The Stranger at the Palazzo D'Oro

by Paul Theroux

  “That'll just make holes and dents. We’re really going to wreck it wicked bad, inside and out.”

  The next Saturday we spent in the woods, lying on our stomachs in the foxhole on the wooded bluff above Doleful Pond, watching for Father Staley’s blue Studebaker. He didn’t show up, though others did—fishermen, lovers, dog walkers. We watched them closely but stayed where we were, and we were well hidden by the leafy branches, for spring had advanced. Twice during the week we made a visit: no Scaly. Maybe he had given up?

  When we did not see him at Mass, we asked Arthur Mutch, Chicky saying, “Father Staley was supposed to teach us some knots.”

  “Father Staley is on a retreat.”

  “What’s a retreat?”

  “It’s what you should do sometime, DePalma,” Arthur Mutch said sternly, because he didn’t like Chicky. “Go to New Hampshire, to pray. Lenten devotion.”

  Whispering to me at the Beaver Patrol, Chicky said, “I bet he’s not praying. Five bucks says he’s whacking off.”

  We did not see Father Staley until just before Easter, saying the Mass on Holy Thursday. We reported this to Walter, who sort of blamed us for Father Staley.

  “We’ll look for him tomorrow,” I said.

  “You going to church again tomorrow?”

  “Good Friday. Holy day of obligation.”

  “I don’t care what you say—that’s worse than us.”

  The Good Friday service lasted almost three hours, and the priests wore elaborate robes and faced the altar, but midway through the incense ceremony, one of the priests turned and swung the thurible at the congregation, waving a cloud of incense at us, and Chicky nudged me, whispering, “Scaly.”

  Attendance at church was not required on Holy Saturday. We didn’t expect to see Father Staley by the pond, but we had the whole day for tracking, and it was a cold sunny day, with some flowers in bloom, and so we were glad to head into the woods. Even if Father Staley didn’t show up, we would have more chances, for the following day was Easter, the start of a week’s vacation.

  Walter was early. He said, “I was in this Bible class. I put up my hand and said, ‘Excuse me.’ The teacher says, ‘Okay.’ So I just left. He thought I was going to the john.”

  Chicky wasn’t listening. He said, “If we kill his car, we’ll put him out of commission.”

  We stopped and had a snack at Panther’s Cave, sitting out of the wind, in the warm sunlight.

  “What have you got?”

  “Bottle of tonic. Some Twinkies. You?”

  “Cheese in a bulkie. Bireley’s Orange.”

  “I ain’t eating, I’m smoking,” Chicky said, and lit a cigarette, and with smoke trickling out of his nose, he looked more than ever in charge.

  The day was lovely, the woods so much greener than on that first day, when Walter had told us his story. We had been cold then, and the goose bumps of fear in our bodies too. Afterward, frightened by the thought of the man chasing Walter, we had stumbled through the woods, not knowing where to go or what to do. Now we knew. The weather was warm, the ground was dry, the woods smelled sweet.

  We were not boys anymore but men with a purpose as we made our way by a zigzag route to the crest of the hill above Doleful Pond, approaching from behind, flattening ourselves on the ground, sliding forward in the leaves until we could see the far shore, then dropping into the foxhole.

  “What did you bring?”

  Walter had taken off his knapsack. “Couple of bricks.”

  “I’ve got the rope,” I said. ‘About fifty feet. Chicky?”

  Chicky kept his eyes on the pond. He said, ‘A potato. A bag of sugar. A couple of tonic bottles. Pair of pliers. Usual stuff.”

  He had always been talkative before, but now that he was in charge he liked to be mysterious. He wasn’t good at schoolwork, but he knew how to fix things, and was even better at breaking them.

  “Someone’s coming,” Walter said.

  But it was the Chevy, the lovers. We watched closely.

  “They’re making out—he’s feeling her up. Hey, this guy I know told me the best way to get laid,” Chicky said. “You get a girl in a car, huh. ‘Cheryl, hey, let’s go for a ride.’ Then you drive into the middle of the boondocks, like where they are now, and when it gets dark you park the car and shut off the engine and you say, ‘Okay, fuck or walk.”’

  “What’s supposed to happen?” Walter said.

  “Listen, banana man. The guy leans over. 'Fuck or walk.' It’s dark, it’s cold, it’s wicked far. So the girl has to take her clothes off and let him bang her, or else she’ll have to walk home.”

  “I’d go with them,” Walter said. “I’d get sloppy seconds.”

  “You’d just jerk off. You’d leave pecker tracks.”

  I said, “When I was young and in my prime, I used to jerk off all the time. But now that I am old and gray, I only jerk off twice a day.”

  “Andy plays with the one-eyed worm.”

  “And you get hind tit.”

  “You can kiss the snotty end of my fuck stick,” Chicky said.

  The next time we looked up, the Chevy was reversing down the road.

  “She came across,” Chicky said. “Didn’t have to walk.”

  By now the sun was low enough to cast long-legged shadows across the pond and the road. The place where the Chevy had been parked lay in darkness.

  None of us saw the blue Studebaker appear. All we saw was its rear lights winking as it braked, sliding into the shadows at the end of the road, where we had removed the No Parking sign and the iron pipe barrier. Its rumplike trunk was blue, though just a few minutes after it parked, even while we were staring at it, we could not make out the color.

  Each of us had one job to do. Walter’s was first—to get Father Staley out of the car and up the road, chasing him, long enough for Chicky and me to do our jobs.

  “There’s someone with him.”

  “Probably some kid.”

  “Maybe someone we know.”

  “Like they say in Russia, tough shitsky,” Chicky said.

  “What are you going to do?” Walter said.

  Slow-witted and sly, liking the mystery, Chicky said, “I got my ways. Just make sure that bastard is out of the car and up the road for a few minutes to give me time.”

  “If he sees us, we’re screwed,” I said.

  “He’s only going to see Herkis,” Chicky said. “Herkis is Protestant!”

  “Let’s put on bandannas,” I said. The word was from the cowboy movies. I took out my handkerchief.

  “You mean a snot rag,” Chicky said, and shook out his own and tied it around the lower half of his face, as I was doing.

  We crouched in the foxhole on the bluff, watching the car. The sun sank some more, the temperature changed, the woods grew cooler, damper, darker, while the pond held the last light of the day.

  “What’s the bastard doing?” Chicky said.

  The end of the road where the car was parked was so shadowy, a person passing by would not have noticed the car. After it had parked, it had seemed to darken and shrink and disappear.

  “I can’t see him,” Walter said.

  Chicky said in his conspirator’s whisper, “If we wait any longer, he might take off. So let’s go. You’re dumping the bricks, Herkis. Andy, you’re doing the bumper.”

  “What about you?”

  “You’ll see. Meet back here, after.” Chicky then put his finger to his lips: no more talking.

  Keeping low, we descended through the bushes single file to the edge of the pond. We used the thick brush at the shore to hide ourselves. Approaching the car from the rear, we could not see anything of the people inside. We were sure it was Father Staley’s car, but where was his head? Now we were kneeling.

  Chicky turned and poked Walter’s arm, and as he did, Walter snorted air and looked alert. With a brick in each hand, Walter rocked back to a squatting position, sort of sighing as he did so. I could see how angry he was from the way his head
was jammed between his shoulders and the sounds of his shoes when he crossed from the dirt path to the cinders.

  We heard nothing but his shoes for a moment and then two loud sounds, one of a brick hitting the metal body of the car, the other the crunch of a brick against the windshield. Just after that, a complaining two-part shout that was so long the first part was muffled inside the car, and the second part a very loud protest as it was released by the car door swinging open.

  Father Staley stumbled out, pulling at his clothes, and Walter screamed “Homo!” as he ran into the woods, and he was gone, hidden by darkness, before Father Staley had stumbled twenty feet. But Father Staley was still going after him.

  My hands trembled as I tied the bowline knot on the front bumper. The other end of the rope, another bowline, I tied to the nearest tree. While I was tying the knots, Chicky rushed from the rear of the car, where he had been doing something, to the side, where he was pulling the flap that covered the gas cap. The last sound I heard was the smash of glass, the tonic bottles under the tires.

  Passing the car door, which was still gaping open, I saw someone inside, a boy, huddled in the seat, his head down, his knees up. I was glad I could not see his face. Then I was off.

  Chicky kicked the car repeatedly, making it shake, and ran, flinging his feet forward, and crashed into the bushes by the pond. He was right behind me, running hard, feeling the same panic that frightened me, the going-nowhere running of a bad dream, skidding on the soil that was cool and moist from the end of day, like running on fudge. We were racing in darkness, but after all the stakeout time we knew where we were going, and when we got to the lookout boulder on the bluff I knew we were safe, because I saw the car's headlights switch on, blazing against the green leaves.

  “He’s taking off.”

  Chicky said, “Did you see me kick the freakin’ car? I didn’t even give a shit!”

  The blue Studebaker was still stationary, its lights dimming each time the engine turned over.

  A noise behind us startled us, but before we could react, Walter flopped down and said, “I wrecked his window!”

  “Lookit,” Chicky said.

  The car grunted and roared, the gearshift grinding, the engine strained against the rope I had tied—strained hard, making no progress, trying to reverse. When the rope snapped with a loud twang I expected to see the car shoot backward, but it had not gone ten feet before the engine coughed and died. Chicky was laughing. The engine groaned to life again—Chicky said, “Hubba-hubba, ding-ding”—and then gasped and died again. But seconds later it was stammering, the intervals shorter and shorter, the engine noise briefer, until at last there was only silence.

  “Car’s freakin’ totaled,” Chicky said.

  And gloating, combing his hair, Chicky explained: my rope had made the engine rev, but he had jammed a potato into the tailpipe, to delay Father Staley in case the rope broke. He had put a pound of sugar into the gas tank, and that was now in the fuel line, gumming up the pistons. The engine was destroyed, the car was a wreck. Father Staley was stranded in the woods with whomever he had brought there.

  After we left the darkness of the woods, there was one last thing, and it was I who raised it. I said, “What about confession?”

  Chicky said, “Was that a sin?”

  “We were helping Walter,” I said.

  “Maybe it’s a sin if you’re helping a Protestant,” Chicky said.

  “Not a mortal sin,” I said.

  “What’s the difference?” Walter asked.

  “If it’s a mortal sin, you go to Hell.”

  We detoured past St. Ray’s to go to confession, Walter watching our guns in the shadows beside the church, near the statue of Saint Raphael with his wings and his halo. I confessed seeing the pictures of the naked women, and fighting, and having impure thoughts: venial sins.

  The next day, Easter, we performed our Easter duty, sitting at Mass, Walter the unbeliever between us in the pew, not knowing when to kneel or pray—skinny, blotchy-faced with embarrassment when he stood up, surveying the priests in their starched white lace-trimmed smocks, and whispering, “Where’s Scaly?”

  Scaly was not on the altar. The pastor’s sermon that day was about the meaning of Easter, Christ slipping out of his tomb, being reborn, pure souls. That was true for me; the holy day reflected exactly how I felt, and made me happy. The smell of the church was the smell of new clothes. When the singing started I shared the Sing to the Lord hymnbook with Walter, who mumbled while I sang loudly,

  Christ is risen from the dead,

  Alleluia, alleluia!

  Risen as he truly said,

  Alleluia, alleluia!

  Father Staley had vanished. All the pastor said was “Reverend Staley has been transferred to a new parish.” People said they missed him. At Scouts, Arthur Mutch talked about Father Staley’s contribution to the troop. His hard work. “He was a vet.” But Mutch wasn’t happy. The blue Studebaker we destroyed was his: Scaly had borrowed it. The thing was a writeoff.

  “Banana man,” Chicky said. That night he said he was quitting the Scouts.

  No one knew what happened to Father Staley, and we never found out who the boy was—maybe a Protestant, like Walter; a secret sin. That was also the mystery of the woods. We had discovered that, going there as Scouts. The woods might be dangerous but the woods were free, the trees had hidden us, and had changed me, turned us into Indians, made us friends, so we couldn’t be Scouts anymore, because of Walter. When I quit the Scouts, my mother said, “You’ll have to get a part-time job, then,” and I thought: Great, now I’ll be able to buy a better gun.

  We had made Staley disappear. We had made ourselves disappear. No one knew us, what we had done, what we could do, how close we had come to killing a man. I was glad—it meant I was alone, I was safe, now no one would ever know me.

  An African Story

  1

  AN UNSPOKEN RULE stipulates that a writer does not appropriate another writer’s talk. The one who says, “An odd thing happened to me,” and tells you the oddity, is sharing a confidence that must not be betrayed, because he will eventually use it. Telling you is a way of trying it out, and the better he tells it, the more he possesses it, making it untouchable. There is no question of your borrowing it: any use of it is theft.

  Lourens Prinsloo told me what happened to him at the age of sixty in similar words, stilted because his mother tongue was Afrikaans: “Quite a curious thing befell me.” But now he is dead, killed as a consequence of the events he described to me, so the story is mine to relate. No one else knows.

  I could tell this story by inventing a fictional name for Prinsloo, but he is so well known, his work so widely read, that there is no point. And I have been around too long to hide myself in fiction.

  I say “well known” and “widely read,” but that is in South Africa, of course. Prinsloo does not exist in the United States—untranslated, unpublished, not spoken of. I would never have been aware of him were it not for Etienne Leroux, my near namesake, author of many novels in Afrikaans, some of them translated into English, such as Seven Days at the Silbersteins and The Third Eye. Leroux, a farmer in Koffiefontein, in the Orange Free State, was introduced to me by Graham Greene. Greene put some aspects of Leroux’s farm life into The Human Factor, on the basis of several visits.

  When Leroux came to London in the 1970s he urged me to visit him in South Africa. I did so, many years later, when I was traveling from Johannesburg to Cape Town after South Africa’s political transformation. Lourens Prinsloo was Leroux’s houseguest.

  “I am homeless at the moment,” Prinsloo said, “but I am an optimist.”

  Leroux called him Louwtjie, pronounced “low-key,” a name that suited him, for he had the most placid disposition. Prinsloo spent the day licking his thumb and turning over the typescript pages of his short story collection in the English translation, preparing it for publication. This typescript he shared with me—lucky for me. Because of a legal dispu
te that arose after his death, his family squabbling over the copyright and the royalties, there was no publication in English.

  2

  The best introduction to Prinsloo is the collection of stories I was privileged to read. Too long for magazine publication, too short for individual books, the stories—novellas, really—appeared two or three at a time in slim volumes, published in Afrikaans in Cape Town. They were admired by Afrikaners, but not enough of them to allow Prinsloo to write full-time. So, like Leroux, Prinsloo remained a farmer—lucerne and cattle and seed maize—supporting fifty black families.

  The farmer-writers of South Africa were like the literary men of old Russia, running country estates and writing at night by lamplight of the rural life they led, servants’ quarrels, local gossip, scandals, superstitions, the low comedy of country life with its adulteries and pettiness, its vendettas and pieties. Blacks in South Africa were like the serfs in old Russia—owned, beaten, barefoot hut dwellers, worked to death. The setting was not a country but a twilit world of loneliness and squabbles, with darkness all around it.

  Prinsloo’s stories were strange. Very long, very detailed, vividly depicted, they were like tales from another age. They had all the elements of Russian stories, but when animals and trees were mentioned they were freakish—two-headed calves, night-blooming bat roosts; and racial oddity abounded—albinos, freckled Bushmen, white men with one Zulu on a remote branch of the family tree. The stories tended to be forty to fifty pages long—what magazine would publish them? But published two or three together in a book, they looked impressive, well printed, on good paper, with tight bindings, old-fashioned handiwork of self-sufficient South Africans. I could not read them but I did have this translation, the pages thickened, physically dented, by the typewritten letters. That in itself reminded me how old typescripts showed the force of the prose, how words were punched into the page, underlinings were slashes and some exclamation marks punctured the paper, and altogether the typewriter gave the pages the raised texture of Braille.