemed to coast over everything, up and over, a good thickness of rushing water between us and the boulders underneath.

For me love is like this: you’re in one room or apartment which you think is fine, then you walk through a door and close it behind you and
find yourself in the next apartment, which is even better, larger, more floorspace, a better view. You’re happy there and then you go into the next apartment and close the door and this one is even better. And the sequence continues, but with the odd feature that although this has happened to you a number of times, you forget: each time your new quarters are manifestly better and each time it’s breathtaking, a surprise, something you’ve done nothing to deserve or make happen. You never intend to go from one room onward to the next—it just happens. You notice a door, you go through, and you’re delighted again.

This feeling of progress to better and larger was present in our conversation too. I suppose that in a sense the size of the items of his personalia I could now unreluctantly bring up obscured my view of smaller but still critical subjects that stayed difficult for us. And of course every topic I ventured was in reality a Trojan horse containing the questions What are you thinking of doing next? and when? and where do I fit in? Probably that was why it felt so congenial to get him on to the very large question of what a person should best do with his or her life. He was willing to return to this again and again.

As a boy and pre-Gandhian he had had no doubt that the best thing you could do with your life was assassinate Franco. Certainly he had had no doubt it was the best thing his father could have done with the end part of his own life. But then in retrospect it was better that Franco had died naturally, with the falangists sated and out of gas, so that Spain could move to normalcy without spasms of reflexive killing on anyone’s part. His intensity about Evasion, about justifying your life, was so unusual in someone at his stage of the game that I was always struck. Of course how it could be that Tsau wasn’t enough of a crown and pinnacle for anyone’s life was beyond me. He was prickly about it and not willing to talk very deeply about Tsau, because, I gathered, it was too soon to sum it up as a success or failure. We talked about peonage in India, which is growing. He listened, but said tackling peonage would mean another physical project probably, and Tsau was his last project, full stop. He bridled a little when I pointed out that in these discussions he always seemed to present himself as someone radically closer to the end of his working life than someone at forty-eight had a right to feel. What about writing? He could tell me about writing. Writing without personal advocacy, if I meant political writing, was pointless. He had written something he would be glad to show me, something he had put into the right hands, something that in retrospect was absolutely correct. It had been an attack on the ANC embracing dual power as a strategy. Dual
power amounts to seizing a cellblock while the rest of the prison remains in the hands of the bourgeoisie or the whites or the fascists, whichever. The great apotheosis of revolutionary dual power had been in Italy in 1920 when the workers had seized the factories in the north and held them just long enough to terrify the bourgeoisie into lining up behind Mussolini. There was no second act for the factory occupiers and none for the ANC once they got hold of the townships. Dual power in the South African context was a recipe for repeated decapitation. I could judge for myself how successful his argumentation had been, since the ANC was more yoked to dual power strategies than ever. I didn’t know what was or was not important in discussions like this, so I went off and wrote down what I could in my journal while what he’d said was still fresh. He was still brooding when I returned, but was willing to talk more.

He said that there was actually one writing project that if carried out successfully would be enough to justify anyone’s life. That would be a convincing essay against violence, against participating in official violence, ever. He had the noumenal form of the essay. It would be brief, it would be secular. The text would be printed on India paper in thirty languages. It would make a book about the size of a deck of cards. There could be a foundation to distribute it to everyone, on the order of the Gideon Bibles, internationally though. Of course the problem was that the essay itself would have to be a thing of genius, of compression, of inspiration. It would be like asking oneself to sit down and write not only a poem but a great poem. It would have to be like Thoreau on civil disobedience or Hume on causality. The fact was, he said, that this essay already existed in him, in his mind and feelings, but that was the problem: it was a conviction about violence, against violence, that overwhelmed any text he had ever tried to confine it in. The text was always pallid and weak compared to what he knew and felt, which was the proof that he lacked the genius to externalize himself on this issue. With this text you could cut the roots of war, of armies, and so on. Telling me this he got slightly flushed.

I was having trouble being sure how completely serious he was, especially when he seemed to remember that there was one other project that would justify his life however everything else he had done to date got ultimately judged. This would be to do something about flight capital, secret accounts, to do something conclusive to make the banksters stop helping the Wabenzi, the kleptocracy, by making bank secrecy illegal everywhere. I didn’t know who the Wabenzi were: it was what the Kenyans called the African civil servants who drive Mercedes-Benzes. If you
wanted to accelerate African development by some unimaginable multiple, bank secrecy reform was what a serious person would put his best effort toward. Of course that would involve lobbying, going through the UN, setting up an organization, and he had sworn an oath to himself that he was never going to sit in an office again in his life. So that apparently was that. How seriously in all this I was being taken was not my question at that time.

It ended nowhere. In retrospect I regret being so passive. But I wanted to hear everything. I think I tried to be more probing about the bank secrecy idea—it had some feeling of reality and possibility about it—but I was deflected by his asking from nowhere if I didn’t think it was interesting that there was no term equivalent to cuckold to apply to women when they were being betrayed. Was it because the condition was so far from exceptional that no particular term was needed? He knew of no language in which that was not the case.

I love your mind, I said.

It seemed we could ride up and over everything, not excluding the to me rather bold maiden decisions of the new mother committee to postpone the plenary and admit men to full membership in Sekopololo. Men could work for credits now instead of only for pula, which was an economic advantage to them, but they were still ineligible to run for any office or serve on committees. And there was no question of any change in the system of female-only inheritance of chattels and homesteads. I tried to tease Nelson by comparing men in Tsau to Jews in the Middle Ages or Indians in Fiji, with respect to land ownership. I was being polemical, and I was quick to add that I appreciated that the difference was that men in Botswana, on past performance, deserved it, unlike the Jews or Indians, obviously. He wouldn’t be drawn. The mother committee was shifting the scenery around quite a bit, I thought, but he was remaining serene.

Except that he did want to talk, however calmly, about the postponement of the plenary. His point was that there had to be a plenary. It was
the custom to have at least one a year. He said more than once We have to assume they’re going to change their minds. Everybody had liked plenaries in the past. It was important to collect the whole social body together periodically. Batswana loved kgotla meetings, so they should love the plenary, which it was just like. He felt strongly enough about this that he had gone to the length of socially letting fall expressions of disappointment that the plenary was being postponed, obviously with the expectation that they would be passed along.

Letting his opinion be known around the plaza a few more times seemed to be enough for him. He stopped bringing up the plenary altogether, which was what I wanted.

So naturally I brought it up again myself. I had something to say that I thought might put the whole question to rest in a profounder way.

I think I put it confusedly.

I said: One thing about yourself that I think you don’t appreciate is the complexity of why people tend to accept things you lay out for them as good ideas. Don’t get mad, but in a way your lifework could be described as getting people to do things you regard as improvements, better for them. You have great powers of getting people to do things the way you want. Only partly is that because the things you come up with are sensible in themselves. The rest of it has to do with something benign about you, unusually so. You seem good. You seem unselfish. Even people who are really at loggerheads with you see it, although it may drive them even crazier against you when they do. Also you look counter to what you are, since you look more like an unemployed wrestler than anything else, which incidentally adds to your power. What you are operates cross-culturally, for some unknown reason. I may be trying to say that possibly the plenary is less important in a structural way than you think, and that it should sink or swim but you should hold back from using your powers to try to get it reinstated. What I want to feel is that you’ve divorced yourself from it.

This is as I reconstruct it. By the end of it I was confused about what, really, I was trying to say, other than quite obviously declaring appreciation tantamount to the most abject love.

His reaction to this was to say Light from the caves! This was a standby he used to greet solecisms or cant.

I was overwhelmed with the desire to apologize, which I suppressed.

When Nelson said in so many words that he loved me, I should have felt it more as the major benchmark it was, the thing long sought, than I did. We were living as though he had already said it, for one thing. And for another it seemed to me that something about his almost always appending a phrase like heart and soul or root and branch to his declaration made it more literary and less real. Something fell off a shelf in the middle of the night and when I said What was that? he said The scales falling from my eyes. I love you.

He started talking about movies with me, gamely but lamely, because he was worried he’d insulted the cinéphile in me by earlier saying things like Only a fool could think an art form is significant where your emotional response to it is signaled to you by mood music. He made good-faith efforts to think of movies he’d seen but forgotten he’d liked, like
Dead of Night
and
Fame Is the Spur,
neither of which I’d seen at the time, unfortunately. He was going to get better movies for Tsau, not just the kung fu films that were so popular: I should think about what classics I might like him to try to get. I remember saying to him Explain to me how I can love someone who has never seen a movie he liked enough to see twice? This had even been a point of pride with him, and it derived from his huge antipathy to repetition of experience in general, to which he attributed his recoil from the prospect of university teaching. I had tried lately to get a little deeper into that famous aversion of his.