The Stranger at the Palazzo D'Oro

by Paul Theroux

  Etienne Leroux, known familiarly as Stephen, didn’t mind that I was absorbed in Prinsloo’s manuscript rather than one of his. Typically generous, he said, “If you read these stories you will understand this place.” I supposed “this place” to mean Africa, though maybe he meant Koffiefontein, OFS.

  The stories were the more terrifying for being rural comedies. The element of the grotesque that I associate with farming was in the grain of all of them, for a raw acceptance penetrates the barnyard. The nearer we live to animals, the more naked life is. Yet while varieties of animals and humans can seem ridiculous and conspiratorial on a big aromatic farm, they are partners deep down, for farm life makes everyone fatalistic. Faulkner at his broadest is a good example of that. Not much is hidden, modernity does not exist though faith is everywhere, life unfolds outdoors, and people's lives come to resemble those of their animals. Existence is a browsing and a fattening, and then comes the harvest and the slaughter.

  The first story was the strangest. A white farmer in a remote dorp of the Free State lusted after one of his female servants. He could see that she recognized his desire, but she made no move, merely waited for him to act. He did nothing. He was nearing sixty, his wife a bit older, and “she had shut up shop some years before,” which I took to mean had lost interest in sex.

  The farmer's wife was approaching a thorn tree one day to photograph a bird (a gray-headed bush shrike) when a snake (a boomslang) wrapped on a bough above her dropped to the earth and bit her. She died soon after. I was later to find that Prinsloo’s stories were full of the particularities of South African natural history.

  Very soon after his wife’s death, the farmer consoled himself with his African servant. But he was so ashamed afterward that he did not repeat the deed. When the African woman appeared at his door she was turned away. Humiliated, she left his employ, but not before putting a curse on the farmer.

  The farmer mourned his wife and asked her forgiveness. He took to staring in a mirror to assess his misery. One day he noticed a mole on his face that he had never seen before. Within a few days it grew larger, and soon it was “the size of a Krugerrand,” not a mole anymore but a deep brown blotch, an irregular stain that spread to cover his cheek. He could not hide it. Other parts of his body were similarly affected. The lower part of his left leg was brown. Soon his entire body was dark.

  At first he dared not show his face in public, and for months—captive to his changing color—he did not leave his house. But when, inevitably, he had to go to town, he hid his dusky face. To his surprise he was not recognized, nor was he singled out—was not noticed at all. He came and went unseen by anyone, and with this new racial coloration became invisible.

  He was so unrecognizable that, although he was fully present, a rumor circulated that he had died. To deny the rumor would have meant revealing himself, and so he let the rumor circulate. Hearing of his death, the African woman showed up with her child—the fruit of their brief union. She intended to stake her claim to the property, using their child as proof of what had occurred between them. The child was white. The woman was chased away by the servants, arrested for kidnapping a white child, and given a long sentence. That story was titled “The Curse.”

  That element of the supernatural seemed to be a trait in Prinsloo’s work, and was more believable than the sort of thing you find in, for example, Edward Lucas White’s “Lukundoo.” In that horror story a white explorer in Africa comes down with a case of apparent measles—boils, anyway—and suffers as they grow, and at last, pricking them, he finds that each boil contains a little black man standing in his flesh, upright on the center of each eruption, looking furious. Prinsloo’s stories were subtler than that, but then Prinsloo considered himself an African.

  In “Katje and Koelie,” the lives of an old woman and her servant are depicted with ironic sympathy. The women, one black, one white, the same age, have been raised together on a remote farm in the eastern Transvaal. At first they are playmates; then the black woman, Koelie, becomes Katje’s servant, washing her clothes, shining her boots. Katje teaches Koelie to read and write, and for a while the servant excels in her studies and speaks of leaving; but, hearing this, Katje forbids it, ends the lessons, and Koelie is reduced to servitude again, until Katje falls ill and is nursed by Koelie, who makes all the decisions. In middle life they have become like a married couple. Katje’s eyesight fails. Koelie becomes her eyes, and because she is literate she writes checks for Katje, deals with Katje’s money, and becomes Katje’s protector.

  You think that something sinister is about to occur when Prinsloo describes them arm in arm, the black servant steering her white mistress, but it is only a characteristic death scene, one of Prinsloo’s signature devices: the white woman, sleepwalking, falls and breaks her hip, and lying an entire night, she is set upon by huge (“mouse-sized”) armored crickets (Acanthoplus dis-coidalis), which chew her flesh. Katje is found in the morning by Koelie, dead, part of her face eaten away. Koelie buries her lifelong friend and keeps one of the crickets, not, as the African staff thinks, for muti (medicine), but as the embodiment of Katje, now and then—this is the last paragraph—allowing the cricket to chew on her own arm.

  “The Justus Family” reminded me of Arthur Schnitzler’s play Reigen: a series of ten encounters takes place, all of them sexual assignations, and all the characters change partners. In the first scene the soldier is bedding the shopgirl, in the second scene the shopgirl is being wooed by a lawyer, in the third the lawyer is pouncing on the society woman, and so forth until the last pairing, the soldier again, with the woman from the penultimate scene, linking her in this human chain to the first scene. It’s about syphilis, some critics have said; but why? Reigen is about how the world works. “The Justus Family” had a similar movement—peristaltic almost.

  Prinsloo’s story, which opens with an obscure funeral, I took to be autobiographical, since there were eight children in it, the same as in Prinsloo’s family. Each of the children sought the approval of a domineering mother. Little alliances were formed among the children but none were secure; in fact, no sooner had one sibling confided in another than that one used the confidence to jeer at the sibling and take the secret to a brother or sister, who in turn passed it on, whispering it to another brother or sister, who of course broke the promise of confidence, undermining the teller and becoming the subject of more whispers. Peristalsis.

  This story of apparent betrayal—no one is true, no one keeps a secret, everyone is mocked—is the more sinister and unsettling for the figure of the mother, a highly respected Boer matriarch and widow, who in fact keeps the whole process going. Her presence gives “The Justus Family” more density than Schnitzler's play, because it is more than just a round of sordid encounters; it involves complex interaction.

  Whenever Mother Justus detects a note of resolution she steps in and stirs, feeding the whispers with whispers of her own, and so the story of the Justus family is really the story of this woman, whose children seem less and less malicious and more and more the victims of a manipulative and insecure mind. The shocked children realize their secrets have been betrayed. Mother Justus laughs and says, “If they were secrets, you wouldn't have told me.”

  But they love and obey her, and when a black farm hand makes an offhand remark about her tyranny he is set upon by the children and killed. The obscure funeral on the first page is his.

  The most ingenious and modern of Prinsloo’s long stories was one of his last, written in his period of birthday melancholy—perhaps for that reason it was his funniest, his crudest, his most unsparing. It is called “The Translator.”

  The translator of the title is a wealthy farmer of citrus in Nelspruit named Finsch, who on his sixtieth birthday acquires the ability (we don't learn how, but it is so convincing we don't ask) to translate what people say to him into what they really mean. The story—novella, really—is all subtext and no text. In a verbal sense everyone who encounters Finsch is naked: nothing is
hidden from him, people’s motives are baldly apparent.

  I can only approximate the dialogue because I am recounting it from memory. The narrative is almost all dialogue, and the piece would make a superbly wicked play. As I mentioned earlier, I was given a thick typescript of Prinsloo’s stories at Etienne Leroux’s house. I spent a day and a night with it, and then was told to hand it back. I was not able to make notes. The only photocopier at the time and place was a big inky machine, predating the mimeograph. It was a Gestetner brand Cyclostyle machine which produced cloudy brown representations of text on crinkly curly sheets of flimsy paper that faded and became unreadable if sunlight fell upon them.

  One of the aspects of the story that is lost in translation, Prinsloo told me, is the elaborate courtesy of the man Finsch, faced by people who plainly dislike him and want something from him. The moral, if such a cynical tale can be said to contain a moral, is that no one means what he says; everyone is out to get something they don’t deserve. But as soon as you conclude that in these encounters there is not an ounce of generosity, you realize that Finsch—for his amazing gift of translation—is the soul of kindness.

  The narrative occupies an entire day in the life of Farmer Finsch, a day in which he sees an old friend, interviews some men for the job of driver, has lunch with his son-in-law, and later, walking in the graveyard outside Nelspruit (all Prinsloo’s stories seemed to take place in deeply rural South African settings), meets and talks with a pretty young woman.

  In the opening paragraph, the early morning of that day, the old friend stops by for coffee. Finsch greets the man amiably and the friend says, “You look terrible—much worse than me. Your face is fat and blotchy, probably from drinking.”

  The reader thinks: What’s going on here? But Prinsloo knows what he is doing; gives no warnings or preliminaries, just plunges into these heartless dialogues. Finsch the translator is implacable.

  “And how are you?”

  “As if you care, you egotist. Your money has blinded you to the misery of the rest of us poor souls.”

  “I haven’t seen you for ages,” Finsch says.

  “I never liked you! Once a year would be too often! God, what a scraggy neck you have. Watery eyes, too. The blood blotches are stamped on your face.”

  Antagonistic people are scrupulous noticers of faults, Prinsloo seems to be saying. And Finsch, although burdened by this prescience, does not reveal what he is hearing.

  “One of these days we should have dinner,” he says.

  “I don’t think I could stand a whole evening. And now I want to go. I want to find a way of ending this conversation. It must be those cigars that make your skin like parchment.”

  “Would you like a cigar? Here, take one.”

  “You think that offering me a cigar means I’m your friend? On the contrary, it makes me despise you more, because it reminds me of how little you’ve given me in all the years I’ve known you.”

  More of this and then the friend goes away, and Finsch is not insulted but calmed by the encounter. And though we have not been told explicitly what Finsch’s gift is, we know what is happening when the men show up for the driver interviews.

  “A bit more than a driver,” as Finsch explains, for he also needs a handyman and mechanic, someone to keep the car in good repair.

  “What experience do you have?” Finsch asks the first man, who is a big blond ex-army sergeant.

  “How much experience do I need? I can drive well, as if you’d know the difference. Put me behind the wheel and I will dazzle you.”

  “Are you knowledgeable about engines?”

  “The usual. I can change the oil, I can fuss and fool. Anything serious would go to a real mechanic—you can afford it. You can’t expect me to know everything.”

  “I need someone who’s handy,” Finsch says.

  “People like you always say that without having the slightest idea of what you mean. You’d never guess how little I know. But I know more than you.”

  Other interviews follow, all the men just as harsh as this; and then a new note is struck, one of timidity, the man revealing himself as fearful of Finsch.

  “I’ll bet you’re always snooping,” this man says. “You’ll be watching everything I do.”

  Finsch says, “You’ll be expected to look after the car as well as drive it.”

  “And it will never be enough for you. You’ll do nothing but complain and make my life hell.”

  After more exchanges, the man cringing, terrified of Finsch, he is offered the job, which, almost mute with fear—little to translate—the man accepts.

  Lunch with the son-in-law was painful to read for all the obvious reasons, the young man mocking Finsch and reflecting on what a close resemblance he has to his selfish pig of a daughter and saying, “I am going to get something from you, or else. I am just deciding what it is I want.” Finsch remains serene. We see that he is content with his seemingly diabolical gift.

  Later in the afternoon, in Nelspruit's white graveyard, Finsch meets a young woman. He realizes, as soon as she begins telling him she is there “to mourn a dear friend,” that her boyfriend has just left for a job in Durban. While she talks to Finsch she is pondering a scheme to ensnare him—get some money out of him—so that she can join her boyfriend.

  “I see you glancing at my breasts. I know you want to play with them. You are so simple. But it is going to cost you. I know I can make you pay.”

  “My wife is buried here,” Finsch says.

  “That is wonderful news. You will be all the more willing to do as I say. You're pathetic, but what a lovely ring on your finger. That will be mine.”

  “I miss her greatly,” Finsch says.

  “One glimpse of my naked body and you’ll stop missing her. You’re weak, but I won’t hurt you. After a little while I’ll take what I deserve and go on my way.”

  “We might meet for a cup of tea one day,” Finsch says.

  “I’ll wear my red dress. I’ll hold my nose. Sometimes men your age can really perform. That’s my only worry—your demands.”

  Of course, Finsch avoids the woman—he has been warned. But he loses his serenity when he realizes that his knack for knowing what people are saying, what is in their heart, makes him lonely. He becomes isolated to the point where he won’t see anyone, so disgusted is he by people’s meanness and cynicism, their insincerity and greed. But in a redemptive moment with his daughter he understands that she genuinely loves him—or at least seems to. Dining with her, he reads her thoughts, as he has those of the others. Her kindness is sincere—or is it? Overwhelmed by a feeling of love, has he lost the ability to translate what she is saying into what she really thinks? The reader must decide.

  There were about six other stories, the shortest of them about a farmer—another farmer—who finds a young abandoned monkey on his land. In his loneliness the farmer raises the monkey, names it, and trains it to become a helpful companion whom he comes to regard as a partner. At the end of the story the farmer is visited by a man who says, “Your monkey is staring at me.” The farmer loses his temper. “That is no monkey!”

  A similar story about a gray parrot with a vast vocabulary and the same name as the main character: at the end you are not sure whether you are reading about the farmer or the parrot.

  In “Drongo,” a bird appears on a veranda, pecking at the railing. The bird will not be deterred by the farmer, who is at first friendly—offering it food; and then hostile—plinking at it with a rifle. This simple bird visitation takes place against a backdrop of the wedding of the farmer’s son, the appearance of the farmer’s first grandchild, the promise of continuity. But without any warning the house collapses. “Eaten away.” Had he looked more closely the farmer would have understood that the drongo he killed was picking at termites and keeping the house whole. Now there is nothing of the house left.

  Strange stories—but Prinsloo’s life, the last years of it, were stranger than anything he wrote.

 
3

  “Quite a curious thing befell me,” Lourens Prinsloo said to me—and as a writer I was keenly aware that he was trying this story out on me, as he had probably tried it out on other people. Because I was a writer myself I would not be able to use the story, though I would be allowed to repeat it, and when this master of the bizarre story finally wrote it, I could compare the version he wrote with the one he had told me in confidence.

  I was listening hard, with the exaggerated attention a younger writer gives to an older one, an intense alertness that is both respect and curiosity. I was not taking notes—it would have been rude, would have seemed too businesslike—so I can only approximate what he told me as I have approximated his translated stories. But Prinsloo had a knack for dialogue, and speaking it, he made it easy for me to remember.

  “It’s an African story,” he said. And then he told me that he had been married to Marianne, a pleasant, helpful, loving woman who had borne him two sons, Wimpie and Hansie. The marriage had flourished for more than thirty years. Farming life had bonded them—she too was from a farming family, cattle ranchers from the wilderness of Kuruman. Prinsloo and Marianne were both descendants of the oldest families to arrive in South Africa, represented centuries of settlement and work, but also of a changelessness that is known only on a farm in the African bush. Her parents had traveled by ox cart; his had had motor vehicles, but even so, they lived the isolated lives of their ancestors, side by side with Africans and speaking their language and feeling that they knew them well.

  As Prinsloo told me this, I was reminded that in his long stories all of his protagonists were either widowers or spinsters. He did not write of the satisfactions of married life—a significant omission, given the fact that he was smiling as he told me how happily married he had been.

  I was on the point of mentioning this when he said, “Happiness is not a fit subject. Happiness is banal. People who read are not happy, or else why would they be alone in a room with a book in their hands? I am a farmer, and on a farm you are neither happy nor sad. You work too hard ever to consider such things. You have no set hours. You are part of a much bigger process of life and death. You tend your animals, you watch the weather, you hope for rain—the right kind at the right time. You try not to think too much, or else you’ll go mad with worry. Farming is the opposite of writing stories.”