Norman Rush - Mating

A few times I was able to watch Nelson during one of his silent visitations to the camp. They accepted him with the same attitude they might have shown toward a heron or stork wandering through their site. Free time was what kept coming up with Nelson after these visits, how much free time does a society guarantee to all its members and not just the preferred classes within it? I reminded him that as far as free time goes, the Basarwa men had rather more of it than the women did. I brought up my information about the degree of concealed violence there was. Then the phrase “organized innocence,” out of William Blake, slipped moonily into the conversation.

There was never a true resolution of his feelings about them, or of mine, to tell the truth. In my mind I can still see the camp with utter clarity. I see the eight dome-shaped huts, the lattice showing in places but mostly covered with a mélange of reed, bark, sacking, scraps of polyvinyl sheeting that looked suspiciously like the ground shielding we used in the nethouses. I see the central campfire, kept smoldering all day by what looked like a completely random system of attentions to it, and fed into a blaze each night. There go the men filing off in the mornings sometimes, and sometimes not, according to rules you would love to be able to figure out and which you felt you might someday divine just by watching long enough. There go the women, off to dig up tubers or gather other varia, the chores getting done by groups that seemed to agglutinate differently each time you watched. They were always chatting. I’ve slightly gentrified the camp I carry in my mind: it was slovenly, but I don’t see that.

Denoon was cogitating, cogitating. We had to do more. There were certain health conditions we had to be more aggressive about. I associated a couple of nights of loud bruxism with his having gone over earlier in the day to the Basarwa camp. The Basarwa can disorient you. I know two colleagues who did fieldwork with the Basarwa and who afterward struck me as different, more meek or dreamy than they had been, in a sense, and they were always eager to justify more fieldwork, more going back.

Pine Nut Soda

An amazing episode, I thought: Nelson sat down with me and said Instead of going to the mother committee or back to Sekopololo I’m going to complain to you about something, the composition of our requisitions lately, the trend, and that’ll be the end of it.

I said So am I not supposed to do something with your complaint?

Nothing. This is by way of an experiment. Before I kept on complaining about the brassieres I talked it over with you and you convinced me. Also you convinced me I was wrong opposing white tea, camphor oil, and what else? Hair thread. But now something else is getting me. First of all, we’re letting ourselves run low on bonemeal and cordage, but that’s not it, it’s going to register with somebody before we’re in trouble. Then I noticed a new import item, Pine Nut Soda, which struck me as the last straw. But that was only the first last straw. The next last straw was Milk Stout.

I stopped him in order to defend Pine Nut Soda, if not Milk Stout. It was true the soda cans took up inordinate space on the plane, but for what it was, it was doing good things. Sekopololo was making it available at an astronomically high credit rate because people wanted it for special occasions, where it was treated almost as champagne. It was for special occasions. When it was traded it went into the solar refrigerator at the infirmary to chill, and people were delighted. I assumed it was about the same with the Milk Stout, although the premium for it would be even higher and admittedly the market for it might be more predominantly the men. And it was alcoholic, granted, whereas Pine Nut was not. But I reiterated, and truthfully, how Sekopololo was thriving on these commodities, in terms of the work people were willing to exchange for them. He grimaced.

He said I don’t want a defense of these things from you; what I want is to stop thinking about them by telling you about them. I mean it. This is what I’m saying. I don’t need to feel that mistakes aren’t being made. But I want to feel that I don’t have to dot every T, you know what I mean. He was embarrassed. I want to stop with things at this level, I think. I think I should. And this might help me. I essentially want my mind elsewhere.

This may be wise, I said. I was flattered, deeply.

The Summarist

We were strolling near the kraals at dusk and watching the bats come out everywhere. Denoon could be eloquent about bats, their wonderful dung, which got collected from the numerous cylindrical bat hotels he’d had affixed to trees everywhere, bats and their insect-destroying qualities, and so on. Anyway, we were rich with bats curving and diving and piping everywhere at dusk, coming out from the koppie and over the flats, even as far as the kraals.

Near one of the dip tanks we ran into three women carrying spades for no purpose I could discern. Dirang Motsidisi had her arm around the shoulders of an obviously distressed woman, Mma Sithebe, our summarist. Acting as a sort of lookout, I decided, was Idol, the kitchenmaster. I liked her although the dynamic she created in the kitchen was not for the faint of heart, because she was a volcano of abuse and mockery which paradoxically kept her co-workers in a state of permanent hilarity. It was a little like the House of Commons when heckling is in order. And people did riposte. More than once I’d heard Idol’s voice compared to the screams of mating leopards. I’d made good-faith tries at working in the kitchen and been unable to take the incessancy of the raillery. But there was a core of regulars who seemed to love it. Outside the kitchen, Idol was very quiet, and very tender with her little granddaughter.

What the summarist did for a job was turn up by appointment before different work groups and read to them, either at breaks or, if the work process was quiet enough, while they were at it, but never for very long, never intrusively. It could be something in English or in Setswana, whatever people wanted. She had a range of things to offer. Tsau was supplied by a virtual cottage industry Denoon had stimulated at the university in Gaborone. He paid students to translate various classics into Setswana in their down time. There was Austen, Kafka, some Dickens, some Thoreau, lots of a poet he liked better than Yeats called Edwin Muir whom I had never heard of until Tsau, who is in fact magnificent, some Blake, needless to say. He stuck to short texts, mostly, excerpts. The only African writers I’m sure were included were Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and Ayi Kwei Armah. One of his translators had abandoned a major project, Wuthering Heights, halfway through, just when people had gotten interested.

The idea of a summarist had come to Nelson through contact with one of the down-on-their-luck radicals his father had put up from time to time, this one an anarchist cigarmaker from Cuba whose union had hired unemployed actors to read Calderón and Kropotkin to them while they rolled cigars. The chronology of all this is inexact in my mind. But Nelson’s father during a good patch had been sent as a perquisite to have fun in Cuba under Batista by some advertising company or other, or possibly he had won a prize. In a burst of drinking bonhomie and heavy tipping he had gotten to be friends with some of the waiters he’d met there, who had given him a complimentary subscription to their union newsletter, Solidaridad Gastronómica. He remembers his father looking crushed when what was clearly the last issue came in the mail, the union having been extinguished by Fidel Castro. Naturally Castro hated them because they were anarchosyndicalists. So despite their having fought valiantly against Batista, Castro destroyed them, expropriated their credit unions, shut their cooperative restaurants, and created a diaspora — particles of which turned up now and then on the Denoon household doorstep to be waited on hand and foot by Mrs. Denoon. Nelson liked to call Fidel Fidel Catastro. Nelson described his father as being promiscuously left, a fan of the left generically, in the sense that to get his approval you could be any variety of leftist so long as you were rank and file. It didn’t matter to him that your leftism was at loggerheads with the variant or tendency of leftism of the person he had invited you to take potluck with. That is, you could be an old Wobbly and be invited to dinner with a Stalinist stevedore, your deadly historical enemy. All you had to be was real, not a piecard, meaning bureaucrat, and not an academic, either. I gather that one reason his father had very little use for the Socialist Party was that they were all schoolteachers or pharmacists, supposedly.