There was even more being done for me. Nelson was cooking more dinners than he had been recently, soups or other one-dish propositions by and large, but I love soup. Keep talking to me, he said a few times when I thought we had covered something and I was moving off to attend to something not in his vicinity. For someone always afraid she’s overtalking, what could be more reassuring? Also he was responding, it seemed to me, to my encouragements to get beyond his stimmung when it came to women in general, which I found ideological. Women are not semisacrosanct. I informed him our nurse was still fighting against isolated outcrops of the traditional method of weaning children when they got to be two or so, viz. putting snuff on the nipple or telling the children worms were coming out of it. How nice was that? I saw progress when he made jokes of the following sort: at breakfast by mistake he took my pile of various pills rather than his, mine including Enovid, and then that evening when I pointed out what he’d done he said That explains why all day I’ve been unusually sensitive to the needs of others. There were a handful of retroconfessions unprompted by me. One was that he felt he’d been a prig in one of his responses to me. I’d said something like Don’t you ever get the feeling you’d like to get out of here just for a few days and act like a pig, eat steak and profiteroles and dress up and go dancing with the kind of funheads who like to go dancing, drink whiskey sours, in your case one just before dinner and one glass of wine with dinner, out of consideration for me? He’d said no and now he took it back and of course he could go for a steak chasseur. He also said he was sure he’d implied that he’d read Middlemarch, but the truth was he’d only read two thirds of it, or a half.
As if to complement the impression of a barrage of lovely things occurring we had on two successive nights displays of unusually brilliant shooting stars. Everywhere people agreed this meant great changes coming.
A Pedestal for Something
The woman who ran the meat tree was one of ours, very pro-Nelson and Dineo. She served up all kinds of news and gossip from her customers, so it paid to stop and chat even if the meat offerings were not exactly what you had in mind. I was reminded how circuitous everything in Tsau was when I gathered from what she was saying that Rra Puleng had fixed it for the summarist to continue reading and announcing everywhere, just as before. So he’s still machinating outside proper channels, I thought to myself. How interesting. I bought two hares because she had so many and it was late in the day. There seemed to be a steady flow of hares from the Basarwa camp lately. This was good because the situation in our rabbit domes was unpromising again.
Then I was converged on by several women, good friends like Mma Isang and Dirang Motsidisi among them. What followed was odd and left me thinking This is a pedestal for something. We were going to walk homeward together, so I had to wait while protracted transactions went on over hares. A conversation began, in the echt traditional way, with inquiries about key relatives. Was my mother keeping well? She was a poor person, wasn’t it? I had no father, wasn’t it? This really set me back because I’d discussed my pater absconditus situation with only two people in Tsau, Denoon and Mma Isang. Wasn’t it so, that no moneys were being sent to me from my home? Other questions established that if I returned to lefatshe la madi there would probably be no one to pay me for my studying about birds and that I would have to go for lowly work as in serving up drinks to men. I was a little irritated. They began commiserating almost before each individual drawback was acknowledged. It seemed to me I was getting oeillades from Mma Isang and Dirang to play up any sadness or forebodings I had. The scene was a contrivance. We were back and forth between English and Setswana. I was uncomfortable and wanted to leave not only because of the oddness of what was going on but because I had what I thought was a consummate entry in a stupid comedic competition Nelson and I were engaged in. He’d started it. Just to annoy me, and based on my age and milieu, he asserted that I had to be a fan of Bob Dylan. This had come up in the umbra of allusions to the difference in our ages. I was such a young person that naturally I was a fan of the great bard of my age cohort, with his wonderful elegant grasp of the lyric, as in Lay Lady Lay, or as in his whining queries as to when we all might expect cannonballs to be forever banned. Denoon liked this conceit so much that my protests were wasted. I think at one point I defended as pretty good the line The pump don’t work ’cause a vandal stole the handle. Somehow this led to a Ping-Pong competition re completions of the phrase The band can’t play ’cause dot dot dot. We had gone through the simple completions like ’cause a strumpet stole the trumpet, or a bum stole the drum, and were at about the level of Jean Arp stole the harp, or a wily crone stole the xylophone. I wanted to spring on Nelson that the band couldn’t play because Vera Hruba Ralston stole the tuba for Halston. Since he knew nothing about movies he was sure to assert Vera Hruba Ralston was a name I made up.
It was hard getting Nelson’s attention, he was such a hive of industry of late. When I commented on it he quoted a line of Blake from a catalog to an exhibition of his pictures I remember as Now after such long slumbers I once again display my giant forms. The exhibition was a failure, as I recall, and Blake went back to engraving ads.
In any case Nelson was back at work in his spare time on a contrivance about the size of a beer keg that I made the mistake of referring to as a light fixture. No, it was more than that, much more, it was something in notional Latin like luminon, lucinant, noctiluminant. The polyhedral carapace was panels of amber and lettuce-colored glass set in a metal framework. Within was a revolving honeycomb entity involving mirrors and certain cells which were crude lenses that would swell the beams of light. A ring of vanes around the top would let the slightest breeze turn the inner entity, at whose heart burned a lamp that would run for twenty-four hours on two quarts of sunflower oil. The idea was to be able to raise and lower it from a mast in the plaza or, better yet, one on the summit of the koppie. But probably it would be for the plaza since decorating the top of the koppie would have to wait until the committee as to names ended the deadlock on what the koppie should be called. Denoon had originally wanted the koppie named the Fulcrum, until he had been convinced that there was no equivalent word in Setswana. His proposal to use a word in Sekalanga that might be stretched to mean fulcrum had been met with furious objections. Even in Tsau the Bakalanga were considered foreign, more foreign than the Baherero. Then he’d proposed Tshiamo, Justice. But there was suddenly an iron consensus for the koppie’s being named for a person, a woman, possibly some woman from the charter days of Tsau. Factions had formed, and there the matter stuck.
I loved to go down to the glassworks and write letters or read while he tinkered with this ornament, sanding glass or buffing or drilling and setting it. Concentration was important when he was at this, so I wasn’t supposed to talk while he was busy unless something in his train of thought led him to laugh out loud or say something on his own. Then I could partake. He started laughing once because he had just had an epiphany in which it suddenly became clear to him how comical a word foolproof was, with its associated imagery of objects or machines so basic no flailing oaf could damage or misuse them. This was!gum, moreover, and the glassery was usually warm because of the furnaces Nelson used. There was immense tablespace there, whereas at the octagon I had to elbow his impedimenta aside whenever I tried to do personal clerical work. The glassery was domestic. The thatch on the building was recent, I gathered, since a faint smell like cinnamon or sherry came from it. There were generous windows looking east to the kraals and the mealie fields. I could duck out and visit my boy Baph.