Norman Rush - Mating

When we got back to Gabs we lost touch directly. He went to Mauritius, I heard, and was loving it.

Martin Wade Leaves a Party

Except among the elderly you rarely see healthy white people as thin as Martin Wade. He was only in his late twenties. He looked like a Tenniel illustration, with his biggish head. All the diplomatic wives wanted to feed him.

He was a celebrity among the South African exiles in Gaborone. His nickname was Mars, which was what the Batswana neighbor children in Bontleng called him. Martin Wade itself was a nom de guerre. He had been significant in the National Union of South African Students at Wits and had done something spectacular enough to get himself conscripted out of turn and sent to the “operational area.” Then he had done something spectacular in the army, after which he had deserted and made his way to Gaborone. In Bontleng he lived in a genuine hovel on some kind of subsidy from the Swedes. People still in South Africa got information to him on strikes and jailings, which he published in a little mimeo newsletter that went out to different newspapers in the West, to be ignored. He was said to be ANC but sub rosa. He was myopic and wore glasses, which like his weight had an effect on me. I have a certain inordinate feeling toward revolutionaries who wear glasses, because there is the sense of how easily they could be unhorsed in the slightest physical confrontation with the enemy just by someone flicking their glasses to the ground and stepping on them. So you assume such people have unusual amounts of courage.

He had crossed my peripheral vision at one or two parties, inspiring in me the universal response: how much was he getting to eat at that particular occasion? Why didn’t he eat more? Was it political, à la Simone Weil? I knew that he was famous for giving away food to the Bontleng urchinry, because one or two hostesses had complained that that was what was happening to food packets they’d put up for him. I thought of approaching him in a light way with something like You give new meaning to the term ectomorph. But then I would have been imbricated with all the other maternal presences in what he doubtless experienced as a nightmare.

The entrée was going to be roast pork the night we finally met. In the universe there is nothing more inciting than pork, garlic, and onions roasting. You could tell he was salivating because his Adam’s apple was on the prominent side and was moving like an animal.

I was having to control my body language with the hors d’oeuvres when he came near. Of course diet is always with me and the psychodrama of why is not mysterious. The script reads along the lines of needing urgently to know what it was about food that turned my mother into an exhibit and might, unless I prevented it, do the same to me. Everything is an artifact. I was in graduate school before I realized that all her innocence about how little she actually ate was a sustained lie, propaganda. So voilà, nutritional anthropology for me, which combined the two things most compelling to me, food and man. Martin was the guest of honor that night.

The couple giving the dinner were Americans, decent people teaching on local contract — which is not munificent — at the university. He was biology and Margaret was setting up a pharmacy curriculum, if I remember. They had been there a few years. They had two junior high age boys in a boarding school in Johannesburg. They felt suitably guilty about it, but they had looked at the alternatives in Botswana and decided it was the only fair choice they could make for the boys, who would be going on in science back home someday, the usual.

Dinner was virtually served. Several of us were commiserating Margaret, who was upset. A couple of days earlier she had picked up the Rand Daily Mail and lo there was a story about St. Stithian’s, the boarding school, to wit, the police had organized a ratissage to drive some squatters out of a wooded area on the school property, with dogs and clubs and all the standard paraphernalia, and they had included boys from the upper forms, including the sons of our hosts. So it had been a tear-stained couple of days and there had been violent phone calls to the school, and so on. It would never happen again. But the boys were going to stay at St. Stithian’s.

Hereupon Martin joined us, a samoosa half-raised to his mouth. He hadn’t heard about the incident. He put the samoosa down.

I admired the way he approached the thing. First he made sure he had all the details right, and in particular that the boys were not going to be withdrawn. Then he said You will have to excuse me. The maid came in to say dinner was served just as he walked out. Margaret’s husband tried to fix things by saying they might do something next term, if they could think of something, and reminded us how impossible it had been when they tried correspondence school for the boys. But Martin had picked up his daypack and was gone.

The only scene like it I had been through involved a dinner destroyed when a guy left abruptly as some veterans of therapy were all agreeing how much they hated their parents. He was European and had apparently never mentioned to anyone present that his parents had died in a concentration camp. It was no help, but anyway I followed Martin out into the street. May I stride with you? I asked him when I caught up with him.

So then we began bantering. He was very cockney, to my ear. I told him that as a South African male he was better off avoiding a meal that was too fatty anyway. They’re at hugely high risk for heart attack, genetically. He said he knew that South African males up to age forty-five had the world’s highest coronary rate but that his explanation was different to mine, as he put it, he would bet. He said Did you know the rate in South African men is the same to the second decimal as the rate for prison guards as a class around the world, and what does that say to you? I said I wouldn’t deign to reply, it was so obvious. Then I asked him if he knew that the best gene pool against coronaries was living right next door to the Boers in the form of the Bantus and especially the southern Sotho. I mentioned studies showing that a tendency to early coronaries had been concentrated in the Boers by inbreeding but that all around, you had the Bantu tribes, with the lowest coronary rates in the world. Only apartheid stood between them. We agreed on the irony of it all: Boer and Bantu, made for each other. I can eat anything, he said, not being a Boer. He was from Natal. His position was that he was responsible for my leaving the dinner, so he would take me to his place and feed me. He knew I entirely understood why he’d felt he had had to leave.

His place, his one-room cement hut, was in a poor neighborhood but not the worst. He had his own standpipe in the yard and his own outhouse. He had a paraffin stove, used mainly to burn letters and documents. He had almost no chattels. Everything had to be kept to the minimum, so that he could decamp instantly and so that there would be nothing in the place he would ever have to come back for. This was another world to me. He was a musicologist. He had taken up the recorder, but only because it was portable. He could play beautifully. His real instrument was the viola da gamba. This whole time we were getting acquainted he was looking for food to serve us, including stepping out to check with his impoverished neighbors to see if they could lend him something when he discovered he had nothing except an ancient orange and two cans of pilchards. This was a man who loved to talk. We fascinated each other. Finally he permitted me to take him to a restaurant — only the most nominal, poorest, most working-class restaurant would do — where we talked endlessly some more. It emerged that he had conflicted feelings toward Americans, which I discovered my working-class origins had a slightly mollifying effect on. I highlighted them and it was all right. He came back with me to my place.