Now when he went missing I had a new place to look for him, one that was closer to home than some of the others — the pyramidon, which is what he called the summit of the koppie, or his ledge, or the glassworks. It got surreal, in that I would go to look for him and find him brooding from the brush overlooking the camp, and I might sit for a while and watch him watching.
I suppose I should fault myself for keeping my distance on this issue for as long as I did. I liked to watch the Basarwa too. It was like observing fairies, they seemed so nice with each other, so tentative and patient. And of course why would I want to disturb any connection he felt with a specimen of a society so close to his ideal in the matter of not injuring the earth? When finally I felt he was too much in the grip of a romance about the Basarwa, I tried to tell him that in fact there were more offstage killings male on male and more wife beating than he might be aware of. But good luck: he knew this wasn’t my field, which I had to admit. He didn’t really want to hear it, and he had on his side the evidence of his senses, which was that life in the encampment was so pacific it was practically treacly.
A few times I was able to watch Nelson during one of his silent visitations to the camp. They accepted him with the same attitude they might have shown toward a heron or stork wandering through their site. Free time was what kept coming up with Nelson after these visits, how much free time does a society guarantee to all its members and not just the preferred classes within it? I reminded him that as far as free time goes, the Basarwa men had rather more of it than the women did. I brought up my information about the degree of concealed violence there was. Then the phrase “organized innocence,” out of William Blake, slipped moonily into the conversation.
There was never a true resolution of his feelings about them, or of mine, to tell the truth. In my mind I can still see the camp with utter clarity. I see the eight dome-shaped huts, the lattice showing in places but mostly covered with a mélange of reed, bark, sacking, scraps of polyvinyl sheeting that looked suspiciously like the ground shielding we used in the nethouses. I see the central campfire, kept smoldering all day by what looked like a completely random system of attentions to it, and fed into a blaze each night. There go the men filing off in the mornings sometimes, and sometimes not, according to rules you would love to be able to figure out and which you felt you might someday divine just by watching long enough. There go the women, off to dig up tubers or gather other varia, the chores getting done by groups that seemed to agglutinate differently each time you watched. They were always chatting. I’ve slightly gentrified the camp I carry in my mind: it was slovenly, but I don’t see that.
Denoon was cogitating, cogitating. We had to do more. There were certain health conditions we had to be more aggressive about. I associated a couple of nights of loud bruxism with his having gone over earlier in the day to the Basarwa camp. The Basarwa can disorient you. I know two colleagues who did fieldwork with the Basarwa and who afterward struck me as different, more meek or dreamy than they had been, in a sense, and they were always eager to justify more fieldwork, more going back.
Pine Nut Soda
An amazing episode, I thought: Nelson sat down with me and said Instead of going to the mother committee or back to Sekopololo I’m going to complain to you about something, the composition of our requisitions lately, the trend, and that’ll be the end of it.
I said So am I not supposed to do something with your complaint?
Nothing. This is by way of an experiment. Before I kept on complaining about the brassieres I talked it over with you and you convinced me. Also you convinced me I was wrong opposing white tea, camphor oil, and what else? Hair thread. But now something else is getting me. First of all, we’re letting ourselves run low on bonemeal and cordage, but that’s not it, it’s going to register with somebody before we’re in trouble. Then I noticed a new import item, Pine Nut Soda, which struck me as the last straw. But that was only the first last straw. The next last straw was Milk Stout.
I stopped him in order to defend Pine Nut Soda, if not Milk Stout. It was true the soda cans took up inordinate space on the plane, but for what it was, it was doing good things. Sekopololo was making it available at an astronomically high credit rate because people wanted it for special occasions, where it was treated almost as champagne. It was for special occasions. When it was traded it went into the solar refrigerator at the infirmary to chill, and people were delighted. I assumed it was about the same with the Milk Stout, although the premium for it would be even higher and admittedly the market for it might be more predominantly the men. And it was alcoholic, granted, whereas Pine Nut was not. But I reiterated, and truthfully, how Sekopololo was thriving on these commodities, in terms of the work people were willing to exchange for them. He grimaced.
He said I don’t want a defense of these things from you; what I want is to stop thinking about them by telling you about them. I mean it. This is what I’m saying. I don’t need to feel that mistakes aren’t being made. But I want to feel that I don’t have to dot every T, you know what I mean. He was embarrassed. I want to stop with things at this level, I think. I think I should. And this might help me. I essentially want my mind elsewhere.
This may be wise, I said. I was flattered, deeply.
The Summarist
We were strolling near the kraals at dusk and watching the bats come out everywhere. Denoon could be eloquent about bats, their wonderful dung, which got collected from the numerous cylindrical bat hotels he’d had affixed to trees everywhere, bats and their insect-destroying qualities, and so on. Anyway, we were rich with bats curving and diving and piping everywhere at dusk, coming out from the koppie and over the flats, even as far as the kraals.
Near one of the dip tanks we ran into three women carrying spades for no purpose I could discern. Dirang Motsidisi had her arm around the shoulders of an obviously distressed woman, Mma Sithebe, our summarist. Acting as a sort of lookout, I decided, was Idol, the kitchenmaster. I liked her although the dynamic she created in the kitchen was not for the faint of heart, because she was a volcano of abuse and mockery which paradoxically kept her co-workers in a state of permanent hilarity. It was a little like the House of Commons when heckling is in order. And people did riposte. More than once I’d heard Idol’s voice compared to the screams of mating leopards. I’d made good-faith tries at working in the kitchen and been unable to take the incessancy of the raillery. But there was a core of regulars who seemed to love it. Outside the kitchen, Idol was very quiet, and very tender with her little granddaughter.