The other item to discuss was that I was accumulating a surplus of unused credits, due to my working more hours than were required to cover my necessities. I said I wondered if it might not be possible to donate some of my surplus credits to one of the older senior women, someone not able to work much who might enjoy some luxuries. This was a hit. I could tell because when Dineo was very happy about something she would wince, à la manière de Humphrey Bogart.
Then what unnerved me began. We were talking generally about how I liked Tsau, and she was, I thought, guardedly probing me by expressing surprise that I had heard nothing about Tsau in, say, Kang, where she knew that people told many stories about Tsau and in fact referred to it as the village where women eat before men do. But right in the midst of this she abruptly got up and said I should follow her to the bathhouse.
I had only seen the bathhouse from the outside up till then. It was one of the oversized rondavels sited in the broad stony shelving area lower down and around to the east, where the kitchen, the laundry, and the clinic were, as well. Why was she taking me there? Was I supposed to be taking a hint about my person? A facetious thought, but it shows how mystified I was.
The bathhouse was empty. The floor was stone, with movable wooden pallets scattered over it. You could see fairly decently by the wash of greenish light that came from two wide units of tinted glass brick set into the wall on either side of the door. Dineo pointed out that there were two kinds of tubs to use — standard squat plastic washtubs or tall wooden cylindrical tubs that you had to get into via stepladder and secure against tipping over by means of ponderous hook and eye catches around the bases. The purpose of the tall tubs was to make it possible to have warm water up to your neck. I gathered you sank down until your knees hit the tub side and that then you sat in this cocked position to your heart’s content. All the tubs and pallets could be shifted around so as to bring your particular tub under one of the three spout pipes that supplied water warmed hot to tepid by a solar apparatus on the roof. You pulled your spout down toward you via a rope. You had to pull fairly hard. Three pulls were the limit per individual and would be enough for a good bath.
Remarkably she began matter-of-factly undressing as she explicated the bathhouse. In fact she handed me her clothes to hold. She kept talking. I should feel free to make use of the bathhouse anytime I was tired of having only the shower at Mma Isang’s. For the present there would always be only women using the place, but soon the men would be given particular times of their own and a cloth would be hung by the door to say so. I should always cover, meaning lather, myself with soap before I pulled the water. And so on. There was no allusion to what she was doing.
There was no reason that I could detect for this scene to be taking place. She took off everything except her scarf. She pulled on one of the spout pipes enough to get a slight flow, but she didn’t do much more with the water than pat her face and underarms. Her body was very good. Clearly she had never nursed. I think that for a few seconds I literally had no idea where I was. I was intensely uncomfortable. I was seeing something intentional and not casual, but uninterpretable. It wasn’t sexual in any sense I was aware of. There is no serious modesty about the body among Batswana, except as regards the female pudendum, and even then it’s pretty much the introitus soi-même that seems to be what counts. Tswana men aren’t moved by the naked bosom or by female nudity generally to anything like the same degree as makhoa. Was it that she wanted me to know that, for her age, she had a body virtually in the hood ornament class? Her pubic thatch was the narrow and mainly vertical strip, not bushy, that you see turning up more and more in masturbation magazines like Playboy. Hers was natural, but I’m sure the ones in the magazines are artifacts created because the perfect fantasy for the male salariat is apparently a chimera with wetnurse breasts and a waxed and thinned preadolescent escutcheon. Where this leaves us more bouffant types is a question, I suppose, and just one more thing to feel imperfect about.
I did notice that she had a jagged, rough-textured scar starting at her navel and leading straight down into her escutcheon. This was wrong for an appendectomy, so I figured it meant that she had had a hysterectomy. It occurred to me that she might have wanted me to notice the scar. I was at sea.
This was not an extended event, interminable as it felt. Dineo got dressed quickly after her mock ablution was done. She never stopped talking. There was nothing languorous about the tone of things.
As we left, Dineo pointed at a stand of pawpaws next to the bathhouse. They were watered by the graywater from the tubs. People are joking as to the rinsings of women being so sweet and strong, and they say if you want to taste what is a woman, taste these fruits, she said.
My notion that she was Denoon’s lover seemed vapid to me afterward, although I didn’t know why that was.
Gaffe Fest
I treated his four days away as nothing when he came back. The last thing I was going to start off with in our relationship was a thrust that would stir up any phobias about personal restrictions, notifications, freedom of movement. I couldn’t help feeling that in his retreat there had been an intent to test me, to see if I was truly up for such an abruptly and highly mobile character as himself. Also I suppose I was thinking that if we did ever move in together and were going to avoid the inevitable claustral feelings that being confined within socializing on one koppie would entail, then he would — and maybe even I would — need to have recourse to overnights away from the hotbed of interactions Tsau obviously was. He told me that he usually stayed away at most three days on these personal retreats, but this one had been prolonged by being combined with a little fieldwork on an ostrich-ranching project he had in mind.
We had advanced to the point of his coming to dinner at Mma Isang’s. For the first couple of times Mma Isang was included, but thereafter although for appearance’s sake we would convene in her place, she would take her food and go off into my rondavel to eat. She insisted. She was part of the sector of women whose sentiment was that he and I should get together. I had a straightforward interpretation of this sentiment at the time: I assumed these were people who wanted Denoon to stay as long as possible in Tsau and who saw that ultimately his intimate status — if this was the truth about his status, which I was resisting accepting — his celibacy, not to put too fine a point on it, would drive him to leave town. After all, it was now generally known that he was on the point of being genuinely divorced. So change was in the air. Intellectually I could see why celibacy for Denoon was a plausible choice. Any liaison with a woman of Tsau would have meant compromising his role as above the battle, would have meant choosing a person from one tribe over all the others, would have complicated both his status and the status of the woman he chose. Also, Tswana women want children and they want them now. To all of which had to be added the question of his professional image as someone who tries to set up and then depart from self-sufficient politico-economic entities not tied to the coffers of the West and certainly not tied to the charisma of one man and a white man at that. Nor in the case of Tsau, where the point was female equality and dignity if it was anything, would it be very palatable to take a wife of convenience, a town wife so to speak, and then either leave her behind insultingly or take her with him when he left, thereby demonstrating to all her sisters that the real bingo in life was to escape to the metropolitan West in the arms of an icon. I could see that from some standpoints I would be perfect for him, if it could be assumed that I genuinely liked Tsau, as I seemed to, and was in no hurry to decamp, and that I was who I seemed to be.