Norman Rush - Mating

I had the specific wherewithal for this. I spoke good Setswana. I had anecdotes. I could demonstrate that beneath the surface the culture was as other as anyone could ask. I would be being useful. Why did Batswana babies have woolen caps on during the summer? On the other hand, why did some Batswana shave their heads in winter? I knew. Why did Kalanga men let the nail on the little finger of the right hand grow to an extreme length and then sharpen it? Why did the Batswana hate lawns and prefer beaten earth around their houses? Why did schoolgirls so often try to sleep with their heads under the covers? I could also help at the mundane level. What American cut of beef did silverside correspond to? What were the Diamond Police? Did anyone care that not far from Molepolole there were Batswana who had serfs? People would have material for letters. I could bring them a sense of the otherness that was eluding them. It would all be informal. A brunet was stalking me, I noticed.

Bring your wife over, I called to him, which unsettled him. I was standing at the fence, musing or trying to, and realizing that a troop of Zed CC marchers was approaching. He didn’t like going to get her.

The spot where he’d noticed me was rather secluded and bosky. I remember he had a sleek brown beard and what the Batswana call a pushing face. He brought a little group with him when he came to the fence.

Fifty marchers went slowly by. Men in taut tan porters’ uniforms and garrison caps led. Women followed, all in white. The women wore ordinary sandals. I pointed out the footgear of the men. They wore sneakers that had been cut apart and reassembled around a section of canvas tubing to extend the toe box by eight or ten inches. The purpose of the shoes was to make a thunderous slap when the men landed from the leaps they made during these marches. They would go up and descend en bloc. I also explained that once they started singing they sang without pause for as long as a couple of hours. My group said things like Where do they get the energy? The marchers were through leaping for the day. But I told my group where they could catch them some other Sunday. I knew what routes they took. I explained how the Zionist Christian Church originated, why it was interesting, some of what its adherents believed, how the main body of the sect in South Africa had sold its soul to the Botha regime.

I must have been fascinating. Before I left I’d been offered a very decent leave house to sit, a type two house on the edge of Extension Sixteen. My duties amounted to feeding some budgerigars. I was delivered from my missionaries. Two women wanted me to go with them to the tapestry workshop at Lentswe la Oodi. I had the next day’s lunch and dinner in my pocket.

A Period of Surplus

It became a peculiar time for me. The original conceit was that I was going to be hedonic, think passim about my life and next steps, repose on the white utopia Gaborone was, inevitably use up my savings, fly home. I had my return ticket. So my period of guilty repose would be self-limiting. Barter would supposedly carry me only so far. But something went wrong.

I began nicely. To avoid any substantive contact with my thesis abortion I wrapped up my notes and records in layer upon layer of kraft paper, tied the parcel with cord, and dropped hot wax on the knots — a thing still done in southern Africa. I left the object in plain view as a memento mori that my academic life was not going to go away but was only lying in wait. My days were fine. There was no typical day. Some days I was up at dawn and watching the sunrise while I sipped rooibos tea. Other days I got up at two or three or worse. Sometimes I played tennis to extinction.

I had never allowed myself this kind of hiatus. I was deliberately planless. I was even able to suppress the vague internalized lifetime reading plan that always nags me when I read trash. I decided to let myself read only whatever turned up in my vicinity. Fortunately the shelves in the house were loaded with Simenon. I think it was Denoon who said that the closest you can come in life to experiencing free will is when you do things at random. There is no free will. Everything is still determined when you make random choices, but you stop noticing. Counterfeit freedom is still something you can enjoy in the right frame of mind. It was perfect being in someone else’s house.

What went wrong was the surplus I began to run. So many things came my way. I had virtually no expenses. I edged toward being extravagant in small ways. When I could get crème fraîche I bought as much as I could conceivably hope to eat before it spoiled. I bought some ostrich-eggshell-chip chokers. I tried to be less driven re eating leftovers. I was still in surplus.

For example: my medical care was gratis. The Peace Corps doctor took a Platonic interest in me. I got a superb parasitology workup from him. It was boring treating volunteers for nonspecific urethritis and sun poisoning and not much else. He felt underutilized and would treat anybody who would let him talk about the medical abysses he had stared into elsewhere in the third world or the shortcomings of the Botswana Ministry of Health. He considered me very clean, based on my having chewed my nails short when I was in the bush. I let him think I agreed with his central conviction that everyone, white and black, was cavalier about sanitation to the point of madness, except the two of us. He lived exclusively on canned food or food that could be boiled. When he went to parties he took his own boiled-water ice cubes. Paper money was infectious because so many Batswana women carried it in their bras, next to the flesh. He lavished free medical samples on me, some of which I still have. I liked him. His name was Elman — after the violinist — Cornetta. He was short, forty, unmarried, normal about sex except for his conclusion — I intuited this — that even the most carefully regulated intercourse was unsanitary. He was at ease in Africa in a generic way: he felt he was performing in what was essentially a hopeless situation. You see variants of this in whites in other hopeless situations. Elman was a genuinely calm person. I interpreted his coming to Africa to be in the midst of infection, the thing he feared most, as purely counterphobic behavior. That made for a bond between us because I could be considered counterphobic in a way myself. I have topological agnosia, a condition somewhat akin to dyslexia and meaning that I have great trouble finding my way around the topography. And I had come to a part of the world where there are almost no landmarks, “Driving through Botswana one is struck by the unvarying landscape stretching into the distance” is a line from the Guide to Botswana expatriates seem to remember and quote.

Elman thought the sanitation problem in the capital was doomed to worsen as the population grew. It would get like Lomé, where the main outdoor sign you see is Défense d’uriner le long des murs. Something needed to be done. I thought I should try to steer his phobia in a constructive direction, and the way that worked out illustrates both how Africa disappoints people and how my attempt at self-impoverishment kept failing. I suggested we produce a comic book presentation on basic sanitation. I would translate his English text into Setswana and find him an artist. He was enthusiastic. We did it. We produced an eight-page black-and-white comic printed offset on newsprint. It was crude but he was delighted. He paid for it himself and he insisted on paying, overpaying, me, which was ridiculous. But he was overjoyed with the thing and it turned out to be a hit. Batswana were dropping by the office and asking for copies. He couldn’t believe it. We had to reprint. For a while he was a new man. Then an enemy of his enlightened him. There are public toilets in central Gaborone but no toilet paper in them. The poor make do with whatever kinds of wastepaper they can lay hands on. Actual commercial toilet paper is a luxury commodity. I tried to comfort him with the news that the same thing was happening to the Watchtower publications the Jehovah’s Witnesses were being mobbed for in the mall. I tried to console him. The money he gave me always smelled sweet. I suspect he swabbed the bills with an astringent before putting them in little plastic bags.