Are you all right? I asked, the inevitable question.
I am, he said. His voice was fine, steady and low.
I pressed my cheek against his mouth and he made a kiss, but not right away.
I was stringing disparate questions and sentiments together: Can I get you anything? Thank god, thank god. You look good, you look well. When can we go home? I elicited smiles and murmurs from him.
Instantly it was time for Nelson to go back in. Kakelo was there with Dineo.
Dineo said He has answered every question as to how he comes to us as he is. And when he closes his eyes it means to cease talking while he can rest.
Nelson had closed his eyes.
I let them take him again. I was ready to rally myself, clean up, renormalize. It bothered me that Nelson seemed limited to a purely responsive mode with people. He had initiated nothing. But this must be proof of the depth of what he’d been through, I told myself. In any case I had an audience with Dineo coming, in which she would tell me all she knew and incidentally take up the matter of what was going to be done about the rifle I had lost and the horse that had been taken and was now dead: Dorcas was making an uproar about both, apparently.
The Smile
Below are three dialogs from Nelson’s convalescence, the first two from different stages of his stay in the infirmary, the last from the first night we were back chez nous. They go in ascending order of normalcy — that is, from the least normal to the most. The first two are reconstructed from notes made immediately after each exchange. The last is actual transcript from a tape. I resorted to taping when I finally sensed the extent of the bouleversement in Nelson I was witnessing, one proof of which was that he had no objection to my taping every word that fell from his lips — quite the contrary, in fact. All his irony about my Boswellizing was gone. Where I say the Smile I mean that his response is a particular smile, very tolerant or forgiving and structurally condescending, but not meant that way. The protocol for an audience with the Dalai Lama involves the audient’s agreeing to a fifteen-minute period for the exchange of benevolent glances before any substantive talking begins. Even the Pope had to agree to this. The Smile is what I imagine people in that situation coming up with. A feature that shows in the dialogs is that I become more upset as he becomes more equilibrized. And throughout I seem to be concealing my decision to stay with him in Tsau, if that was a bona fide decision, which is explained, I think, by my understandable interest in getting some hint from him that that question was working its way from the depths of his mind to somewhere near uppermost, where it had been before his, to my way of thinking, misadventure. My withholding my inner decision is of course something I look back on with hindsight telling me that my blaring out at some point my yes to staying might have changed the course of events. In fact I couldn’t do it.
The first dialog began after I’d been telling him yet again how I’d gone from hell to heaven, losing him, being in Tsau with Dorcas raising the winds over his absence and what it had to mean vis-à-vis Hector, the main implication being that Nelson was a fugitive from justice, the general seethings over the taken horse, no one listening to me, and then getting him back alive. He was healing absurdly rapidly, his face losing its swelling and joining his body in a perfection I could do without. Even the little lozenge of fat that seems to appear after you’re forty on the side of your nose was gone. His weight loss was anchored by his current diet, which was largely soup, broths. I think I would have made a perfect gay man, my appreciation for the male form being what it is. Nelson was becoming the pygmalion object I would have carved for myself as a physical mate. We were twinned, me with my response to his corporeal self and he with his self-proclaimed receptivity to the female shell, the beautiful ones, that is, naturellement.
He was still in his original windowless room at the infirmary during the first two dialogs, still under observation. I wasn’t supposed to close the door when I was in camera with Nelson, although no reason was ever given to me for the proscription. I have no doubt the idea was to deter me from bothering Nelson sexually, in his delicate condition. He was being treated like a godlet. If I did close the door, it would be unobtrusively popped ajar by an unknown hand.
Three Dialogs
1. Are we all right?
He nods.
I need you to say it, not just nod it.
Yes, we are, he says.
Is it still so tiring for you to speak up?
No, he says, more strongly but still marginally for normal discourse.
Then do we love each other? because I dot dot dot love you. I said the words dot dot dot in an attempt at lightheartedness and also to remind him of the days when he had seen fit to tease me about the caesuras in my conversation — as when I was too slow to make my point — by saying dot dot dot, just as I had. The point in those days had been for me to realize that I had to hurry to keep up with his fine intellect, the brain of a person so keenly attuned to things that movies were a bore for him because of that flicker of black between the frames that he, unlike the groundlings who saw movies as seamless things, was aware of. I don’t know why this particular claim to fame remains such a burr under my saddle, but it does. But in any case it was his turn to be the provider of caesuras. He was slower and more hesitant than I had ever been at my worst. But I had the feeling he wasn’t really trying, which had never been true of me. I know I was being unfair, in the circumstances.
That day he had let me brush his teeth instead of his doing it himself. He could do it himself. I had offered to do it just to see if he’d let me. This was an epitome of the way he was.
Please tell me everything that happened.
The Smile.
Nelson, do you want to walk around outside?
He said No. But without giving a reason.
Nelson, tell me yourself what happened, or give me a sketch, at least. They’re making things up about you, like that at some point when you were lying helpless you were protected by bees.
The Smile.
I was tired of not hearing the whole story from his mouth. Kakelo and Dineo were together in the position that he should be protected from having to tell the story over and over to every comer. Reportedly he found telling the story very difficult, although anything longer than three sentences, on any subject, seemed to be a trial for him. I had talked to Dineo and others and I knew the vulgate on his misadventures: he’d lain injured on the ground for eight days before being found by the Baherero. He had been halfway to Tikwe when a boomslang had dropped out of an acacia onto his horse’s neck, or alternatively it had struck the horse in the neck from the side as they passed too close to a tree limb. The horse had panicked, thrown Nelson, broken its leg in its thrashings to escape or shake off the snake. When it happened they were in a patch of slippery black sand locally called black cotton soil, which I think is a kind of marl, or sand with marl mixed in. Snakes are supposed to be more common in black cotton soil areas, which was a piece of lore I was surprised he was unfamiliar with. All his supplies were on the horse with the exception of his canteen. Nelson was on the ground going in and out of consciousness. The horse was a shuddering hulk maybe twenty or thirty yards from him when he came fully to. It had been maybe an hour and a half. He was badly sunburned, and an arm and a leg were broken. He dragged himself fifty feet to a termite tump built at the base of a tree and set his arm and fainted again. That night he dragged himself back to the horse and got all his provisions and impedimenta off it and then cut the animal’s throat with his hunting knife. There was no rifle with him, which was his way of making a certain point, I suppose. Then in a paradise of pain he had dragged himself back to his tump, not once but twice since he had to make a return trip to the horsewreck in order to get everything there was that he might utilize for purposes of surviving. Then it becomes fabulous. He had been delirious and had had visions of presences or a presence, a female presence, who had been involved somehow in his immunity from the attentions of the black-backed jackals who had come to devour his horse before his very eyes the next day. Also, bees had been involved in discouraging the jackals. There were different versions. Bees had discouraged either the jackals or the boomslang, which was still dangerously in the vicinity. He had had various insights of a certain grandeur, which he had only been willing to hint at so far to others. There was more and worse. He had put his ear against the tump and heard what the termites say, or heard their songs, which were magnificent. This, for me, was like finding myself wandering around in the Midrash. Dineo had left it out of her account, along with most of the other signs and wonders — she knew me — but I was hearing them elsewhere.