I Love a Demystified Thing Inordinately
I was improving on my texts as I went along, adding asides and priorly left-out associations.
That the fact that I was creating material almost as fast as I was classifying the material already in hand didn’t bother me meant something — either I was at heart a congenital academic or the prospect of indefinitely delaying coming to a conclusion about living with Denoon was not unwelcome to me. Neither interpretation was flattering. One or both were probably right, but this realization was completely weightless, somehow. I kept on, drivenly, with that mobbed feeling your brain gets when you’re cramming for finals in nonelectives. Meanwhile the issue of the night men was turning crescive without my noticing.
One morning three women I particularly liked came to get me for an arch raising. They were Mma Isang, Mina Hlotse, who was our best midwife, and Prettyrose Chilume, who was physically so slight that her contribution to the actual labor of arch raising was basically spiritual, even though she pulled and shoved along with the rest of us. I was always asked. That day we were supposed to raise an arch over Our Mother Street, the mother being not the Virgin Mary, as I think I’d been bemusedly assuming, but Mme Mpopo Kalighatle. This was an average arch, about twenty feet high and seven wide, made of gum tree logs enameled red and black in alternating bands, with the street names carved into the crosspiece and painted with tar into which multicolored glass fragments had been pressed while the tar was still sticky. Raising the arch involved pushing the crosspiece up using claw-tipped poles while the uprights were slid into the pits dug to receive them. The main problem was the weight of the poles. You needed a few fairly sturdy women in the crew. These events were largely celebratory. A few words would be said about the virtues of the honoree, which, in Mme Mpopo’s case — I was about to learn — included an unfailing willingness to work wherever she was needed most and an aptitude for intercepting children about to wander out into the desert. She’d died two years earlier. Her name came up often. She had a genuine reputation for great benevolence, and I wished I had known her. A new thing was that men were offering their services at the raisings, claiming that they could do it faster and more safely. In fact there had been a time or two when the arch had not gotten to apogee at first try and had flopped back, narrowly missing someone’s foot. But women are nimble. Whatever we lack in hoisting power we more than make up in agility at getting out of the way of toppling structures. We were perfectly able to manage the raisings on our own.
I was scribbling away when mes amis said koko. It was a relief to feel obliged to knock off, since I seemed to be in quicksand anyway. One problem I was encountering in making my compilations was deciding when some striking remark of Nelson’s was more than it seemed to be at first blush, determining if perchance it was meant to convey something in an aesopian way to me. I might be looking for something even deeper than that, some warning or cue, some little nothing from the bowels of his mind, something to pay attention to because his unconscious was my friend, because Nelson loved me. Just then I was trying to see the relationship between Nelson’s cynical observation that the meaning of life in every formulation seemed to reduce to finding or inventing a perfect will to be subject to, the relationship of that to scanting remarks about la femme moyenne sensuelle — which we agreed I was not, of course — finding her raison d’être in the love of a male as close to alpha as she can get. Then, to add to that, I had a handful of asides alluding to certain self-evident similarities between happy marriages and socialism, or just between marriage as an idea and socialism. Did he mean the two are similarly impossible, something as blunt and cheap as that? But that led to the bolus of whether he was or wasn’t, himself, a socialist. One, he hated his father for being, merely, a prosocialist, a fan of the concept: that was utterly clear. Two, Nelson referred to himself from time to time as a socialist, but meaning something particular by it: his socialism was closer to the noumen than anybody’s. And in the same jeremiad he could be referring to himself as a socialist in one breath and execrating genre marxists and social cubists in the next. His socialism was socialism, their socialism was militant nostalgia, and so on. Anyway, I didn’t mind leaving all this for the nonce.
Mma Isang was hurrying us. I asked why and was told it was because a decision had been made to set up the arch without notice, which would prevent certain people, the baruledi, from coming to try and help. It would all be finished before the baruledi were even awake. Since baruledi means roofers or roof repairers, I was at sea. My friends were surprised that they had to explain it to me. The baruledi ba bojang, thatch roofers, were the night men. Thatch repairing was a bawdy if rather oblique euphemism for the service they provided. Clearly, resentment against the night men, on the part of some of the women, was getting substantial.
They are uprising against us, Mina said. It is all because of Raboupi. They just uprise against us without fear. You can see so many queens just defending about them.
There are now as many as nine night men. Mina named them. Raboupi wasn’t one of them, but it was suspected he took a cut of the take. I asked more questions. There were some reasonable controls on the practice, at least. Mina said that the baruledi would always, now, bring protection from the clinic. And it was established that they were not to idle forever in order to be invited to meals: they had to leave when they were asked to go. I thought that the objections to the night men might arise from service being withheld from the aunts, generally. But that wasn’t happening, as I should have known. One of the attractive things about African society across the board is how old a woman can be and still be some younger man’s sex pal.
Apparently what was disliked was a growing blatancy about the enterprise. When I asked them how it was I hadn’t noticed all this if it was so major, they shrugged, saying I overlooked it because it was hidden under a shadow, an ironic Tswanism meaning it wasn’t hidden at all, ergo I was just not paying attention. They grumbled on as we proceeded, but I was relieved, oddly, about the whole thing. The notion that sex was nonpresent as an issue in Tsau, or was being transmuted wholesomely and wonderfully into something neutral and socially positive had always felt dubious to me, not to put too fine a point on it. I love demystified things inordinately. Also I loved it that the whores in Tsau were men.
The actual raising was very rushed, in fact, and throughout there was a subtle feeling of getting away with something. Several women spoke in praise of Our Mother Mpopo, each one in a very telescoped way — considering what the norm for occasions like this is. And lo just as we finished a little detachment of Raboupists turned up. They were welcome as spectators. Their group demeanor suffered slightly when the group was joined by a copain emerging blinking from a nearby rondavel not his own. We reacted kindly. We were already leaving.
I ran into Nelson as he was trotting down toward the site of the concluded event, his grapevine having belatedly functioned. I had to tell him it was over. He was genuinely unhappy. He’d prepared remarks a week ago or more. He had been deeply fond of Mpopo. There were things to say about her that only he could have said. He asked me who’d spoken. He’d known Mpopo better and longer than any of them. And so on. He was very distressed.
He had a right to know why the arch raising had been unannounced, so I told him. I wanted him to know that his not being included was an artifact, not something deliberate. In retrospect this was reckless, I suppose, but in mitigation I think I was under the impression I’d already mentioned the night men to him, however glancingly. It’s possible I had but that he’d been in his occasional, rare actually, though less rare recently, Stepford husband mode, only appearing to hear me. Maybe I hadn’t mentioned it.