Mating (67 page)

Since the questions I was entertaining were for my eyes only and
could always be triaged, I felt free to get ultra vires if I felt like it. Some were what he hated most, pop psychological, as in Is there anything that might be helpful to you in deciding about this if you looked at your parental constellation, id est the idea that you might be carrying out a paternal mission, converting his philoradicalism into the real thing, and at the same time creating a society your saintly mother would be proud of, in which women are supposedly never harmed by men and where temperance is queen, which also retroactively rules the cause of your father’s downfall out of existence? I’m not quite the deadly enemy of pop psychology I’m afraid I let Nelson assume I was. I’m a true eclectic. In fact I once even vaguely thought about becoming a Transactional Analyst, because they had wonderfully simple certification procedures and I don’t think you can argue with the idea that internalized family dynamics are to some degree or other critical in what we are. This was during my continual search for economic fallbacks. Nelson never fully appreciated how determined I was not to fall into poverty in America, into debt in particular. I knew what that was. Even when I went ultra vires there were limits. In none of my questions do the words midlife crisis appear, for instance.

Another question I had was Supposing I were more vocationally clear and driven and less skeptical and ambivalent, how would that affect this? It wasn’t that I was no longer interested in nutritional anthropology. I am and was. And I knew that with a modicum of luck and encouragement I could blow on the embers and get the son et lumière back, probably. But pursuing Nelson had filled the skies of my mind with another edifice. I would try to revivify my feeling for anthropology from time to time, even carrying my efforts into little fantasies of pulling out, going alone and whole hog back to Stanford and into a new thesis and a new thesis adviser and lo and behold having Nelson without warning turn up, having followed me across the world to be with me. But if he didn’t come, what then? And what about having to deal with the dynamo women who were taking over in anthropology, the ones who had been smarter and who had done it better, who would be really en route, some of them with husbands they loved, who loved them, children already? And what would I do when it turned out that the most interesting thing I could tell anyone was anything I was willing to divulge about the great social genius Nelson Denoon, who was rumored to have been very attached to me at one time?

This moment in my life wasn’t good and had to end. To live in Tsau
decently you have to attend to small things. Distraction can hurt you. I got slipshod about checking the bedclothes for scorpions, for example, and felt something on my ankle one night and that was what it was. I knocked it away before it could sting, but it was a warning to me.

My dreams were not helping me in any way. In one of them I had a suitcase and was entering a house that was like a child’s drawing and in one of whose windows I had caught a glimpse of a name anthropologist, male, who had once expressed an interest in me but who was, I had found out, bisexual. When I got inside the house it was a place where I had lived briefly with my mother, a rickety cottage on the outskirts of a quarry. There was blasting at any time of the day, two or three times a week. In this house there were no level surfaces. You would get used to it but then the next time they blasted, things would slide in a direction you weren’t adapted to. My mother in a deluded attempt to spruce the place up had pried down the lath covering the joins in the beaverboard panels that made up the ceiling and had tried to spackle and repaint the whole thing to create a more seamless effect, because, as I recall, she hated the feeling of being under a grid. But unfortunately the outcome was that as the grout between the panels dried out and the blasting continued, little bits of stuff and dust would drop down on you, especially, it seemed, when you had your little friends over for a tea party. Anyway, that was the house I was back in, in my dream, although nothing seemed to be going on and there was no sign of my mother.

One night I looked at my right hand and noticed a callus like a little knob just above the first joint on my middle finger, and a padlike thickening on the tip of my index finger that I’d been unconsciously picking at lately, all due to incessant writing. This has to end, I said to myself.

One morning he was up before light. He was gathering things together and putting them in a pack. I’m leaving, I thought I heard him say.

Naturally I was electrified. He looked altered. He was purposive. If
he was packing, I should be packing too, n’est-ce pas? I was afraid to say or do anything that would threaten the construction I was placing on things.

But he undeceived me in a flash. He knew what he was going to do vis-à-vis Tsau. He was going to go, now, at once, to the minuscule hamlet of Tikwe. Tikwe was forty-five miles to the north of us. In the stretch of desert between us and Tikwe, there were no settlements whatever. He, singular, was going. He was looking for my water-points map.

He would be going to Tikwe for a specific purpose. It was time for Tsau to have a sister colony, an affine of some concrete sort. The lack of a sister or daughter colony was at the root of what was wrong in Tsau. People had to be confronted with the need to spread the idea of Tsau rather than merely reposing comfortably in it. There needed to be exchange. Exchange would concentrate the public consciousness in Tsau on what Tsau truly was. People in Tsau had gotten too casual and spent too much time writing letters to poor relations elsewhere, essentially lording it over them. In Tikwe he would see about setting up a branch of Tsau, or at a minimum explore bringing back a couple of women as interns. Tsau had the wealth to begin to expand modestly, and this was modest. Also he would be able to see if there was any news of Hector in Tikwe.

Sit down while we eat something, I said. I could smell danger all over this project, commencing with his mode of conveyance. He was going to borrow—this was his word—a horse. Tsau owned two horses. I knew this was something that had to go through a committee, and he was not planning to go through a committee. He was departing immediately. He was speaking in short sentences and sentence fragments, I pointed out to him. I said Being this terse is proof this whole thing is precipitate, isn’t it?

I was frank with him. This is action for the sake of action, I told him. There was no risk, he claimed, and if there was, it was a fraction of what I had faced in coming to Tsau. He knew this patch of the Kalahari inside out, whether I believed that or not. In any case he wasn’t going to argue the central proposition, because that would be time-consuming and he was definitely determined to go. If he was wrong, so be it, it would cost him a week and then he would be back to rejoin the waltz and I would have been proven right about something yet again.

I could stop you, I said. I could notify people. I love you, which you’re exploiting: you know I won’t stop this. But I should. I should, just to stop you from talking to me in this particular way ever again. I am not
your audience. Remember that. I’m dead against this and I love you, but nothing I say can have the slightest effect on you, can it? We both know it. This is patter you’re giving me, and you’re the supposed proclaimed enemy of the idea that women are just pontoons for the various male enterprises coming down the pike, but look at this. What would be wrong with going tomorrow or the next day? The problem is that the women would make difficulties for you. They are not going to love your absconding with one of our horses. This is going to be left for me to handle. In fact you need me to be here, which is why I can’t go along if you have to leave without notice like this. Isn’t this right? If we took both horses without a by your leave, there would be hysteria to the skies. But with me left behind I can rationalize, I can explain, I can invent the reasons why this had to be done without notice, and so on, right?

I made him let me check on his food choices, which were adequate. But he had forgotten both the first aid and the snakebite kits. He found them.

I am trying to save this place, he said.

But you don’t deny anything I’m saying, do you? I asked.

No, he said.

This is wrong, I said.

I talked to myself after he left. He wasn’t a fool, so why was he doing this, or why did he feel so absolutely that he had to do it? I was full of staircase wisdom. Maybe the conviction was establishing itself that people wanted him to go, actively in some cases, clearly, and more passively in others. So that by this action he would reverse everything and create a new role for himself it would take them awhile to fathom and object to. So that he could stay. I could have raised this possibility with him. I could have raised the possibility that all the approval for and orchestration of our getting together as a ménage had been directed at the same thing, something permitted to happen premised on the prescient idea that I was younger and would be likely to have an agenda that would pull us both away sooner rather than later. I could have found some way to
get under the closed surface of his patter. I could have made him argue, somehow.

I even ran a little way out with the idea of catching him and telling him to take Baphomey instead of one of the horses, because people would be less upset about it, even though Baph was technically Sekopololo property, like the horses. I had given Baph to Sekopololo. But I realized there was no way he was going to be willing to arrive back in Tsau riding on an ass, with or without Tikwe in the palm of his hand. He would want to look equestrian. I went back to bed. I think now that I still might have been able to catch up with him and make him reconsider, but there was also the fact that the idea of Tsau’s becoming more a model and propagator of the equity system sooner rather than later was itself respectable. It was something that had been talked about. So I went back to bed.

The uproar began at noon, when the absence of one of the horses was noticed. I made mistakes immediately. I got down to the plaza after the fact. I was on my way to see Dineo to tell her what had happened, but timing now suggested this was a bad idea and that I should dissemble.

Dorcas was there, infuriated, sensationalizing the missing horse and saying Denoon was out in the desert taking Hector’s body with him to hide there.

I was afraid. Fear made me say I had been asleep and knew as little as anyone else.

These people are always asleep when crime is going forthwards, Dorcas said, screamed, rather.

Dineo pulled me in, and I told her the truth immediately. I emphasized how I had argued with Nelson but that he had been immovable. I had to write a statement. I felt for her. She was upset.

The weather was peculiar, a white low sky with wispy black under-clouds like ink dispersing in water. That night it rained. I thought of Nelson in the desert, thinking it would probably take at least two days for
the journey. I slept badly, waking up when the perfect phrase came to me for what Nelson had done, the phrase I could have used to stop him, maybe: On s’engage et puis on voit. That might have stopped him. Being classified was one of the few things that ever did. Or maybe it would only have encouraged him. I found his main sunglasses on the desk. He had others, but why would these be here?

In the morning I walked down to the kraals to see Baph. There was an ostentatious guard, men and women, posted. I suppose the idea was to keep me from helping myself to either Baph or the remaining horse. I probably shouldn’t have made that visit.

The justice committee was convened again.

I thought to myself I am in danger of going crazy if this goes on for very long. I had been dropped out of two discourses, one with Denoon because in a crisis we were not really collegial and also because of not being a man, I am convinced. And I was being dropped out of discourse with the women of Tsau because of not being an African and also because of my connection with the increasingly suspect Nelson.

I tried to be internally militant and to disdain the present circumstances of my life because they were boring and I was not born to be bored. Of course in Setswana there is no word for boring or bored, which Nelson had pointed out to me as an example of Tswana soundness. But then where was Nelson, my friend, whatever his weaknesses, now that I needed him?

You are boring to me, was the heresy I wanted to shout into the faces of the squinting rabble who were following Dorcas around. You bore me to tears. You are consigning me to a boring position. You are interesting only from the standpoint of someone interested in boring people. You are less than uninteresting. You are boring in the way you interact. I am not asking you to be characters in Proust, but I am mentally asking you not to surveil me, which is the most boring thing you can either do or be subject to. All over the world in the privacy of their huts anthropologists are turning up their hands and saying This is boring. Life should not be boring. There is a person here who is not boring, Nelson Denoon, and you together have driven him into a state where he is out in the desert, and the desert is always dangerous if you go out into it alone. I also am not boring. You may think you aren’t boring because you’re courteous a lot, when you feel like it. In my humble opinion courtesy is the ancien régime everywhere if it goes off and on like a traffic light. I made my own discourse.

He was supposed to be gone a week at most. A week can mean five days or seven days. And when seven days had passed I was frantically telling myself that he had probably said About a week.

After the fifth day I was frozen with anxiety. I was convinced something terrible had happened to him. My writing project seemed pointless, worse than pointless if something had happened. I should be doing something physical or practical. The effort it took to keep my handwriting from looking atypical was frightening me. I signed up at Sekopololo to distribute seeds around town for the spring planting in the kitchen gardens. At certain houses they closed the door to me when they saw who was calling. I persisted anyway.