What upset you? Nelson asked when I came back in. Nothing, maybe my mother, I said, evading, when what I really wanted was to shout at him about the gigantic quid pro quo he was presenting, as in We can be together forever but only on the head of a pin, in Tsau. I was tired of the good news and the bad news always linking up. You win a honeymoon but in Beirut, you win a retirement chalet but on top of Kanchenjunga. I wanted to stride around and kick his sacks of rare sand. And I felt I absolutely must avoid getting into discussing the merits of Tsau as a venue according to its position on the depressing spectrum of where the poor have to live worldwide. Or into discussing futures suggesting that his place was anywhere but with the poor forever: that was definitional of him and in any case I respected it, although I reserved the right to adumbrate ways you could be with the poor without necessarily being at their elbow year in and year out. I had a retrograde gust of feeling or yearning toward being religious, so that I would be able to believe that my suffering in itself, separate from anything else I might do, metaphysically lightened the sufferings of the poor. But religion was beyond me anyway and I had been dragged farther away from any berserk clutching at it I might be reduced to, by Denoon’s on and off stream of aperçus and imprecations on the subject. He was fuel to the flame. And his most recent recensions on religion, to the effect that the taproot of religion is perennial irrational individual self-hatred, had been especially trenchant to me. Religion might originate through thunder and lightning and wondering what the stars are, Nelson had been saying, but once it gets rolling it’s about self-hatred, which is why religions crossculturally always exalt and beatify people who continually hurt themselves or allow others to hurt them. I think this had been touched off by a pope recently blessing a devout bathing beauty who had crossed the Alps on hands and knees to see him. Another tack never to take was that Tsau was effectively, by African standards, middleclass, so was his continued presence being justified as necessary to its remaining so? his white presence? mine included.
I thought I was being superbly contained, considering what I was feeling, until Nelson said So this is what one hand clapping sounds like, which was an evident reference to the lukewarmness over staying forever in Tsau I thought I’d been masking so well. The proposition was serious for both of us, which I could tell in various ways, from the primary to the trivial. Among the trivial was an onset of rather sharp itching in my escutcheon, an established accompaniment to moments of major foreboding. At the same level was Denoon using the amalgam GodJesus in connection with swearing one thing or another. He would never coerce me or anyone, if that was how I was feeling. He was sorry if I thought that. He loved me. I shouldn’t be upset. Then he confessed for the second time he regretted giving me the impression when we were discussing Middlemarch that he’d finished it. Before I could remind him that he’d already confessed this he was going further, saying he’d never even begun it, that he knew what was in it only from what he’d picked up from women discussing it. But now he was going to read it, he swore. Here a blur ensues. We went on to other things.
STRIFE
In Retrospect, Where Was I?
In retrospect, where was I when strife came to Tsau, and what was I doing? I keep asking this. How inert was I? Could I have done more to deflect the future? I think so. I have no excuse other than my inner absorption with the prospect of staying on in Tsau, wrestling with it, trying to look clearly and deeply at it, find the right and true referents for it, and not keep recurrently seeing it as sheer exile.
I had battles of my own to fight. Statistics such as that in the United States a colgrad needs to be in a city of at least a million in order to be able to count on having five close friends would assail me and have to be countered with reminders that in Tsau I would have one perfect friend, for a start. What city in America could guarantee me that? And repeatedly I had to push back value reversals: things about Tsau that had been giving me pleasure, like the oceanic skies or the quintessence of solitude you attained on the summit of the koppie, were suddenly malign and frightening. Or I had to fight back moments of conviction that this was all coldhearted and a test. And always there was the struggle not to be sordid, not to will myself to be engulfed by blinder love, slave love so strong nothing spatial would matter.
At moments everything seemed like a conspiracy against me, to force a choice, like Denoon’s theory of the characterological collapse of the male in the Western world, America in particular. As women get stronger and more defined, men get more silly, violent, and erratic overall. I more than agreed. I was a walking contribution to the statistics the idea reposed on. But why go on about this more than once, if the inner point was not to get me to feel panic about who else I could get if I abandoned Nelson, the clearsighted man, obviously one in a million, exempt from this piece of sociology? Then, was it only happenstance that he was dropping aperçus about the superiority of small and powerless countries like Botswana or Ireland morally as places to live? However oppositional you are in a superpower, you partake in the routine misery being inflicted through its CIA or equivalents, secret wars, arms sales driving the third world mad and sowing dragons’ teeth unto the last generation. I felt like saying Ireland, yay! But in the nick of time I remembered the priestocracy.
I knew what I needed was exactly what I couldn’t have here: a woman friend I could discuss Nelson with, confide in. There was the political barrier of my identification with him. That would always exist. Also standing in the way was the Tswana institutionalized madness about secrets. Secrets are for the family only. Outside the family, secrets confer dangerous power to the hearer over the divulger. When I say the Batswana are opaque I mean things like the young woman at the national bank, high level, whose husband had been in England for four years straight getting a doctorate in biology: she was perfectly cheerful, was famous for it and for not having boyfriends. Of course in time every culture will yield to someone saintly enough, supposedly. Of course I had recently been driven to talking to my donkey, and what did that mean? There were two women in the United States and one, possibly, in Sweden I could conceive of making an emergency life and death confessional help-me phonecall to. But there were no phones in Tsau and never would be until I was in cronehood, if then. Would life in Tsau be me forever wandering up and down the interface between the main two races I would never understand, Bantus and the male? This was when I was at my lowest.
I tried America has taught me to overestimate my importance in the scheme of things. I tried this often. I fought off image seizures of newlywed wives in movies confronting more than humble apartments and putting their fists on their hips and saying This place has possibilities, which would lead into surreal fantasies of how I would revise and redecorate Tsau to my own individual taste, long and involved fantasies. Mostly I tried to find some equilibrium around the feeling that Nelson had in fact been talking more exploratorily than conclusively. But then he would unhorse me by reminding himself of dead undertakings he was going to revive — promoting sauerkraut and croquet were two of them. And during all this he was being especially perfect and solicitous.