Here things begin to fragment on me. The woman addressing me was in anxiety. Her costume, a gray tunic and long skirt and a white headscarf knotted to produce collapsed rabbit ears, struck me as beautiful. She was stocky. I believe I said something about vegetables or possibly even something about garlic. I know I sensed it wouldn’t be against my interests to be a little incoherent for the time being, until I could see more clearly what kind of place I had come to: I was especially determined not to let anything slip suggesting a prior association with Nelson. I was going to present myself as a derelict traveler whose excursion had gone wrong. My story would have me doing ornithology. Tsau was a closed project, with an automatic exclusion rule for uninvited visitors. I would outwit this.
I knew she was afraid I had something to do with the Boers. The South African Defence Force does as it pleases in Caprivi and Namibia and if they one day decided they wanted to drop down into the central Kalahari like the wolf on the fold, there would be nothing to prevent it. She had active eyebrows, but she calmed down once I convinced her I was an American. I was sitting down and drinking broth by this time, and fading badly.
I didn’t want to fade out before I knew what this place was, or if not what it was, what it was like, at least. In its symmetry and neatness and Mediterranean color scheme it looked like a town in the Babar books, but in its atmosphere there was something operatic or extravagant. I had no referent for it.
Then two women were insisting I come inside and lie down. I communicated about my animaclass="underline" someone had to be sent for him. They were quick to arrange that. So I went inside and lay down on a platform bed in a clean white room. There was some cool tea, my face was sponged, and then I slept.
They woke me up to get more soup into me, a more substantial soup, with macaroni in it. It was evening.
My hands felt huge. They had been taken care of medically, the splinters extracted, and rather excessive bandaging wound on. I had been cleaned up. They had done everything but shampoo me. I was wearing a garment like a shift, very lightweight.
I was led into one of the wonders of the world, the Denoon outhouse, and left there awhile. I used the facility correctly. When I came out I was shown that normally I should dip my hands in a bowl of weak antiseptic fluid on a stand next to the outhouse door. Because of my bandages this was impossible, but they did somewhat brush and press my bandages with a damp towel anyway.
Baph was safe, was the good news.
I was in a regulated place. They had put some kind of unguent on my lips.
Being in this place and in the hands of women ran counter to my main established refuge fantasy, wherein my father or uncle is a retired judge or captain of industry with a giant Victorian house in an area like Bucks County. He is there off and on. You can go to this house anytime and collapse there for as long as you like, no questions asked. There would be a staff. My father or uncle is powerful but also good, which is one reason the place is so safe. He has goodwill extending to him from far and near, either because his legal judgments were so wise and beloved or because of unspecified other benefactions touching everyone in that county. The food would be simple but good. There would be a farm attached to the house. My protector is very diversified economically, so that no depression would wipe him out. I could be a spinster if I wanted, live in my beautiful room, use the extensive library and the piano, or if I chose to I could moon around in my room and only come down for meals. There was no mother in this. My uncle, though, would be devoted to the memory of my mother. I once said to Denoon, after he denied he harbored any refuge fantasies whatsoever, I don’t believe you, but if this is true it’s because the thing you as a white male will carry to your grave is the feeling that you’re safe anywhere in the world, in essence, unless you have some particular physical handicap. I suppose my position was that everyone has refuge fantasies. I said Saying you have no refuge fantasies and even believing you don’t is not the same thing as really not having them in some way, shape, or form. He got mad. Was I saying he was lying? he wanted to know. Only partially, I said. Then god damn it, he said, I’ll tell you again I don’t and that I also doubt that any fully mature human being does and also that if you do, you belong to the one tenth of one percent of the female race who construct this refuge fantasy because the automatic marriage fantasy, which is the real refuge-fantasy people have until they try it, is repugnant to them somehow.
I scanned around. The furnishings were restful. There was a reed mat on the floor. I could see a wooden table, a cupboard, a wardrobe, all highly polished. I was covered with a cotton thermal blanket, light but warm. My pillow was possibly a little on the hard side. My attendant was sitting in a wooden armchair, reading by the light of candles burning in a holder with winglike mirrors folded out from a spindle attached to the base of the fixture. There was a heat source somewhere. All my goods were laid out along the base of the wall where I could see them.
Just as I began to drift off again, it came to me that I had yet to ask this woman in loco parentis over me what her name was. I was ashamed of myself. I asked, and it was Mma Isang. Here I had an inappropriate internal reaction. The fact that she was identifying herself in the completely traditional way as the mother of whoever her firstborn was, in this case a son, should have produced no reaction in me whatever. It was ordinary. But I wanted to shake her. Women were saving me, and why wasn’t this motherly woman more a separate being? I seemed to be wanting to say. Somehow it brought up the totally unrelated contempt I have for all the apparatus of seconds and thirds and juniors specific to the patriciate in America and applicable only to sons and never to daughters. Denoon called this scionism. Also I wanted to know if Nelson Denoon had so much as looked in on me. He had to know I or someone very much like me had pitched up in his forbidden city. I had trekked across the plain of the abyss for a purpose. Where was Denoon? Who wants to feel like a tart, and an unsuccessful tart to boot? I felt like one of the loser sperms you see in Swedish documentaries shot inside the reproductive tract, one of the members of the shining herd, who only gets halfway up a fallopian tube when the Time Gentlemen bell is rung announcing that some other particle has made it to the ovum and the game is over. You aren’t yourself, I told myself. Mma Isang saw I was agitated, and I believe I was then handfed some segments of orange, and then it was on to a marathon sleep.
Yliane
I awoke in total darkness in that state of intellectual fatigue that means you’ve been working things out violently and exhaustively in your dreamlife. I had had a dream — whose outlines I atypically still had hold of — with stature. I may have had six or so like this in my life, always at rubiconic junctures. My normal dreams are worse than run of the mill. But clearly you symbolically harangue yourself in your sleep when your inner self perceives looming danger. But was I in danger, or rather was I in any danger greater than making a fool of myself? Something in me seemed to think so. I felt as though I had just been excused from an excruciatingly long but absolutely essential lecture which I had had to listen to while standing up.