Why Was He Doing This?
I talked to myself after he left. He wasn’t a fool, so why was he doing this, or why did he feel so absolutely that he had to do it? I was full of staircase wisdom. Maybe the conviction was establishing itself that people wanted him to go, actively in some cases, clearly, and more passively in others. So that by this action he would reverse everything and create a new role for himself it would take them awhile to fathom and object to. So that he could stay. I could have raised this possibility with him. I could have raised the possibility that all the approval for and orchestration of our getting together as a ménage had been directed at the same thing, something permitted to happen premised on the prescient idea that I was younger and would be likely to have an agenda that would pull us both away sooner rather than later. I could have found some way to get under the closed surface of his patter. I could have made him argue, somehow.
I even ran a little way out with the idea of catching him and telling him to take Baphomey instead of one of the horses, because people would be less upset about it, even though Baph was technically Sekopololo property, like the horses. I had given Baph to Sekopololo. But I realized there was no way he was going to be willing to arrive back in Tsau riding on an ass, with or without Tikwe in the palm of his hand. He would want to look equestrian. I went back to bed. I think now that I still might have been able to catch up with him and make him reconsider, but there was also the fact that the idea of Tsau’s becoming more a model and propagator of the equity system sooner rather than later was itself respectable. It was something that had been talked about. So I went back to bed.
A Heresy
The uproar began at noon, when the absence of one of the horses was noticed. I made mistakes immediately. I got down to the plaza after the fact. I was on my way to see Dineo to tell her what had happened, but timing now suggested this was a bad idea and that I should dissemble.
Dorcas was there, infuriated, sensationalizing the missing horse and saying Denoon was out in the desert taking Hector’s body with him to hide there.
I was afraid. Fear made me say I had been asleep and knew as little as anyone else.
These people are always asleep when crime is going forthwards, Dorcas said, screamed, rather.
Dineo pulled me in, and I told her the truth immediately. I emphasized how I had argued with Nelson but that he had been immovable. I had to write a statement. I felt for her. She was upset.
The weather was peculiar, a white low sky with wispy black under-clouds like ink dispersing in water. That night it rained. I thought of Nelson in the desert, thinking it would probably take at least two days for the journey. I slept badly, waking up when the perfect phrase came to me for what Nelson had done, the phrase I could have used to stop him, maybe: On s’engage et puis on voit. That might have stopped him. Being classified was one of the few things that ever did. Or maybe it would only have encouraged him. I found his main sunglasses on the desk. He had others, but why would these be here?
In the morning I walked down to the kraals to see Baph. There was an ostentatious guard, men and women, posted. I suppose the idea was to keep me from helping myself to either Baph or the remaining horse. I probably shouldn’t have made that visit.
The justice committee was convened again.
I thought to myself I am in danger of going crazy if this goes on for very long. I had been dropped out of two discourses, one with Denoon because in a crisis we were not really collegial and also because of not being a man, I am convinced. And I was being dropped out of discourse with the women of Tsau because of not being an African and also because of my connection with the increasingly suspect Nelson.
I tried to be internally militant and to disdain the present circumstances of my life because they were boring and I was not born to be bored. Of course in Setswana there is no word for boring or bored, which Nelson had pointed out to me as an example of Tswana soundness. But then where was Nelson, my friend, whatever his weaknesses, now that I needed him?
You are boring to me, was the heresy I wanted to shout into the faces of the squinting rabble who were following Dorcas around. You bore me to tears. You are consigning me to a boring position. You are interesting only from the standpoint of someone interested in boring people. You are less than uninteresting. You are boring in the way you interact. I am not asking you to be characters in Proust, but I am mentally asking you not to surveil me, which is the most boring thing you can either do or be subject to. All over the world in the privacy of their huts anthropologists are turning up their hands and saying This is boring. Life should not be boring. There is a person here who is not boring, Nelson Denoon, and you together have driven him into a state where he is out in the desert, and the desert is always dangerous if you go out into it alone. I also am not boring. You may think you aren’t boring because you’re courteous a lot, when you feel like it. In my humble opinion courtesy is the ancien régime everywhere if it goes off and on like a traffic light. I made my own discourse.
Where Was He?
He was supposed to be gone a week at most. A week can mean five days or seven days. And when seven days had passed I was frantically telling myself that he had probably said About a week.
After the fifth day I was frozen with anxiety. I was convinced something terrible had happened to him. My writing project seemed pointless, worse than pointless if something had happened. I should be doing something physical or practical. The effort it took to keep my handwriting from looking atypical was frightening me. I signed up at Sekopololo to distribute seeds around town for the spring planting in the kitchen gardens. At certain houses they closed the door to me when they saw who was calling. I persisted anyway.
The weather had been irregular, some days bright and some ominous, with a little rain. I went up the koppie every morning and evening to see where it had rained, where the dark patches were that would turn green first. Also I was looking for Nelson. I tried to remember what he had told me about a Frenchman in the seventeenth century who had had one and only one occult power, which was to be able to predict accurately when ships would be arriving at Toulon. He couldn’t predict or prophesy in any other way. Nelson’s favorite mystics were individuals who had one freakish talent that was fairly pointless. In the fifties there was a character who seemed to be able to get little fragments of scenes onto photographic plates by sheer concentration. Usually Nelson’s heroes ended in poverty and ignominy. The Frenchman who could see ships around the curvature of the earth, which was what he claimed he could do, never attempted to make money from his gift. One of Nelson’s major qualities, all of which I was appreciating strongly in my present state, was that if he knew something you didn’t know, he would tell you all there was, and there was no part of it he would shade or leave out because it fit badly into his own belief system. Why did he know these things? He believed in aleatory reading. Through his academic friends he had stack privileges in all the great libraries — this must be a slight exaggeration — and often when he was back in what I would never dare to his face to call civilization he would go straight to the nearest university library and stand up for eight hours, wandering and reading until he had it out of his system. Now where was he?
I had been twice to Dineo to try to get her to authorize a party to search for him. She said that they knew him better than I did and that they were aware of many times when he had gone off like this to one of the pans or along the sand river. She was sure he would be back in good time, and in any case there was the complicating matter of his taking the horse. There really was no excuse for it. I spent an entire day on the koppie, with my binoculars. There was nothing to do. Maun and Kang had been radioed. I was the only one who was distraught.