On the spur of the moment, apparently, Leto came out and began pulling at me to come with her. She was inviting me to come fight snakes. There was some supportive ululation around me, so I said yes, hardly knowing what I was agreeing to. Then there was an adventure, at which I was essentially a nerve-wracked observer, ending in our trooping back with an only slightly damaged eight-foot-long rock python bound to a pole carried by our youngest novice and the little girl who had discovered the snake. I had been in terror throughout, but my companions claimed I had done a few helpful things, and they said they wanted me to join the group. I said Yes, you honor me.
Afterward I was extremely elated. There was an impromptu lunch set out for us when we got back. Denoon claimed all this happened on the very day he was going to ask me to think about moving in with him but that seeing me so elevated and involved with the group, he had decided to hold off. I think I do recall him contemplating me avuncularly while we were eating and being told how valiant we were. He even insisted he’d felt an extra attraction occasioned by my amazonesque accessories and general look. Only a fetishist would say that, I said. In any case, it would be a few days more until I was asked, and asked poorly, if you ask me.
I Am Asked
I was enjoying working. For one thing, I was very approved of for working more than I had to and for being goodnatured about volunteering my brawn for some of the heavier jobs. I liked being able to skip work altogether if I felt meditative. I especially liked shifting from one phylum of work to another and also that from time to time spontaneous singing would break out during certain kinds of gang work. These songs were real inventions. They were topical. There used to be something like them in rural Mexico. They were far removed from people robotically lip-synching along with the top forty, which was my closest workplace experience analog. Also work was transparent, unabstract. I was halfway into a state at right angles to my usual American median state of being in which you are in perpetual anxiety about the next thing that’s supposed to transpire in your lifeplan, to the point that you can barely enjoy the thing you’ve just done or the plateau you’ve reached. Can you get pregnant? You do, but then will your child be healthy? Will it be popular, productive, and if it’s a girl will she be assertive but not abrasive? And so on unto whether she is going to abandon you or not when you get old and burdensome. It resembles being a writer and having each book you write being judged essentially on how promising it is, what it augurs about how well you might do next time out. In America there are people who spend all year in agony because they don’t know what quality of New Year’s Eve party they’re going to get invited to. Even in summer camp, which is supposed to be a respite, it was impossible to relax, because the Lutherans who were so charitably giving me a scholarship fixed it so that I was striving the whole time to rise into the next and less humiliating grade of the swimming competence hierarchy or be the object of subtle scorn — not that they realized it. All this was falling away. Partly it was just being with Africans, who are so much the reverse of the American anxiety. And who knows how much of my luxe and calme may have been my romantic reaction to the idea of the experience I was having rather than the result of the experience itself, by which I mean reaction to received ideas about the beauty of communal labor, women being in charge, and so forth. Another perfect fragment from a different imperfect favorite poem of Nelson’s describes pretty well the way I was feeling: Zeno’s arrow in my heart / I float in the plunging year. Basically the reason I don’t know why I felt the way I did is because unfortunately we don’t know what we are, anthropology notwithstanding, even though the reason I clutched anthropology to my bosom was because I believed that academic disciplines did what they said they were doing rather than being hotbeds of dominance behavior where disagreeing on the simplest point gets you into a Götterdämmerung with somebody or his disciples. Another layer of it all was the problem of my knowing that Nelson would no doubt love me more if I loved his system, which Tsau was, tout court. He would be happy if I was happy, he would be seduced if I was seduced, and so on into the night. So it was another bolus.
It was public when Nelson asked me to come and live with him. He chose a cream tea which happened to be particularly well attended. I’m still annoyed. He strode over and drew me to my feet as in some period movie. It was done to be observed. I suppose I betrayed myself to some extent, because I could have said We should talk this over later, but in fact my relief that the moment had arrived was too much. I did want it. I’d sought it. It could be seen as just one more instance of Satan controlling the timing. I accepted with a nod. Some women at my table said Ow! which signified surprise, pleasant surprise, and was just short of ululating on the applause meter.
We embraced. On my part it was dutiful but numb, and brief. A kiss, which I was in no mood for anyway, would have shocked the Batswana, who still mainly regard the act as outré.
I brought up his peculiar choice of venue much later. Horrifyingly his shortlived initial position was that he had chosen the moment on impulse and not out of any public relations consideration. I controlled the rage I felt, but I said You are a liar. It was over almost instantly, with Nelson admitting everything and apologizing and concluding by saying what a bad liar he had always been.
You are? I said in a tone that must have been more underlined than I intended. It made him look warily at me for a long time. He sensed something.
A Deluge
Nelson came to dinner that evening, bringing gifts for Mma Isang that served as a sort of joke surrogate for lobola. It was a nice touch. There was a small crowd hanging around. Individuals wandered in and out, giving good wishes.
The joke brideprice Nelson brought consisted of various delicacies of which I remember particularly a can of mandarin orange segments and a jar of marmite. He was trying to promote marmite as a spread. I had intimated to him that it would be advisable for there to be a general increase in B-complex intake. Marmite is yeast, so Nelson was reviving an earlier failed effort to get people to like it. He would say things like This is very popular in Australia. At our little leavetaking ceremony he was eating marmite demonstratively himself on water biscuits and buttering biscuits with it and passing them around the way hostesses do at parties where they’ve put hard work into a gourmet dip that isn’t going over at all well. Mma Isang told me emotionally she would always be my mother.