Norman Rush - Mating

In most rondavels a soupçon of glass brick of the kind you used to see in moderne cocktail lounge façades is incorporated. The bricks are embedded in the walls in random arrangements. If you look at Tsau at night from out in the plain or from the top of the koppie you can imagine the dots and dashes the lit bricks become constituting a message in code. Apropos his vitromania I once asked Denoon to make the thought experiment of asking himself what he would have done with his life if he had been born into a world evolving on its own decently enough that his personal attention was not required: would he have been a glassblower or glass artisan of some kind? I meant this innocently, but it was taken as needling him. This was precisely the question to ask if I wanted to make him more seclusive about his glass projects, about which he was already defensive because it was so evident how lavishly his glass workshop was outfitted. He had a very expensive — in the thousands — solar crucible and a plethora of other devices and supplies, including sacks of rare sand. His glassworks was better equipped than the carpentry shop with its ludicrous pedal-driven saw. I had exclaimed the first time I saw his place. He didn’t like my reaction. It was unfair to call glasscraft a hobby. He was forever going to find someone appropriate to train, although his maiden foray in that direction had gone wrong when the young woman who was his apprentice burned her arm badly. This had traumatized him and led him to keep the workshop as his own sealed bailiwick afterward. When I pointed out to him that it was odd that the glassworks was the only venue in Tsau, apart from the Sekopololo office and the post office, ever locked at night, he stopped locking it — but I think he never forgave me for making him feel he ought to. My last thrust at getting to the roots of his vitromania came when he told me the tale of going as a boy to the part of Oakland below Fourteenth Street where the Japanese flower growers and truck farmers had a settlement, just after the Japanese were taken away and put into camps at Tule Lake. There was absolute destruction. Mobs had come there. Acres of greenhouses had been smashed, houses trashed and vandalized. There were acres of broken glass. He was incredulous. It still depressed him to think of it. I suppose he partook in the cult of the working class his father followed. There was an important but tenuous connection here. Oakland and San Francisco were then, by our standards, citadels of union power, he claimed. How could the destruction have happened in a union town? was his question. I said The people who wrecked the greenhouses were hardly detachments from the Central Labor Council or the CIO, were they? No, I said, undoubtedly they were young boys. But no, he knew the mobs were men. I gather that the question was why the unions had permitted this, if they were what his father had said they were. I wanted to know where this episode lay in relation to his father’s assault on Nelson’s bottle sculpture, a reasonable enough thing to want to know. But with that the portcullis came down with a vengeance.

There is the credit system operating through Sekopololo, there is private barter outside that system, and there is a regular pula currency system operating, with regular banking through the post office. I keep looking for someone who is existing totally outside Sekopololo, something theoretically possible, but no one is, including the very hostile health post nurse assigned here by the government. She considers this exile, but people here are seducing her into liking the place by being unfailingly nice to her. Everyone says she was much worse formerly, which is hard to believe. They wish she would go if she is unhappy. The woman being trained to replace her is already more proficient at giving shots. The health post nurse is too young for this place. The government also wanted someone on government pay to run the post office, but Denoon succeeded in getting a Tsau woman deputized for that, if that’s the word. But what the systems conjoin to produce is an amazing equality of condition. Equality is relaxing, Denoon liked to say. Certain powers only arise under conditions of equality, meaning absolute equality, and even then not at first, until people believe it is going to be permanent. Don’t you feel it yourself? he would ask, and sometimes I did.

Decoration rampant. No object too minor. Framing, lintels, all carved and stained. Crank handles on composters carved spirally. The dung carts. Sandal straps have designs burned in. Walkways in compounds edged with painted stones or mouth-down bottle butts. There is a tool here for sawing up scrap glass, bottles especially. Intaglio in the planking around the toilet holes identifies each one as to function, and at face level in the wall opposite as you sit is a wooden plaque bearing an eye-shaped piece of glass over gilt paint intended to glint at you and remind of correct procedure. When I first saw these I thought what wonderful mementos of Tsau they would make, which I read as meaning that I already saw myself as leaving Tsau — as fascinating as I found it and despite the fact that I had just arrived. Do you belong anywhere? I asked myself. Denoon loved a book by James Joyce’s brother in which their father is described as someone it was impossible to imagine as a happy, productive member of any society the mind of man had yet to come up with. I immediately thought of myself, of course. Crockery heavily glazed in spectrum colors, but odd because the black-glaze floral motifs applied are clearly thumbprints. After the rondavels are painted a mastic is applied to the lower third of the exteriors to defeat termites: various herringbone and serpentine designs are created in the wet mastic, using the fingertips, including one design that looks very much like dollar signs.

How serious is this place, au fond? I once said to Nelson that he should call Tsau Occam’s Torment instead, because he was always multiplying entities unnecessarily. This was during the long period when he could be teased pretty freely. If it looks like rain you pull a string and a gutter made of overlapping flappets of wood flops down that extends beyond the edge of the roof thatch so that a drop of rain is never wasted. The gutter feeds a buried cistern equipped with an iron hand pump out of the nineteenth century. There is a box on a post next to the stoop: this is for messages, either in chalk on slate or in soft pencil on oblongs of frosted glass sealed to a wooden tablet: you rub out the message on the glass with a damp cloth or the heel of your hand. Reuse is king. Paper is precious here, so writing on both sides of a sheet is universal. You shower in the afternoon, having earlier raised a black polyvinyl sack of water up onto a shelf at the top of a stall, where the sun heats the water. The sack plug turns into a showerhead when you twist it. You raise the shower sack via pulley. The number of things that can be raised and lowered or operated at a distance via pulley systems is greater than I would ever have dreamed.All tables are dropleaf, with very solidly made fly rails. All candle stands and oil lamps have mirror reflector attachments.

I understand some things and not others. I can understand why the proportion of older women with some visible defect or deformity is high. I understand this in a general way because we know that illness in the culture is interpreted as being the result of some transgression of what the ancestors wanted you to do. So that permanent defects must mean serious transgressions. But why is Dineo here? How did she get cast into destitution? She could be a model! Many of the younger women have been shunned over prostitution coming to light, other patriarch-enraging actions or disobediences, or witchcraft accusations. Dineo is atypical in some way. Her Setswana is pure, without dialect traces. When I ask what tribe she is, people say Bamangwato, but on questioning it turns out that this is an assumption, no doubt based on her self-confidence, and two people have said Bamalete. She slightly obsesses me, which I have to control because asking personal questions, especially about other people, is très gauche in Tswana culture.