Having been on the periphery of a certain number of the near great, I was in fear of a certain phenomenon transpiring, which is a dimming in their regard like a fine membrane coming down over their eyeballs. They keep looking at you but not seeing you if you aren’t on their level or are a kind of prey not of interest to them. There is such a thing in nature. It’s called a nictitating membrane and certain reptiles have it, as did the great Chinese criminal genius Fu Manchu, a hero of Nelson’s boyhood reading as I later found out in the course of a discussion of the moment we met. Denoon denied he ever did it. My position was that the great can’t help doing it, but I did finally concede that I’d never seen him do it, not even once. He considered himself a congenital democrat. This was urgent to him.
What tirade? he asked.
So I answered him in Setswana, very brisk, slightly parodically, saying The tirade about the sun being the cow that nobody troubles to milk. This was another shot meant to hit before the portcullis came down. It had several features. It gave a sketch of one of my powers. I was someone out of the ordinary. It also had the carom quality of indirectly apprising him that in his description of the sun he had missed a bet by not comparing it to a cow. In Botswana the most magnificent entity you can be compared to is a cow. It’s true for all Bantu people, not only the Tswana. The god with the moist nose, is one way it’s put. Also here or later I used the phrase “dry rain” for sunlight, which he loved and which can be found in the Setswana pamphlet on solar democracy that eventually came out. I must have said it later.
If I overdwell on this it can’t be helped: love is important and the reasons you get it or fail to are important. The number of women in my generation who in retrospect anyone will apply the term “great love” to, in any connection, is going to be minute. I needed to know if I had a chance here. Love is strenuous. Pursuing someone is strenuous. What I say is if you find yourself condemned to wanting love, you have to play while you can play. Of course it would be so much easier to play from the male side. They never go after love qua love, ever. They go after women. And for men love is the distillate or description of whatever happened with each woman that was not actually painful in feeling-tone. There is some contradiction here which I can’t expel. What was moving me was the feeling of being worth someone’s absolute love, great love, even. And to me this means male love whether I like it or not. C’est ça. Here I am, there I was. I don’t know if getting love out of a man is more of a feat of strength now than it used to be or not, except that I do: it is. It’s hideous. It’s an ordeal beyond speech. When I’m depressed I feel like what was meant by one of his favorite quotations: A bitter feast was steaming hot and a mouth must be found to eat it. Men are like armored things, mountainous assemblages of armor and leather, masonry even, which you are told will self-dismantle if you touch the right spot, and out will flow passionate attention. And we know that this sometimes does happen for one of our sisters, or has happened. This comes full circle back to my attitude to kissing, which he never adjusted to. You want kisses, obviously. But you want kisses from a source, a person, who is in a state. This is why the plague of little moth kisses from men just planting their seniority on you is so intolerable. Of course even as I was machinating I was well aware I was in the outskirts of the suburbs of the thing you want or suspect is there. But at this moment in my life I was at the point where even the briefest experience of unmistakable love would be something I could clutch to myself as proof that my theory of myself was not incorrect. Theories can be reactionary and still be applicable.
Of course, Grace was drunk. It was crystalline. I had led a drunk to this occasion but not seen it until now. How I had missed it was a case study in the effect of motivation on perception. He would have to be feeling that without me she would never have been there. Grace swayed.
How do you like her? Grace said.
I thought you were leaving on Tuesday, Grace. It was all set, I thought.
You thought I was gone, she said. But I found her. How do you like her?
He ignored that. He said Grace, it was definite when you were going to leave. I have to go back to … I have to go back.
Ah, but Nel I have a few things to do. He lets you call him Nel. But pretty soon I’ll be gone.
Well. So when you do think?
Don’t be so anxious, she said. He’s divorcing me, she said to me.
He blew his cheeks out.
Everybody wants a divorce, she said. Why is that?
This isn’t edifying, Grace, he said, sterner.
I never am, she said. Oh I know. So you two just talk instead of me. That might be edifying. I think.
She pulled herself up very straight, in a parody of girlish interest that didn’t work. She tried to go up on her toes for some reason. She swayed badly and we all, reaching for her, somewhat grabbed each other. My elbow went against his midsection but it told me nothing.
I got a chair for her and she sat down. He poised his right hand over his head and then brought the nails down on his part, a self-calming strategy related to acupressure and something I only saw him do in absolute extremis.
It was now awkward or impossible for us to say anything to each other, unless I could come up with something.
Bits of the audience had come back. A nice, very meek, serious young Motswana guy who worked at the Botswana Book Centre was edging deferentially toward our viper’s knot, all unknowing. I knew this guy because whenever I went to the bookshop he was reading Penguin Classics, like The Mill on the Floss, for some reason. His main job was to carry bales of the Rand Daily Mail and the Star up to the front of the shop and then to carry the unsold ones back, which he did. But in the intervals he moved quickly back to his studies.
He wanted to talk to Denoon, but Grace summoned him over.
Africa is huge, isn’t it? she said. I find it huge.
He was dumbfounded, but said it was. Nelson rescued him.
He wanted to ask Nelson what could be done to stop the Boers. But I suddenly was interested in the question of whether Grace was stupid or just drunk. Was she caricaturing herself out of desperation or je m’en foutisme of some kind? How smart was she? Had her hold on Denoon failed because she was below a certain intellectual level?
I went over to her.
It was no use. She wasn’t talking, apparently. It was all nodding or headshaking. She wouldn’t have lunch with me. She didn’t want me to go with her back to the hotel, no no no.
Denoon was concluding a very succinct proposal on sanctions. The way to produce a white revolt against the government in South Africa was to get the four companies in the world that manufactured automobile tires to make a boycott. South Africa would run out of tires in less than a year.
The LGL permsec was standing nervously next to Denoon and waiting for enough of the audience to reassemble for him to thank them for coming. Finally he drifted off.
Denoon went over to organize Grace. He said something, and she said something back like You think I don’t think Africa is pleasant, but I do. I could be very happy around here. Very much so.
Old Naledi
I spent the better part of the next day trying to ascertain where in Gaborone Denoon was staying. Naturally I had to hear once again all the antinomies about him I had already heard. He had renounced his U.S. citizenship versus he was on the verge of going back to redeem the South Bronx. He was personally rich versus he had given all his goods to the poor at some point. He was a genius versus he was finished, a crank. His secret project was in the Kalahari versus being in the Tuli Block. His project was self-financing versus he had inexhaustible funds from Histadrut and/or Olivetti. It made me suspicious that there was consensus on only one point: it was all over with his wife, who had made this last desperate expedition to corner him and get him to reconcile.