I wish I had a videotape of the way they organized themselves. They were very courteous, but then so had I been very courteous, starting out with Dumelang, bo bana and so on. We had a deal in about three minutes. I tried to imagine American kids in a parallel situation. They would go for the police or their mothers. One thing wrong with America, according to Denoon, is that the society is converging to suppress unsupervised mass play, largely through the mechanisms of TV and adult-run sports like Little League. His theory was that if you leave young males alone they will go in play situations from fascism to feudalism to democracy. So now there is a diffuse and thwarted attraction to fascism that is getting played out at the adult level. He was fecund with theories. He also thought the increase in heart attacks in the white West could be traced to the decline in stair climbing, id est to the victory of the ranch-style house and the elevator. The switch from tub bathing to showers was a related public health disaster because tub bathing does something physiologically unique having to do with the vagus nerve. Part of his feeling about gang play for boys came from his own sense of personal deprivation in that area. When he was growing up in East Oakland there were vacant lots all over, and gangs of boys having mudball wars, building clubhouses, forming confederations. But his weekends had been eaten up with compulsory churchgoing and compulsory shopping attendance, which prevented him from engaging fully in these, as he called them, political experiments. His mother was the motive force behind his weekend captivity, and he tried in retrospect to be forgiving. She wanted him with her out of spiritual loneliness, was his guess. But he never forgave his father for not intervening to free him, at least from the shopping.
The Tutwanes were in fact wellknown in Old Naledi. Our deal was that two of the bana would take me there quickly, but first I had to hand over the paint can lid. I acceded, and we went off.
Intellectual Love
I hadn’t wanted to offer money for information earlier, just out of prudence. I didn’t want to be seen as a white moneybags careering around out of her depth. But now it was all right and I gave a few thebe to my little escorts as they prepared to flee.
The Tutwane place was a surprise. It was very shipshape and well-kempt. A low storm fence surrounded the plot. The house was a good-sized ovaldavel, recently limewashed, with a good thatch roof. There was an elephant grass enclosure to one side of the house, from which lustral sounds were issuing. At points along the fence were wooden tubs containing various bushy plants. The yard was beaten earth, neatly swept. And in one corner of the plot was an outhouse, also freshly limewashed. I needed to urinate desperately.
If I could go back in time and rechoreograph the first three minutes chez Tutwane I would. Of course I would still have to get into the outhouse tout de suite whatever choreography obtained, thanks to the accursed female bladder. If there is an evolutionary justification for the pygmy bladder assigned to the female race I would like to know what it is.
As I was knocking at the gate saying koko, the solar democrat backed through the elephant grass carrying a basin of graywater, which he began to empty delicately in a line along the edge of the planting. The pouring did it. My situation was extremely urgent.
He had been washing his torso, obviously, and was still barechested, wearing cutoffs and those egregious sandals that looked like cothurni. He heard me yank the gate clip up, turned, saw me standing there in the gloaming, then, oddly enough, stepped back through the elephant grass. I didn’t know it then, but it was modesty. He was retreating to get a shirt on. It was unnecessary. His midsection was nice, better than I’d expected. There was some rondure, but nothing undue at his age or out of reach of the lash of diet and situps.
I ran to the outhouse. The interior was tidy and decent and there were squares of newspaper on a spike in the wall. It was dark. I proceeded mostly by feel. There was a candle on the floor I could have lit. There was, I could tell, something slightly nonstandard about the toilet seat itself.
I thought I heard Nelson say Wait, from a distance. Next I sensed him just outside the outhouse, agitated. I hurried to finish. As I exited I clarified for myself that the toilet opening was definitely not usual, being like a keyhole turned sideways.
He was annoyed and redfaced. He matched his lurid dashiki.
What have I done? I asked him. You remember we met?
Hello, yes. Look, did you just urinate? I’m sorry I’m asking you this. That thing should be locked.
I did, I said, astounded.
He was irritated, no question, but mostly at himself. The subject matter was on the intimate side for such short acquaintance as ours. I was mortified.
He explained while I apologized a few times, each time more fervently. The people who lived in this place, who were away, had been good enough to help him with an experimental trial of a composting latrine. The principle of the privy was to separate urine from feces, to conduct urine separately off. It seems I was the only educated human being who had never heard of the universally known fact that urea keeps feces from composting properly. Correspondingly, I had to be the only development-connected person unaware that the single most needed scientific invention in the world was not the wireless transmission of electrical energy but the compound that would neutralize urea when it got mixed with nightsoil. All this was true enough, to my shame. In the absence of such a discovery, there was this experimental Burmese toilet that so far only the Confucians of the Far East had had the discipline to use correctly over long periods of time, except for the Tutwanes. Denoon himself had somewhat redesigned the toilet hole. All you had to do was slide to your left for the urine phase and back to your right for the other. Third world agriculture was waiting for this cornucopia of natural fertilizer to be proved out, and I had been unhelpful.
Finally I said I am horribly sorry about this but I can’t keep repeating it this way without starting to feel like a machine.
That made him see himself, apparently.
The celerity with which people recognize something is spilt milk is a main measure of their rationality. We were both quick in this way. He got over being mad at me very expeditiously. It was the same with me. I had shot myself in the foot at the beginning of the race, but the thing to do was to proceed anyway with as much vivacity as I could dredge up.
I thought that next he was probably going to make me state my business. Instead he was decent. He assumed I was there about his project. We could talk, he said, but up front I should know that there were no openings, volunteer or other, at the site. Tsau was always “the site.”
Given the way things had begun, I was clearly not going to talk myself into Tsau that night. The lesser task I had to rise to was to convince him I was colleague material. I was not to be mistaken for a world traveler, for example, someone out of the self-made pauper stratum of first world young people bumming through the third world in search of cheap dope and the unspoiled in general and taking up space in the jampacked jitneys and ferries the involuntary poor are stuck with. He had to see I was a trained person. This was herculean enough.
He got tea for us.
We sat down. He faced me.
So do you like the Batswana? he asked. I sensed this was a precipice.
I don’t know yet, I said. Apparently that was right.
We had a silence.
I took a chance with Tell me how you disappear into a project? I’m skeptical. You’re a lakhoa. I don’t see how knowing the language can be enough.