All was well. I had tied up the loose ends of my life with a vengeance. I had given a jumble sale almost as a joke but ended up making money. I had mailed things off and reduced my possessions to what I could carry. I had said thanks wherever it was applicable. There had been some misdirection. It had seemed like a good idea to give the impression that I was going back to the U.S. I had everything I needed for my sortie including my Botschem tweezers. I was decently equipped for light camping. I had a map of the water points along the route I intended to take from Kang to Tsau, although it could have been more recent. It was six years old, but I told myself that since it had been made during a previous drought it was probably accurate enough.
We were going so fitfully there was even time, between lunges, to chat with my copassenger, a young pregnant woman from Mogoditsane who was under the impression her cousin could get her a job as a cleaner at the abattoir in Lobatse. Her questions showed she was sorry for me that at my advanced age I was unmarried and childless. She also was unmarried. In Botswana, in the villages, the practice is for women to produce a child first, to advertise their marriageability.
That’s up to them, I thought, which reminds me that I have to stop using phrases meaningless except between me and Denoon. See what happen! is another phrase I have to stop using for the same reason. That’s up to them arises from an older Jewish couple who had come to Botswana with the Peace Corps and had had a number of difficult cultural adjustments to make, the one they talked about most being that their Indian upstairs neighbors ate rice every day. The Roths believed strongly that it was more appropriate to eat potatoes every day as a starch staple. Mr. Roth agreed with his wife that the Indians were strange, but when she continued to wonder over and over at this matter in front of people, his attempt to get her to abbreviate her going on about this was to say — of the Indians preferring rice — That’s up to them. I told this story to Nelson and he found it as obscurely funny as I did, and between us it became indispensable as a signum of the recurring problem of other people doing things you find peculiar or stressful but probably shouldn’t. The provenance of See what happen! was a lake in a park in Oakland where there were flocks of geese and ducks. A rabble of Hispanic boys was there, with one ten- or eleven-year-old ringleader urging a five-year-old minion to try to urinate on a duck. The five-year-old was reluctant but began complying, running after some ducks with his tiny penis out, after the older boy had inspired him with cries of See what happen! The deed was being done in the scientific spirit, apparently. Where could you find a better emblem for dubious propositions being vigorously encouraged, and where is Denoon, who understands, and what is he doing now?
One attractive thing about me is that I’m never bored, because during any caesura my personal automatic pastime of questioning my own motives is there for me. I looked at my copassenger. Was it possible I was homing in on Tsau out of maternal urges I was incapable of recognizing in myself? Was that the kind of fool I was, underneath? I think and hope I’m averagely maternal, but I think I reject the idea that the repetition compulsion, which is my private phrase for the drive to reproduce, is shadowily behind every move we make while we’re fertile.
I don’t see myself as antimaternal, but I’m not under any compulsion to repeat myself, either. I think if I were laden with accomplishments to date or saw some on the horizon I might feel differently. Nor had there been up to then any particular male person I was so impressed with I thought I should contribute to his replication. Was I being attacked by this whole question now because the impetus of my drive to reach Denoon had slackened, physically, for the first time since I began it: I was on a track, being conveyed, passive, stopped, and had a pregnant woman as part of the landscape. Denoon was childless, so far as I knew: and that was interesting. But, next question, if the whole issue of repetition is so uninteresting, why was Denoon’s childlessness interesting? Was he also waiting for the perfect missing jigsaw puzzle partner to complete his inner wholeness and so release him into wanting to reproduce? That I could be swept out of myself under the sign of absolute love and into embracing motherhood was something I suppose I was assuming, but this has to be bracketed with the population question, on which I’m a fanatic, still. In the cities of the third world your heart is constantly breaking for the children who are either homeless or next door to it, excess children that you feel in your heart of hearts you should be doing something concrete for, creating crèches or schools, something. Also who would want what I was as an adolescent? Pas moi. Denoon once said Do you realize that ninety percent of all the adolescents who have ever lived are alive today? I think I wanted the question of reproduction to be deliberative, as in Well, should we reproduce? or What are we that we should want to reproduce? and so on, à la Immanuel Kant. Of course, this would give you a minuscule world population.
Or was I in fact holding the repetition compulsion at bay at a deeper level with vague self-admonitions that there were more options available in my wonderful home culture than I could shake a stick at, more than there had ever been, e.g., single motherhood via a friend or a sperm bank. Or, just to mention everything, what about a relationship with another woman? This was happening. I have no inclination toward it, but then, presumably, neither had some of the women in my personal range of acquaintance who had astonishingly turned up in that category, mostly during their forties or fifties. In fact I remembered hearing about a woman who was seeing a psychotherapist with the object of overcoming her heterosexuality, presumably in response to the dearth of decent men. Wait, consider the source, I said to myself when it came to me that this story was a gem from the lips of a man with whom I’d had a short sharp relationship which ended when it dawned on me that he was a complete fool, an example of whose level of wit was his whistling or humming the first bars of Two Different Worlds whenever we happened to pass by an interracial couple. There was nothing interesting about Gary, or rather an index of his blankness was that the most interesting thing about him was that he was lactose intolerant. I think I like children. I know I like intelligent children. I might be impatient for a child of mine to talk. I never wanted pets. My mother wanted me to have a dog once, which I tried, and which I rejected because it couldn’t talk to me. This may relate. Infants qua infants fail to produce faintness and emotional synesthesia in me. I might have bonded with my dog if my mother had gotten it for me when I was younger. I had too high expectations by the time I got it. I was precocious.
At Lobatse the drivers offered to let someone ride in the cab with them. All declined but me. The cab is roomy and seemed as though it might be restful for part of the trip and that at the very least riding in it would give me a chance to extract the hemp spines from my palms. It was all right until we got onto rough ground during a detour outside Kanye. There was a jack and crank sitting loose in an open box at my feet. On the washboarding we drove at a speed that was only a foretaste of what would be the norm later but that was still excessive, with the result that whenever we hit a bump thirty pounds of metal would float up into the air and rotate in the void between my knees before crashing back down. I’m attached to my feet, so I suggested to the reserve driver — who seemed like a sensible family man and not a daredevil like the fiendish shavenheaded adolescent at the wheel — that if we tried we could force the jack under the seat. But he pretended not to hear me. This was, after all, a suggestion from a woman. Also this continuous limb-threatening hazard probably helped keep everybody alert. So when we stopped in Kanye it was al fresco time for me again.