Norman Rush - Mating

A Reduced Footing

Once he was restored I was free to have an attack of urticaria. I felt hideous not only because my face is always the first thing affected when I get these attacks but because my mother also gets hives, so it seemed like another gratuitous foreshadowing. But the outcome was something only possible between people in a state of love in that Denoon really seemed not to notice. And it certainly had no effect on his physical interest in me. When I finally noted offhand that he seemed not to have any particular reaction to my eyes having virtually disappeared thanks to adjacent tissue swelling — I was overstating — or to blotching on some of his favorite parts of mine, he admitted that in fact he had noticed but it had led him into thanking god I was a skin reactor. Humans react to stress in three ways — through their organs, their muscles, or their skin — he informed me, only gradually picking up from my hyperpatient attitude that I was fully up to date on this piece of pop psychosomatology. But he went on with it. The luckiest are the skin reactors, because the range of topical medications they qualify for is so huge. So he was relieved that I was in that category. Inter alia he was letting me know he appreciated that my stress was probably his fault, or his malaria’s fault, and he was grateful for what I had done for him more than very much. Concluding, he said My category is organ reactor. I’ll say, I said, attempting a lewd reference. It went past him. He was all concern. He took my hand. The treatment for urticaria is the same as for malaria, he said — that is, the passage of time.

I think he was almost disappointed when my hives faded as precipitately as they did. He wanted to reciprocate my taking care of him. The irony was that the hives cleared up after his suggesting that I might speed up their exit by willing them to go, in a conscious way. He suggested I visualize my body as a paper doll with blotches and then as a paper doll without them, blank. He even made some joke mesmeric passes over me while I carried out his mental exercise to humor him. In the morning I had to laugh, the improvement was so distinct. We were both surmounting everything, it seemed, without strain, with a feeling of automatism, almost. Even his being put on a reduced footing with the committees wasn’t affecting him to the naked eye, although all the news of the day for the period when he’d been out of it had to be gone over and nailed down, to be sure there was nothing included that was something from his deliria. I think he thought his removal was something he’d imagined. He appeared unworried about it, though. There were going to be elections soon, and then a general meeting, a plenary, where everything always got settled. For myself, I wasn’t unhappy feeling that the forces of circumstances were moving him toward thinking of a future in someplace less remote, although I kept this strictly to myself.

I can’t say I was perceiving any serious ambivalence in him about someday leaving Tsau. Or possibly if I was seeing any, I was dismissing it as my mistake. When I praised Tsau once, over something I forget that impressed me, he went into a sort of aria asking how Tsau could fail to be terrific, since it was the pyramidon at the top of all his prior failures, socalled. He gave the entire sequence of truths learned, project to project, such as controlling the scale, working in the vernacular, cutting expatriate staff to near zero, locating yourself remotely enough to avoid premature disruption, balancing collective and individual incentives, basing your political economy on women instead of men — his theme song, Every female is a golden loom. I had heard it all before, but this time it was put together in a lighthearted way. He did tack on, of course, that if Tsau were really perfect the proof of the pudding would be its originator being unable to give up living in it, but then he went on to say nothing is perfect, so that if this was significant in a precursory way, I missed it. I read it as valedictory.

Accouchements

Among my mistakes was going twice to accouchements.

I went out of curiosity initially, and to sharpen up my midwifery, in which I have an actual certificate. I no sooner set foot in the birth house than I was deluged with complaints about Nelson, making me wonder if this wasn’t the real reason for my being invited to attend. He must remain away, was the main demand. Apparently he haunted the environs of the birth house during accouchements, in a proprietary way understandable to most of them but still a thing they could do without. In fact it was an improvement on his earlier conduct, which encompassed attempts to be present during births and to urge fathers to be present during births. His will may have been good, but I was amazed he would run headfirst against so fixed a tenet of Tswana culture as the belief that if the male eye landed on a newborn’s head the baby’s fontanel wouldn’t close. No one but me knew how apprehensive he got when a delivery was due. He was overflowing with horror stories about mothers typically getting to the hospital too late, after the child had turned in the womb, the child having to be decapitated to save the mother, about caesareans resulting in death owing to wretched aftercare, stories relayed by a woman who had been a maternity nurse at Jubilee Hospital in Francistown and told to him primarily, I think, to induce him not to want to insert himself into such gruesome scenes.

In Tsau you gave birth sitting up in a massive peculiar wooden chair with raisable stirrups to hold you in a knees-up position. The chair was a beautiful piece of carving and joinery, and there was something about the fact that all the babies in Tsau descended into the world via this chair that was extremely moving to me. I kept thinking that this was how things became sacred. Also I had a fugitive feeling of wanting to sit in the chair sometime just to see how it felt, particularly how it felt when the trap in the seat was unlatched beneath you. I supposed I was lacerating myself. I felt both that I wanted to sit in the chair and that I had no right to do it. The chair was set up on a U-shaped platform so that the attendants could get on their knees and slip under the mother to help the baby out, with or without employing a wooden chute that locked into place to guarantee against the child being fumbled and dropped. Tubs of flowers were always moved inside the birth room on the principle — as I understood it — that the first things the eyes of a newborn saw should be beautiful. I was told that sometimes the mother would supply a particular piece of printed cloth or weaving or picture she loved and that it would be held up for the baby before the child was held near the flowers. The room was immaculate, red tiles with a hatched surface on the floor and slick red tiles halfway up the rondavel walls. There was another of Denoon’s notional crank-system fans high in the vault, but I never saw it used. Everyone was barefoot, always, for deliveries.

I don’t know what I found so wrenching about the experience. It wasn’t the pain and mess of childbirth, which I was already familiar with and which at Tsau seemed so much less anyway. Childbirth in the vertical position went so straightforwardly and apparently so much more easily for the mothers that I felt essentially like a bystander. An hour or two was the longest any recent delivery had taken, and there was some amused conjecture that the mother had prolonged the action in order to get some dagga to smoke, which was allowed. Even the nurse who supposedly hated Tsau was heard to say once that she wished she could come back when it was time to deliver her own child. There was a little ceremony after the umbilicus was cut, in which each woman placed two hands on the child and told it that it had landed in freedom and that everyone there was the child’s mother. This was not an overpowering ceremony in any way. It also contained the wish that the child’s mother should never falter. When it was over, the team went in a body to the bathhouse to clean up. That was all. But both times I left feeling depressed and hostile and labile.