The Stranger at the Palazzo D'Oro

by Paul Theroux

  Prinsloo heard she had a lover, but could not prove it. Anyway, what if she did? She had no sentiment. The lover would be swindled—good riddance; or she would—ditto.

  What tipped him off was her saying, “I want to work.”

  What work could a one-armed woman do, apart from the teaching she had done before? What need was there? She was wealthy. She owned a farm bigger than a township, and a settlement of black workers within the farm, humans and animals and all their food, too. So what she was saying in wishing to work was that she wanted to circulate, have some freedom, be social.

  This business with Nolo made him think of his first marriage, and always with regret. Marianne had never been manipulative. He reproached himself for having been so hard on that patient woman. And he played along with Nolo, encouraging her to work. She became a committee member in the dorp's local government, not much money, but an office, some status, and offering occasions to dress up, ceremonials, welcoming foreign visitors, formal teas, lawn parties. Nolo left the child in the care of an old servant.

  Prinsloo easily persuaded the servant to release the child, so that he could take him for a drive. Prinsloo brought biltong and bread, and they sat at the margin of the game ranch Prinsloo had built and lost, and they watched the eland browsing in the bush. Prinsloo returned to find the police waiting for him—black police. They arrested him.

  “Attempted kidnapping, baas.”

  “That’s my child!”

  Nolo would not return his calls, she worked through a lawyer, took out a restraining order, demanded more money to pay her legal expenses, and this time there was nothing in return, only the promise that if he paid promptly she might not ask for more.

  Prinsloo had lost everything, even his own freedom. He had nothing left, nowhere to go.

  9

  He said to me, sounding like a character in one of his stories: “I imagined a new life. This was a new life. But not the one I imagined.”

  What he called his exile was not exile in a conventional sense. He was not driven out of South Africa. He found a place to live in, just a bolthole in Johannesburg, and made visits to his friends. Most of them dreaded his arrival because of the failure and hopelessness he dragged with him. But Prinsloo made it impossible for them to refuse. “I want to come and sleep on your floor for a few days.” How could they turn him away? Etienne Leroux in Koffiefontein, one of his staunchest friends, encouraged him to visit. Prinsloo said that his condition could perhaps best be described as “internal exile.”

  He had lost his estate, his first family, his second family, his writing life—the life that he wanted, that he had never believed anyone could take from him. But no, he had handed it over.

  “Exiled!” He joked about his homelessness. Not bitterly but lightly, because he had no hope, and the facetious humor of the truly hopeless sustained him. He knew that no one could tut-tut and remark upon how things would improve. Nothing would improve.

  “It’s a tragedy,” Etienne said to me.

  All I had heard in South Africa were stories about massacres, political scheming, torture and imprisonment, different sorts of violent crime—nothing about a domestic tragedy such as Prinsloo’s. And with all the extravagant stories of terror circulating, no one wanted to hear Prinsloo’s story. He tried telling it; no one would listen, the country was changing too fast for anyone to have the patience for pettiness.

  It was about this time that I met Prinsloo, a white-haired man, prematurely feeble, making each complaint into a joke, seeming to ask for reassurance, then jeering when I tried to reassure him.

  “But he will write it,” Etienne said.

  A writer needs to take pleasure in solitude. Prinsloo could not bear to be alone now. He loved the fact that I was a visitor to South Africa, that I was eager to read his typescript of stories, that I was such a stranger to him, so willing to listen. And over the course of the week or so that I stayed in Koffiefontein he told me his story.

  I listened closely, excited at the thought that this man, such a fabulist in his own work, had material of this kind for a new story, perhaps his greatest. It would be the equal of André Brink, or J. M. Coetzee, or Leroux himself. It was an African story but a peculiarly white man's story, one of Prinsloo’s weirdest, as though everything he had written had prepared him for it.

  Even before he finished telling me the story, I sort of understood it: at the point in his life when Prinsloo loses the imagination to write his extravagant stories, he decides to embark upon a narrative of his own. Leaving the security of his marriage and family and ancestral farm, he makes love to and marries a onearmed African woman schoolteacher whom he has met in a feed store. He proves his point, acts out a story he could live, but loses the ability to write. What he hoped would be greater inspiration almost destroyed him.

  His eyes were lively as he told me his story, and with a strange glee and no self-pity he answered every question I had, smiling even as I asked for more details about the wooing, the lovemaking, the bondage and submission, the slavery reenactments.

  Then he said, “That episode is the story I should have written. But I couldn’t both live it and write it. So now I know how the rest of the world suffers.”

  He was never more animated than when I tried to tell him that his story was unique.

  “No! No!” He got to his feet and, unsteady, his laughter revealing his decaying teeth, the rattle of his bad lungs, he said, “Not just my story. That’s why it is useless to write. Many men have lived this. The woman that arouses our sexual passion—weak, pretty, submissive, childlike—is nearly always the opposite of the woman we want to live with, who is strong, undemanding, motherly, and trustworthy. In my case there is no moral to be drawn. It’s just an African story.”

  He died alone, unknown, unmourned. His farm was not improved, yet the momentum of its operation had never been interrupted and it continued to prosper. Nolo did not remarry. She became fiercely respectable, sometimes lending her name to good causes. She had not changed her name from Prinsloo. When foreign visitors toured the province her estate was one of the stops, the foreigners marveling at the fruitful fields and the animals, and clucking at Nolo’s son, praising his looks and saying, “Where did you get those lovely eyes?”

  Disheveled Nymphs

  1

  LELAND WEVILL told me he was a lawyer. Instead of walking away, I asked him what kind of lawyer he was. He said, “I bite people on the neck for a living. That kind.” So I decided to get to know him. He didn't do much lawyering now. “I’ve got plenty of money.” Early on, he said to me, “I beg you to believe that the things I don't have are things I don’t want.” Even after I found out that he was quoting the French aphorist Chamfort, I believed him. That it was plagiarized didn’t make it less interesting or, in Wevill's case, less true. Wevill had everything he wanted.

  He was devoted to living in Hawaii and to perfecting his beautiful house. He said, “I want a house that I never have to leave.” He meant an estate, his own world with a wall around it. I had seen it and I had been invited back. I had passed the test. We had another bond—our mutual friend the kindly lawyer Lionberg, who had killed himself. “Long story short, Royce overreached himself,” he said. “Bad decisions have a long tail. Create a lot to untangle.”

  Wevill was not the simple cruel man he seemed. He was one of those wealthy men who had made his house into a shrine—a secular shrine, representing his mind and his taste, filled with fetishes and trophies peculiar to his own passions. The house was like an extension of his own body, as his Jaguar was, as was everything he owned: no buffalo heads or zebra skins but many Japanese prints, a rack of samurai swords, and the carved throne—it looked like a spindly leather-seated chair—of a Chokwe chief. “Your Chokwe live in eastern Angola.” The house was off limits to everyone except his family—that is, his mother and his two children. They were on the mainland, so he hardly saw them. He disliked all visitors, for their intrusion and their envy and resentment, for the way t
hey coveted what he had. He loved Rita and Nina, the two women who cleaned his house, the young mother and her attractive daughter who could have been sisters, who were not covetous at all; in fact, the house was richer with them in it.

  Like many such men who lived in lovely houses they had furnished themselves—anyway, men I knew, never women Leland Wevill regarded his unwelcome visitors as subjects and his house as the test. He judged people by how they behaved among his possessions. You went there and he watched you react and sometimes he gave you the third degree. He seldom entertained, but because he was a retired lawyer from the mainland, his former associates sent people to him, other lawyers mostly, who happened to be passing through the islands. He resented being on these travelers’ itineraries, a stopping place on their tour, and so out of hostility he put them to the test, judged them by the objects they touched and how they handled them, the details they noticed, the items they ignored—obvious treasures in some cases—what questions they asked, how they responded to his answers, how they reacted when he lied, as he often did.

  “It’s just something I picked up in India,” he said of a rare Japanese inro.

  “It’s one of Hiroshige’s classic images,” he said of a Hokusai print.

  Of his favorite piece, an original Watteau, bought at an auction in New York for a fabulous sum—but he would have paid anything for the large detailed drawing of two disheveled nymphs, their tumbled hair and rumpled low-cut blouses—he said, “I’m told it’s a shoddy reproduction. It’s kind of fun.”

  And, “I don’t know much about it. Just a chair, I guess. Shaker, maybe?” of the Chokwe chief’s throne.

  Then he waited for the guest to speak. Tribal art so often looked indeterminate, ageless, generic even—a Masai rongo club like a Fijian head-basher, a Papuan highlander’s spear like a Kikuyu’s, Ethiopian icons could pass for crude Byzantine altarpieces.

  To the trained eye, to anyone who visited museums, Wevill’s estate was a treasure house.

  “Maybe some kind of kitchen implement,” he said of a whalebone slasher, called a patu, used by nineteenth-century Maoris in close-combat battle. “Maybe a false nose,” he said of a highlander’s phallocrypt.

  Most people failed his house test—wanted the thing they were most ignorant about, took him at his word when he lied, admired the ordinary picture in the priceless frame or the fake stones in the jade dagger handle, accepted his saying that the beautiful thick-petaled blossom in the painting was by Mary Cassatt when it was an early Mondrian.

  Just the way visitors handled objects told him everything he needed to know. Some people would pick up the dagger handle and not want to let go. There was a stare people had that meant they were taking possession of the painting and would have no hesitation in stealing it.

  The visitors’ envy exhausted him because it gave him no rest, and he was suspicious—he saw them as potential thieves. They wanted what he had. One visit to his house revealed everything about them.

  But here was the paradox. Rita and Nina, the cleaning women, asked no questions. They were as careful with the Tibetan silver-rimmed skullcup as they were with the plastic soap dish in the bathroom—and were careful without being covetous. He was impressed by the lightness of their touch without their having the least idea of what they were handling. Because of this, he knew almost nothing about these two women. He could not test them.

  They talked intimately with each other, conversations he could not enter, on subjects that bewildered him, information they got from television programs he’d never heard of. He just listened.

  “The Psychic Hot Line is a rip-off. Plus, they keep calling you up after, saying they got something else to tell you.”

  “Psychics give you good news, like, ‘A big change is coming.’ But anyone can say that.”

  “I actually visited one. I was pregnant with you and I says to the psychic, 'When am I going to have a baby?’ and she says, ‘Not for a few years.’ I was like sticking out and she didn’t even notice.”

  “I want numbers from psychics. Like, if they can see the future, why aren’t they rich?”

  “Maybe they can only see the past, but what’s so great about that?”

  “I’d like to go to Vegas with a psychic. Just to see.”

  “Or one of those cruises where you just play slots and eat.”

  They often mentioned gambling, which seemed odd to Wevill, because they were two of the unlikeliest gamblers—just pretty island women, all smiles, easygoing, in old clothes, with none of the obsessive behavior and tasteless outfits he associated with gamblers, no superstitious rituals, no strange jackets.

  They threw him, everything about them foxed him.

  Most people walk a certain way in their own house, with a confident nakedness—efficient, unselfconscious, with an economy of gesture, not noticing anything, fixed on the one thing they happen to be doing, undistractible. 'I’m in here,' while stretching out a hand in the darkness to flick a switch, taking the shortest route among the sharp corners of furniture without looking, all the flourishes of ownership. Wevill was like that six days a week.

  On Saturdays you would not have believed Wevill to be in his own home, this shrine to his life and taste, his enlarged being, for his distraction and his impatience were obvious. That was the day the cleaning women were at work in his rooms, and in his head Wevill was bereft, he never felt weaker or more superfluous.

  Wevill, who told me “I bite people on the neck for a living,” watched helplessly as the cleaners possessed the house, possessed him, the pretty witch, the skinny ballerina, mother and daughter.

  The day the cleaning women came was usually the day you went out or made yourself scarce—“The check is on the kitchen counter”—but that was the one day Wevill made a point of staying home, looking like a brain-sick potentate, big and ineffectual, bumping into his own chairs, too numb with desire to do anything but gape at their ungainly grace.

  The women cleaned as though mimicking dancers, the same approximations of bending and stretching, sometimes on tiptoe, reaching straight-armed, darting forward and back, bowing to the lowest shelves, often kneeling, crouched like spaniels, showing Wevill their dusty footpads and their pretty buttocks. They wore no makeup, their hair was loose, they favored baggy sweatsuits. They might have just crept from bed, that was their look as they worked, disheveled nymphs.

  Wevill—pretending to be busy, shifting vases, squaring-up papers—watched them, the twenty-year-old, her mother not yet forty; young, husbandless, no partners—he had obliquely asked, they had answered directly. “Let’s say you had a boyfriend.” “No thanks!” Knowing he could have been father to one and grandfather to the other, he desired both of them.

  Mopping, scrubbing on all fours, lying on their backs to beat a feather duster at cobwebs under the sofa, straining on tiptoe to brush at geckos, they hiked up their shirts and showed smooth honey-colored down on their lower backs. All the demanding postures of housework, which represented the most passionate postures of lovemaking. And still they talked.

  “Dwarfs marry each other sometimes, but sometimes they get normal big-sized kids and sometimes they get more dwarfs.”

  “Britney and Christina used to be Mouseketeers, and so did Justin. That's why Britney and Justin are dating.”

  “What makes a guy lolo is living with his mother.”

  This is just a miscellaneous anecdote in the life of Leland Wevill, someone universally acknowledged to be a powerful man—who died a few years ago and has been written about endlessly for his contributions to charities, his shrewd investments, his vast holdings, his career as a lawyer, his role on the boards of several large corporations, his successful innovations, his superb art collection. In almost everything he did he acted from a position of strength—bought weak companies and built them up and sold them, found an inexpensive but ingenious product and represented it for a share of the proceeds, acquired paintings and sculptures years before the artists’ reputations grew and the prices shot
up. Even in the case of the Watteau he had been bottom-feeding.

  Everything he accomplished was a species of transformation. Even himself, his own life. He was born into an ordinary family in Massachusetts, the city of Cambridge, the unfashionable side. But he was bright. He got into Harvard as a townie, lived at home to save money, earned a scholarship to Harvard Law School and afterward seemed like someone special: Bostonian, Harvard graduate, with a distinguished-sounding name—“Leland” was his own idea, he hated being Fred Junior. In the active part of his life he made a fortune, the sort of lawyer who owns a portion of every case he represents, not taking risks but studying the client’s odds, and winning big when he won. He had moved to Hawaii in his fifties, on the suggestion of Royce Lionberg. He was sixty-one now, just under six feet, a healthy man, and until answering the ad in the Star-Bulletin for the two cleaners, he had believed he was very happy.

  Apart from Lionberg—the former personal-injury lawyer who had fallen in love with a woman of twenty-three, was rebuffed, fell into a depression, and died by hanging himself from the door handle of his Lexus with his Hermes tie—Leland Wevill was the most powerful man I knew.

  He was a highly intelligent man, which made it all the more interesting to me that he had the capacity to behave foolishly.

  Ever since coming to Hawaii, Wevill had been keenly aware of his aging body—he was a big soft man with white hairless legs and a potbelly. He didn’t mind being conspicuous, he hated being a fool. He didn’t swim much, he didn’t play golf at all. A good golf swing would have won him playmates in Hawaii. He did not understand the social scene at all. Now and then when he went to a strip club he was horrified to recognize that many of the other patrons were men who looked exactly like him—bored, sixtyish, desperate, no friends, just rattling around, more lonely than horny.