Ripeness is all, was Bronwen. People had said you would know her when you saw her because she looked like the ingenues in the Coke ads of the nineteen forties, the perfect blond ones. She must have been genuinely beautiful, because fluorescent light, which makes the rest of us look cadaverous, only made her look luminous. She had hair the color of custard. I doubt that she was twenty-six. She wore absolutely no makeup. Conceivably her underlip was a little overfull. She was shorter than I am.
I got interlocking satanic inspirations. This woman would be awed to meet Nelson. He would love her for her honey-colored hair alone. She could have Nelson. I had had the Nelson she was reading the words of. What there had been of him I had in my mind, in my memory, in my notes. Maybe she would love the present Nelson even more than she would have loved the original. We could see. We could find out. I could bring them together. This led to my second inspiration. I could bring them together at a celebration for Nelson he would never forget. I would open the floodgates. Something had to change in my life. If I was unable to get him back to himself singlehanded, then maybe the curious descending all at once on him could do it, along with Bronwen Something. He wanted to be Adamic, then okay, leave it to me to round up an Eve. He hated surprise parties, and he hated birthday parties. His birthday was in the wrong part of the year, but this could just be my mistake. I could orchestrate this. It could be done. I had been kept from taking any kind of real action for too long. Now I could act. It was intoxicating to think of all this. She was the right one: unknown to her as she plowed on through Nelson’s book, she was the center of a web of male glances, black and white male glances. Some of them even saw that I saw, and it meant nothing to them. They kept staring, so what was I? People were arranging what they had to do so they could rest their eyes on her. I was nothing. I was nothing despite my superior bosom, and she was some pure flamelike thing with her part perfectly straight and perfectly white, her custard-colored hair up in valences behind her absolutely perfect ears. I felt almost simian. I have definite down on my arms, no more than average but it is a little darkish, and her arms were like polished dowels of some kind. I would drop her in his lap. He would have the option to ignore her. He would have the option to be enraged, to accuse me of anything, pimpery. That would be something. We would see. There was a suppressed furor going on over Nelson’s sequestration. Everyone would want to come. Let them, I thought. She never looked up. She was not a rapid reader.
ABOUT THE FOREGOING
The Call
I don’t like it here in Palo Alto. For a while I was able to sustain myself by self-congratulation. Severing myself from the spectacle Nelson had become to me had been a success, as I read it, a stupendous thing. It gave me strength. Everything worked for me. A way I could contrive a thesis out of my Tswapong Hills data and some haphazard data from Tsau came to me. I have an extension. The department was delighted to see me. I went to see my mother and controlled everything. I was never insulted once. The most partial of answers satisfied her for a change. She is in the bosom of a Lutheran cult and likes it: they operate a nursing home on a freezing peninsula, where she works in the mailroom for room and board, essentially. She can stay there forever if she wants to, she says. She considers she has her first white-collar employment ever. Everything was yielding to my hand. I kept saying Freedom. I was riding a wave of fire at first. I went to a parasitologist, who said I was cleaner internally than the average middleclass American.
Of course this demonic phase had to end sometime, and it has. The wonder of my escape from Africa, as I so often couched it for myself in the beginning, is less sustaining to me. Now, apparently, I would rather think circuitously back and imagine ways that the necessity to sever us could have been avoided. Or I have time fantasies. Supposing we had met in the eighteen nineties, say, when there was nothing ambiguous about socialism being the answer to everything. It would have been obvious that the collective ownership of the means of production was all that was needed to make us happy. That would have been a medium for us to embrace in. We would have been perfect militants. I come out of fantasies like this furious with actually existing socialism, vacuously enough.
The demonic phase was on an adrenaline continuum with my lutte finale surprise party for Nelson. It almost arranged itself. Everyone wanted to come, the extraordinary Bronwen most of all. She was on the qui vive re Nelson after picking up on all the speculation at the embassy concerning him. That was why she’d looked up Development as the Death of Villages.
As an infernal device the party was perfect. Once I’d started issuing invitations the die was cast. I had to go through with it, however fainthearted I got. I’m not sure now what it was I really wanted, other than to see him either alter before my eyes or be confirmed as what I was afraid he had become. Just to have him infuriated with me, in a personal way, would have been a treasure. In the beginning I tried to honor my promise to Dineo to protect him from certain unfriendly characters in the donor community. But ultimately there was no way I could. They all heard about it — Brits, Boso people, a closet Trotskyite in the Friedrich Ebert Foundation. The Libyans call their embassy the Jamahiriya, meaning nonembassy or people’s bureau or whirlwind, I forget which: two of them were coming. Apparently Qaddafi had pervertedly incorporated some anarchist tenets into his political bible, The Green Book, an act which Nelson had found extremely offensive, so perhaps those embers would have a chance to reignite. I realized the guest list was very light on anyone who might be called Denoonisant, except for lustrous Bronwen. So much the better, I thought. With Bronwen I played a complex game of self-presentation intended to lead her to think of me as someone not necessarily happily associated with this great man, someone possibly coarse, possibly uncaring toward him, someone not legally married to him, in any event. I thought so often of Grace, Grace pushing me toward Nelson. There was even a full moon the night of the party.
One thing I made sure of was the alcohol supply. There would be ample hard liquor, good brands. The cook-maid who came with the house would emerge, in her green uniform, with salvers of samoosas and drumsticks from time to time, in the style usual in top-dog socializing.
At the lutte finale I was invisible, or, more accurately, visible only at the margins, never at the center. That was for Bronwen. Nelson came out from his late nap. The forty guests erupted from behind things, shouting what they were supposed to.
Of course all of the above is really about the phonecall and the What is to be done? question. Somewhere in everything I remember lies the answer to how I should decide. At this point, oddly enough, I have the money to do whatever I decide is required. Of course a month has passed since the call, and I haven’t decided. Instead I’ve done what I do best, made an academic study of myself centering on the last two years, made myself a field of academic study with only one specialist in it. The lutte finale was about resolving doubt, I thought, but it would be exactly doubt that could wrench me out of here one more time. The reason Achilles can never lay hands on the tortoise is the same reason a month has passed while I’ve studied the question of why I have yet to act. There is always new material to be integrated into the study of me. Each moment of thought demands multiples of moments of classification, analysis, parsing. I tried to suppress the gravamen of the phonecall, which was so interesting of me, wasn’t it?
Nelson’s conceit about god being in control of the content of life and the devil being in control of the timing is so useful, especially as applied to the question of what to do about my phonecall. Normally my slender means would have decided for me. For most of my life that would have been the case. But right now everything is working for me, and paying too. I got a TA-ship right away. The Association of American University Women chapter in San Mateo heard about me and asked me to give a little talk. But I have no slides, I said, and I’m so busy that if I do it I’ll have to have an honorarium. Gosiame! They loved it that I had no slides, that I could paint word pictures and induce people to experience Africa the way I had, viz. not as a picture-taking robot only there to reduce everything to visual documentation while the gists and piths of authentic local life evanesced unnoticed. Other clubs are burning to get me. I attacked tourism, à la Nelson Denoon: Your warriors shall be bootblacks, your potmakers shall be chambermaids, and so on. Gosiame! I was quoting Nelson up and down. He sounded fascinating. He was still known. When I left the U.S. for Africa he was probably about even with Ivan Illich on the clerisy’s fame meter. The clerisy is a word I got from Nelson which turns out to be indispensable, like others of his. Now Denoon’s probably a point or two lower than he was, but his name still resonates nicely.