I have walked, at home, near a transvestite whose facial skin is like mottled rubber, and I have often witnessed her chatting with neighborhood people who by now don't appear to notice how she looks, but I couldn't forget the distress her face connotes, like a memoir written by a survivor, even if we were friends for many years, which would be impossible. I couldn't be friends with her, since I could never forget how badly scarred her face was, how her uneven eye make-up dripped down her face in garish streaks and marked her rubbery cheeks, or how her lips drooped and her lipstick smeared onto her pocked chin. Sometimes her hair, amplified or enhanced with a wig of peculiar material, is pulled up and piled in a bun near the front of her head, matted and about to topple over onto her forehead, and, as she thrusts her rippled chin forward in apparent defiance, crossing the street, her massive bun moves, too, and threatens to fall onto her rouged cheeks. Rouge streaks her nose and chin also, and if there is deliberateness, which there appears to be, the effect she has in mind and has designed is inaccessible to me, though Adolf Loos believed the origin of fine art was "the urge to decorate one's face," so in her haphazard application of rouge may lie artfulness. The Zulu say, Ngiyakubona kalukhuni, which means, I see you with difficulty. In the city where I walk past her and in which we reside together separately, my lunch is not carried to me in a paper bag and I do not dump it, like tomato soup with cold spaghetti, into the toilet bowl. I once threw grapefruit peels into a city toilet, which immediately overflowed, and I suppressed a scream as the water poured over the seat onto the floor of the place I was renting, but I never threw any other food into a toilet in the city. The Count, to whom I cautiously mentioned my fear of overflowing toilets, when we were in the main house before dinner discussing the creative impulse, was wry and elegant, with an exceptional horse face, eyes like black jet, and tiny pits dotting his face, remnants of adolescent acne, especially on his high cheekbones that were like flying buttresses I thought, his winged victory. He was a handsome man or stately, and, during this period, when I was far from people I knew well whom I could trust even moderately, I sometimes felt I had all the time in the world, that time was abundant, another sweet illusion, but his presence, whenever I was near him, established its passage. Of all who were in residence during this sojourn, when something might occur that could change my life, though I also doubted it, it was to him I expected to speak about chairs, my aging mother, American and other history, my dead father, my sensitive skin, friends and enemies, maybe even the Polish woman, how she cared for me, how I depended upon her being alien and close, too, as in most intimate encounters with strangers like her. Immediately he had struck me as a person who could listen. His wife, whom he mentioned the first night, but never again, flourished as a fantasy, and she might have been Polish, like the beautician, off with a lover, or had abandoned the Count because of his devotion to clocks over which she had no power or control, and he had none, either. To distract himself, or as an amusement, he was learning Sanskrit, during, I supposed, the long nights that were his days, while I was, I said to him, unmaking stuff, sketching chairs, and haphazardly studying Zulu, but I was no good at picking up foreign tongues. In the town antique store and book outlet, I had acquired a Zulu manual for beginners, with exercises, published in 1960, and toyed with mastering a language no one I knew could speak, not as yet anyway, though mastery is a residual, even fugitive idea, and Zulu I believe may be more complex than other languages to which my native language is related, because it likes to join words together; still, no one I knew could test me on it. It might have been then that the Count, my timekeeper, decided to befriend me, while simultaneously embracing the tall balding man, who was increasingly suspicious of me, since he knew I observed him and the disconsolate woman flirt, as she pushed her food around on her plate and eyed him with limpid hunger. It also may have been shortly afterward, when I recited to the Count, in beginner's Zulu, "The lion slept in the east," ibubesi (lion) impumalanga (east), an image I found beautiful and had no reason ever to say in English, that he taught me the best way to start a fire. "It is lucky," he remarked in his droll way, "that you don't suffer from pyrophobia, because this would be the wrong community for you." Later, as we watched a fire he had built, he told me that the poet Rumi started the whirling dervishes, the real ones, and that he saw them dance in southern Turkey, but that was a long time ago.
In Zulu the word for time is isikhathi, and many nouns, generally those indicating time, or periods of time, may be used adverbially, without change or inflection. The noun is the master of the Zulu sentence, and the verbs, adjectives, relatives and possessives in the same sentence must be in concordance with it. The Zulu verb with all its inflected forms and manners and implications and tenses and moods is a very intricate and elaborate instrument of thought, capable of conveying many shades and refinements of meaning. I don't know that I could say this about English verbs. The words and simple sentences the manual requires me to learn first must be of signal importance to its users, so I started a list of commensurate phrases and words I would set forth first in English. My name is. Your name is? Name isn't in the Zulu manual, and that's a pleasant surprise, since everywhere I go, people learn each others' names, though here only first names, because it's considered an imposition to know a fellow resident's last name, as it might reveal more than the person wants, since society, the one I now inhabit especially but all of it that I know too, sometimes needs anonymity and protection. When a newcomer arrives and comes across a resident, the newcomer is instantly transformed into a fellow resident and asked his or her name, it's automatic and expected that you provide it, but were you to answer, "I prefer not to," as Bartleby did, your stay might be thorny, since resistance to protocol disturbs the peace of mind of others, so that, at breakfast, it would be remarked that you hadn't given your name, along with speculation and comment about the head cook, the assistant cook, the freshly baked muffins that were served to unanimous acclaim, or the sorry meal at last evening's dinner. The staff would also object to a resident's not being agreeable, since agreeability is a necessary trait allowing the community to persist, since all residents are allowed a high degree of freedom, even though many carry pasts that could, in other situations, engender or call forth a more rigorous guidance or surveillance, but all have been placed on their honor, which is also at stake, and asked to rely on their consciences, a murky business, and must demonstrate regard not only for themselves, but also for the others, as well as for the staff who serve the community for a price, which many residents don't pay in sufficient amounts. A man here called JD, whose wife ten years before was murdered and whose murderer hasn't been apprehended, can't pay his fees, but a fund exists for such residents to provide them relief, especially when they're able, as JD is, to trade or contribute skills. JD sweeps the leaves from the grounds during the fall, washes windows and scrubs floors, fixes the plumbing, acts as a handy man, and, with help from a generous donor, whom no has met but who has come forward anonymously to several of us over the years-the Green Lady, she's called-he is permitted to come and go frequently, to attend lectures, eat all meals, and to further his investigation into bees, whose hives he knows how to care for and about which he has spawned several theories and projects, especially about honey, which is no better nutritionally than white sugar, but which he believes has healing powers. He smears honey on his body, shapes objects from it, and always smells of it. His dominant smell in no way deflects me from seeing him always as the man whose wife was murdered. Honey is the dominant ingredient in the wax the Polish woman uses on my legs.