Norman Rush - Mating

Physically, these were interesting people. They were middleaged but very impressive and fit-looking. They were middleaged in the way actors are middleaged, which seems different. Harold was a fine figure of a man. He was made for tights. I loved his big, martial jaw and full head of gray hair worn leonine. It was crimped across the back where the helmet band had pressed. His eyebrows were the color of brass. He had carriage. They both did. They seemed like dancers. Julia was wiry and small, with a headstrong-looking face. She was fatigued. The flesh beneath her eyes was soft and looked crosshatched. They were both in safari kit. I knew she had no breasts to speak of, despite the brave cups in her shirtfront. Her upper chest was bony. Her hair was gray-blond, cleverly streaked, cut shortish. Harold was not perfect, on closer scrutiny. His magnificent nose had a slightly dropped septum, which would have made no difference except that the interior of his nose was rather vermilion, so you noticed. Also there were a couple of liver spots on his forehead which hadn’t been visible before he had performed his mini-toilette just now. They must have been touched up. His eye whites were congested, but that could have been due to fatigue and nothing worse.

As I led the way into town my personal fixation on the relationship between looks and fate revived. How old was Julia? My mother’s age, roughly? What was I going to look like in twenty or so years? What was the kind of roughing it I seemed to be committing myself to going to do to me? What was the consequence going to be of living where you kept running out of moisturizer? What was Harold’s story? Clearly his physical envelope qualified him for something loftier than being a strolling player in places like this.

They seemed to like me. Julia’s voice was her creature. It had an adorable rasp to it. Harold had a rich, capacious voice I could tell would be capable of great projection. Then there was Nelson’s fine voice. I was assigned to be the only lakhoa in Tsau with a nondescript voice. It was true that they seemed to like me, but they were showing not the least surprise at finding someone like me in a place like Tsau. I don’t know exactly what I thought they should think, what more wonderful situation I was clearly more appropriate for, someone so youngish and smashing as myself, but I was a little undermined.

They were especially British, which worried me. They weren’t incidentally British, like British aid workers you might encounter in Africa. They were paid exemplars. Nelson’s hostility to Britain started with the British refusal to do sanctions against South Africa and stretched backward through items like their letting Mussolini through the Suez Canal so he could invade Ethiopia, which according to Nelson wouldn’t have happened otherwise. He was encyclopedic. By 1898 Japan was the only Pacific country the British had failed to force the opium trade on. And if you mentioned anything favorable you’d be reminded that if you put it in the box with everything else and shook it all up, what you would come out with would still be the British Empire. Also he referred to himself as a birthright Fenian. This had osmosed to him through his father from an even more diehard nationalist uncle, so diehard that he had briefly been a blueshirt and gone to fight alongside the Germans, the great enemy of his enemy. Of course, for his father, that had been going too far, and when the uncle visited after the war there had been cataclysmic scenes, drink-based and violent, ultimately.

I had a slight coup. Harold had calmed down. He said Place — the Seacoast of Illyria, and then What country, friends, is this? I said Twelfth Night. I’m not sure how I knew, since Shakespeare is a blur to me, Hamlet and Macbeth excepted. Harold noticed that I knew, nicely. I took them straight to the guest quarters at Mma Isang’s. My excuse for not taking them up to the plaza first, for formalities, was that they needed desperately to rest and get hold of themselves.

Foreign Bodies

An hour later I was trying to impress on Denoon that he was not dealing with evil people here, so far as I could tell. As I’d approached the octagon I’d heard the thudding of the generator and guessed correctly that Nelson was radioing Gaborone for explanations. Somebody who’d witnessed Harold and Julia’s arrival had run to him with the essentials. Nelson already knew more about the visitors than I did, viz. that Harold had played Richard the Lion-Hearted’s best friend in a BBC-TV series in the sixties. The explanation for their presence was that there was someone new running the British Council and also that the person at Local Government and Lands who should have known enough to block the visit was on holiday. The government was being apologetic. We would have Harold and Julia for four days, no more.

He seemed to be reconciling himself to the intrusion, albeit with little side trips into grumbling about Shakespeare. The chronicle plays were royalist propaganda of the purest sort and did I know that in them only kings were allowed to speak from a seated position? Proroyalism was the secret core of the impotence of British socialism. It all came down to something as intractable as not liking it that America emerged from so unsatisfactory a culture as Britain. I feel about England the way Blake did, he said.

He wouldn’t come to meet them right away. Dineo could meet them, and I should be in charge of them for the time being, which was what Dineo had already suggested to me. In the meantime he had an idea — something he wanted to work on, which he would tell me about later. He looked pleased with himself in a way that I’d come to perceive with a certain amount of apprehension.

Toward three I picked up Harold and Julia and took them on a tour of Tsau. They had napped. I had them each bring a change of clothes along — my plan was to end our tour at the bathhouse, where they could clean up for the reception and dinner the mother committee had decided to put on.

Tsau impressed them, although it was clear being impressed with Tsau made Harold unhappy. It’s so clean, Julia said, so almost Swiss. She asked good questions, and it was clear she grasped the fact that Tsau was a brilliant machine intended to reroute social power to women in a variety of ways. She was very probing on female-only inheritance. I was eloquent. I explained that the next stage of the equity system would be the setting up of satellites of Sekopololo in major villages like Maun, enclave branches, starting with the same kinds of poor and destitute women who had made Tsau, and that ultimately Tsau should ideally evolve into a training center and Vatican for the broader movement, if all went well. Here I was adumbrating on my own hook a bit. But surely something like this was going to happen. Harold was deliberately superficial in his reactions, saying, whenever some feature of the place struck him as particularly eccentric, What country, friends, is this? His remarks kept verging on the implication that Tsau was a sort of theater, artificial. I love the costume, he said. He was a little offensive — as in referring to the cart boys and girls as porters — but this came from disequilibrium. He kept wondering aloud whether the Overseas Ministry had put funds into any of this. Wherever I introduced him someone was sure to ask if this was the swordsman everyone had heard about, which he didn’t like much. Where are your churches, may I know? he asked me at one point. I told him there were no churches, although certain groups met informally. Even when he was being dismissive, there was something playful about the man that I liked.

I took them into the bathhouse and showed them how it worked. It was reserved for them for a half hour for their exclusive use. Harold was being mysteriously funny and started to say something, but Julia took control and thanked me and led him in. When she let go of his elbow there was a white pinchmark where she’d been gripping.