Norman Rush - Mating

No way can you overstate Old Naledi, which you enter by leaping across a ditch flowing with something black and viscous, probably dumped crankcase oil from the Central Transport Organisation work-yard nearby. No one had heard of the Tutwanes, let alone Rra Puleng. I tried virtually everybody — not excluding a gaunt character hurrying along with a netbag full of bloody cowbones over his shoulder, with blood incidentally soaking into his shirt and with a ball-peen hammer stuck in his belt. Three women were sitting in a dooryard behind a plot fence entirely made out of rusted auto brake-spring leaves sticking up like fangs. I approached them. They did in fact answer me but not without continuing what they were doing, which was simultaneously conversing a blue streak and masticating mouthfuls of sweet reed, id est chewing the strips into pulp and spewing the white waste out onto the ground, as if they were pieces of agricultural machinery. The directions they gave me were internally contradictory: I should be going both bophiri-matsatsi and botlhabats-atsi, west and east. The fact that I spoke Setswana was seemingly not wowing anyone. It only seemed to be making them more suspicious of me. Some even seemed to hate me for it.

I saw something ahead that looked from a distance like a play yard with blue and white blocks scattered over a wide area. I made for it, until I realized it was a shebeen and the blocks were empty chibuku cartons by the hundred. A couple of the nonrecumbent partakers were showing an interest in me. I would have to detour. A top homily about Botswana is that white women never get raped by Batswana men. This is pure embassy folklore.

Slips of the tongue are rare with me. When I make them I can be sure I’m under strain. So I was horrified when I was describing to Denoon my odyssey through Old Naledi and heard myself say that when I saw the shebeen I decided to give the guys at it a wide breast. It was performance anxiety. Needless to say, what I did was mix up “give a wide berth to” with “making a clean breast of.” It was a true sign of delicacy in him that he pretended not to notice my gaffe. Neither of us mentioned it, although I was suffering inwardly. At Tsau at one point I thanked him, in effect, for having let it pass and never teasing me about it. In fact that turned out to be like releasing a spring allowing him to tease me forever after with various permutations of the gaffe, à la Would you mind giving me a clean berth, or Let’s have a wide breast, and so on. But it was a proof of gentility that he overlooked my first parapraxis in his presence and is probably even one of the reasons I was moved to persist despite an otherwise not-auspicious encounter at Tutwane’s.

I was at the farthest edge of Old Naledi, where the shanties stop and the bush begins. A footpath led straight into the bush and along it a kids’ game was in progress. There were six or eight bana arrayed on either side of the path so that each one was facing a clear space. A kid from the foot of the left hand row would go to the head of the path, where it disappeared into the bush where his mission was to roll a paint can lid down between the opposing ranks for them to hurl rocks at. Somebody was keeping score. Everybody would move down a notch after each hit, as in volleyball. These were little kids, between six and ten or so, all male naturally, in ragged school shorts, with three little girls spectating. I had arrived at a key moment. It would soon be too dark to play and they were trying to speed things up so that the championship could be settled before they had to quit.

Well, I said to myself. And with no ado whatsoever I stepped into their game and like a genius snatched up the paint can lid as it was rolling, before a single rock could be fired, and held it behind my back, thusly amazing them.

They had an adult reaction. They stood up like soldiers and began to consult. I thought they might scatter at the intervention of this giant white woman. I told them all I wanted was to be told how I could find the Tutwane place. Then I would return their toy.

I wish I had a videotape of the way they organized themselves. They were very courteous, but then so had I been very courteous, starting out with Dumelang, bo bana and so on. We had a deal in about three minutes. I tried to imagine American kids in a parallel situation. They would go for the police or their mothers. One thing wrong with America, according to Denoon, is that the society is converging to suppress unsupervised mass play, largely through the mechanisms of TV and adult-run sports like Little League. His theory was that if you leave young males alone they will go in play situations from fascism to feudalism to democracy. So now there is a diffuse and thwarted attraction to fascism that is getting played out at the adult level. He was fecund with theories. He also thought the increase in heart attacks in the white West could be traced to the decline in stair climbing, id est to the victory of the ranch-style house and the elevator. The switch from tub bathing to showers was a related public health disaster because tub bathing does something physiologically unique having to do with the vagus nerve. Part of his feeling about gang play for boys came from his own sense of personal deprivation in that area. When he was growing up in East Oakland there were vacant lots all over, and gangs of boys having mudball wars, building clubhouses, forming confederations. But his weekends had been eaten up with compulsory churchgoing and compulsory shopping attendance, which prevented him from engaging fully in these, as he called them, political experiments. His mother was the motive force behind his weekend captivity, and he tried in retrospect to be forgiving. She wanted him with her out of spiritual loneliness, was his guess. But he never forgave his father for not intervening to free him, at least from the shopping.

The Tutwanes were in fact wellknown in Old Naledi. Our deal was that two of the bana would take me there quickly, but first I had to hand over the paint can lid. I acceded, and we went off.

Intellectual Love

I hadn’t wanted to offer money for information earlier, just out of prudence. I didn’t want to be seen as a white moneybags careering around out of her depth. But now it was all right and I gave a few thebe to my little escorts as they prepared to flee.

The Tutwane place was a surprise. It was very shipshape and well-kempt. A low storm fence surrounded the plot. The house was a good-sized ovaldavel, recently limewashed, with a good thatch roof. There was an elephant grass enclosure to one side of the house, from which lustral sounds were issuing. At points along the fence were wooden tubs containing various bushy plants. The yard was beaten earth, neatly swept. And in one corner of the plot was an outhouse, also freshly limewashed. I needed to urinate desperately.

If I could go back in time and rechoreograph the first three minutes chez Tutwane I would. Of course I would still have to get into the outhouse tout de suite whatever choreography obtained, thanks to the accursed female bladder. If there is an evolutionary justification for the pygmy bladder assigned to the female race I would like to know what it is.

As I was knocking at the gate saying koko, the solar democrat backed through the elephant grass carrying a basin of graywater, which he began to empty delicately in a line along the edge of the planting. The pouring did it. My situation was extremely urgent.

He had been washing his torso, obviously, and was still barechested, wearing cutoffs and those egregious sandals that looked like cothurni. He heard me yank the gate clip up, turned, saw me standing there in the gloaming, then, oddly enough, stepped back through the elephant grass. I didn’t know it then, but it was modesty. He was retreating to get a shirt on. It was unnecessary. His midsection was nice, better than I’d expected. There was some rondure, but nothing undue at his age or out of reach of the lash of diet and situps.