Norman Rush - Mating

Denoon was the chair as we resumed. There had been a reshuffling among the opposition. Dorcas and the batlodi and their other cadre women were settled in a ring around Hector and his male cadres, four or five of them. They had moved up en bloc and were only eight or so feet from the dais mat. I was certain this meant something disagreeable, some new thrust in embryo.

The last subject was apparently to be the afterlife. Three or four questions had been sent up from the crowd. I remember thinking the questions were good, even the ones defending the afterlife, and that Denoon had his work cut out for him.

He began with a virtuoso overview of the paradoxes involved in fitting the main hells and paradises and limbos of the leading religions into any single continuum. This was good for closure because it allowed him to be both encyclopedic and funny. En passant he displayed facts such as that in the Muslim paradise the beautiful houris who wait on the heroic dead pogromists are specially created beings who have no genitalia. There was always something fresh. I knew that there was a Jewish hell but not that it’s actually physically next door to paradise and that the saved can look forward to peering over the wall to watch the damned in their sufferings, if they like. Tackling the afterlife was clever also because by not attacking a particular religion but instead juxtaposing the incompatibilities in all the different lives to come, all religions were made to appear childish and wishful.

Suddenly it came to me where he was going with this. He’d been polishing an argument he was quite proud of but which was too complex for a group discussion, in my opinion. He’d tried it out on me. The argument was that even if you could demonstrate, somehow, the existence of god, there was no way you could rule out — and in fact you had inadvertently strengthened the case for — the existence of many gods. In other words, any arguments confirming the existence of a god simultaneously undid the contention that there could be only one of them. This is as I remember it. And since all the great surviving imperial religions, except Hinduism, were monotheistic in an exclusivist, and contradictory, way, this argument was supposed to let him illuminate a critical disjuncture facing people when they undertook credulism or, as he sometimes more gently put it, credism. I’d told him that this was all too Thomistic to be useful. But my saying that seemed to make him feel I was falling below a certain standard he had for me, meaning I was rather dimmer than I should be or, worse, than he’d thought I was. This was the true elenchus, the coup de grace, he said, and I was failing to appreciate it. So this was what I saw about to be bracketed to the afterlife piece, his pièce de résistance. Well, it was what he wanted.

The overview was finished. The bridge — if I was right — that was to lead to his set piece on multitheism was a dialog, now just beginning, between Nelson and Mma Isang, who had joined him on the dais mat. We were continuing in total Setswana. With the dialog, the trouble began. At first I thought I was hearing an animal sound coming from some source not apparent to me.

But then it became clear. I couldn’t credit it. Each time Nelson’s turn came in the dialog, Hector’s group, just the men at first, made an obstructive sound. They started in a low groaning mode, but got louder and more organized-sounding each time. Mma Isang could say anything, and nothing would happen.

Nelson dinged his glass object and tried again. They kept it up. Dineo took the dinger from him and got immediate silence. I don’t think she grasped yet that the chant was solely by men and solely directed at Nelson. She said something general about courtesy and how late it was getting.

Nelson began again, and again the growl came. I badly wished I could be next to Nelson to be sure he understood this was something specifically orchestrated by the Raboupis. It was dark and he was in fact more nearsighted than he liked to admit. Also I wanted him to be certain to let a woman handle this, please.

Again Mma Isang was permitted her turn. When Nelson spoke he tried to ignore the chant and raise his voice to get above it. But they matched him. There was a point to what they were doing that went beyond showing contempt for Nelson. They were demonstrating that any woman could speak but that no woman could prevent them from obstructing Nelson. I think Dorcas didn’t care for this, although this may be overinterpretation on my part. The obstruction was cold. There was no armwaving. Even while the chant was going on the chanters projected stillness, normal attention.

There was more of it. I was bursting to intervene.

I saw it clearly. The women had to act to contain or stop this before it unraveled to the point where it would be up to Nelson to stop it. Something atavistic was developing. Nelson’s being steely in the face of all this was beside the point. He was in a vise. If he let the chanting silence him, Hector had won. The growl had evolved into nonsense syllables, which on closer inspection were not nonsense: they were chanting bo-so, bo-so, bo-so.

I took another Compral, dry, chewed it up, and swallowed it assisted by saliva and nothing else. This itself was irrational. Also irrational was putting into Setswana in my head Denoon’s theory of male gangs, their inevitability, how deeply he saw into them and how essentially unhostile his view of them was. He had belonged to gangs, or cliques that were ganglike. I couldn’t remember all of it. But young men needed gangs as an experience to pass through because, as I reconstruct it, power in the family unit is given, you have to obey regardless of the qualities or lack of them you perceive in your parents, your masters. In gangs there would be a sorting out based on some sort of competition, at least. I don’t know today if this is a parody of what he’d said or not. But then you would pass through the gang stage. The reason I took the last Compral was because I felt a tickle inside my head that suggested my headache returning, which I couldn’t permit, because someone was going to have to act, probably me. I had a piercing ringing in one ear. There was nothing relating to women in Nelson’s theory of the normalcy of gangs, of course, because we are on our own, in the real world, as I put it to myself.

Denoon tried a couple of times more. Some of the small fry evidently thought the blocking chant was funny and shyly joined in. Their mothers reacted instantly to make them stop: in fact for the first time ever in Tsau I saw hands being raised threateningly in the direction of the cherubim. An apprehension of the extremity of what was going on was spreading, resulting in the female contribution to the proceedings largely dying away as people listened more intently to see if they could possibly be right about the turn things were taking. Direct unadulterated intermale conflict had become for us a novelty, with something transfixing about it. I felt that myself. We were not used to it. It even brought out a fleeting regression in me, like wondering if this feeling I had would be what I would feel at a prizefight where two brutes were consummating their entelechies by bashing each other into unconsciousness while I ate peanuts. When I was fairly tiny I went through a brief mania about prizefighting, wishing I could see one in person. Nelson was trying again. I shook myself away from the toy chest of my psyche and tried to think. The mutterance this time was the loudest yet.

Dineo said something feeble to the effect that it was bad if people could not be heard. The response was sarcasm from someone in Hector’s claque: But we hear all you are saying so very well, mma. I could feel the scene tipping over. The darkness was speeding things up, or rather the anonymity that went with it, and so were shadows around the lantern lights. We had to conclude somehow. It was cold, and that was another reason people needed all this to come to an end, as well as being an explanation for their upsetting passivity: they were letting the disturbers of the peace produce a condition someone would have to use fiat on so we could all go home, I told myself. But the dais seemed paralyzed. Nobody was moving toward closure. You are playing as animals, Dineo said directly to Hector, who said back If you can say we are animals then you must tell us who is forcing Batswana to live as elephants. This was said ringingly, in English for Nelson’s particular benefit and then in Setswana so that no one would miss the point.