We Engage
One evening after dinner chez moi he invited me to accompany him up to his place. There was a reason for it I forget, but it was really to show me the place: so far as he knew I hadn’t seen it previously. It was changed utterly. He was being a bowerbird homolog. There was more furniture. The windows had been washed. Machinery and parts had been consolidated. Candle drippings had been scraped off surfaces where they had been prominent. There was now a significant water storage tank attached to the bathtub setup. I tapped it: it was full. Inside the house it was a wonderland of karosses, not only on the floor but tacked to the walls.
The song I hate most from the sixties begins I will follow him, follow him wherever he may go, and so on, whiningly sung. It epitomizes something humiliating. The prospect of moving in with someone always raises up fears of being the ignominious one, the supplicant, the camp follower, so it was very reassuring to see how delicately Nelson went about showing me his bower.
We held hands during the house tour and when we came out into nightfall both got the idea simultaneously of swinging our clasped hands in a parody of grade school handholding. Then came the embrace. There are ways to embrace a woman that are standard and there are ways that are perfect. This was the latter. If you’re as tall as I am you begin to notice that men about your height always try to arrange for the first embrace-kiss sequence to take place while both of you are seated, so that they can subtly slide you down and deliver the coup de grace of the embrace, the declaratory kiss, from above, with your head bent back, and your throat exposed so you’re like an animal signaling submission to a larger member of the species. The nice thing with Nelson was that no kiss followed. The embrace was not just the scaffolding for the great declaratory kiss. The best standing-up embrace is like that one, slightly off center so that you have his leg and not his actual téméraire up against you, one hand on the base of your spine, and you are brought in against him but not mashingly. His cheek is at your ear but not occluding your actual ear canal. His breath is in your hair. Then you want to feel him sinking against you, slightly, suggesting relief and repose: the embrace from something, not simply stage one in a campaign of possession.
So we hung against each other. I liked his smell. It was positive and faintly like a veal soup my mother made five or so times in my life when for some unknown reason she was elated about something. It was a trace smell subtending the soap, diesel, and smoke amalgam.
Who terminates the embrace is important also. It was up to me.
Not thinking why, I slid my hands down his spine and through the waistbands of his absurd pasha pants and his underpants. I spread his buttocks apart. I broke the embrace. I think he was amused. He asked me something like where I got to be so playful.
Anyway, there we were with Africa sliding into night, bats starting to circulate, the village turning into a brilliant code message as lights came on. It was up to me if we wanted to go further, but I held back. I would have liked to touch his beautiful sternocleidomastoids as thick as backpack straps. I was happy. I was so happy. The feeling I had was that whatever else we could do for each other, we were going to be physical friends, friendly bodies. I determined when it was time for me to be escorted back home. I made some joke about having to get to bed early because I was probably going to be awake all night. I left him to figure out why this might be the case.
Snake Women
Some of the intervening steps to my moving in have to be left out, fascinating as every inch of the process is to me still. When we were looking back and talking about his Achilles-and-the-tortoise approach, I made him laugh when I asked if he didn’t think my narcissism was the most interesting thing there was. I got control of my obsession with not exactly having been rushed off my feet as such as soon as I got to Tsau when Nelson said I was becoming a werewife. That is, for long stretches I was a normal companion, and then voilà when the moon is full I am an echt wife nostalgically fixated on the details of our sluggish courtship.
He claimed that it had been a distraction for us both when I became a snake woman. Being a snake woman was very honorific. This group earned huge extra credits at Sekopololo if it came back from a snake alarm bearing the culprit physically intact or, better yet, still alive. Joining the snake women was purely counterphobic on my part. I hate snakes.
The events the plaza bell was rung for were births, deaths, storm and hail, plenary meetings, snake sightings. Everything was supposed to stop and everyone gather.
I got to be a snake woman with very little ado. I was standing around during the shapeup that took place every morning outside Sekopololo. There was a blackboard propped up advertising the most deserving tasks — and the jacked-up credits you could earn by doing them — and there was a woman acting as a barker, touting particularly urgent tasks in a comic bravura style. I became friendly with her later out of sheer admiration. In action she reminded me of the traffic constables in Bermuda. Her name was Leto Mayekiso and she was the ex-household serf of a Bakwena headman. People acted knowing as to the exact manner of her manumission, which had something to do with the frequency of the unexplained minor fires that had seemed to plague her vicinity, although she was always able to show she was totally innocent. She had been freed but had suffered from some kind of informal blacklisting. There could be raillery from the crowd when she was touting work in the kiln or laundry, which she would never fail to describe as hotter than any woman should be expected to endure. In fact one of her main pieces of shtick was to dwell on how physically unbearable certain tasks were, obviously as a dare. The crowd would ululate appreciatively. I loved it all. She was about my age. She was very canny. If she saw Herero or Kalanga women coming to shape up she would dip into their languages. So far as I could tell she was a genuinely happy and satisfied human being. Anybody who can make the dour Baherero laugh has to be a genius. She was single. Happy people fascinate me.
So on a cold morning the bell rang and the scene around me dissolved madly: there was a snake sighting. Leto dropped the flywhisk she used in her performance and shot into Sekopololo. In the normal villages of Botswana snakes are taken care of by men, who go about it, in my opinion, fairly hysterically, their efforts usually culminating in burning down the perfectly good tree the snake has retired to and then hacking the carcass to bits with mattocks. The snake corps was made up of six trained women and two novices, one of them quite young. There was a fixed routine for dealing with snakes. Whoever spotted the animal was to stand there and blow a police whistle. The snake women would rush to Sekopololo and get into special, rather medieval-looking leather gear: there were greaves that you strapped to your shins under your skirt, a pipelike tube you slid onto your right forearm, heavy gloves, and a skimpy helmet or cloche that not everyone bothered with. Your armaments were like hypertrophied fireplace equipment — staves, tongs, long rods with pitch on the ends that you lit to smoke your quarry out of crevices, plus machetes, weighted nets, sacks, a stick with a wire slip noose attached. Dozens of snakes had been caught since the founding of Tsau. Several snake women had been bitten, none fatally. Beside the great aim of bringing the snake back alive or at least intact, there was an additional bonus for snake eggs. The skins were cured and sold, the skeletons were sunk in polymer and sold to biology departments somewhere, cobras and boomslangs were kept and milked for venom, for which there was also a market. The snake meat ended up grilled and cut into fragments and served as canapés at a celebration in the plaza.