His reaction was beyond disliking being the last one on the block to hear. He was trying to conceal how shaken he was. My thrusts in the direction of levity were a waste. I said he should look on Tsau as finally normalizing, first via the development of begging, thanks to the Basarwa, and now with prostitution.
We had to sit down somewhere. At first he didn’t want to talk. Then he wanted to know everything I knew. A sure sign he was in extremis was his pressing down on the top of his head with his fingernails, as though a column of force was trying to emerge from his fontanel. He did this twice.
I Hear the Biography of Edward Lear
He stayed rattled all day and into that night. I thought sex might help and I showed I was approachable. I don’t remember exactly how that foundered, but it had something to do with my hands, which were pale blue from an afternoon in the fabric printery. We got off the track, although this was far from the kind of thing that would normally derail him. Their heads were green and their hands were blue and they went to sea in a sieve, he started quoting. He loved Edward Lear. So did I. But did I know what an unhappy life Lear had lived, how his homosexuality had forced him to live out his life in places like Corsica? No, and he told me, in extenso. Slowly this developed the flavor of an incident from my past when someone I knew to be personally desperate seized on a book he had been recently reading and I hadn’t read and proceeded to tediously summarize the whole thing as a means of evading the central misery we both knew was there. I never need to read the Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens.
Why Do You Look This Way?
I don’t know how long it was, exactly, one day or two or three, three being the most it could have been, until the end of things began in earnest.
Whichever night it was, at dinner Nelson was silent, which constituted a total prodigy between us. He had been spending time closeted with Dineo, enough time to make me uncomfortable. The word was that he had been making inquiries about the night men.
I said Why do you look this way?
How do I look? It took him an effort to say even that much.
You look dissociated, almost.
Not that I said it, but my model for the way he was looking was my mother in certain of her troughs.
Then came a ghastly effort to appear animated and normal, ruined by his voice being sepulchral.
I finally got out of him what he had been discussing with Dineo. It had nothing to do with the night men. Hector Raboupi had gotten someone pregnant, a minor.
He had been planning not to tell me who, astonishingly. I got it out of him by reminding him I had friends who would tell me anyway.
It was Adelah Makhise. She was thirteen, a child. I loved her. She was darling and very smart. She was preparing to transfer to the government secondary at Kang. I was sick with rage. I wanted something done. There was a complete reversal going on. Now I was marginal with rage over this and he was supposed to soothe me and contextualize, whereas before it had been my role to calm him down over the night men. This had nothing to do with the night men or prostitution. It had been a simple seduction, apparently.
But Nelson was very wrung out. He had no surplus, nothing to give me. Everything he said was pro forma. And the worst part was that I developed the conviction he was more interested in observing me than in helping me. I felt I was being studied.
I know how random I must have seemed. I wanted to know everything, but in no particular order. Was Raboupi planning to marry this child? Nelson laughed. This set me off even more. The one place in the world something like this should never happen to Adelah, to this wonderful child, was Tsau. What was Raboupi’s punishment going to be?
You know the culture, Nelson said. That meant the most that Raboupi would have to do by way of recompense was pay Adelah about forty pula per month, assuming she even requested it. But what are the women going to do about it? I wanted to know. There had to be better answers than the piddling forty pula. Raboupi should be punished, humiliated. There should be something like the practice in ancient Rome of creditors hiring mobs of people to follow deadbeats everywhere and identify them for what they were. I even remembered what that was called — the convicium — thanks to my cryptomnesia. I guess he was used to hits like this issuing from me from time to time, but I took his lack of reaction as meaning something more. My point was that a social invention addressing cases like Adelah’s was lacking here. Who was to blame, if not the person in Tsau whose second name was social inventions?
Then, so amazingly, right in the midst of this he said Sometime we should talk about whether Boswell hated Johnson, which I can prove.
I don’t know if this was deliberate protean behavior à la cornered jackrabbits or if it was simply adventitious. I had to strain to see what it had to do with anything. For a while he’d been teasing me about my Boswellian relationship with him. And lately he’d asked me for my Oxford paperback of The Life, which he had never read. In those days I carried my Oxford Boswell everywhere as a fallback in case I broke a leg somewhere where reading matter was a problem. I’d started The Life several times, never getting much beyond Johnson tutoring his schoolmates in Latin in exchange for their carrying him on their backs to school. It took three of them to manage it. Then Nelson seemed to be going on about Johnson’s pulling strings at the British Admiralty to get his freed-slave manservant involuntarily returned to him after he’d run away to sea, as an illustration of the nasty side of Johnson Boswell was consistently revealing. I refused to talk about it. It was news to me, if true. This was not what we needed to talk about.
You’re giving me cognitive dissonance, I said, so stop it. What’s going to be done about Adelah?
Organize something, he said, continuing in the distant tone I hated and that felt so hostile.
I’m white, I said. What can I do? What about her mother?
Nelson said the news was that she was not so upset. It wasn’t that there was great disgrace involved. He said Dineo thought Adelah’s mother might have already gotten a gift of money from Hector which would have reassured her that he was prepared to do his duty. Hector had a surprising amount of disposable income, some of it from the game meat scheme he’d worked out with the Basarwa. Nelson was watching that, he reminded me.
Abortion, I thought. I knew the nurse could do it. There were other women I was sure could do it. But how far along was Adelah?
Around four months, Denoon said, and if you’re thinking about abortion, it can’t be done.
Because she’s too far along, you mean?
It may be less than four months, he said, but it still can’t be done.
You mean because someone has asked her and the answer is that she wants to have the baby? Because if that’s it, let me talk to her before anyone says no on this, please.
No, he said, standing up, very white. No because an abortion is all we need. It’s illegal. We have enemies in Gaborone doing nothing but waiting for us to break the law. An abortion would give them just what they want.
I said Oh, then the little arrangement over meat between Raboupi and the Basarwa, which is an illegality tout court but involving men, is all right. But an illegality by one or two women on behalf of a young girl is not all right — am I following you? How attractive is that?