What Denoon had was space, privacy, the bathtub, magnificent views — especially the view west toward the red hills and the sand river. But clearly, as I read it, he was uncomfortable about any privilege at all and so the theme of perpetual work and study and basic austerity had to manifest everywhere. I was seeing it in the way the interior of the octagon was set up. Moreover, as he admitted later, he also was under a self-injunction against seeming to be a permanent fixture, against putting his roots down and elaborating his personal environment, because the deal was that he would be going away when Tsau was ready, id est perfect, which was a day bound to come sometime pretty soon. He had been there for eight years already.
I meant to limit myself to what I could pick up by looking in through the windows. First I had knocked violently enough at the door to be certain no one was home. The interior was divided up into a large cooking-sleeping-sitting front room and two smaller back rooms, one of which was mostly given over to a radio transmitter. For decor it was maps and planting charts. The walls were white, which was a relief, because it would have been totally congruent with the general spirit of austerity to have gone with the same lentil-green paint that was on the exterior, to show how above his intimate surroundings a person could be. I could see a few personal things of Denoon’s in the front room: everything was very neatly kept. His clean clothes were wedged into compartments in a sagging wickerwork construct affixed to the wall. There was a sling chair. The mattress on the platform bed was going to be maize husk, I could sense. I had to go in, if only to get a better look at what passed for a kitchen.
I decided the kitchen was minimal but workable. There was the usual mudstove, and a camp stove with a goodly supply of bottled gas canisters. A surprise was that the tap over the tiny sink was not just an ornament. Denoon had the only functional interior sink I knew of in Tsau. All other houses had outdoor standpipes. I had to prowl carefully. There were neat stacks of books and papers on the floor in untoward places. Tables were in surplus, and they were loaded with more books, papers and periodicals, accordion files, and — in the rear rooms — utilitariana like surveying equipment, hand tools, and paper-cutters. Clearly the living quarters were just another part of the silva rerum the patio was.
Where would I be in all this? was the unavoidable question. I would need a table of my own, for example, at a minimum. How could I insert myself without becoming the longlost eternal feminine whose touch would now make everything cheery and comfy?
It was cold there. The floor needed more than the two or three mats in evidence. Leaving, I doubted myself, until from somewhere an image came to me of Nelson as being like a fig, something heavy in the hand and thickly seeded as opposed to light sweet things like seedless grapes. He was not watery. I had images of him going back and forth from room to room, or really of his burly legs going by me while I sat at my table.
Dineo
This was the same day. I had decided that my rival must be Dineo. She was someone it was impossible not to picture getting what she wanted and doing it without your noticing. She was purposive. She radiated purpose.
So it was electrifying when, as I was skinning some rabbits my nurturance had failed to save, I got a summons from Dineo to come to see her. The summons was on a slate in a bag in a cart rolled to me by my livewire favorite boy in the world, King James, the one who had brought breakfast to my first mother committee meeting. I was being asked to come to Sekopololo to meet with Dineo after lunch, id est during siesta, which was in itself interesting because, I had noticed, we were the two women who consistently worked through siesta, ignoring it. She had noticed the same thing. I sent back the message that I’d be there. King James seemed delighted to get the return errand. His mother was the young woman who had burned her arm apprenticing with Denoon in the glassworks.
Dineo was nowhere in Sekopololo, so I went searching for her through the stores house and then tentatively back into the cave. Finding her was odd, but only mildly in comparison to what came slightly later.
It was a hot day for that time of year, May, mid-fall in Africa. I was just inside the cave. To my left was what appeared to be a passage but was actually a narrow room out of Dickens, with pigeonhole racks on either side containing I forget what. There was light at the end of the room, which I perceived to be shining on some beautiful but unidentifiable piece of wooden furniture but which in fact was light from a paraffin lantern set on the floor shining off the bent-over naked back of Dineo as she rummaged through something. It was stifling and she had folded down the top of her dress. Only her back was lit: her head was bent down, out of sight, and so were her arms. What is that beautiful thing? I thought, until it moved when she heard my footsteps. A routine thing for women in the villages to do when the weather is scorching is to disencumber themselves down to the waist. There are famous stories of the consternation of male Peace Corps volunteers teaching in the upper forms of some of the remoter secondary schools turning around from the blackboard to confront ranks of young women allowing their nubile little breasts to show all innocently. This was before the headmasters had been appealed to by the various volunteer agencies to discourage this. Now it was rare. Dineo covered up like lightning, not turning around. She was surprised that I was there so quickly, she said, and asked if I knew the hour. I estimated. Time in Tsau was mostly by rough reckoning. Very few people wore wristwatches. Dineo was one of the ones who usually did. Denoon was sporadic with his.
We went back over to Sekopololo, to a dim meeting room where she motioned me to sit down next to her at a vast round marquetry table. I was very edgy, which I think she noticed and tried to dispel by mock-seriously locking her little fingers in the permission-to-speak-English sign. We smiled.
We talked about the weather, the heat. This sometimes can help us, Dineo said, referring to an overhead fan attached to the beamwork above us and connected by rods to a long box on the wall with a crank projecting from it. The fan ran by some variant of clockwork, some spring mechanism, I gathered. Dineo got up and cranked the thing tight, and the wooden blades of the fan began to feebly rotate. She had my file and started going through it, in the course of which a sheet of paper stuck to her arm. She peeled it off, grimacing, and wagged her hand in front of her face. We had both been doing strenuous physical work.
My interview seemed to be about the rabbits, who were not flourishing. Because of the climate, they had to be reared in small thick cement domes instead of the usual wire mesh hutches. This particular system had been a roaring success in some other arid place, like the Negev, and Dineo knew that Denoon was hipped on generalizing rabbit raising to the individual household level. She seemed relieved when I agreed with her that the idea was premature. The fan had stopped. She looked resigned, got up to recrank, and pointed out what I could already see — that the fan ran pretty briefly considering the effort it took to wind it up. Here was yet one more limb of Denoon’s inventiousness.
Something suppressed and burning was going on with Dineo. I had the feeling she never stopped reading me. I felt it all through the cautionary tale she told about Denoon’s enthusiasms for various husbandries, the latest being for ostrich husbandry. One message was that I should rely on the advice of women, certain women, and she named some who were active with the other animals. At one time Denoon had apparently been determined to raise pigs at Tsau. Ultimately the attempt had been given up. The heart of the scheme had been what Dineo called a moving house of pigs — a large, covered movable pen open at the bottom, with pigs in it. The idea had been that the enclosure would be moved around and anchored in different venues long enough for the rooting-around and defecating pigs to turn each locus into potting soil. The trouble was that pigs are very powerful animals, apparently, and also prone to cooperate among themselves. The cage was impossible to anchor satisfactorily, ever, so the pigs would shoulder the thing along over great distances to anywhere they pleased, such as the grounds of the primary school, where the children would see it coming and get hilarious. Not only was it beyond the power of man to anchor the cage, it was also impossible to construct it solidly enough to keep the pigs from, over time, bursting it apart and running off in all directions. Now, Dineo said, Rra Puleng wished to catch and raise ostriches, which were far stronger than pigs. In any case, I should proceed with the rabbits in the way I felt I should.