Being deliberate with each other was mutual. I had not done the usual swan dive women do when they start a promising relationship, which is to just deliver all there is about ourselves, the entire midden of past relationships, your first sex, your hopes, your dreams, the entire midden in a backhoe. We were wary and going through a more male process, which resembles two people sitting opposite each other and taking turns putting soupçons in the scales blind justice carries around and trying to keep the pans level. He was parsimonious because he was a man. I was parsimonious because I knew I was dealing with a feminist to whom a heart-laid-bare swan dive would seem stereotypical and also because I had had a shorter and, to say the least, more restricted life. So I felt it might be intelligent to ration my res gestae a little. I wasn’t the one who had someone like Bernadette Devlin McAliskey to send a get-well telegram to or who got six-page letters from Hungarian socialists named Kornai, another name I had just added to my syllabus. The most famous person in my ambit was Denoon himself. But in the bathing engine the ratchet would turn a click or two toward greater openness. He was, for example, apparently worried about rifles.
Has anyone talked to you about rifles? he asked me.
About rifles? No. The main topic is still the rainstorm. Tsau is as full as a plum, and so on.
No one is saying Sekopololo should be stocking a few rifles?
No, and what is this about?
Probably nothing, but tell me if it happens.
I think it was to get off this subject that he, luckily as it turned out, brought up the question of what it was about the particular atmospherics of the bath hut that made me a little anxious.
What light is this like? he asked.
Well, it turned out that it was like the light in a treehouse some neighborhood boys had built, which I had been allowed up into in order to play doctor. There was a tarpaulin across the top and most but not all of the way down the sides, although you could get virtual privacy by sliding sections of cardboard carton over the open spots. There was a nice view. We were quite a way up. Access was via slats nailed to the trunk, of one of the trees. My mother crept up on us. She wanted to know what was going on up there. I forget what we said, but it couldn’t have been the right thing, because she decided she would climb up and see for herself, with the inevitable result that the rungs popped out of the tree under her weight right away, inspiring her to start howling like an animal. Come down! she screamed, all the while in her rage and berserk strength plucking the remaining rungs out of the tree, destroying, naturally, our only means of downgress. We could get a little way down, then had to hang and drop to our fate.
You were terrified, Denoon said.
Oh indeed, I said. But at least she never hit me. I was inviolate that way. Property was another matter.
We lay there silently for a while. Light breaks where no sun shines, he said, quoting something.
Already the feeling in the bath hut was different for me.
Vervets
Shortly after this I did begin hearing about rifles, in connection with a vervet monkey population explosion in the eastern wards.
I mentioned it to Nelson while we were eating dinner and I was getting him to admit he looked incredibly improved since he’d let me cut his hair. It was short, almost en brosse, parted over the left eye. I had teased him gradually into it by showing him how he looked with his long hair fanned around into pageboy bobs and so forth and calling him Prince Valiant.
He knew about the vervet problem. Male vervets are particularly distracting because their favorite pastime is to sit on your door or windowsill and display their electronic blue or lime green testicles, an act they intersperse with helping themselves to food items. I said that what I understood was being proposed was buying a couple of rifles to have available for hire at Sekopololo for situations just like this. I had been lobbied gently and had expressed myself as thinking it wasn’t unreasonable.
Guns are not a good idea, he said, very curt. Then it was Who, exactly, talked to you?
Reason with me and I might tell you, I said.
He didn’t want to. He wanted me to accept the general proposition. I was firm. I took a lighter tack, telling him about my pacifist friends in Palo Alto who had forbidden their little boy to play with toy guns. By the age of five he was so obsessed with guns he turned everything into a gun. He would bite his toast into a gun shape. He aimed his banana at you at breakfast. This could be similar.
But it seems I was being infantile. There were serious reasons not to, among them the paranoia about Tsau in certain quarters in Gaborone. Certain people in certain ministries were in the pay of the Boers, who were convinced that somehow Tsau was giving aid and comfort to SWAPO, if not the ANC, or both. Everything that came out on the Barclays plane was monitored. He wouldn’t tell me how he knew any of this. In addition, hunting was illegal where we were, in the Central Kalahari Reserve. Only the Basarwa were allowed to hunt, and then only with bows and arrows and blowguns. He would appear to be getting set to violate one of the founding conditions he had agreed to.
I thought that was all, but in a minute he went on more vehemently. Couldn’t I see how it would go? Suppose we got a waiver and got a couple of rifles in. Then we would need a few more. Then the main thing the men would be doing would be clandestine hunting instead of attending to the heavier work they were doing now. The guns would be checked out by the women for legitimate nuisances like the vervets and they would be passed on the sly to the men. I was an anthropologist, so I must know that the oldest male racket ever invented was hunting, I of all people. Didn’t I know how laughable the nutritional contribution male hunters made to the common diet was, everywhere? Which didn’t stop them from acquiring status with the women in honor of their long hours drinking and lolling around out in the bush. So he was going to oppose it as long as he could. He was very unhappy.
So what were the women supposed to do about the vervet plague?
They should stop taking the line of least resistance and instead think of something. What did they do in the villages before there were guns? There were plenty of predators in the equation, which ought to take care of it over time, if people could be patient.
The vervets will spread, I said. They’re already showing up around the kitchen.
Then poison! There was someone he could write to.
You’re too rigid, I said. You try to preempt everything.
No, what I’m trying to do is preserve for as long as I can what’s exceptional about this place so that something will survive once the hacking and trimming start.