Mating

by Norman Rush

  I made the usual assumptions about where he might have gone, at least for the shorter absences. There was also the delicate matter of our both being pretty much on the sendero leguminoso, dietarily, as he put it, so that there was some flatulence to deal with, simple flatulence. It seemed to be cyclical, but it was definitely there. In our first days together we had individually found reasons to go outside for a minute, especially after we’d gone to bed, to avoid the antiromance of it all. But that got to be too much. We developed a fairly decent modus, I thought. He might say, when I was the author, Also sprach Zarathustra, or Ah, a report from the interior, as though he were an ambassador or proconsul. These and some other coinages evolved as we became more comfortable with each other. This condition does have to be worked through between lovers. I know of a marriage where the first hairline crack that led to full collapse appeared when the husband claimed that flatulence was only a problem when he did the cooking.

  A few times I said nothing on his return. Then once I said Where do you go, mostly?

  Well, mostly it was to the latrine, but not always. Sometimes it was to muse on the landscape, to moongaze.

  I was persistent. I asked But do people come and meet with you late at night ever?

  Sometimes yes, he said, but only occasionally. There was some of that—meeting outside of channels—before things settled down at Tsau and we got the committees really working. The Tswana are secretive, in case you hadn’t noticed.

  Forget I said anything, I said. But then I said, like a deranged person, Tell me what you did about sex all the years here when you were seeing Grace infrequently, shall we say, what you did aside from sublimating. This question had been en route to my lips from ancient times, and the moment of asking it was like the moment when you know for a certainty that nothing you do, no posture you get in, is going to keep you from retching. I was ashamed, naturally.

  I give him credit. He was direct. I masturbated, he said, not as a regular thing, or I went to two or three women in Gaborone who aren’t exactly prostitutes and are my friends, and the real question you want to ask me, and to which the answer is no, is if I slept with any woman in Tsau. So. And the beautiful Dineo is included in that.

  Too much is enough, I said. Let’s change the subject. I was overwrought, and it continued, partly because he was showing so much noblesse toward me, and how little if any quid pro quo was expected from my side. This I took as nobly and subtly acknowledging that the storage tank of lies and adventures on the male side is so much larger, generally, than the one on the female side that there was no onus whatever on me to reciprocate. I was thinking Well, masturbation, how not? but how often, on average dot dot dot. But that would have been genuinely too much, so we went on to business as usual, both of us about equally upset.

  He was still upset when it was time for my abacus lesson. He was skilled at tutoring, but that day he was impatient and not clear. In Tsau everybody ultimately learned the abacus. Business meetings at Sekopololo were alive with the click of the beads. It was required, like learning to butcher. I loved the abacus and still use it. Why isn’t this amazing instrument taught in schools in the United States? I asked him. Because it doesn’t create dependency, was his answer. No batteries, no electricity, and one abacus is all you need for your whole life. He had plans for an Abacus Society for all of Botswana and beyond into Swaziland and Lesotho. I absorbed nothing during that session.

  A Diagram

  About here I began to be more fragmentary. I was doing my journal less assiduously, I think because doing it felt slightly counterromantic, although that wasn’t what I told myself. This wasn’t in response to pressure of any sort from Nelson. He had at worst a quizzical attitude toward my diarizing: he was also flattered, at least that was the way I took all his Boswell references. Somewhere shortly before this I’d done something Nelson took exception to, strongly. And that incident may have had some impact on my eagerness to write things down.

  I must have been showing what struck Nelson as more than a passing interest in different people’s backgrounds, their affiliations, who were the devout Zed CC’s and who were pro Boso, and so on. I really was doing this more in the spirit of asking myself about women who interested me, trying to get him to confirm the correctness of the croquis résumés which I was amusing myself by coming up with to pass the time when I was working at something dull.

  I remember we were talking about the Botswana Social Front. I was curious as to how they must feel about Tsau. The ones I had talked to in Gabs had been for nationalizing everything except cattle and giving a social wage to everybody, working or not. They had a huge youth wing, I knew, and a women’s organization. They had two people in parliament and were, although I didn’t know it at the time, on the verge of electing mayors in two of the large towns. Martin Wade had approved strenuously of them, I hadn’t failed to notice. The Bosos I’d met fell into two categories, those who were nice but fervent in a way it was hard to take seriously and those who were cold, rigid, and eager to be in some position where nobody would talk back to them, ever.

  Ah, Boso, ah yes, Nelson said. He went on, copiously, even after I reminded him that I knew somewhat of his attitude to Boso, since he had been debating one of them, Mbaake, the first time we met. I was hearing what I already knew, to wit, Boso was Jacobin, corrupt at the top, the rank and file ingenuous, the top dogs taking money under the table from the tribal chiefs—or giving it to them, rather—and from the Russians and from De Beers and from the South Africans. Did you ever meet Pamane, the Boso supreme secretary? Nelson asked me. All I knew was that he was a dentist. He said Then probably you don’t know why he’s so revered by the student left, which is because he has apparently memorized the last volume in the Marx Engels Gesamtausgabe, the Chronik Seines Lebens, which is a day by day listing of where Marx and Engels were on any given day of their lives and what they were doing. This is what they worship. He’ll even give you the book and you pick out a month, I think it is, and he tells you what Marx was up to, like a mentalist. This is what they worship! Here in the dry heart of dying Africa, in a country famishing for welders, plumbers, borehole mechanics! You talk about savant idiot—he’s it. The students want to be like him. So does the whole industrial-class level of the civil service. And he isn’t a dentist, by the way, he’s a chiropodist, a further irony in that you have so few foot problems in Africa because people still go barefoot a lot and commercial footwear is the main cause of foot problems, so that his medical specialty is probably the least needed one he could have picked out.

  He said Anyway I got this up for you. He produced a folio-size sheet of thick paper folded in half or thirds. He unfolded it at me, saying that he had put work into it.

  It was a political diagram of the population of Tsau, as I understood it, or more properly an affinal diagram, because families and tribes and other affiliations were among the attributes keyed. It was in several colors.

  Something impelled me to make him not show this to me. I violently didn’t want to see it. I hadn’t asked for it.

  I pushed it away.

  He was stung and annoyed and repeated that he’d put work into it.

  Don’t get upset, I said, but I don’t want to see it, that’s all.

  I don’t know what my impulse was. It would be facile to say it was pure solidarity with the women, for instance. But I would have left the premises rather than look at this thing. I wonder now if in some oblique way it made me mad that Pamane’s memoriousness had been trashed, since if I have any distinct mental virtue that would be it. What was so despicable about Pamane being able to remember a remarkable amount about someone he admired, rightly or wrongly?

  In any case, my saying no provoked a peculiar enraged act that took me totally by surprise. The act was like a strongman performance in the circus, it was so deft and definite, so practiced-seeming. What he did was, in a lightning way, crushingly fold the chart down into a square packet the size of a deck of cards. Then he dashed out into the yard
and thrust the packet into the throat of the mudstove.

  I followed and squatted down near him in order to catch what he was muttering to me while he solicited the paper or cardboard or foolscap or whatever it was to burn. He seemed to be saying everything was all right.

  I made him out to be saying You identify, which I love. You identify.

  I said I don’t know if I identify or not, but in fact I don’t think it’s that. I think your document smacks of something.

  He stood up and dusted his hands off, his face very flushed, still. You identify, he said. You’re a woman. You think my chart is manipulative.

  I thought this was pretty reflexive of him and told him so. I reached into myself, which being oversimplified by someone else helps with. It’s principle, I said. Your diagram is part of something I don’t like. These people have a right to be anything they want and for that not to be noticed or recorded by you except in passing. Are you an anthropologist? What is this?

  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.

  Diving

  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.

  Masepa

  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.