Dineo was already occultly in our house and taking care of things by the time I got back with the nurse in tow. I must have attracted more attention than I thought during my search, stopping people and so on when there was no one at the infirmary. Word had reached her and here she was. Nelson seemed better too.
The nurse was very good. I tried to be helpful and brisk, but I was fighting surges of feeling faint. I felt incompetent. I know first aid and I know a fair amount about the body, but all of that had left me, apparently because the patient was Nelson. I felt like a peasant next to these two women. Dineo was in a beautiful caftan decorated with ankh symbols. The nurse was thin and strong without being overbig, unlike me, with my big shoulders and all. I had to hide that I was in terror that Denoon was slipping away. He was clearly very sick and might be sicker than they were saying. He was sick, someone I had never seen sick, and what had I been doing with my life lately except parsing everything going on with us like a maniac?
I wrote down what they said I had to do — there was in fact some medication in the house — and lo, my handwriting was the handwriting of someone else: my mother. This was more proof to me that I was doomed, metabolically doomed. Living with Denoon had already made me fatter than I’d been for a good while. And now abruptly it was intolerable to have these two women, these in particular, in our house, in our privacy, witnessing but not understanding that there was an unresolved war going on between two different aesthetics of what comfort was, for one thing. I wanted them to leave and said No in a virtual scream when Dineo said she was going to send someone to stay with us.
I’ve been overwrought in my life, but this was a revelation. The culmination was my rushing out to catch them before they left our patio to tell them both, sobbingly, that I loved Nelson, which I wanted them to know, and that I would do everything, everything.
Then it was all right. I was with Denoon for forty-eight hours straight, reading to him and doing as I’d been told and jumping under the covers to hold him when he began to vibrate. His malaria dated from Tanzania, and these bouts were infrequent, never more than one per year, he said. He was back to his lucid self permanently by midnight the first night, although a few times he came out with aperçus not clearly related to anything going on around him.
Everything was all right. I’m convinced I was drawing power from some new source. I fought off three serious attempts by women to come in in numbers to stay with us while Nelson recovered, which is the Tswana way: the more people there are in the sickroom with you while you convalesce, the less likely it is the badimo will snatch away your soul. But I managed to get rid of everybody without offending anyone and began to feel that if I could manage that situation I could manage the world. Someone as a treat brought cold Pine Nut Soda, innocently. Nelson drank it and said it tasted beautiful. I had news for him I had to withhold: Dineo wanted me to be the one who let him know a rule had been adopted saying that he was welcome to come to committee meetings only when he was specifically invited, except for the committee as to names, to which he could come anytime he pleased. He was being rendered emeritus whether he liked it or not, I gathered. It was interesting that I was chosen to be the messenger for this news, and I even wondered if the change would have happened at all if I hadn’t been there to convey it, the ideal conduit, although I may be inflating myself here. It was nothing when I did break it to him, seemingly. He was gazing at me with love following some ministration or other, and the gaze continued while I gave him the news, and afterward, such that I was able to believe him when he said it was nothing. I was everything, or we together were everything, was the implication. Every day was soft.
A Reduced Footing
Once he was restored I was free to have an attack of urticaria. I felt hideous not only because my face is always the first thing affected when I get these attacks but because my mother also gets hives, so it seemed like another gratuitous foreshadowing. But the outcome was something only possible between people in a state of love in that Denoon really seemed not to notice. And it certainly had no effect on his physical interest in me. When I finally noted offhand that he seemed not to have any particular reaction to my eyes having virtually disappeared thanks to adjacent tissue swelling — I was overstating — or to blotching on some of his favorite parts of mine, he admitted that in fact he had noticed but it had led him into thanking god I was a skin reactor. Humans react to stress in three ways — through their organs, their muscles, or their skin — he informed me, only gradually picking up from my hyperpatient attitude that I was fully up to date on this piece of pop psychosomatology. But he went on with it. The luckiest are the skin reactors, because the range of topical medications they qualify for is so huge. So he was relieved that I was in that category. Inter alia he was letting me know he appreciated that my stress was probably his fault, or his malaria’s fault, and he was grateful for what I had done for him more than very much. Concluding, he said My category is organ reactor. I’ll say, I said, attempting a lewd reference. It went past him. He was all concern. He took my hand. The treatment for urticaria is the same as for malaria, he said — that is, the passage of time.
I think he was almost disappointed when my hives faded as precipitately as they did. He wanted to reciprocate my taking care of him. The irony was that the hives cleared up after his suggesting that I might speed up their exit by willing them to go, in a conscious way. He suggested I visualize my body as a paper doll with blotches and then as a paper doll without them, blank. He even made some joke mesmeric passes over me while I carried out his mental exercise to humor him. In the morning I had to laugh, the improvement was so distinct. We were both surmounting everything, it seemed, without strain, with a feeling of automatism, almost. Even his being put on a reduced footing with the committees wasn’t affecting him to the naked eye, although all the news of the day for the period when he’d been out of it had to be gone over and nailed down, to be sure there was nothing included that was something from his deliria. I think he thought his removal was something he’d imagined. He appeared unworried about it, though. There were going to be elections soon, and then a general meeting, a plenary, where everything always got settled. For myself, I wasn’t unhappy feeling that the forces of circumstances were moving him toward thinking of a future in someplace less remote, although I kept this strictly to myself.
I can’t say I was perceiving any serious ambivalence in him about someday leaving Tsau. Or possibly if I was seeing any, I was dismissing it as my mistake. When I praised Tsau once, over something I forget that impressed me, he went into a sort of aria asking how Tsau could fail to be terrific, since it was the pyramidon at the top of all his prior failures, socalled. He gave the entire sequence of truths learned, project to project, such as controlling the scale, working in the vernacular, cutting expatriate staff to near zero, locating yourself remotely enough to avoid premature disruption, balancing collective and individual incentives, basing your political economy on women instead of men — his theme song, Every female is a golden loom. I had heard it all before, but this time it was put together in a lighthearted way. He did tack on, of course, that if Tsau were really perfect the proof of the pudding would be its originator being unable to give up living in it, but then he went on to say nothing is perfect, so that if this was significant in a precursory way, I missed it. I read it as valedictory.