I did errands that week — shopping, going to Immigration to cement relations — at a run. I ran because I was so unsure about Nelson. I was perpetually afraid I’d come back and find him gone, recovered in my absence and gone. He was essentially doing nothing that I could see. People who wanted to see him he referred to as the curious. He got up late. He walked around the garden. He ate small meals. He bathed or showered a couple of times a day. He napped. He would listen to music if I suggested it and set up the stereo and chose something. The only basic change was that he was reading again, which was the good news. The bad news was that he would only read one book, the Tao Te Ching, which he had brought with him, that book and only that book. I had begun to hate Lao Tzu. It was impossible to get a discussion going, however tangential, relating to the Tao. I gathered that the whole thing was too sacred, too central to what was distracting him. We slept in a vast bed. He went to sleep every night at eight o’clock. Sex was not rearing its lovely head.
I wanted to supply just a little in the way of delicacies available only in the capital, but Nelson was showing a marked preference for the food of the people: bogobe, other porridges, maas, all the staples of our existence at Tsau. He never told me to stop getting the Wensleydale cheese or the occasional cup of crème fraîche, but he took only token tastes, mostly, then asked for his porridge and maybe a piece of fruit. I wasn’t made to feel guilty about my European eating propensities. I could do what I liked. I was eating a little too much at first because I felt I ought to finish up what he was declining to more than taste.
That week yielded exactly one unsolicited comment or statement from him, although he continued answering everything that was put to him. That one unsolicited comment was, I think, Time is an ape. I think this is what he said. I asked him to repeat it and he just said Never mind. I would have pursued it except that I’d sworn off all pressure for the week, just to see if he might slide back toward normalcy.
After the embassy nurse came over I was depressed, as depressed as I’d been. She took him into the bedroom and I could hear the repartee. It sounded completely normal. It would, naturally, since it was just Q and A. I had told her point-blank that I wanted something from her that would let me refer him to a psychiatrist somewhere. At least I wanted her to see if she could get Nelson designated a stop on the circuit the embassy medical officer in Pretoria made from time to time. She came out effusing about him, apparently not only because he was healing so wonderfully but because he was himself such a wonderful person. He had been using a knobkerrie as a crutch, and he could stop that anytime he wanted. She would schedule him for x-rays but only because I seemed so determined on it. She wished she could find more Americans his age with his blood pressure. Psychologically this was just a man who was relaxing in order to heal. He was fine. His reflexes were like an adolescent’s. All this was conveyed to me with an unsuppressible, wistful, jealous but still Christian look that said what a lucky dog I was to have this man. She went on to show me that she fully empathized with how it must have been for me when he was missing. She was about forty. She was unmarried. By the time she was leaving she was more concerned about me than about Nelson, with my incomprehensible fixations and misinterpretations, as she obviously saw them. I wondered that she didn’t find it odd that Nelson never joined us but stayed sitting on the bed where he’d been left, thinking about something or other, deeply. She gave me an over-the-counter sleeping pill that was risible. I did confirm that the only psychiatrist in Botswana was still the Italian in Lobatse, with this addendum: he was a Yugoslav, who mainly spoke Italian. Her look confirmed everything I had already concluded re hopelessness in that direction. After she left I felt like killing myself for not mentioning that the only thing Nelson had volunteered all week was the sentence Time is an ape, and how would she like that in a boyfriend? Why could I not bring myself to say the words nervous breakdown?
There was one false dawn that week, when someone turned up at the gate whom he seemed to want to see. Nelson was sitting embowered in the blazing jacaranda. He recognized the face at the gate and got up with alacrity, actually, to stop the yardman from sending this guest away.
I watched from the kitchen. The visitor was a pathetic fixture in downtown Gabs, a refugee from Lesotho, a high school teacher who had been tortured after the Chief Jonathan coup in the seventies. He was in his forties and he was a gargoyle. One eye was half closed with scar tissue and there were terrible scars on his neck and down his chest, which you could see because he never buttoned his shirt. He walked with one leg dragging. Torture had made him a gargoyle. Apparently Nelson had known him. Hiram was his name. He got a little stipend from the UN High Commission on Refugees and lived in a shed behind a Canadian’s house. He was always being stolen from. Expatriates would take pity on him and give him food and clothes, especially when their tours were up, which the local thieves had figured out. He forgot to lock his place up half the time, so he was always being robbed. Mentally he was not quite right. He was always smiling. He wrote things, strange manifestos and so on, in Sesotho. You would see him circulating around Gaborone, and occasionally he would beg. He would go into an office or a shop and beg for writing paper, never money. Children were afraid of him. He was usually wearing rags.
In came Hiram. They sat down facing, knees almost touching, on lawn chairs, myself thinking that now I was going to see my love galvanized back into himself by this icon of man’s inhumanity to man. I was willing to bet on it. This would remind him. This was his walking and talking raison d’être.
One thing about Hiram was that he was voluble. He had a strange, hissing voice, and he was voluble in a way you could hardly make out, but once he had your eyes he kept talking, soliciting you, nexing with you.
But lo, not at all, this was real! Hiram was silent. This was like the exchange of benevolent glances between the Pope and the Dalai Lama. Neither party said a word. Nelson rested his hand on Hiram’s shoulder for a long time, then took it away. At the beginning of things, Nelson had made me write down the name of a book, The Power of the Charlatan, from which had come a phrase he’d used a couple of times and that I’d inquired about: e nosatu et sta ben così: I’ve smelled him and now I feel so good. At some point in Italy there were charlatans who sold sniffs of themselves. I crept out to hear if they were talking at all. It was still silent benevolence. After fifteen minutes Hiram got up to go. The event was over. I sped back into the kitchen to throw food items into a sakkie for him and grab one of Nelson’s better unwhite shirts, and I managed to catch him just as he was turning the corner at the end of our street. Nelson was back in his bower.
This also was the week I found my first four or five indisputably gray hairs. I was shocked. I thought they were supposed to come in by ones for a while, then twos, and then much later in threes and genuine arrays like this. I blamed my surprise on a certain inattention to my appearance that had taken root in Tsau, and on the bleary inadequate mirror and lighting I had available for my toilettes there. One of the hairs was oddly coarse and semicorkscrewed, and I pulled it out, but then stopped. There is the joke about finding a little golden screw in your navel and unscrewing it and then having your anus drop out onto the floor. My equivalent of that, after I tugged my premier gray hairs out, was the descent of a pseudo insight that gripped me for a day or two until it disappeared. The insight was that Nelson’s whole mien was an act intended in a kind way to get me to relinquish him, go away on my own initiative, because he was too old for me and in fifteen years there would be trouble, pain, however we parsed it, wherever we went, whatever we did: there would be inevitable tragedy, it was a terrible idea, like marrying a Negro was supposed to be in the forties. So it seemed brilliant just then to let the gray remain, to not look any younger than I had to.