Norman Rush - Mating

Of course, Grace was drunk. It was crystalline. I had led a drunk to this occasion but not seen it until now. How I had missed it was a case study in the effect of motivation on perception. He would have to be feeling that without me she would never have been there. Grace swayed.

How do you like her? Grace said.

I thought you were leaving on Tuesday, Grace. It was all set, I thought.

You thought I was gone, she said. But I found her. How do you like her?

He ignored that. He said Grace, it was definite when you were going to leave. I have to go back to … I have to go back.

Ah, but Nel I have a few things to do. He lets you call him Nel. But pretty soon I’ll be gone.

Well. So when you do think?

Don’t be so anxious, she said. He’s divorcing me, she said to me.

He blew his cheeks out.

Everybody wants a divorce, she said. Why is that?

This isn’t edifying, Grace, he said, sterner.

I never am, she said. Oh I know. So you two just talk instead of me. That might be edifying. I think.

She pulled herself up very straight, in a parody of girlish interest that didn’t work. She tried to go up on her toes for some reason. She swayed badly and we all, reaching for her, somewhat grabbed each other. My elbow went against his midsection but it told me nothing.

I got a chair for her and she sat down. He poised his right hand over his head and then brought the nails down on his part, a self-calming strategy related to acupressure and something I only saw him do in absolute extremis.

It was now awkward or impossible for us to say anything to each other, unless I could come up with something.

Bits of the audience had come back. A nice, very meek, serious young Motswana guy who worked at the Botswana Book Centre was edging deferentially toward our viper’s knot, all unknowing. I knew this guy because whenever I went to the bookshop he was reading Penguin Classics, like The Mill on the Floss, for some reason. His main job was to carry bales of the Rand Daily Mail and the Star up to the front of the shop and then to carry the unsold ones back, which he did. But in the intervals he moved quickly back to his studies.

He wanted to talk to Denoon, but Grace summoned him over.

Africa is huge, isn’t it? she said. I find it huge.

He was dumbfounded, but said it was. Nelson rescued him.

He wanted to ask Nelson what could be done to stop the Boers. But I suddenly was interested in the question of whether Grace was stupid or just drunk. Was she caricaturing herself out of desperation or je m’en foutisme of some kind? How smart was she? Had her hold on Denoon failed because she was below a certain intellectual level?

I went over to her.

It was no use. She wasn’t talking, apparently. It was all nodding or headshaking. She wouldn’t have lunch with me. She didn’t want me to go with her back to the hotel, no no no.

Denoon was concluding a very succinct proposal on sanctions. The way to produce a white revolt against the government in South Africa was to get the four companies in the world that manufactured automobile tires to make a boycott. South Africa would run out of tires in less than a year.

The LGL permsec was standing nervously next to Denoon and waiting for enough of the audience to reassemble for him to thank them for coming. Finally he drifted off.

Denoon went over to organize Grace. He said something, and she said something back like You think I don’t think Africa is pleasant, but I do. I could be very happy around here. Very much so.

Old Naledi

I spent the better part of the next day trying to ascertain where in Gaborone Denoon was staying. Naturally I had to hear once again all the antinomies about him I had already heard. He had renounced his U.S. citizenship versus he was on the verge of going back to redeem the South Bronx. He was personally rich versus he had given all his goods to the poor at some point. He was a genius versus he was finished, a crank. His secret project was in the Kalahari versus being in the Tuli Block. His project was self-financing versus he had inexhaustible funds from Histadrut and/or Olivetti. It made me suspicious that there was consensus on only one point: it was all over with his wife, who had made this last desperate expedition to corner him and get him to reconcile.

In my case I was going to find him and offer myself as a volunteer, for a while, in his project. I had more to offer than he knew yet. When I was in the bush I had learned a few words of Saherero out of boredom. In fact it had occurred to me to greet him with a hearty Wapenduka! the night before, which I had rejected as a totally artificial thing to do, rightly. In any case the only way you can speak perfect Saherero is to have your two front teeth taken out the way they do, which is asking too much. But I knew there were Herero in his project, some anyway.

By seven in the evening I was brazening it out in Old Naledi. He was staying with a family called Tutwane. There are two parts to the squatter settlement in Gaborone, Old Naledi and new Old Naledi. New Old Naledi is where the World Bank has been razing shacks and putting up site and service shells for their inhabitants. Each shell has a standpipe and electricity. House shells are just that — walls awaiting ceilings, windows, doors.

But naturally Denoon would be staying in Old Naledi, where the mud shacks are falling apart, where holes in the house walls are plugged with wadded rags and the tin roofs are held down with cobbles. I was jumping over ditches and getting hoarse shouting Footsek! at the terrifying roaming ridgeback hounds. Footsek is Afrikaans and is the only thing that gives them pause, somehow. A peaches and blood sunset was over. It was getting dark. Nobody I asked about the Tutwanes would tell me anything. I couldn’t blame them: I could have been anybody.

I was fairly desperate because I had a plan that required getting to the Tutwane house circa dinnertime to exploit the provision in Tswana culture that if you happen around dinnertime you’ll be invited in. To whites, there is a slight element of scam in this provision as regards them, since it cannot have failed to be noted by their Batswana dinner guests that no white family has ever felt free to utilize it. Besides, the Batswana eat their main meal at noon and dinner is fairly catch as catch can. Nevertheless.

I was near defeat. There is a pool of woodsmoke from yard fires that hangs over Old Naledi and makes you weep. Any nostalgia you might have about woodsmoke you can say goodbye to after an hour of this.

Maybe the way I was dressed struck people the wrong way, as semiofficial. I had decided it would be a smart idea to look bush ready, so I was wearing a new khaki blouse and skirt outfit. I would have worn jeans except that the further down you get in the Botswana pecking order, the worse people think it is for women to be seen in trousers. And Old Naledi is traditionopolis, because the squatters are the freshest and rawest refugees from the bush. I think also that the deeper I went into Old Naledi, the more official I acted, out of fear. I realized I was using my skin color more and more, but I couldn’t help it. It was like a horror ride in an amusement park, where you proceed along okay in the dark and then a thing springs up in front of you to terrify you — a snarling ridgeback or an ancient guy trying to get you to buy something he has in a sack but talking in a dialect you don’t understand. People go into their hovels and sit there in the dark and take care of business in the dark, which makes them seem like a different order of being, despite all your training.

I was in danger of clutching. I was deep in the maze of the bleakest section of Old Naledi, the part closest to Kgale Hill, where quarrying is going on and fine grit floats out over everything until it looks like a painting of bedlam in the sfumato style, where there are no real edges or outlines to things. I had fine grit in the corners of my mouth and in my lashes. I wanted to look decent above all and now this was happening.