The sexual atmosphere of this place is normal, I think. But how can it be? You do see something covert and baffled in the faces of the men occasionally, which may relate. I would expect Tsau to be like what I imagine convents to be, in short, hells of incessant sexual stimulation and fixation, on the analysis that a convent is an institution devoted to an injunction reducible to Whatever you do, don’t think about an elephant, the analog to the elephant being sex. The relative scarcity of men here should guarantee that, at least for the queens, you would think. I suppose there must be some sexual partnering going on between some of the women. I get the feeling that the only one here not sexually placid is me. I have fantasies in which I am hanging on Nelson’s body like a langur, feeling inside his shirt. I think about his legs and the back of his head, the two main things of his I see as he skirts me and retreats from my vicinity with great celerity. Why is my meeting with the mother committee always being postponed? Why is nothing reaching me from him? Everything was too slow. I hate trendlessness. I began dissecting the question of why Denoon was facilitating my being there. I could hardly attribute it to love, at that stage, or even protolove, or, given the snail’s pace at which everything was occurring, to an opportunistic interest in me sexually. There were self-evident reasons, given his role in Tsau, for his not being sexually involved with members of the local nubility. And somehow he had managed himself sexually to his own satisfaction. I was not inclined to flatter myself that it was the unique charms concatenated in me that had wrecked whatever sexual equilibrium he had been enjoying previously. I asked myself what was the marxian, that is, selfish, interpretation of his apparently wanting me there? Light broke. It was obvious. Denoon wanted to know what he had wrought at Tsau. What was Tsau, really? I was an almost ideal vehicle through which he could find out. He would have had to be unaware of his own inner dynamic here, which meant that the little mating dance I was reading into our meetings in Gabs had been unconsciously allowed by him to ripen into whatever I had the force to bring it to. I was his ideal observer, and once I had been so persistent and brazen as to turn up in Tsau, there would be no way he would want me sent off. As I suddenly saw it, his problem was how to know truly what Tsau was. He was so immersed in the project and so identified with it that his own reading of it would be suspect, to start with. As for the actual beneficiaries of Tsau, there was a divide to cross. Having the language would help only so much. There was the gulf of gender, there was race, there was a culture tending toward evasion and defensive courtesy, and there was the fact that the people of Tsau would be insane to rock the boat: behind them was destitution, cruelty, hunger. Ultimately when professional project evaluators managed to force their way into Tsau, they would be looking for flaws and would be bringing with them the understandable bias of orthodox developmentalists against something like Tsau being a success. Nelson would not be being paranoid to feel this. He was celebrated in his field but not popular. So although he could never have consciously orchestrated my getting to Tsau without contaminating my ability to see things disinterestedly, my arrival must have seemed perfect. Everyone has a demon of pride. His was feeling deprived, and here was someone who could be helpful, who had taken the trouble to cross the desert to get to him, no less. There could, of course, be other motives supporting this one, I told myself to make myself feel a little better. But my insight seemed plausible and made me redouble my efforts to get everything down and achieve an intelligent sense of what Tsau was as a synergy. This felt like an assignment, and that felt comfortable. In any case it was what I had to work with. I find it difficult to probe people in re what they may find unsatisfactory about Tsau. It makes me look ungrateful. But there are certain perceptible areas of tenderness. There seems to be no congregational religious activity of any kind. The Bible study that’s done is very ad hoc and people are slightly furtive about it. Botswana is very Christianized, and very Zionist Christianized: so what is this about? I gather that Denoon is regarded as the village atheist. He is known for his jeremiads against religion, which seem to be regarded as just another of the odd, lakhoa things he likes to do. There do seem to be misgivings over the rule that housing be tribally mixed. Six of the thirteen Tswana tribes are represented here, plus the handful of Baherero. The mixing of tribes in the wards and neighborhoods is for the most part defended as a good thing, and people tend to claim that feelings on it were much stronger earlier on. I’m not so sure. Tomorrow I finally meet the mother committee and get a chance to see how the deception I seem to be embarked on is going over. I hadn’t actually written the word deception in my book, naturally. My surrogate for that was excursus in some places and gavotte in others. Before my past cleverness makes these entries impenetrable to me, I need to make a glossary — either that or forget the whole thing. I am already guessing at what I meant, here and there.
The Plaza
With great regularity Nelson would regret and then not regret siting the public buildings of Tsau on a terrace one hundred and twenty-five feet above the plain. Everyone at one time or another would curse Tsau for not being laid out all on one level. I got used to seeing people dragging themselves around strickenly for a while after reaching the terrace, particularly if they’d had to get up to it in a hurry. This came across to me as largely pro forma, though. It was never long before the tonic elements in the setting would take over. The breezes, were lovely there. You could promenade along the terrace rim and peer down into people’s yards. And the actual ascent was very gradual, with benches along the routes.
The view was dramatic. You appreciated the greenness of Tsau, as against the burning grays and yellows of the Kalahari. When there were cloud shadows, the Kalahari looked like a leopard pelt. People would sit and commune with the view. What Denoon would say in defense of the location was that civically important events should take place in an elevating setting. I knew he had images of Delphi in mind. I also knew he thought stair climbing was cardiovascularly good for you and I found myself wondering if that had had something to do subliminally with the choice. My bet, still, is that, all things considered, no woman would have voted to have the washhouse, the stores house, the central kitchen, and the Sekopololo offices located at the top end of a long though gentle ramp. We inhabit male outcomes. Every human settlement is a male outcome. So was Tsau, which was seventy percent complete when the first women moved in.