Norman Rush - Mating

Africans have a particular way of interacting with the insane, and I thought I could feel myself drifting into that kind of regard. My best friends among the women kept treating me like a child: Rra Puleng would be fine, he was fine.

I was volatile. One day I was shaping up to work in the kraals dawn to dusk, and the next I was refusing to do something minor, something I had agreed to do in prehistoric times: I think there was a prize for the person who had taken the most books out of the library and I had agreed to do the tally, but somehow in my present state I felt it was an affront being asked to do this. I couldn’t explain why.

Dineo, I decided, was going to be the key to the exit.

Whatever hesitation there was in my mind about getting Nelson out of there and in reach of someone who could identify his condition for me was diminishing day by day. If he was improving, it was unbearably slowly.

I would go to see Dineo. First I would invoke what I felt had been an implicit friendship between us. Then I would remind her that I was formidable too and that I was ready to bring the American embassy into getting Nelson out if I had to. This would be against everybody’s will and interest, Nelson’s included, but I knew how to operate the radio and I could make it happen whether anyone liked it or not. I could lie to the embassy if I had to. Of course by going the route of force majeure I would tear up any chance I would have of ever coming back to Tsau. I wouldn’t be forgiven. I tried to have a proposal ready for each of the likeliest objections. I wanted him x-rayed. I had to get out of a matrix that was becoming untrustworthy and impenetrable, so that I could trust my own thoughts again.

From the outset Dineo resisted so strongly that I was taken aback.

There were changes in her office. The interior had been freshly calcimined. We met in a white glow. It was midmorning. In the old office all the chairs had been uniform. Now hers had a taller back and had arms. She looked imperious. She was wearing her headscarf in a new style, with the tails brought together over one shoulder and secured with a medallion clip. Tea was served to us, which surprised me.

The first surprise was that she wanted us to speak only in Setswana. People would be coming in and out, and Setswana would be best. I don’t know why that put me off my stride so badly, but it did. It was a statement. Also I had been set for her to be warmer, or at least more silken toward me. Instead she was being rueful and direct and looking me straight in the eye. I know by having us speak Setswana she wanted to avoid any suggestion of collusion between us, but still I hated her for it. She had never been my enemy.

We talked in general about how well Nelson was coming along. This was her view. I made the distinction between physical and psychological, and she appeared to be listening to me. Then she said that although she could see Nelson was quieter than before, she wanted me to know that the nurse had told her that anything of that sort should be put down to convalescence, the aftereffects of the trauma, something that would lift. She also slipped into the stream of our talk a few hints that there could be questions of favoritism if someone with a medical condition perceived to be as minor as Nelson’s were evacuated to Gaborone. Also she made clear that she understood from Rra Puleng that he was not at all interested in being moved.

She was being clever. At no point was she refusing me. But she was resisting.

I decided to be frank. I said I had often wanted to remind her about her showing me in the bathhouse the scars that meant she could never bear children, and how I had taken that as a gesture of friendship toward me, to show that she was not a possible mate for Nelson, if that was in fact something that was crossing my mind.

She nodded. She was not embarrassed by this.

I said that then I had wondered if the reason she and others had been encouraging me to be with Rra Puleng was because perhaps an attachment to me would lead him to think more quickly about going away with me and leaving Tsau in the hands of its citizens a little sooner.

She was very precise as she denied this. She spoke so formally that I almost felt it as an invitation to read through what she was saying, not to be literal. She did deny any thought of the kind I was mentioning. She was speaking for everyone in Tsau. She was sure that no one except for some unfortunate people who in any case might not be for long in Tsau could have wanted anything other than that Rra Puleng must stay in Tsau as long as he was pleased to. All of this was in the same strangely precise delivery.

I’d already started in this direction, so I continued. I probably put this badly, but what I said was that she must see — given the idea or suspicion I’d just admitted — that it was only natural for me to wonder if, now that Nelson seemed so much changed, and so passive, there might be perfectly understandable reasons for him to be wanted in Tsau, with or without me. I had to repeat this with some changes to be sure that I was getting everything into it in Setswana that I wanted to be there. I was brave.

She was very cool here. She wanted me to understand that she could see how I would have such fears but that there was nothing true about them, any of them, about any fear like the one I had expressed. But she felt it would be the worst thing for Nelson to go off before he himself felt it was the correct time for it.

She alluded to the problems of the dead horse and the lost Enfield. This whole time, she was thinking I would have to sign a document of liability for the rifle, and if I went away with Rra Puleng we would both have to sign for the horse. Or possibly only Nelson would have to sign. She would consult with the mother committee. I thought I saw daylight coming. She said she assumed Rra Puleng and I would be leaving our things if we went off. I said eagerly Yes, yes. I had nothing to leave, essentially, that I cared about. All I wanted was my notebooks. Anything else they could have forever.

Early on in the discussion I felt I’d been successful in conveying that there were lengths I was prepared to go to that would be painful for me. I was loaded with propositions I never had to use, thank god. I was ready to tell her that I was going to marry Nelson and I was a Catholic, a lapsed Catholic who had just recently unbackslid and that of course as a Catholic we would need to be married in a real Catholic church, of which there were none in Tsau. I was gambling that Nelson was so limp that if I told him we needed to go to Gabs to get married he would do it, like that.

I felt a stab, thinking this. That was really the problem. Nelson was in some unreal state of acceptance. He was agreeing to everything, it seemed, with the one exception of requests that he go through chapter and verse of his ordeal. But anything else, at all, he would do for you. It was dangerous.

I wanted this interview to be over with before I lost my hold on myself. Why was she so beautiful and exactly how old was she anyway? What was I going to be in eight years or eleven or thirteen? I wouldn’t age the way she had. This was my physical high noon, in all probability. I knew it.

Then she dropped into English, just for a moment. It was rushed, and what she said was that she would be most concerned if certain of the donors were to visit with Nelson in Gaborone before he was fully recovered. She mentioned two names in particular. I knew who one of them was. The other she identified for me as the present representative of the Swedish International Development Agency.

I don’t know what I said, but it was what was needed. I made a circumlocutious pledge to guard Nelson, rusticate him in Gabs the way she had in the infirmary, manage his contacts until he was himself again, which, with the help of the doctors I could definitely find or summon to Gabs, wouldn’t be long. I half implied, to assuage her fears about donors prematurely stumbling on him, that Nelson might well be in Gabs for only a few days, if it was decided that he ought to see someone in Harare, say.