I immediately misjudged the way Nelson was dressed. He was wearing a garish dashiki with a red and black naive floral motif, some kind of unisex gray muslinoid drawstring pants, and elaborate leather sandals of a kind I’d never seen. I of course leapt to the conclusion that he was dressed to show how little dressing up meant to someone of his degree of seriousness and inner direction. I thought it was pointlessly combative or provocative. I even got a pang when I realized that only an objectively goodlooking presence could transcend the implications of such a costume. Later on when I discovered that he was dressed that way for a perfectly good reason I felt callow. He was acting as a manikin. Everything he was wearing or carrying represented something the people in his project were producing. He was even taking orders for things. All his accessories were from the workshops at Tsau, including a peculiar spade-shaped cowhide sidebag and some hideous leather bracelets. Not only was his costume defensible, it was self-sacrificial. But for the time being I took comfort from my snap judgment that, at least in this, he was a bit of a fool.
A Great Reckoning in a Little Room
What was my attitude? So far Denoon was impressing me with his performance of absolute repose in the midst of turbulence. We had arrived during a break. The audience was pure agitation — guys machinating, exchanging greetings, checking the time, organizing couriers for more drinks. It was the usual male smokefest, but no cigarettes for him. He was at rest even though he was standing up. He was leaning on one palm against a window frame, gazing out into the night. He was roughly my height or a little under, which was fine because I regard caring about height as a kind of fetishism, which is easy for me to say, I recognize, being tall myself. He looked very strong and I know why: I associate big wrist and elbow knobs with unusual physical strength. Actually it was Nelson who elucidated that to me about myself, in the life to come. The light was fluorescent, very harsh. No matter what he thought he could stand on the basis of his dark complexion, he was getting too much sun, in my humble opinion. But had he noticed that his wife had entered the room? In fact, where was she? Had he taken the lost-in-thought pose he had in order not to have to interact, or was everything accidental?
Grace had found the only place to hide that there was. She was sitting on a camp stool behind a big potted arboricola near the door. Since I owed my entrée to this scene entirely to her, I went over. She waved me off, violently, but keeping her movements tight. I tried again and produced what I can only call a paroxysm, so I stopped. She put her head back against the wall, which lifted her tiny nostrils once again into my field of vision. The effect conveyed was of unspeakable refinement. I left her alone. All I wanted next was to hear Denoon speak. I am apparently voice activated. I judge inordinately by the voice. And there was the promo his voice had been given by Whoreen.
This might be good, I thought as I studied the crowd. There were several definitely intelligent guys present, not strobe-light intellects but people who could make you uncomfortable in a debate if you got too much beyond what you absolutely had the facts on. My preference is always for hanging out with the finalists, and there were some there. What did I want? I wanted Denoon either to turn out to be the definitive elusive great man or I wanted him to turn out to be an open-and-shut fraud — that is, mediocre — so I could go on with my lifelong headlong flight from the unintelligentsia and all its works. I don’t know which I wanted more, although I’ve thought about it. I was well aware this was chapter nine thousand in the supremely boring unfinished comic opera The Mediocre and Me, and also aware there was nothing so superlative about me as to justify my stupid elitism. But there it was, crazing me as usual. The psychogenesis of this is not a mystery to me.
I loved the averting of eyes my presence seemed to stimulate.
I finally found a couple of people willing to overlook my interloping and talk to me. One was an Ethiopian underling at UNDP. I love Ethiopians for their almond eyes. And they remind me of Siamese cats, they’re so sinuous. I gathered from him that the left was fairly joyous over Act One, which was devoted to excoriating the capitalist development mode for Africa. The country representative of the Gustav Noske Foundation looked happy, and the Swedes did too, insofar as you can detect emotion in them. I said Act Two, where he attacks the socialist mode, is going to be good, especially if somebody remembers Denoon once said socialism is like knitting with oars. But just then an overling from UNDP saw me talking with my contact, who thereupon slid off.
I got next to a Motswana from Commerce and Industry, who I expected would be unhappy but wasn’t. This was surprising in a way. Botswana is capitalist. There is plenty of socialism — subsidized housing, car loans, and so on — for the civil service, but the political class in toto is whole hog for capitalism red in tooth and claw, which is why the West loves the country so much. When the man who had just become president of the country was vice president he had gotten up in parliament and said, apropos a proposal to regulate the number of bottle stores in the towns, If a man can get rich selling liquor let him make the nation drunk. So how did they feel at Commerce and Industry about someone they were sponsoring, Denoon, pissing all over capitalist Botswana, a jewel in the crown of capitalist success right up there with Malawi and the Ivory Coast? I took it they were just very pleased. Everything was just all right, which is idiomatic for superb in southern Africa. I had a flash of the feeling I used to get from time to time of the Batswana as spectators at a great game played by whites called Running Your Country.
Meantime I was trying to keep something of an eye on Grace and figure out what was going on with her as she made herself small behind the arboricola. She still looked crazed. Remember this is Africa, I said to myself, where hospital patients run around the streets of the city in pajamas. Grace’s glittering eyes were nothing. In West Africa the foux were part of the cityscape. Also I was certain that there was something subsidiary going on with her, something involving cunning, which I chose to take as reassuring. I should have been more sisterly toward her, but I couldn’t be. She was extremely goodlooking, which I had to push aside a little if I was not going to be affected by envy of her derisory little hips and just right bosom. My breasts are the wrong size for an active person. They would be fine for someone restricted to lounging. I am built for childbearing, which was the last thing I wanted to happen to me, but — but looking at her I comforted myself with the idea that should I fall pregnant, as the idiom goes over there, I’d be in better shape than she would. Her bust was perfect in that it was perfect for galvanizing oafdom if she chose to stand up straight and inhale, and perfect in that she could let a succession of males pass by her in a narrow train corridor without having to keep her back to each one that passed. Of course apparently something unspeakable was going on between her and her husband. She had something planned relating to it. A talent I have is being able to step into a roomful of people and fairly instantly classify the majority who are just walking around in intake mode and the handful who are bent on something.
I should have been a better person toward her. I was blocked. She had one of your true heart-shaped faces. I loved her teeth. She was a perfect representative of whatever size she was, all in proportion, what have you. Was she possibly originally southern? Because there was an effluvium of flirtation about her, even though she wasn’t doing it: all she was doing was being miserable and hatching some deluded plan. She would have been one of the girls in my high school with nine hundred cashmere sweaters, cashmeres coming out of her closet like Kleenex. I never asked Denoon if she was southern. Status in my high school came from how infrequently you wore the same clothes, and especially how infrequently you wore the same sweaters. In my humble opinion life shouldn’t be more painful than it has to be. I remember all the desperate improvisations and camouflages it took to disguise the dreadful brevity of the little cycle of clothes I had to wear. This still has the capacity to freeze my heart.