undetectable as that was, thanks to the genius of his bootmaker. Ray knew charm when he saw it. But charm goes with vanity, he thought. Vanity was there. The cut of Morel’s attire was toward formfitting. Wrists as thick as those could only come from hours of boringly squeezing grip-builders, a pair of which Iris had given him several years ago, Ray now remembered, and which he had never used.
“Say hello,” Iris muttered to Ray.
He was going to.
He disliked Morel, genuinely, which came as a relief since up to now his attitude toward him had been based on assumptions. Morel was lighter-skinned than he had appeared to be in his ID photograph. Plenty of Batswana would interact with him as a lakhoa. He would have something to work against. American blacks could be the most disappointed people you came across in Africa. I hate arrogance, Ray thought, and inward arrogance like his I hate the worst. Ray judged himself to be marginally taller than Morel, although it was hard to see why he bothered to care about it since he knew that in fact Morel’s height was a function of his orthopedic footwear. He felt stupid for caring about it, but he couldn’t help it. And only one of Morel’s shoes was built up anyway. He put his hand out. He kept his gaze up, not to show any interest in something he was supposed to know nothing about, Morel’s invisible disability.
Iris said hello, tentatively.
Morel’s hair was close-cropped and dense. In general he was as represented by his photograph, if just that much softer at the edges that a couple of years of passing time would guarantee. Ray thought, Age operates in one of two modes, it either withers you, or it puffs you out… I am withering.
Morel shook Ray’s hand with average force and smiled at him and Iris. There had been nothing to notice in the moment of acknowledgment, which had been casual and quick because Morel was busy being upbraided in Setswana and English by someone Ray knew about, a character, the head of the Star and Arm of David group, one of the thousand offshoots of the Zionist Christian Church.
Unless he was a superb actor, Morel had had no particular reaction to seeing Ray for the first time. It looked as though Ray could relax a little. Of course he had been impossibly positioned to pick up anything in Iris’s expression that might have been there when Morel greeted them, because she had been almost behind Ray as they approached, hanging back, which was unlike her.
The harangue stopped as a young woman, someone associated with the moruti’s group, arrived presenting a plate of food gathered from the buffet. Morel declined, saying he was fasting. Probably this was an evasion. The food was as usual—leaden-looking samoosas, fried chicken… drumsticks only. There were small paper cups of oily bean salad, but no forks, so that eating the beans involved a maneuver more like drinking. Only Morel and the moruti were offered anything. The young woman attended her moruti, wiping his hands for him with a paper towel when he was through. He asked her to find him some tea and she went off to do that.
Ray moved forward, intending to say something more to Morel, but the moruti subtly blocked him. He was a heavy man, all in black, in his late fifties, Ray judged. On a ribbon around his neck hung a medallion of some kind, which he kissed brusquely before resuming with Morel.
“Should we go?” Iris whispered.
Ray was definite that they shouldn’t.
The moruti was proceeding in Setswana. The harangue part one had been mostly in English with short deviations into Setswana, or so Ray had gathered as he’d approached the group. Morel was listening, with his head down, respectfully, and then, startling Ray, he replied to the moruti in
Not learning Setswana was something Ray held against himself. His original rationalization, because that was what it was, for not learning any particular African language had been that there was no telling where in the continent he might be posted next. He had known it was a rationalization but he had never been able to make himself go beyond learning the basic necessities in the local language anywhere, and in a certain way it had been useful, because host-country nationals would say things to one another in frankness in front of him in their own languages and feel comfortable doing that, and sometimes he had had the option of taping them and securing material somebody else could translate, useful material, often enough. He was normally set up to tape at the drop of a hat. He was today. So over time the original rationalization had gotten stronger. Also, foreign languages had always been difficult for him, a subject outside his best aptitudes. Working in foreign languages, for him, had been like working underwater. He was thinking of his struggle with Latin, which he had been forced to master out of fealty to great Milton, fealty and love. And had been unnatural and difficult for him and he had discovered in himself a mental tendency to forget what he’d learned, like the body expelling a foreign object. And that had led to a defect in his embrace, his total embrace, of the body of Milton, as compared to that of the show-off Latinists in the field, the others. Certain things were not in him, and he had paid for it. Some of his resistance to learning other languages could be attributed to chauvinism about English, some hard relic of his upbringing. Undoubtedly there were other relics as bad or worse he had never had the time to fix. Iris would know. She might have a list. There were seven hundred thousand words available in the English language and in the next closest, German, only four hundred thousand. Someone had written a very funny poem saying that German was originally the language that gargoyles spoke. And as for French, he couldn’t wait for it to become a dead language, since no nation, a nation of peacocks, had ever deserved it more. It was coming, they knew it and were hysterical about it, but adieu, adieu. But still he should have learned Setswana.
And if he wasn’t going to go ahead and learn Setswana, it was certainly stupid of him, and also indefensible, to have pretended to Boyle that he was fluent in it. How base was it to make himself into a liar to Boyle, and how pointless was it to do it over something that didn’t actually matter to his work, to his productivity, and also how stupid was it to try to impress Boyle by claiming a skill Boyle wouldn’t have the sense to value?
Comma Lesole was there in the crowd around Morel. Comma had recently been promoted to chief of maintenance at St. James and Ray couldn’t remember if he had congratulated him or not. Guiding Iris, he moved next to Comma Lesole and touched his shoulder.
“Dumela, rra,” Ray said to him. “Can you say what this is going on about?”
“Dumela, rra, when he can stop I shall say it to you.” But he wanted to be able to listen closely for the moment.
“Very good. But the moruti is…? His name is what?”
“He is their bishop, rra. He is called Bishop Tsatsilebe and you must call him your grace every time.”
He didn’t think Iris had ever met Comma. She was going to be curious about the name. Ray wouldn’t be able to help her because he had never asked Comma why that particular name, his registered Christian name and not a nickname, had been given to him. Odd names were commonplace in Tswana town culture. Questioning people about them was gauche and stamped you as a greenhorn. You just could not overreact to the recurrent necessity to address someone you worked with as Toboggan or Judas or Substitute.
The bishop’s tone was angry. Morel was listening, but saying less and less. He was having trouble knowing when it was appropriate for him to respond. The bishop left large intervals between the points he was making, presumably to allow them to register, but the intervals were just that. A sequence of pronouncements was in progress and the bishop was making it plain that Morel’s attempts to respond to each point were premature and unwelcome. Ray didn’t need to know Setswana to recognize that a good deal of the bishop’s presentation involved emphatic repetition of the same statements.
There was a pause as the bishop was handed his tea, extended by consultations with several of his followers as to whether an umbrella should be held above his head. A woman who was probably his wife pushed a tam-o’- shanter into his hands, which he tossed angrily away. He declined the umbrella. A follower retrieved the tam-o’- shanter.
Morel had a trait which, in Ray’s experience, was common among important or self-important people. This was a reflex tendency to be aware at all times of who in the immediate area of the important person might be more important to talk to than present company. It was a scanning reflex. Morel was doing it now.
Ray decided to bother Comma Lesole again.
Still reluctant, Comma Lesole said, “I cannot tell you all what-what he has said, rra. This chap.” He indicated Morel. He said, “He has said many things, many things. Well well, it was not good. Ehe.”
Ray liked the standard local pronunciation of “said,” making it rhyme with “aid,” as “says” was pronounced to rhyme with “gaze.” It elevated what was being reported, somehow. Maybe it had a biblical ring. The American
