Norman Rush - Mating

Or was I in fact holding the repetition compulsion at bay at a deeper level with vague self-admonitions that there were more options available in my wonderful home culture than I could shake a stick at, more than there had ever been, e.g., single motherhood via a friend or a sperm bank. Or, just to mention everything, what about a relationship with another woman? This was happening. I have no inclination toward it, but then, presumably, neither had some of the women in my personal range of acquaintance who had astonishingly turned up in that category, mostly during their forties or fifties. In fact I remembered hearing about a woman who was seeing a psychotherapist with the object of overcoming her heterosexuality, presumably in response to the dearth of decent men. Wait, consider the source, I said to myself when it came to me that this story was a gem from the lips of a man with whom I’d had a short sharp relationship which ended when it dawned on me that he was a complete fool, an example of whose level of wit was his whistling or humming the first bars of Two Different Worlds whenever we happened to pass by an interracial couple. There was nothing interesting about Gary, or rather an index of his blankness was that the most interesting thing about him was that he was lactose intolerant. I think I like children. I know I like intelligent children. I might be impatient for a child of mine to talk. I never wanted pets. My mother wanted me to have a dog once, which I tried, and which I rejected because it couldn’t talk to me. This may relate. Infants qua infants fail to produce faintness and emotional synesthesia in me. I might have bonded with my dog if my mother had gotten it for me when I was younger. I had too high expectations by the time I got it. I was precocious.

At Lobatse the drivers offered to let someone ride in the cab with them. All declined but me. The cab is roomy and seemed as though it might be restful for part of the trip and that at the very least riding in it would give me a chance to extract the hemp spines from my palms. It was all right until we got onto rough ground during a detour outside Kanye. There was a jack and crank sitting loose in an open box at my feet. On the washboarding we drove at a speed that was only a foretaste of what would be the norm later but that was still excessive, with the result that whenever we hit a bump thirty pounds of metal would float up into the air and rotate in the void between my knees before crashing back down. I’m attached to my feet, so I suggested to the reserve driver — who seemed like a sensible family man and not a daredevil like the fiendish shavenheaded adolescent at the wheel — that if we tried we could force the jack under the seat. But he pretended not to hear me. This was, after all, a suggestion from a woman. Also this continuous limb-threatening hazard probably helped keep everybody alert. So when we stopped in Kanye it was al fresco time for me again.

The tarmac ends at Sekgoma Pan, which looks like a lobe of hell, which is appropriate because driving through the bush on the back of a Bedford being operated according to the CTO theory of how to drive over unpaved road is identical with flying through hell. The pan had been ravaged by veldfires: what had been thorn trees looked like black candelabras and pylons. The ground was scorched black, with drifts of gray and white ash here and there. There were four of us on the load, all women. I couldn’t help thinking of the pol-econ officer at the American embassy who liked to say that Botswana was missing its calling: his notion was that it was a perfect setting for day-after-the-end-of-the-world movies, with a few outnumbered good guys running around in post-wargasm desolations, protecting the last nubile woman from the dregs of the lumpenproletariat.

The Bedford isn’t a four wheel drive vehicle, so the CTO full-tilt theory of driving may not be insane. The idea is to go, over the cross-rutted stretches, so fast that you’re touching only the tops of the ruts, in effect making them a continuous surface. Also your intense speed is supposed to carry you through the intermittent tracts of pure sand. We began. This way lies madness, I thought, which became the caption for my experience between Sekgoma Pan and Kang.

The wind ripped out everything that was holding my hair in place, so I thought So be it. I was keeping my hair long for attractiveness’ sake, against every rule about bush living there is. The blast made consecutive thought impossible. I stood up in the blast, the back of my shirt blown out taut like a turtleshell, and sang the Marseillaise. Faster! I frequently murmured. Denoon is the only non-French person I ever met who knows all the verses of the Marseillaise. He also knew other anthems, and specialized in ones from minor countries. He thought anthems were hilarious, as a genus. He thought occupations should have anthems. For chefs there could be one called La Mayonnaise. He did a hilarious English version of the Boer anthem, Die Stem, which I have on tape.

We stopped a few times before reaching Kang, once to pick up a hitchhiking young woman, a teacher, and to let all hands relieve themselves, and again when we hit deep sand outside Mabuasehube and the passenger-side door burst open and the teacher and the jack and the crank flew onto the road. The sand was soft, fortunately. She wasn’t hurt. The same or a slightly preceding jolt had cracked a carton of Daylight soap, so that bars of soap were distributed down the road behind us in a long array, The drivers were scrupulous, I must say. They climbed up high on the load to oversee us, the passengers, as we retrieved every spilled bar, and were very encouraging with their shouts and cries. This was our main rest break.

There was a moment when it looked as though getting out of the sand might be a problem. The breakdown kit, when it was extricated, surprised us by containing only a spare carburetor — no shovel, no sand mat of the absolutely reliable and time-tested kind they use all over the Sahel, no first aid kit. In point of fact, it wasn’t a spare carburetor but rather one that had given out sometime in the past.

Apparently our drivers would get us out through sheer experience. I was told how long they had successfully been driving this route, and it was years and years. The adolescent must have begun driving as a tot. I hoped they were right, because I wasn’t happy at the prospect of camping right there if they were wrong. We would be okay: there was water, although drinking water was siphoned out for us with the same length of hose used to refill the gas tank from the spare petrol drum. I was asked why I was asking the most questions.

By a trick, which no doubt took years of life off the drive train, a violent shifting back and forth between forward and reverse, they got us out. So it was back to more of the same searing thing, Botswana passing in a sepia blur. Ultimately I was too parched even for mental singing. I had to give up on the private travel game of guessing when the glittering decor along the roadside, the cans and bottles and broken glass, would thin out and stop. It never stopped. My mind emptied.

I was exhausted but increasingly elated. This was travel at its purest. This was velocitude, the feeling of wellbeing associated with being in prolonged transit. I had no idea this was a faintly contemptible thing. For someone who had traveled everywhere, Denoon was peculiarly scathing on people who liked to travel. Of all the enthusiasms, the one for sheer travel was the one he claimed to find the most boring. You could rarely if ever get a travel buff to tell you one thing of interest, he would say. They can tell you the names of the places they’ve been and the number of places they’ve been. If you’re lucky they can tell if someplace was fabulously cheap or criminally expensive. The quintessence of it was something Robert Louis Stevenson wrote, to wit, I travel not to go anywhere but to go, which was imprinted, fittingly enough, on the paper the Banana Republic wrapped your purchases in. Nelson was against recreational travel. It was his puritanism. If your work compelled you to travel, that was fine. Then you could enjoy it, presumably. But he hated tourism and thought people should stay home and make their own backyards interesting enough to hold their attention. There was something about Denoon not realizing he was having his cake and eating it too in this connection that drove me to distraction. He wasn’t a good sport about confronting it, either, or not at first.