by Norman Rush
Can’t anything be innate? he wanted to know, objecting to my probing into his childhood yet again. Does everything have to be an exfoliation from the minutiae of our miserable childhoods? I happen to love silence, he said. Why do we have to be swamped in narrative? Our lives are consumed in narrative. We daydream and it’s narrative. We fall asleep and dream and more narrative! Every human being we encounter has a story to tell us. So what did I think was so wrong with the pursuit of some occasional surcease of narrative?
In retrospect I suppose I could have pursued the reasons for his bouts of indwelling, but when you’re being courted you develop such a gooseneck persona, even if only temporarily, that you’re out of position to catch clues that would normally alert you to things you need to pursue. But of course nothing is more profitless than going back over what interventions might have changed the shape of things to come. I want to scream at myself when I do that.
I realize that I may have contributed to his wanting to be silent during our walks by my too concentrated and cathected soundings re the books in his life. I was groping gingerly for his intellectual keystone, but not gingerly enough. There are certain quagmires to be avoided with people. You can find yourself liking someone who appears intellectually normal and then have him let drop that his favorite book of all time is The Prophet. That wasn’t the particular danger with Denoon, but there were others. A guy who tells you the best novel ever written is Clarissa, which also happens to be the first or second novel ever written, is also not unlikely to tell you that the only music he likes to listen to is motets and that art has never really advanced over the cave paintings at Lascaux. I suppose I was on the qui vive for some variant of this reflex because Denoon had said his favorite novel was War and Peace, so I was thinking, Oh no, it’s going to be Beethoven for music and Shakespeare for plays. It isn’t that these positions are not defensible, but taking them may mean someone is not very individual. One thing you distinctly never want to hear a man you’re interested in say softly is that his favorite book in the whole world is The Golden Notebook. Here you are dealing with a liar from the black lagoon and it’s time to start feeling in your purse for carfare. Anyway, when I sensed the depth of Denoon’s desire for a little silence, I desisted. What I got out of this first attempt to look at his literary underpinnings was a paperback called L’Afrique Noire est Mal Partie to read and comment on.
The Octagon
Denoon was abruptly missing for four days, having said nothing about going anywhere.
Unbeknownst to me, there was an innocent explanation for his absence. He had a custom of retreating once a month to a lean-to a mile down the sand river for reading and reflection. The date had crept up on him. He’d discovered it was time to go by turning a page in his daybook. He’d looked for me, hadn’t found me, hadn’t wanted to leave anything in written form for my information—the problem being, I was nonplussed to hear, that written communications in Tsau weren’t necessarily that secure—and most of all he hadn’t wanted to put off doing something that everyone knew he had always done religiously, like clockwork, up till then. These scruples related to his delicate stage-management of our relationship in terms of the way it was important for it to appear to the watchership of Tsau. Everything in our getting together had to appear to be the result of accident and natural evolution. Everything had to be convincingly gradual.
I couldn’t ask where Denoon was because I felt I had to be wary about the undoubtedly larger than suspected percentage of women in Tsau who privately assumed I had come there with premeditation to chase Denoon. So I couldn’t ask, but what I could do was instantaneously convince myself that Denoon was involved in a covert liaison. Somebody must have given him an ultimatum and forced him to go away for a confrontation. There must be a grotto someplace, I thought, or some other hideout where they were meeting. Who might my rival be? I instantly had two candidates—Dineo, and Kakelo Modise, our surly nurse. It seemed to me that both of them had been out of the public eye sufficiently during Denoon’s absence to make either of them plausible. I, at least, hadn’t seen much of either of them lately, insofar as I could reconstruct.
It had to be Kakelo, probably. She was less than twenty-five and had a very cute figure, which she tailored her nurse costume to exploit. She went everywhere in full kit—always including her miniature toque of a nurse’s cap—lest we forget who she was. She had a beautiful au lait complexion. In her presence you were never unaware that here was someone in no doubt she was wasting her fragrance on the desert air. She was in fact the sole user of perfume in the entire village, to my knowledge. I had sympathy for her, but I was never able to exercise it. She was tremendously rude. There was a protocol obtaining in small groups in the event someone wanted to start speaking in English. It was more pro forma than not, because I never saw anyone give the decline signal. If you wanted to go into English you were supposed to lock your little fingers together for a moment to give people the theoretical option of signaling no with a thumbs-down. But whenever she had intersected any group I was in she had tramplingly ignored the protocol and gone straight into clipped, rapid English. Naturally if she was Denoon’s secret inamorata her rudeness toward me was more than explained. She was clearly seething over something. And any lonely male would be interested in her, if she was interested, it seemed to me. I constructed a complete psychology for her. I imagined myself in her place, nubile and posted involuntarily to a city of women: what would make more sense than trying to go sexually for the indirect author of my distress, to wrench him down? Folklore vis-à-vis young nurses from my adolescence helped me along. Thanks to the amusing reports on the male world I extracted from a gay male friend, I knew what high school guys in my day thought about nurses. My high school had been located two blocks from a college of nursing. My friend described a locker room scene in which a letter man, a lacrosse champion, becomes unhinged and begins pounding the lockers: he has just gotten the news from the team physician that he has contracted a social disease. His worldview is crumbling because he has contracted it from a nurse, or nursing student, rather. Nurses were assumed to be sexually active both out of horniness—they lived under parietal rules—and because they knew all about hygiene and were contraceptively astute and could even give each other abortions if something went wrong. Nurses were supposed to be sexually sanitary in every way. And here a nurse has gotten him infected.
My suspicion of Kakelo was shortlived, though. I had a look around in her office and couldn’t help noticing the thickness of the file of carbons of savingrams she had sent to the Ministry of Health appealing for transfer before her tour was up. Many of the appeals were recent. If she had ensnared Nelson, why would she be pressing so insistently for reassignment? Also a little inquiry revealed that her nonattendance at the health post recently had been due to bronchitis or hypochondria, both of which she had had spells of in the past according to everyone. And, finally, it was brought home to me that she bullied everyone about speaking English, whether I was in the group or not. Her first name translated into Obedience, funnily enough.
The last day Denoon was missing I went prowling around his place like a nut, very early in the morning. I had my pretexts ready in the event I came to anybody’s attention, including his, should he be in situ. He wasn’t. I got there circuitously, slipping down from the brushy hillside above the house instead of going publicly up the path from the plaza. Denoon had a terrace all to himself, an area about the size of two tennis courts end to end.
The house was a concrete block octagon, formerly the command center of the Belgian construction outfit that had built Tsau. There was something disparate and notional about the tall, double-peaked thatch roof. This was a feeling that turned out to be prescient: I was looking at something that would become a personal material headache. In fact the original perfectly good corrugated iron roof had been taken off at Denoon’s instruction and replaced with this thatch fantasia not structurally appropriate to the shape of the building. He wanted to live under
thatch like everybody else. At first my heart went out to Denoon over his having to live in such a peculiar albeit spacious building. It looked vaguely industrial, or even military industrial, like a blockhouse in World War I, or I may mean pillbox, except for the absence of guns sticking out of the narrow rectangular windows set horizontally at a higher than normal level in the walls. But then the more closely I looked at his house and grounds the more interesting and deceptive his choice of domicile seemed to me to be.
It amused me to refer to the whole yard area stretching away from the front of the house and ending in a precipice as the patio. Nelson never fully got the humor in the term. It came to me during that first reconnaissance. In truth what the yard resembled was a sculpture garden of broken or half-repaired or obsolescent machines and machine elements. In among the machines were other sorts of matériel—vats in which machine parts seemed to be marinating in solvents, piping bundled according to caliber, unopened crates. His yard was an antipatio, although there was a clear space near the outer edge of the terrace where any normal person would long ago have put a table and chairs or a hammock. This spot was shaded by the most perfect umbrella tree in Africa, incidentally. As a gardener, Denoon was nominal. There was a measly presentation of parsley and some other herbs in tubs near his doorstep. More could be done. To the back of the terrace, behind the house, was the privy and a sketchier thatched structure like the places you get drinks from on the beach in the Caribbean, except that it contained a huge authentic porcelain bathtub. The bathhouse walls were litani mats held together at the overlaps by clothespins. I marveled at this facility briefly, noting that here was the only place in all of Tsau where you could stretch out full length in hot water. Later I would discover that there was at least one other English bathtub in Tsau, at Dineo’s. I tried the tap, and nothing. The bathtub wasn’t reticulated to the water system. Water had to be brought in in canisters and emptied into the donkey boiler—essentially an oildrum set over a stone firebox—for heating. Here was exactly the peculiar amalgam of amenity and discomfort that I was picking up as a suppressed motif. You could have your own bathtub, but it would have to be somewhat of an ordeal to make use of it. It’s an unfair simile, but what I thought of in scanning his accommodations was the signs you see protesters carrying in demonstrations in movies where the supposedly homemade lettering is so obviously the art director’s version of what an enraged untrained hand would produce. This thought was unfair but I had it.
What Denoon had was space, privacy, the bathtub, magnificent views—especially the view west toward the red hills and the sand river. But clearly, as I read it, he was uncomfortable about any privilege at all and so the theme of perpetual work and study and basic austerity had to manifest everywhere. I was seeing it in the way the interior of the octagon was set up. Moreover, as he admitted later, he also was under a self-injunction against seeming to be a permanent fixture, against putting his roots down and elaborating his personal environment, because the deal was that he would be going away when Tsau was ready, id est perfect, which was a day bound to come sometime pretty soon. He had been there for eight years already.
I meant to limit myself to what I could pick up by looking in through the windows. First I had knocked violently enough at the door to be certain no one was home. The interior was divided up into a large cooking-sleeping-sitting front room and two smaller back rooms, one of which was mostly given over to a radio transmitter. For decor it was maps and planting charts. The walls were white, which was a relief, because it would have been totally congruent with the general spirit of austerity to have gone with the same lentil-green paint that was on the exterior, to show how above his intimate surroundings a person could be. I could see a few personal things of Denoon’s in the front room: everything was very neatly kept. His clean clothes were wedged into compartments in a sagging wickerwork construct affixed to the wall. There was a sling chair. The mattress on the platform bed was going to be maize husk, I could sense. I had to go in, if only to get a better look at what passed for a kitchen.
I decided the kitchen was minimal but workable. There was the usual mudstove, and a camp stove with a goodly supply of bottled gas canisters. A surprise was that the tap over the tiny sink was not just an ornament. Denoon had the only functional interior sink I knew of in Tsau. All other houses had outdoor standpipes. I had to prowl carefully. There were neat stacks of books and papers on the floor in untoward places. Tables were in surplus, and they were loaded with more books, papers and periodicals, accordion files, and—in the rear rooms—utilitariana like surveying equipment, hand tools, and paper-cutters. Clearly the living quarters were just another part of the silva rerum the patio was.
Where would I be in all this? was the unavoidable question. I would need a table of my own, for example, at a minimum. How could I insert myself without becoming the longlost eternal feminine whose touch would now make everything cheery and comfy?
It was cold there. The floor needed more than the two or three mats in evidence. Leaving, I doubted myself, until from somewhere an image came to me of Nelson as being like a fig, something heavy in the hand and thickly seeded as opposed to light sweet things like seedless grapes. He was not watery. I had images of him going back and forth from room to room, or really of his burly legs going by me while I sat at my table.
Dineo
This was the same day. I had decided that my rival must be Dineo. She was someone it was impossible not to picture getting what she wanted and doing it without your noticing. She was purposive. She radiated purpose.
So it was electrifying when, as I was skinning some rabbits my nurturance had failed to save, I got a summons from Dineo to come to see her. The summons was on a slate in a bag in a cart rolled to me by my livewire favorite boy in the world, King James, the one who had brought breakfast to my first mother committee meeting. I was being asked to come to Sekopololo to meet with Dineo after lunch, id est during siesta, which was in itself interesting because, I had noticed, we were the two women who consistently worked through siesta, ignoring it. She had noticed the same thing. I sent back the message that I’d be there. King James seemed delighted to get the return errand. His mother was the young woman who had burned her arm apprenticing with Denoon in the glassworks.
Dineo was nowhere in Sekopololo, so I went searching for her through the stores house and then tentatively back into the cave. Finding her was odd, but only mildly in comparison to what came slightly later.
It was a hot day for that time of year, May, mid-fall in Africa. I was just inside the cave. To my left was what appeared to be a passage but was actually a narrow room out of Dickens, with pigeonhole racks on either side containing I forget what. There was light at the end of the room, which I perceived to be shining on some beautiful but unidentifiable piece of wooden furniture but which in fact was light from a paraffin lantern set on the floor shining off the bent-over naked back of Dineo as she rummaged through something. It was stifling and she had folded down the top of her dress. Only her back was lit: her head was bent down, out of sight, and so were her arms. What is that beautiful thing? I thought, until it moved when she heard my footsteps. A routine thing for women in the villages to do when the weather is scorching is to disencumber themselves down to the waist. There are famous stories of the consternation of male Peace Corps volunteers teaching in the upper forms of some of the remoter secondary schools turning around from the blackboard to confront ranks of young women allowing their nubile little breasts to show all innocently. This was before the headmasters had been appealed to by the various volunteer agencies to discourage this. Now it was rare. Dineo covered up like lightning, not turning around. She was surprised that I was there so quickly, she said, and asked if I knew the hour. I estimated. Time in Tsau was mostly by rough reckoning. Very few people wore wristwatches. Dineo was one of the ones who usually did. Denoon was sporadic with his.
We went back over to Sekopololo, to a dim meeting room where she motioned me to sit down next to
her at a vast round marquetry table. I was very edgy, which I think she noticed and tried to dispel by mock-seriously locking her little fingers in the permission-to-speak-English sign. We smiled.
We talked about the weather, the heat. This sometimes can help us, Dineo said, referring to an overhead fan attached to the beamwork above us and connected by rods to a long box on the wall with a crank projecting from it. The fan ran by some variant of clockwork, some spring mechanism, I gathered. Dineo got up and cranked the thing tight, and the wooden blades of the fan began to feebly rotate. She had my file and started going through it, in the course of which a sheet of paper stuck to her arm. She peeled it off, grimacing, and wagged her hand in front of her face. We had both been doing strenuous physical work.
My interview seemed to be about the rabbits, who were not flourishing. Because of the climate, they had to be reared in small thick cement domes instead of the usual wire mesh hutches. This particular system had been a roaring success in some other arid place, like the Negev, and Dineo knew that Denoon was hipped on generalizing rabbit raising to the individual household level. She seemed relieved when I agreed with her that the idea was premature. The fan had stopped. She looked resigned, got up to recrank, and pointed out what I could already see—that the fan ran pretty briefly considering the effort it took to wind it up. Here was yet one more limb of Denoon’s inventiousness.
