The Stranger at the Palazzo D'Oro

by Paul Theroux

  It was easy for me to recall his saying that, because it was a general statement of farming life. His next statement was memorable, too, for its succinctness.

  “Nothing happened to me for sixty years. Then I had my birthday, and everything happened.”

  His saying that made me especially attentive. I let him proceed at his own pace—first a long pause, a silence, as though to allow him to find something equally dramatic as a follow-up. And really, nothing could have been better than what he said next.

  “Do you remember the African woman who appears toward the end of Heart of Darkness—probably Kurtz's lover, ‘wild, animal-like... flamboyant... all in feathers... a magnificent creature,' all of that?”

  He had some of it right. Conrad describes the African woman in the most vivid terms: “a wild and gorgeous apparition of a woman... treading the earth proudly, with a slight jingle and flash of barbarous ornaments... She must have had the value of several elephant tusks upon her. She was savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent...” And so forth.

  When I said I remembered her well, Prinsloo smiled one of his ironical smiles and said, “This woman, my woman Noloyiso, was nothing like her.”

  If Nolo had been the educated eldest daughter of one of his farm laborers, there would have been no obstacle to his having a casual affair with her—though he had never touched an African woman in his life. Yet, because Africans had worked for his father, their children would work for his children, it was impossible not to regard them in a profound sense as his property: they all belonged to him. Many of the girls in the fields were pretty, but in time they lost their looks, they bore children, their lives were short. He saw them not as they were but as they would become.

  Nolo he saw first at the store in town and was struck by her beauty, her youth, a sense of vitality—and it was only afterward that he found she was unmarried, thirty-four years old—late middle age for an African woman. She was not dressed in the African style. She wore a gray pleated skirt, a blue blazer over a white blouse. She could have been a dining car attendant on a minor branch of the Spoorweg. Her full name was Noloyiso Vilikazi.

  Her head was small, round, close-cropped hair, with a child’s face, a child’s ears, large dark eyes, and her figure was slight yet sturdy. Prinsloo was a good judge of an African’s strength. He could tell who would last in the fields, and the women were far superior to the men.

  This woman was not in the least interested in him, but for the first time in his life Prinsloo’s head was turned—and by an African. She was a schoolteacher in town, so he learned. She lived alone in a simple house in the staff compound. She had been educated at a training college. She was very pretty, but her beauty was not remarkable. He was fascinated by something else, a trait he had never noticed in anyone, man or woman. What struck him was that he, a great imaginer, could not imagine Noloyiso old. He was certain that she would always look as she looked today, as lovely, as young, with the same glow of health.

  He needed that assurance. He was desperate to have her. And her seriousness, her indifference, her aloofness, even her posture, all these aspects like the aspects of a watchful impala—she had the same eyes—only made his impatience worse. The second time he saw her, he noticed that her left arm was missing. Had she just lost it? No, for her left side had been hidden from him the first time. The missing arm made her more attractive to him—not pity but the opposite, an admiration for her strength.

  Something within him responded, an inner voice, which was not speech but knowledge. Yet if it were put into words, it would have said: With this woman you will be young again, you will be happy, you will be strong, you will sire children, you will love the land again, you will enjoy your food, you will know passion and desire, you will be loved, you will be admired, people will smile with satisfaction when they see you, you will live longer, you will discover new subjects to write about.

  A sexual awakening, perhaps, but more than that, for sex was just hydraulics, a frenzy of muscle and fluid. A new life was what he saw. The beauty of it was that he knew this woman was able to transform him, to re-create him as though fictionalizing him, making him into the other, better person he had been as a youth, hopeful, happy, energetic, fascinated, innocent—someone who slumbered within him, the pure-hearted being who, to be animated and given life again, needed only to be woken with a kiss by this one unexpected woman.

  What he saw and felt was like a definition of love. It was deeper than desire. It was the awakening of a whole being, and the need was powerful because only this one woman could do it. Without her, he was only his incomplete self, half asleep; with her, he was the better person—forgiving, strong, generous, imaginative—because of her love. Sex was part of it, sex was the magic; but the bond was love.

  4

  Mingled in his mind were sex and creation—his writing. He believed that he was an imaginative and prolific writer because of his powerful sexual instinct, that he owed the extravagance of his imagination to his persistent sexual desire, a sort of engine that drove his writing. He hardly distinguished between the two, his desire for sex, his desire to write, and steaming in all his writing was this rosy-hued lechery—even the sober-seeming people in his strange excursions, such as Finsch and Katje and the Justus family, were running a temperature. Sex was exploration and conquest, so he reasoned. And the fever of sexual desire gave the imagination its wild and sometimes blinding fulguration. Sex was also the hot velvety darkness behind the dazzle of his creation. He would have been lost without it, he would have been lost if he had been wholly fulfilled: repressing it was a way of harnessing it and using it. “Thwarted desire was the steam contained under pressure in the boiler of his body” was a line from one of his stories, I forget which.

  No man in South Africa ever found it difficult to locate a like-minded woman, a willing partner. Prinsloo knew by the look alone whether a woman was willing. Farmers’ wives, farmers’ daughters, Rhodesians, Mozambicans; but commonest of all were the women known as “coloreds”—ambiguous mixed-race beauties who were welcome nowhere and everywhere, looking for security. The slightest hint that he was interested animated them, and he loved watching them and seeing how clever they could be in devising ways to meet him covertly, in a nearby dorp or in remote parts of his own land, for his farm was so extensive an estate as to have hidden corners and places for assignations.

  With sex he was rejuvenated. He was granted new ideas, new confidence. He did not distinguish between his literary notions and the ingenuity in these sexual affairs.

  Sex was a disease, sex was also a cure. He would feel the desire to make love to a particular woman—like a rooster spotting a hen. The seduction preoccupied him, made him impatient, drove his imagination, helped his writing. At last, when the day of assignation came, the act might be clumsy the first time, better the second time, a great deal smoother the third time, but after a while, gaining skill, it lost passion. Sex was the cure for sex, like medicine three times the first day, two the second, dwindling in dosage as the condition improved, until no more was needed; and then he looked for a new woman. His wife knew nothing, for—such was his sexual charge—he did not neglect her.

  At the outset he believed that with Nolo the repetition would rid him of his desire—odd, too, for she was the first full-blooded African he had ever slept with, one of the plainest, and—since she was missing one arm—incomplete.

  It was her strangest feature, something like an asset, for in the dark she seemed to possess not one arm but three. His whole body was gripped. She used her mouth. She clamped him between her agile legs and wrapped herself around him and, snakelike, squeezed him until he gasped for air. This small creature in the dark became an immense boomslang, and he the soft yielding thing being devoured.

  He felt small, even vulnerable, caressed and embraced by this woman who had seemed like a child. He felt young when he was with her—the first time youthful, the subsequent times like a child, with a child's physical vitality and optimism,
as though at the beginning of a long life. That he had only fleetingly felt with other women. Now it was a condition of being with Nolo: he was not an older man but a youth.

  Everything contributed to this feeling—the time of day, the secrecy of the place, the passion of the act, the mysteriousness of the woman. It was all new to him. Being new, it took the place of his most original writing. He had not written anything since the day, weeks before, when he first saw Nolo in her blue blazer and pleated skirt in the shop. But sex with her much resembled his best days at his desk, writing brilliantly—was in some respects superior to those days—the desire he felt like the joyous drug that lay behind his most enigmatic fiction.

  Here was the woman at first glance: dependable, serious-seeming, soberly dressed as only an African schoolteacher would be, rather tense with the self-conscious piety of the educated African—and a bit defensive, too: incomplete—that missing arm. She hardly smiled.

  In the bedroom, in his bakkie (pickup truck, he explained to me), she was a cat—wild, reckless, full of surprises—and seemed to know what was in his mind at every moment.

  Just like a cat, facing away, she crouched and raised her buttocks and said, “Do it to me”—she had no word for the act, did not want to know the word, only wanted the struggle and satisfaction.

  That different woman in the dark helped him discover a different man in himself; and over the course of a month he discovered much else—all revealed to him when he was with Nolo, much as in the writing of a paragraph or a page he discovered with pleasure the thought or incident that lurked there, that proved he was uncovering something new.

  So instead of burning itself out, the flame grew fiercer, hotter, and brighter.

  He loved the idea that only he knew that she was two people, and neither of them was African in any sense he had known or seen before. And he a man, a baas, who had been born in the country!

  He was enough of a man of the world, had lived long enough, to understand the lover's illusion of the beloved as someone unique—and, more than that, someone known only to the lover. The lover's conceit that no one else may intrude, no one else has the capacity to see or understand. Desire was this special way of seeing the lover as irreplaceable. Smitten meant hit on the head, he knew that, and he still felt that he was in sole possession of the truth.

  Desire, need, urgency, made him reckless. He could hardly believe how much. Loving a black was breaking the law. What he felt was the nearest thing to love he had ever known—yet to call it that was unnatural and illegal, and while it was normal for him to feel affection and even desire, love was absurd.

  Nevertheless, she gave him something powerful without speaking a word—bewitched him. She made him whole, made him strong, restored youth to him, gave him power. She inspired him. Seeing him the first time, she had seemed to understand him and silently to respond with promises. In their lovemaking she kept her promises. So she was true.

  Without telling his wife why, he found a house for her, asked her to live in it, and said that he needed to be alone, to think.

  She knew what was wrong. Many times in the past, working on one of his long stories, he had absented himself, vanished somewhere on his vast estate, so that he could understand the story better.

  Nolo was like a character in one of his strangest stories. So was he. Exactly. The sense of living inside one of his own stories roused and compelled him to look deeper. The feeling did not pass away, nor even diminish. He wanted more of it.

  5

  Distracted, almost demented by this fever of passion and attachment, feeling unwell, he had no doubt that there was only one cure for his ailment, ridiculous as it might seem to the whites he knew—a sickening desire for the half-educated schoolteacher with one arm, just a kaffir and, outside the bedroom, a deeply moralistic munt. All he wanted, now that he was separated from his wife, was for the African to move into his house with him, something any African woman would have been eager to do, to share his life, to be waited on by servants, to know a degree of luxury that was way beyond the imagining of most of them, like winning the lottery.

  She said no.

  Prinsloo almost laughed. This was a ruse, surely. He demanded to know why.

  “Because we are not married,” she said.

  He stared at her.

  “In the eyes of God,” she added.

  “In the eyes of God we are!”

  “Not married,” she said stubbornly, frowning, defying him.

  This from a woman whose people hardly used the word, who stuck a spear upright, twangling in the ground, before the door of a rondavel, which meant, I am a man. I am here. This is my woman.

  Prinsloo still smiled. He said, “We have done nothing but sneak around and make love for almost a month.”

  “I regret that.”

  He reminded her of certain acts she had performed, words she had said, noises she had made.

  “I should not have,” she said, looking demure, pressing her prim lips together. “Because of my Christian vows.”

  Prinsloo wanted to hit her. He had spanked his children, and one drunken night he had smacked his wife; he had never struck an African, though such beatings were common enough in his stories—thrashings with sjamboks that cut flesh and drew blood. Having rehearsed them in his work, he was able to imagine snatching a whip and slashing her with it and belaboring her on the floor until she agreed with everything he said, until she submitted.

  He wondered whether she was deliberately provoking him, wishing to be thrashed and dominated. He was reaching for her wrist, on the point of grabbing it, when she pulled away, looking shocked, and said that he would have to think seriously about marrying her before he touched her again.

  “You have no right,” she said.

  That fascinated him, as though she were making a kind of promise: if they were legally together he would have a perfect right to make her submit.

  She said no more, she just withdrew, she vanished into her schoolroom. He turned to his work, which had lain untouched, stopped cold, since he had initiated the affair with Noloyiso and left it as he had left his wife. But he was stumped. He could not make a sentence. Work that had taken the place of sex, that had inspired sex, that was inspired by sex, that had been his life, was inert. His pen was small and loose in his hand, just a dry stick he used to make crosshatches in the margins of his sheet of paper. He wanted to stab himself with the thing.

  Or stab her with it, injecting her with ink. The one-armed Bantu schoolteacher had rebuffed him. Apparently her life was complete: she turned her back on him and went on teaching. Was it possible that she felt nothing?

  At least he knew where she was. At certain times of the day, unable to work, the times when he would have worked, he crossed the dorp in his bakkie, bumped over the railway tracks that divided the town into black and white, and, parking on the road, he walked the last hundred yards on stony ground to the hencoop of a school.

  Black children in the playground stared at him. It was not unusual for a white school super or inspector to appear, but this man went to the window and looked in, standing and staring like a reproachful ghost.

  Nolo continued to teach her class, with him at the window. But when the bell sounded she hurried outside looking stern, her face immobile.

  “If you don’t leave the premises I’ll have to call the police.”

  “Premises”—this scrubby acre! “Police”—those lazy villains!

  Prinsloo said, “I am not committing a crime.”

  “You are trespassing.”

  He thought: Imagine being accused by a Bantu!

  But he said, “I want you to come with me.”

  “You know my position on that. You know my terms.”

  “Position”! “Terms”! He wanted to laugh. He hoped that her speaking to him in this way would fill him with self-disgust and act as a signal for him to reject her. Yet the opposite happened. He was humiliated and humbled. Her speaking sharply to him clarified his feelings. He realiz
ed that he could not live without her.

  He divorced Marianne. The poor woman's face crumpled with grief, as though she had just gotten news of the death of a loved one. In a sense, that was just what had happened, for he was lost to her for good.

  She begged him to change his mind. He pitied her, but he also wanted her to wish him well. He said so.

  She said, “I don't wish you ill,” and then, considering the words she had spoken, added, “No, I do wish you ill. You deserve to suffer.”

  He said, “I haven’t written a single word for six months!”—meaning that he had already suffered.

  “You’re divorcing me and all you think about is your writing.”

  “Because that’s all I ever think about.”

  Why had he said this? Was it true? He did not think about his unwritten stories, only about Noloyiso the Bantu schoolteacher, who had one arm, who possessed him, body and soul.

  He told Nolo in a letter what he had done.

  She agreed to see him. She allowed his advances, they made love again, but it was understood that she would not move in with him.

  “My people would call me a harlot.”

  “Your people are always living together. That’s the usual arrangement!”

  “With each other. In the same age group. Not with a white man. And you are old.”

  She had him there.

  What made Prinsloo think it would be a reasonable idea for him to introduce Nolo to Hansie? Wimpie was in Cape Town, or else he would have included him, too, at the lunch in the hotel dining room in the dorp. It was bad enough with Hansie; Wimpie would have made it worse. Prinsloo saw at once it was a mistake. Nolo and Hansie were the same age.