Norman Rush - Mating

Ah, Boso, ah yes, Nelson said. He went on, copiously, even after I reminded him that I knew somewhat of his attitude to Boso, since he had been debating one of them, Mbaake, the first time we met. I was hearing what I already knew, to wit, Boso was Jacobin, corrupt at the top, the rank and file ingenuous, the top dogs taking money under the table from the tribal chiefs — or giving it to them, rather — and from the Russians and from De Beers and from the South Africans. Did you ever meet Pamane, the Boso supreme secretary? Nelson asked me. All I knew was that he was a dentist. He said Then probably you don’t know why he’s so revered by the student left, which is because he has apparently memorized the last volume in the Marx Engels Gesamtausgabe, the Chronik Seines Lebens, which is a day by day listing of where Marx and Engels were on any given day of their lives and what they were doing. This is what they worship. He’ll even give you the book and you pick out a month, I think it is, and he tells you what Marx was up to, like a mentalist. This is what they worship! Here in the dry heart of dying Africa, in a country famishing for welders, plumbers, borehole mechanics! You talk about savant idiot — he’s it. The students want to be like him. So does the whole industrial-class level of the civil service. And he isn’t a dentist, by the way, he’s a chiropodist, a further irony in that you have so few foot problems in Africa because people still go barefoot a lot and commercial footwear is the main cause of foot problems, so that his medical specialty is probably the least needed one he could have picked out.

He said Anyway I got this up for you. He produced a folio-size sheet of thick paper folded in half or thirds. He unfolded it at me, saying that he had put work into it.

It was a political diagram of the population of Tsau, as I understood it, or more properly an affinal diagram, because families and tribes and other affiliations were among the attributes keyed. It was in several colors.

Something impelled me to make him not show this to me. I violently didn’t want to see it. I hadn’t asked for it.

I pushed it away.

He was stung and annoyed and repeated that he’d put work into it.

Don’t get upset, I said, but I don’t want to see it, that’s all.

I don’t know what my impulse was. It would be facile to say it was pure solidarity with the women, for instance. But I would have left the premises rather than look at this thing. I wonder now if in some oblique way it made me mad that Pamane’s memoriousness had been trashed, since if I have any distinct mental virtue that would be it. What was so despicable about Pamane being able to remember a remarkable amount about someone he admired, rightly or wrongly?

In any case, my saying no provoked a peculiar enraged act that took me totally by surprise. The act was like a strongman performance in the circus, it was so deft and definite, so practiced-seeming. What he did was, in a lightning way, crushingly fold the chart down into a square packet the size of a deck of cards. Then he dashed out into the yard and thrust the packet into the throat of the mudstove.

I followed and squatted down near him in order to catch what he was muttering to me while he solicited the paper or cardboard or foolscap or whatever it was to burn. He seemed to be saying everything was all right.

I made him out to be saying You identify, which I love. You identify.

I said I don’t know if I identify or not, but in fact I don’t think it’s that. I think your document smacks of something.

He stood up and dusted his hands off, his face very flushed, still. You identify, he said. You’re a woman. You think my chart is manipulative.

I thought this was pretty reflexive of him and told him so. I reached into myself, which being oversimplified by someone else helps with. It’s principle, I said. Your diagram is part of something I don’t like. These people have a right to be anything they want and for that not to be noticed or recorded by you except in passing. Are you an anthropologist? What is this?

He seemed astonished with me.

I said My mother thought Negroes were funny. I’ve escaped from her. She knew nothing. How many black people were there in Minnesota? She got her idea of black people from the radio, Amos and Andy, Is you is or is you ain’t my baby? She’d say that to me when I was being naughty, with a big ho ho.

I was worked up.

I said This reminds me of her and reminds me of dossiers. You think you’re neutral, you think what you do is neutral because you’re not British or a Boer, because you’re American and we never did much in this particular neck of the woods. But it’s the strong and the weak, or that’s what this feels like to me. I’m sorry if I’m being incoherent.

You’re so strict, was his last word on this, turning away deeply unsatisfactorily to me with my need for a cincture at the bottom of every event.

He started to go in but stopped and came back to embrace me. I’m yours, he said, I am.

The only thing I didn’t like about that was the suddenness of the transition from evident rage to this. I hate bouleversements in general.

Diving

His I’m yours stayed with me and became more gravid in my mind over the days. I took it as a sign we were close to the point where it would be as painful for him to lose me as for me to lose him. Whenever I felt that that might really be true I tried saying Pride goeth before a fall to myself, sonorously, not with great effectiveness.

Wherever it was we really were, I did notice that I was more interested than ever in the exact terms of his divorce, not that I felt it would be smart to reveal that. And I felt our sex was going differently. Sex can be various things, but in my experience the usual thing it is is considerate work on the part of both parties, with Alphonse and Gaston — style routines — after you, no, after you, mais non — this being the standard among educated people. But then there’s another kind of sex, that’s more like despair on both sides. My own name for it is blank sex. It’s sex without an order of battle. No program goes with blank sex. My closest nonsexual analog for it is from repeated diving. When I was a girl I would go to the municipal pool in the summers and get into uninterrupted diving, off the board and into the pool and back up onto the board again as fast as I could: chain-diving. This was from the low board only, so that the circuit would be the shortest possible. The idea, I think, was trying to link the experience of being in midair as closely to the next moment of it as you could humanly achieve. Or it may have been the moments of plunging I was trying to link up. What you wanted was a certain inner teeming feeling produced under cover of ostensibly testing yourself on the number and quality of dives you could make. I was always surprised that there was no one to notice what I was so manically doing and try to moderate me. But then I used feints so that I could continue. I would sometimes nod or shake my head as though I were responding to someone in the area where the mothers sat, mine not included, to throw anyone who might think I was being excessive off the track. In blank sex everything tangible about your partner is transformed into something that excites and weakens you, seems irreplaceable, his breath, even physical defects, and all these things are somehow necessary for your physical survival or salvation, and yet you know you can never possess them even as you caress them and try to convince yourself that contact with them in the heat of sex is the same as claiming them, having them forever, which in your heart you know is untrue, and thus the tonus of despair.

Blank sex is only possible between adults — that is, it’s not a reflorescence of onset sex à la adolescence, which is intense but so expeditionary and educational that sadness and intimations of finitude hardly come into it. But then you do get experience and you get older and sex is going to continue and it does continue and then sex is what it is, average, until the time comes when everything about it changes.