Norman Rush - Mating

There was one false dawn that week, when someone turned up at the gate whom he seemed to want to see. Nelson was sitting embowered in the blazing jacaranda. He recognized the face at the gate and got up with alacrity, actually, to stop the yardman from sending this guest away.

I watched from the kitchen. The visitor was a pathetic fixture in downtown Gabs, a refugee from Lesotho, a high school teacher who had been tortured after the Chief Jonathan coup in the seventies. He was in his forties and he was a gargoyle. One eye was half closed with scar tissue and there were terrible scars on his neck and down his chest, which you could see because he never buttoned his shirt. He walked with one leg dragging. Torture had made him a gargoyle. Apparently Nelson had known him. Hiram was his name. He got a little stipend from the UN High Commission on Refugees and lived in a shed behind a Canadian’s house. He was always being stolen from. Expatriates would take pity on him and give him food and clothes, especially when their tours were up, which the local thieves had figured out. He forgot to lock his place up half the time, so he was always being robbed. Mentally he was not quite right. He was always smiling. He wrote things, strange manifestos and so on, in Sesotho. You would see him circulating around Gaborone, and occasionally he would beg. He would go into an office or a shop and beg for writing paper, never money. Children were afraid of him. He was usually wearing rags.

In came Hiram. They sat down facing, knees almost touching, on lawn chairs, myself thinking that now I was going to see my love galvanized back into himself by this icon of man’s inhumanity to man. I was willing to bet on it. This would remind him. This was his walking and talking raison d’être.

One thing about Hiram was that he was voluble. He had a strange, hissing voice, and he was voluble in a way you could hardly make out, but once he had your eyes he kept talking, soliciting you, nexing with you.

But lo, not at all, this was real! Hiram was silent. This was like the exchange of benevolent glances between the Pope and the Dalai Lama. Neither party said a word. Nelson rested his hand on Hiram’s shoulder for a long time, then took it away. At the beginning of things, Nelson had made me write down the name of a book, The Power of the Charlatan, from which had come a phrase he’d used a couple of times and that I’d inquired about: e nosatu et sta ben così: I’ve smelled him and now I feel so good. At some point in Italy there were charlatans who sold sniffs of themselves. I crept out to hear if they were talking at all. It was still silent benevolence. After fifteen minutes Hiram got up to go. The event was over. I sped back into the kitchen to throw food items into a sakkie for him and grab one of Nelson’s better unwhite shirts, and I managed to catch him just as he was turning the corner at the end of our street. Nelson was back in his bower.

This also was the week I found my first four or five indisputably gray hairs. I was shocked. I thought they were supposed to come in by ones for a while, then twos, and then much later in threes and genuine arrays like this. I blamed my surprise on a certain inattention to my appearance that had taken root in Tsau, and on the bleary inadequate mirror and lighting I had available for my toilettes there. One of the hairs was oddly coarse and semicorkscrewed, and I pulled it out, but then stopped. There is the joke about finding a little golden screw in your navel and unscrewing it and then having your anus drop out onto the floor. My equivalent of that, after I tugged my premier gray hairs out, was the descent of a pseudo insight that gripped me for a day or two until it disappeared. The insight was that Nelson’s whole mien was an act intended in a kind way to get me to relinquish him, go away on my own initiative, because he was too old for me and in fifteen years there would be trouble, pain, however we parsed it, wherever we went, whatever we did: there would be inevitable tragedy, it was a terrible idea, like marrying a Negro was supposed to be in the forties. So it seemed brilliant just then to let the gray remain, to not look any younger than I had to.

I was being driven to the edge by Nelson’s seeming normal, for one reason or another, to everyone but me. The nurse, Rita, had given a religious interpretation to his experience, I was sure of it. I knew she was Catholic. I knew they’d murmured back and forth about the meaning of life during his socalled examination. This was not someone who could tell the difference between enlightenment and a nervous breakdown and elucidate it to me while she was at it. Then as to his stasis and dolce far niente: Europeans will go into villages in Africa and not infrequently see people not at work at anything discernible, not doing a task or hurrying en route from one task to another. There is what to us looks like lavish standing around, alone or in silent groups, people sometimes but not always leaning against a tree or a wall in a sort of self-communing state. And then you have the ultrarural population, people on cattle posts tens and hundreds of miles from anywhere, without amusements of any kind that you can imagine other than listening to Springbok Radio or Radio Botswana if they’re lucky enough to have a radio. When you see them these are not depressed or unhappy people, or bored people, insofar as anything like that can be determined from the outside. So to the Batswana all Nelson would seem to be doing would be partaking subtly in that particular lifeway. Nothing odd about that. Of course the premise of Tsau was to break poverty in the village by replacing stasis with its opposite, contests and meetings and inventions and dynamism. But nobody around here was thinking about that.

No, he was just all right, meaning just fine, to the locals. The resident help had almost nothing to do, we were so undemanding and so few, so they leapt into the breach and devoted themselves to his wardrobe, starching and ironing and bleaching his vanilla costume, for example, into a blinding state of perfection. He didn’t object. This was slightly a judgment on me by all concerned, I felt. Why had I let him go around in so much lesser a state of splendor? He looked so splendid, groomed up this way. It helped that his weight was perfect. He was growing a beard, but shaving meticulously every day, so as not to let beard shadow creep up into his cheeks. I waited out the first week. I gathered that what he anticipated was going back to Tsau, soon, apparently, and presumably with me.

The first week was up and I was inwardly girding my loins for strife, uprooting his mode or making him say what it was, making me understand it.

We were having mint tea at the dining room table when he said, almost as an afterthought to my questions about things that needed to be done in Gabs, We can be married.

Then he said it again: We can be married here. And then he added And we can have children.

I burst away from the table and went off to our room. I wept but I was enraged. I left the door open to give him the chance to come normally after me and see what was wrong, what he could do.

From where I was I could see him still sitting at the table, looking vaguely after me but not rising. What was this? Was it a byproduct of collapse and regression into a kind of simpleminded protohusband role, or was it enlightenment and his inner self telling him it was time to multiply with me, or was it the last worst slash of the knife at me, a trick to disorient me and make me let go? Was he incapable of seeing this as an act of force against me, this reversal of every position he had ever had on the subject and an exploitation of what he certainly knew was a highly particular vulnerability of mine, in my situation? He had torn me away from midwifing in Tsau in order to help me keep my natalist impulses from starting to churn, which incidentally would have run athwart his bias against having children, there being so many unwanted ones in the world. And now this.