He tried not to look at her. Trading is one thing, he said. This is begging. This can’t be.
I asked him why it was a municipal problem here but not in Ghanzi, where they officially just ignore it. No, something had to be done.
So when he asked me who the best Sesarwa speaker in Tsau was I told him the truth: it was Hector Raboupi, far and away.
And now as we were leaving the unpleasantness with Dorcas, I learned that Raboupi had indeed gone down with him to ask the Basarwa not to come into Tsau to beg. Nelson assumed he had made himself understood. He was genuinely grateful to Raboupi.
I heard again that things would get sorted out at the plenary.
A Proposition
One morning at shapeup two women approached me and asked in a hushed way if I would go to see Dineo to say if I would stand in the election for the mother committee. I was incredulous. I told them no one had asked me, to which they said that just now they were asking me. We say you are very pleasant and you are strong for women, they said. I told them how amazed and pleased I was, but that I couldn’t decide such a thing quickly, especially since it would be saying I would be in Tsau for at least one year more. And I would have to speak with Nelson.
I brought the proposition up at the wrong time, I suppose. Nelson had pitched himself into a phase of dawn-to-dusk heavy manual labor. He was working extending the trail grid on the high south side of the koppie. He would come in at night, wash, eat, and sleep like the dead. He felt this was therapeutic for him. He thought it might work akin to Russian sleep therapy, where when you’re artificially kept asleep for a week — through brainwave manipulation, with an IV hookup, naturally — you wake up with your melancholia in abeyance. One of his tests of a sound society was the existence of arrangements letting you switch off into periods of intense physicality when you felt the need. The aerobic exercise craze in America was something he saw as a sad substitute for this option of heavy work, and wasteful in that you produce nothing socially useful while you do it. I knew he was tired, but I felt under pressure from the mother committee to say yea or nay, so I brought it up while he was nodding over his demitasse.
He was surprised at the offer but, I discovered, absolutely determined to say nothing one way or the other as to whether I should accept. He would discuss neither it nor anything to do with it, not even something so germane as the question of whether or not this was intended to compensate for his having been made occasional at mother committee meetings. No, it was a tribute to me, was all he would say, and it was my affair and something I should decide strictly on my own. I strained to imagine what principle or scruple could possibly be at play in his attitude, but came up with nothing. I really pleaded. We have to discuss it, I said, because everything is connected.
I was left groping. Was the idea for me to make a decision that would tend to settle things re his future without his participation when he felt divided on the merits of competing courses of action, and was this a situation it made sense for me to slide along with? I hate a vagarious temperament in men, which this was not: it was something else, but not necessarily something I liked a lot better. I hated the idea of being ananke for him, or being the shape the yarrowstalks took when they fell and which he had in secret committed himself to obey. Despite my saying it revealed a taste for stasis, he continued at points to quote Zeno’s arrow in my heart, I float in the plunging year — never very relevantly that I could see. What did it mean? Fate is our destiny, was a bétise by some major politician that he had happened to notice. In fact beware being great or important and ever saying anything stupid with Denoon around, because he would remember. The most he would say was Do it or don’t do it. I reminded myself of things he’d said about the ideal relationship between a man and a woman consisting of alternation between who gets to be yin and who gets to be yang, where one partner acts with force when he or she feels it and the reverse when not, whereupon the other picks up the cudgels for a while. American women hate this idea, he’d said. Not me, I like it, had been my position. But why was this sudden attack of laissez-faire of his being stimulated by my little situation with the mother committee? It was beyond me.
I dropped it with him, then, and decided that if he could be inert so could I. It was pique. I said something noncommittal to my contacts on the mother committee, who left me alone afterward on the subject, and gradually the whole proposition seemed to fade away. When Nelson evinced some mild interest in what was happening I put him off, saying no one had followed up, which was the truth.
This Is Intimacy, I Said
A new thing was my sense that the impulse for wordless lounging together was coming as much from him as from me. We had had foreshadowings of this during times together in the bathing engine, but with nudity as an ingredient and the natural terminus put to events by the water cooling, it had been different. Now we would just lie down in the late afternoon or evening, fully clothed, not necessarily — in fact often not — with a precoital feeling going, and not even read or remind each other of things that needed to be done. He gave up always having a notepad and pencil at hand. Our lying down together was noninstrumental. I sensed and he confirmed that he preferred me not to be reading anything too absorbing while we were lying down, because it took me away. Poetry was fine because there were gaps between poems when I was present again. I couldn’t credit this. It was too flattering.
About this time the question of true intimacy — how to define it, did we have it or not — blessedly went away. Sometimes as we were resting Nelson would roll over and confront me with a manic smile that made him look like the logo on a funhouse. This was to give me the opportunity to reassure him about his teeth and smile. This is intimacy, I said. He knew that one reason he smiled less than other people was his feeling that his teeth, which were a little jumbled at the sides, were unattractive, and when he smiled his face felt swollen to him, unnatural. This is intimacy, I said, and dredging up vintage fantasies about having sex with identical twins is fake intimacy, although that constitutes ninety percent of the male concept of it.
Most of the activity around the mother committee elections clearly went on during the afternoons we were engaged in our new extended siestas, because it was almost a surprise when the elections were over. Denoon surprised me by insisting on getting down to the plaza to read the results in the freezing dawn rather than waiting to go by at midmorning. And he surprised me by having no particular reaction to the results. There were a few new women on the committee, but aside from Dorcas Raboupi advancing to the second chair I couldn’t detect any startling change. Dineo was still chair.
The signs that there was less equanimity in Nelson than met the eye must have been around, but in my flattered state I was mostly missing them. They were wavelets.
We were in deep winter, but thanks to the incredibly long growing season in the Kalahari were still getting greens out of the nethouse, albeit only escarole, and only escarole as tough as sacking. Nelson wanted it exclusively in salads nevertheless. He could be insistent. I don’t know how many times I said This belongs in soup, minced, with onions. But no, we had to endure it in salads, and why exactly? Because people should eat something live or raw at every meal. I ascertained that this was something other than an avatar of my saying that the consumption of leafy greens in Tsau needed to be encouraged. He meant something else. It came to me then how unfailing he always was about picking off a cherry tomato or a sprig of parsley from our doorside tubs after a meal, or in seeking out a pinch of whatever we were sprouting that week in the event it hadn’t been an ingredient in our last collation.