I was being driven to the edge by Nelson’s seeming normal, for one reason or another, to everyone but me. The nurse, Rita, had given a religious interpretation to his experience, I was sure of it. I knew she was Catholic. I knew they’d murmured back and forth about the meaning of life during his socalled examination. This was not someone who could tell the difference between enlightenment and a nervous breakdown and elucidate it to me while she was at it. Then as to his stasis and dolce far niente: Europeans will go into villages in Africa and not infrequently see people not at work at anything discernible, not doing a task or hurrying en route from one task to another. There is what to us looks like lavish standing around, alone or in silent groups, people sometimes but not always leaning against a tree or a wall in a sort of self-communing state. And then you have the ultrarural population, people on cattle posts tens and hundreds of miles from anywhere, without amusements of any kind that you can imagine other than listening to Springbok Radio or Radio Botswana if they’re lucky enough to have a radio. When you see them these are not depressed or unhappy people, or bored people, insofar as anything like that can be determined from the outside. So to the Batswana all Nelson would seem to be doing would be partaking subtly in that particular lifeway. Nothing odd about that. Of course the premise of Tsau was to break poverty in the village by replacing stasis with its opposite, contests and meetings and inventions and dynamism. But nobody around here was thinking about that.
No, he was just all right, meaning just fine, to the locals. The resident help had almost nothing to do, we were so undemanding and so few, so they leapt into the breach and devoted themselves to his wardrobe, starching and ironing and bleaching his vanilla costume, for example, into a blinding state of perfection. He didn’t object. This was slightly a judgment on me by all concerned, I felt. Why had I let him go around in so much lesser a state of splendor? He looked so splendid, groomed up this way. It helped that his weight was perfect. He was growing a beard, but shaving meticulously every day, so as not to let beard shadow creep up into his cheeks. I waited out the first week. I gathered that what he anticipated was going back to Tsau, soon, apparently, and presumably with me.
The first week was up and I was inwardly girding my loins for strife, uprooting his mode or making him say what it was, making me understand it.
We were having mint tea at the dining room table when he said, almost as an afterthought to my questions about things that needed to be done in Gabs, We can be married.
Then he said it again: We can be married here. And then he added And we can have children.
I burst away from the table and went off to our room. I wept but I was enraged. I left the door open to give him the chance to come normally after me and see what was wrong, what he could do.
From where I was I could see him still sitting at the table, looking vaguely after me but not rising. What was this? Was it a byproduct of collapse and regression into a kind of simpleminded protohusband role, or was it enlightenment and his inner self telling him it was time to multiply with me, or was it the last worst slash of the knife at me, a trick to disorient me and make me let go? Was he incapable of seeing this as an act of force against me, this reversal of every position he had ever had on the subject and an exploitation of what he certainly knew was a highly particular vulnerability of mine, in my situation? He had torn me away from midwifing in Tsau in order to help me keep my natalist impulses from starting to churn, which incidentally would have run athwart his bias against having children, there being so many unwanted ones in the world. And now this.
Anyway, with that he had unnerved me and I was in no condition to start on the interrogation I had been preparing myself for. Could he have done this deliberately to derail me?
Psychology
I think it was weakness that made me want to reknit for a couple of days before I made the assault on whatever his new belief structure was, that and the news that there was an actual trained psychiatrist briefly in town, a Sri Lankan on consult at the Ministry of Health. Nelson had been willing to see the nurse. But there was no question of his going to Pretoria or Johannesburg, because that was South Africa. So mightn’t he see Dr. Pereira if I could arrange it? Pereira would come over. Nelson wouldn’t have to leave the house.
At breakfast I went at it obliquely.
I mentioned that there was a Sri Lankan psychiatrist in town.
He said Sri Lanka, that could have been a paradise after the English left except for two mistakes. One was canceling English as the official language, which drove the Tamils wild because they were having enough trouble in the civil service without having to learn to write their memos in Sinhalese. The other mistake slips my mind.
I was alert, waiting for more, but he fell into silence again.
Having gotten Dr. Pereira’s name into the atmosphere, I swung into some overkill on psychology, remembering Nelson’s hostility to the discipline and his hatred of clinical psychology in particular, a specialty he thought of as about as respectable as colonic irrigation. I may have played a role in exacerbating his feelings here — not that much help was needed — with the horrible true story of something that had happened when my mother and I lived in the gatehouse of an estate a clinical psychologist couple had rented the rest of. One of their patients, a woman being treated for shyness, had frozen to death in their parking area one winter. She had had car trouble and hadn’t wanted to bother anyone. She’d been in treatment with one of them for five years. Also the psychologists were cryptosurvivalists, and we would see vanloads of canned goods and staples being delivered in the dead of night and stuffed into various outbuildings. Nelson and I had been peas in a pod on the subject. I’d torn out an item in the Economist to show him, reporting that the two hundred top psychologists, department heads and deep thinkers and top-dog practitioners, had been asked to list the most important theories or discoveries in the field in the last twenty-five years. And there was total disagreement among the lists, no consensus anywhere, absolutely the only uniformity being that if they’d discovered or proposed something themselves it would likely appear on their list of the top five advances. So now I was about to beg him to let himself be psychologized for my sake.
I did a roundabout rehabilitation of psychology. Had I ever told him, I asked him, about my discovery in my mid-twenties of why doing mental work would suddenly become much easier for me at about three in the afternoon? I had been talking about grammar school with someone, and how much I’d hated it. Then through that the click had come. Everything in grammar school had been coercion and boredom, which ended at three when school let out. After that my concentration was the same morning, noon, or night: all I had to do was remind myself that I was no longer at Horace Mann.