Mating Read online

  He had been washing his torso, obviously, and was still barechested, wearing cutoffs and those egregious sandals that looked like cothurni. He heard me yank the gate clip up, turned, saw me standing there in the gloaming, then, oddly enough, stepped back through the elephant grass. I didn’t know it then, but it was modesty. He was retreating to get a shirt on. It was unnecessary. His midsection was nice, better than I’d expected. There was some rondure, but nothing undue at his age or out of reach of the lash of diet and situps.

  I ran to the outhouse. The interior was tidy and decent and there were squares of newspaper on a spike in the wall. It was dark. I proceeded mostly by feel. There was a candle on the floor I could have lit. There was, I could tell, something slightly nonstandard about the toilet seat itself.

  I thought I heard Nelson say Wait, from a distance. Next I sensed him just outside the outhouse, agitated. I hurried to finish. As I exited I clarified for myself that the toilet opening was definitely not usual, being like a keyhole turned sideways.

  He was annoyed and redfaced. He matched his lurid dashiki.

  What have I done? I asked him. You remember we met?

  Hello, yes. Look, did you just urinate? I’m sorry I’m asking you this. That thing should be locked.

  I did, I said, astounded.

  He was irritated, no question, but mostly at himself. The subject matter was on the intimate side for such short acquaintance as ours. I was mortified.

  He explained while I apologized a few times, each time more fervently. The people who lived in this place, who were away, had been good enough to help him with an experimental trial of a composting latrine. The principle of the privy was to separate urine from feces, to conduct urine separately off. It seems I was the only educated human being who had never heard of the universally known fact that urea keeps feces from composting properly. Correspondingly, I had to be the only development-connected person unaware that the single most needed scientific invention in the world was not the wireless transmission of electrical energy but the compound that would neutralize urea when it got mixed with nightsoil. All this was true enough, to my shame. In the absence of such a discovery, there was this experimental Burmese toilet that so far only the Confucians of the Far East had had the discipline to use correctly over long periods of time, except for the Tutwanes. Denoon himself had somewhat redesigned the toilet hole. All you had to do was slide to your left for the urine phase and back to your right for the other. Third world agriculture was waiting for this cornucopia of natural fertilizer to be proved out, and I had been unhelpful.

  Finally I said I am horribly sorry about this but I can’t keep repeating it this way without starting to feel like a machine.

  That made him see himself, apparently.

  The celerity with which people recognize something is spilt milk is a main measure of their rationality. We were both quick in this way. He got over being mad at me very expeditiously. It was the same with me. I had shot myself in the foot at the beginning of the race, but the thing to do was to proceed anyway with as much vivacity as I could dredge up.

  I thought that next he was probably going to make me state my business. Instead he was decent. He assumed I was there about his project. We could talk, he said, but up front I should know that there were no openings, volunteer or other, at the site. Tsau was always “the site.”

  Given the way things had begun, I was clearly not going to talk myself into Tsau that night. The lesser task I had to rise to was to convince him I was colleague material. I was not to be mistaken for a world traveler, for example, someone out of the self-made pauper stratum of first world young people bumming through the third world in search of cheap dope and the unspoiled in general and taking up space in the jampacked jitneys and ferries the involuntary poor are stuck with. He had to see I was a trained person. This was herculean enough.

  He got tea for us.

  We sat down. He faced me.

  So do you like the Batswana? he asked. I sensed this was a precipice.

  I don’t know yet, I said. Apparently that was right.

  We had a silence.

  I took a chance with Tell me how you disappear into a project? I’m skeptical. You’re a lakhoa. I don’t see how knowing the language can be enough.

  Oh, it can be enough, he said. You have to know what you’re doing. For example, how to make a deal with Motswana.

  I said Say more about that.

  Makhoa make deals standing up and shaking hands. But the Batswana make deals with everybody squatting or sitting. It may have something to do with everybody being on the same level: when men are standing, somebody is always going to be taller. I think the feeling is that squatting people are at least temporarily all the same height. Be that as it may. A deal made standing up doesn’t feel real to a Motswana, especially a deal over something major. He won’t tell you that, but it doesn’t bind him in the same way and he might follow through or he might not. By the way, I’m aware that I said men. I’m talking about traditionalists.

  No question he was showing off for me with this—but why, if any further association with him was as out of the question as he seemed to want me to understand?

  Not that there aren’t problems to be avoided, he said. Do you want to know what the worst problem is in most projects once they start running decently?

  I did. Of course I thought I already knew that the worst thing in the world was what urea does to nightsoil. Silly me, he was now talking at a more elevated level—the psychosocial. The correct answer was ressentiment, did I know the word? I thanked God I’d kept quiet. It happened I did know the word, which led to a small coup. There is a classic that touches heavily on the concept. Envy, by somebody Schoeck. I had read it and Denoon hadn’t. He hated having to admit not having read anything describable as a genuine classic. He would routinely stoop to saying he knew a certain work. This was an unfailing sign that he was guiltily concealing that he hadn’t read it or had only read part of it. He stopped doing it during my reign.

  Of course I know about ressentiment, I said. It’s from French sociology and means roughly rancor expressed covertly, especially against our benefactors. Then I mentioned the Schoeck and was surprised to see how much not knowing this particular book discomfited him. He took some comfort in my inability to remember Schoeck’s first name.

  Anyway, he said, so say we have some average collection of poor Africans, farmers, and here come some white experts to induce development, say by setting up an integrated rural development project in the most sensitive way anybody has figured out to date. Time passes. Things begin to work. But a funny thing: the best of the poor, the most competent, the ones doing best and the ones who’re even the most like you spiritually, are the ones who are going to present you with leis and bouquets of ressentiment. Why? What can be done? I am talking about your mainstream development project here, by the way.

  This had to me faintly the tinge of a crypto job interview. I told myself I was wrong.

  No adult wants to be helped, I said. It’s definitional. Probably I should qualify adult as male adult: it’s different with women. But take the French and the British and us. You’d think they’d at least pretend to like us for part of a generation or so after we save them from being turned into provinces of the Third Reich. You can help women but beware helping men. Nations are male. I thought that here there was a slight change for the better in the quality of his attention. There was. Later he acknowledged it.

  After a rather strained passage wherein he made it overabundantly clear that I should never for a moment think he had raised the question of ressentiment because it was rearing its head at the site, we got on to anti-Americanism. The exact nexus eludes me now. But he was making numerous fine distinctions vis-à-vis anti-Americanism. For example, British anti-Americanism was hardly worth noticing because it was just one more facet of the larger phenomenon of British self-worship. The only race the British had ever liked while they were subjecting it to empire had been those dash
ing pederasts of the Sahara, the Bedouins in their lovely robes. The French and British could go fuck themselves, especially the British. There were only two countries in Europe Denoon could stomach, Italy and Denmark, and that was because they were the only ones to attempt to protect their Jews during World War II. Everybody else had jumped in with both feet or, the same thing, studiously done nothing. Churchill, trying to come up with an especially thoughtful token of his esteem for FDR, had settled on a sumptuous little private edition of Kipling’s anti-Semitic poetry. Now ironically the Israelis were making themselves unforgivable.

  At intervals throughout this occasion I was undergoing an event like a blackout or seizure, but with text, where I would incredulously ask myself if it could possibly be true that I had begun this encounter by urinating into the main crucible of an experiment to save the poorest of the poor. It was like seeing titles in a silent movie.

  Next he irritated me almost to the breaking point, which I deserve some kind of an award for concealing. Terrible as America was becoming, he wasn’t responsible. Oh la, I thought. And why wasn’t he responsible? One, he always voted, by absentee ballot if necessary, and always for the minority party candidate most perpendicular to what was becoming standard national operating procedure. There was a tiny relic of the original Debsian socialist party he had been partial to, but which unfortunately was no longer running presidential candidates. Not, he unnecessarily reminded me, that he, Denoon, was a genre socialist. And two, he hadn’t paid federal taxes, thanks to the overseas exclusion, for nineteen years. I saw red. I swore inwardly this would come up again between us if anything would, in spades, when it was safe. All I could think of was the semi-immortal Edmund Wilson, distracted by being famous, failing to get around to paying his taxes for years out of pure sloth, then wrapping himself in the antiwar flag when the IRS knocked on his door. Anybody decent has urges against paying taxes when the realpolitik gets too egregious, but in America not paying your taxes is not an option for the average person. There is such a life and death thing as a credit rating. At that moment I could thank God I was never going to be famous. This man thought he was cleaner than thou despite the fact that it was only the luck of his genius that had brought him into this realm where he neither had to face paying taxes for the things he excoriated nor to consider renouncing his citizenship. Of course I agreed with him about Chile and Guatemala, but was I supposed to feel morally coarser than he was because under the Brazen Head I was going to be paying for crueler things than anything I had dreamed of yet? Not that I had ever had to pay that much. It was oblivious privilege speaking through Denoon, and elitism. I thought of that poor hapless blue-collar deserter being ordered shot by Eisenhower while Ezra Pound got to poetize and eat petits fours for the rest of his life. It was too breathtaking for me. But apparently my fate is to resonate against my will to representatives of certain elitisms I intellectually reject. Ultimately I developed a more tout pardonner perspective toward Denoon on this: after all, here was the son of a man so very pure he had demolished the family vacuum cleaner in a rage after reading in a newsletter that Electrolux was owned by a Nazi collaborator.

  I needed to get from this tract of discourse over to something more restful and with fewer pitfalls, so I asked if there had ever been any anthropologists associated with his project. This was more than a mistake, because everything was wrong with anthropology, according to him. No: no anthropologist had ever been allowed near the site. Most of the official great names in anthropology were mediocrities. Some were creeps. Malinowski had screwed Trobriand women. Boas had made things up about the Tlingits: if you went back and looked at his field notes they bore only a glancing resemblance to what he’d put in his books. No advance in general theory in forty years. Anthropology: a bolus, anecdotal. The few interesting contributions to anthropology that there were had been made by rich dilettantes like Theodore Besterman. What is the conceptual distinction between anthropology and sociology? On it went. It was hard to keep up with his anathemas. I kept semiagreeing with him, although I felt like screaming due to the implications for present company. I told myself this must be an exercise to see how well I stood up under being told my specialty was somebody’s bête noire and I was the torchbearer for a discipline that was turning into a social control system like industrial psychology, a figleaf for multinational corporations and the World Bank. Anthropology departments had given cover to CIA operations. He could name names. On it went. Does everything have to be an ordeal? I thought. The basic premise of doctoral programs is bad enough, to wit, driving the academic weak sisters out of the program through trial by ordeal until only the strong remain. He was right and he was wrong. I think I was judicious. He was wearing me out. I had to hold back. I think I showed I was reserving comment re some of his thrusts. I think I did. Anthropology is not negligible, even if it’s still only information so far. The point was to be supportive of his general iconoclasm but not to concede I was a charlatan and knew it. Fortunately it stopped. I was saved by a woman screaming in a shanty somewhere close by. Denoon sprang over to the fence and listened into the darkness, but there was no repetition.

  Intellectual love is not the same animal as landing a mentor, although women I’ve raised the construct with want to reduce it to that. I distrust and shun the whole mentor concept, which is just as well since I seem not to attract them. Nelson was not my mentor, ever. I gave as well as I got, with him. But there was intellectual love on my part, commencing circa that night.

  Intellectual love is a particular hazard for educated women, I think. Certain conditions have to obtain. You meet someone—I would specify of the opposite sex, but this is obviously me being hyperparochial—who strikes you as having persuasive and wellfounded answers to questions on the order of Where is the world going? These are distinctly not meaning-of-life questions. One thing Denoon did convince me of is that all answers so far to the question What is the meaning of life? dissolve into ascertaining what some hypostatized superior entity wants you to be doing, id est ascertaining how, and to whom or what, you should be in an obedience relationship. The proof of this is that no one would ever say, if he or she had been convinced that life was totally random and accidental in origin and evolution, that he or she had found the meaning of life. So, fundamentally, intellectual love is for a secular mind, because if you discover that someone, however smart, is—he has neglected to mention—a Thomist or in Baha’i, you think of him as a slave to something uninteresting.

  What beguiles you toward intellectual love is the feeling of observing a mental searchlight lazily turning here and there and lighting up certain parts of the landscape you thought might be dubious or fraudulent but lacked the time or energy to investigate or the inner authority to dismiss tout court. The searchlight confirms you. I’m thinking of Nelson’s comments on the formerly famous Norman O. Brown, or on deconstructionism, although all this came much later. Denoon was an answer to something I was only subliminally aware was really bothering me, namely the glut of things you feel you ought to have a perspective on, à la core-periphery analysis or the galloping hypothèse Girardien. You are barely able to take note of the earthshaking novelties people are producing before they are swathed in bibliographies to be gotten through. But paradoxically you also want some tinge of provisionality about the most sweeping or summary judgments offered up for you. There was this feeling in for example Denoon’s fairly straightfaced contention that Christianity was originally a type of police socialism, id est Paul was a Roman imperial provocateur out to undo armed messianic Judaism and replace it with toothless lovingkindness. There needs to be humor, also. And there needs to be unselfconsciousness, some degree of it anyway, about the quality of the propositions our hero is able to produce. Denoon was often quite aphoristic. By my standards he often said publishable things. But there was no great vanity attaching. He said things matter of factly, and he was scrupulous to the point of mania about crediting whoever the author was of something he was using that the hearer might t
hink was his, such as Society—an inferno of saviors, one of his favorite quotations and one I told him he didn’t have to keep telling me was by E. M. Cioran, a name I’ll never forget.

  Nelson was interesting on the Boers, which was our last main topic at Tutwane’s. I was flagging, but this woke me up. In Gaborone, especially within the embassy penumbra, everybody talks about the Boers but nobody does anything about them, as I once said and which went over gratifyingly. The Boers keep coming into Botswana and killing people when they feel like it. They are still doing it. So we were always speculating about when the next raid would be, how far they would turn the screw, when they would close the railway at Ramatlabama, and so on. Anyone who had anything new or acute to say on the Boers was regarded with interest. I in fact jotted down key words from Denoon’s take on the Boer menace as soon as I got back under a streetlight. I might not get invited to the site, but I would take this away with me against a rainy day. Waste not want not is my motto.

  The craziness of the Boers comes out of nationalism, he said. The Boers have only had the feeling of being in charge in South Africa since 1948 or 1950, which is recent, when they finally overcame the British. They had just gotten their feet under the table, so to speak, when of all people the kaffirs start telling them it’s all over, dinner will not be served. All they get is starters. The Boers reminded him of America, which only got to run a Pax Americana from the end of the Second World War until the sixties. Tantalized nationalisms are the worst. To which he added that, more than in any comparable case, the Boers are their state, since over half the adult Boer workforce is state employed.

  Secondly, apartheid had to be looked at as an instance of a generically male form of madness having to do with sport. He said You’re looking at a particular game of performative excellence, like the shepherds in Crete who base their hierarchies on successful sheep rustling. Oppressing blacks is a national blood sport. We should consider the handicap the Boers accept. A tiny minority is holding down a gigantic black majority getting larger and more furious by the day. If the Boers can do it it’s better than winning every medal in the Olympics, which the Boers can’t play in anyway. The game is called Triumph of the Will. I know a fair number of Boers, he said, and Boers want to go into the SADF and go to the border or ride like lords through the townships. The English speakers don’t and are the ones who are conscientious objecting or slipping away abroad when the draft touches them. The white exiles you meet in Gaborone are English speakers, most of them. You strike up a conversation with a Boer and the first thing he wants to know is if you’ve done your military service, wherever you come from. Been to the army, then? is the first line out of their mouths. If you haven’t, they’ll still talk to you but from an emotional distance. I know them, he said.