What the summarist did for a job was turn up by appointment before different work groups and read to them, either at breaks or, if the work process was quiet enough, while they were at it, but never for very long, never intrusively. It could be something in English or in Setswana, whatever people wanted. She had a range of things to offer. Tsau was supplied by a virtual cottage industry Denoon had stimulated at the university in Gaborone. He paid students to translate various classics into Setswana in their down time. There was Austen, Kafka, some Dickens, some Thoreau, lots of a poet he liked better than Yeats called Edwin Muir whom I had never heard of until Tsau, who is in fact magnificent, some Blake, needless to say. He stuck to short texts, mostly, excerpts. The only African writers I’m sure were included were Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and Ayi Kwei Armah. One of his translators had abandoned a major project, Wuthering Heights, halfway through, just when people had gotten interested.
The idea of a summarist had come to Nelson through contact with one of the down-on-their-luck radicals his father had put up from time to time, this one an anarchist cigarmaker from Cuba whose union had hired unemployed actors to read Calderón and Kropotkin to them while they rolled cigars. The chronology of all this is inexact in my mind. But Nelson’s father during a good patch had been sent as a perquisite to have fun in Cuba under Batista by some advertising company or other, or possibly he had won a prize. In a burst of drinking bonhomie and heavy tipping he had gotten to be friends with some of the waiters he’d met there, who had given him a complimentary subscription to their union newsletter, Solidaridad Gastronómica. He remembers his father looking crushed when what was clearly the last issue came in the mail, the union having been extinguished by Fidel Castro. Naturally Castro hated them because they were anarchosyndicalists. So despite their having fought valiantly against Batista, Castro destroyed them, expropriated their credit unions, shut their cooperative restaurants, and created a diaspora — particles of which turned up now and then on the Denoon household doorstep to be waited on hand and foot by Mrs. Denoon. Nelson liked to call Fidel Fidel Catastro. Nelson described his father as being promiscuously left, a fan of the left generically, in the sense that to get his approval you could be any variety of leftist so long as you were rank and file. It didn’t matter to him that your leftism was at loggerheads with the variant or tendency of leftism of the person he had invited you to take potluck with. That is, you could be an old Wobbly and be invited to dinner with a Stalinist stevedore, your deadly historical enemy. All you had to be was real, not a piecard, meaning bureaucrat, and not an academic, either. I gather that one reason his father had very little use for the Socialist Party was that they were all schoolteachers or pharmacists, supposedly.
Mma Sithebe had a clear, steady voice, she could translate from English to Setswana or the reverse quite decently, and she was uniformly nice to everyone. Her nine-year-old son, Sithebe, was studious and was also pleasant. There was nothing invasive about Mma Sithebe. Even when she summarized current events at cream teas or other common meals, which she sometimes did, she was almost apologetic before commencing, and she was always brief. She was our town crier. There had never been the slightest sign that anyone was anything but happy with her, even when it was her task to roam around calling out reminders about meetings or classes, or when she named people who were defaulting on inoculation schedules at the clinic, or when she announced deadlines for the multifarious contests always being promoted. Now, we learned, three enterprises had voted against her coming to them in the future, on the grounds that they would rather have conversation among themselves than have makhoa literature forced upon them. The three women had set out to intercept us with this. Mma Sithebe was distressed. They say they have no need of me, she said. Dirang said Dorcas Raboupi was behind it, at least as it touched the laundry and the fabric print house. Idol had defeated a similar maneuver in the central kitchen.
Denoon gave a puzzling performance. He tried to convince Mma Sithebe that this would blow over, that he had heard only fine things about her. He seemed to want to say that these actions were not really directed at her, they were directed at him, through her, but he put it all so vaguely that even I had difficulty getting his drift. Why did I feel the three women were much more militant about this than he was? There would be an answer, he kept telling her, and people might change their minds. He would think of something to do. It was a weak performance by Nelson, his weakest, and so felt we all, I was sure.
LOVE ITSELF
This Is How Depraved You Can Become
Nelson began looking peaked, then got lethargic. I knew something was definitely wrong when I invited him to not come to the table once or twice and he let me bring him his dinner to eat propped up in bed. I thought this was the consequence of overexertion resulting from a day of work grooming the airstrip, which was something supposed to be done periodically by a levée en masse, like a quilting bee. There had been a decent turnout, I thought. But he wanted to have it all done within one day, as apparently it had been in the past, and he had driven himself too much in order to attain that, raking and grading late into the evening with only a few hangers-on for company, finally.
I was taking his soupbowl away and handing him a damp cloth when he said, astounding me, I would never leave you. There was no context immediately evident. As a stone neurotic I naturally fastened on why I was hearing would instead of could: didn’t this mean there was a trailing clause lacking, like a phantom limb, which would reduce to his saying he would never leave me once some as yet unattained level of intimacy was reached? Wouldn’t could have been preferable, more definite, more present-based? I was agitated.
I was agitated because what we were both trying to do, I think, was arrive at love manifest — that is, love being established between us to both our satisfactions without anyone having to go through the horrible bourgeois ritual of declaring love, he for his reasons, I for mine. He was sensitive and knew that the last thing I wanted was a horrible sotto voce I love you and then on into a flurry of hungry kisses to bury the robotic nature of what he’d felt he had to say. I assumed that of course he had declared his love to Grace at one point. Inescapably declarations precede not only the few marriages that make it but also all the farces and divorces there are. Judging by British television, the practice has been given up on over there by now except in situation comedies and among the rural.
He closed his eyes and began to writhe and mumble and sweat almost immediately. It was a plunge into another state. His brow was hot. He was having an attack. Already he seemed to be in the outskirts of delirium. And this is how depraved you can become: I bent over him for a minute listening to see if something about love might not escape — or anything that might shed light on how to interpret his I would never leave you, anything to show me if that statement itself had integrity or had only been a first spattering from the storm that was now on my hands. Might he repeat the phrase, but with could instead of would, showing me I’d misheard?
I got badly frightened and tried to wake him up. I shook him, which instantly seemed wrong. I think I pulled on his ears, I was so distraught. He would rally, but only for a minute, then flop back comatose. It was unplanned, but in my fear I told him I loved him, fairly loudly, a few times. Nothing was helping. I ran out to get the nurse.