They’ll stop, he said.
No they won’t, I said. Not until someone can say with some sort of authority that this is what happened and that this is a fable, such as you. Or me.
It was a mistake, he said.
What was?
Going into it. People are going to forget about it.
Do you think you’re different since Tikwe?
Do I think I’m different. Yes. I don’t know. I was different before.
This was going to lead to a paradox of some kind. I had no appetite for it.
Just tell me this, I said. Just tell me if this is right, that something momentous happened to you on the way to Tikwe, you think.
Something momentous. I think so.
It was up to him to elaborate. I could have made him do it, led him to do it. But the sense that I represented the forces of interruption was too much for me, the sense that I was keeping him from certain sessions of sweet silent thought, sweeter and more important to him than anything else on earth.
We sat in silence.
I hated life.
Conspiracies
In my attitude toward Tsau I was stuck at a paranoid level. All I did all day was revolve the permutations of the explanations for the lurid impasse I was in. There were explanations in which everything that had happened was connected, like parts in a complicated machine. There were explanations in which everything critical that had happened to me was accidental. Certain things could have been charades. Dineo’s dilatoriness about letting me organize help for Nelson could have been a result of the fact that she somehow knew he was all right someplace. Possibly all this was an ordeal designed for me, something to test how much I wanted this man. Or possibly Nelson wanted me out and gone. Or possibly I had just been a catspaw of forces that had favored my getting together with Nelson in order to move him along the path to departure, stimulating him to speed it up by my ordinariness and consumerism and need to get back to the country money comes from. Or possibly Dineo had disposed of Hector in order to break up Boso and stimulate Dorcas into going somewhere else. On it went with me. Possibly the original idea had been to use me to get Nelson’s case of founder’s disease out of the vicinity and into a project on some other continent, leaving the women of Tsau to evolve in their own way. But maybe the new revised passive Denoon was another story: maybe he was now someone who could be useful in his present form, a Prince Albert in a can for Dineo. Or was it conceivable Nelson had disposed of Hector and out of remorse dumped himself to either die or improve and come back shorn and tractable, speaking only when spoken to, being good, already up and hobblingly doing little chores, a man as good as a woman. That was conceivable. I laved myself in conspiracy and in the process felt myself closer to the central or historical Nelson, with his very patent — to me — view of the world as a place in which conspiracy is routine. I don’t mean that he was an obsessed assassinationologist of the standard kind you run into in the States. With him it was more an assumption of the mundanity of conspiracy. He was offhand about it: of course there was a conspiracy behind the John F. Kennedy assassination, he might remark, unless it makes sense that Lee Harvey Oswald would advertise himself as a marxist by having his picture taken holding up copies of the Militant and the Daily Worker at the same time, two papers whose party lines in regard to Cuba were violently opposed at a time when he was supposed to be a member of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and so, strictly pro-Castro. Then there was the Shakespeare conspiracy, although on that he was more of a zealot than in some other cases.
Africans have a particular way of interacting with the insane, and I thought I could feel myself drifting into that kind of regard. My best friends among the women kept treating me like a child: Rra Puleng would be fine, he was fine.
I was volatile. One day I was shaping up to work in the kraals dawn to dusk, and the next I was refusing to do something minor, something I had agreed to do in prehistoric times: I think there was a prize for the person who had taken the most books out of the library and I had agreed to do the tally, but somehow in my present state I felt it was an affront being asked to do this. I couldn’t explain why.
Dineo, I decided, was going to be the key to the exit.
Whatever hesitation there was in my mind about getting Nelson out of there and in reach of someone who could identify his condition for me was diminishing day by day. If he was improving, it was unbearably slowly.
I would go to see Dineo. First I would invoke what I felt had been an implicit friendship between us. Then I would remind her that I was formidable too and that I was ready to bring the American embassy into getting Nelson out if I had to. This would be against everybody’s will and interest, Nelson’s included, but I knew how to operate the radio and I could make it happen whether anyone liked it or not. I could lie to the embassy if I had to. Of course by going the route of force majeure I would tear up any chance I would have of ever coming back to Tsau. I wouldn’t be forgiven. I tried to have a proposal ready for each of the likeliest objections. I wanted him x-rayed. I had to get out of a matrix that was becoming untrustworthy and impenetrable, so that I could trust my own thoughts again.
From the outset Dineo resisted so strongly that I was taken aback.
There were changes in her office. The interior had been freshly calcimined. We met in a white glow. It was midmorning. In the old office all the chairs had been uniform. Now hers had a taller back and had arms. She looked imperious. She was wearing her headscarf in a new style, with the tails brought together over one shoulder and secured with a medallion clip. Tea was served to us, which surprised me.
The first surprise was that she wanted us to speak only in Setswana. People would be coming in and out, and Setswana would be best. I don’t know why that put me off my stride so badly, but it did. It was a statement. Also I had been set for her to be warmer, or at least more silken toward me. Instead she was being rueful and direct and looking me straight in the eye. I know by having us speak Setswana she wanted to avoid any suggestion of collusion between us, but still I hated her for it. She had never been my enemy.
We talked in general about how well Nelson was coming along. This was her view. I made the distinction between physical and psychological, and she appeared to be listening to me. Then she said that although she could see Nelson was quieter than before, she wanted me to know that the nurse had told her that anything of that sort should be put down to convalescence, the aftereffects of the trauma, something that would lift. She also slipped into the stream of our talk a few hints that there could be questions of favoritism if someone with a medical condition perceived to be as minor as Nelson’s were evacuated to Gaborone. Also she made clear that she understood from Rra Puleng that he was not at all interested in being moved.
She was being clever. At no point was she refusing me. But she was resisting.
I decided to be frank. I said I had often wanted to remind her about her showing me in the bathhouse the scars that meant she could never bear children, and how I had taken that as a gesture of friendship toward me, to show that she was not a possible mate for Nelson, if that was in fact something that was crossing my mind.
She nodded. She was not embarrassed by this.
I said that then I had wondered if the reason she and others had been encouraging me to be with Rra Puleng was because perhaps an attachment to me would lead him to think more quickly about going away with me and leaving Tsau in the hands of its citizens a little sooner.
She was very precise as she denied this. She spoke so formally that I almost felt it as an invitation to read through what she was saying, not to be literal. She did deny any thought of the kind I was mentioning. She was speaking for everyone in Tsau. She was sure that no one except for some unfortunate people who in any case might not be for long in Tsau could have wanted anything other than that Rra Puleng must stay in Tsau as long as he was pleased to. All of this was in the same strangely precise delivery.