by Paul Theroux
The comfort Hock felt was the comfort of a homecoming—a friendliness, the gratitude of the old men, and the dignity of a ritual welcome. He felt important, even powerful, because they knew who he was—all that had been apparent from the outset. Hock wished that someone he had known back in the States—Deena, or Roy—could witness him here, the tableau of his calmly sitting among the elders in the remote village on the Lower River. At first he’d wondered if he’d been too hasty in dismissing the driver. Now he knew it had been right.
He slipped to the mat and fell asleep. Hearing voices, Hock saw three men entering the clearing from the road. The sun was lower, the air cooler.
“Manyenga?”
“Not Manyenga.”
The men were carrying a pole, holding it horizontally. A crocodile was slung beneath it—not a big one, hardly three feet long from snout to tail tip. The creature sagged on the binding, obviously dead, swollen from decomposition, its legs swinging limp, its jaw hanging open. It looked like a child’s toy, but an old one, from an attic.
“Nyama,” Hock said—meat. A croc’s tail was eaten in the Lower River.
But the men didn’t answer. Maso was giving them orders, obviously contradicting them, setting them straight, in an I-know-better voice.
“It was found dead in the marsh,” Nyachikadza said. “Just here. Too near.”
Now all the men became serious, eyeing the dead croc as though it was not merely an interloper but a menace that had been sneaked into the village.
“They are wanting to bury it,” Maso said, laughing in mockery. And to the young men he said in Sena, “Don’t bury.”
“Bunning is better,” Nyachikadza said in English.
“If you are burying,” Maso said, “anyone at all can dig it out of the ground and cut its liver, and poison us.”
“But the badness is,” one of the other older men said, and finished the sentence in Sena, which Hock believed he understood: The crocodile has to be completely destroyed.
The men spoke in a sagacious-sounding way when they used English. Hock complimented them on their fluency. Maso said that the older people spoke English because they’d had American-trained teachers, but the younger ones didn’t go to school.
“Paraffin,” Maso said to Hock.
That made sense: douse the croc in paraffin, reduce it to ashes.
They muttered a little more while Hock listened, and as he did, he realized they were being circumspect, talking about money. They needed money to buy some paraffin at the village shop, where there was a drum of it. Still, they were murmuring, discussing the problem softly. Hock sat at the edge of this talk, listening to the repeated word, ndalama—money.
“How much do you need?”
Maso looked up and said promptly, “Five hundred kwacha.”
“Okay,” Hock said. It was about three dollars.
“Or one thousand,” another man said. “Crocodile must be bunned.”
Hock called for his duffel bag. He took it aside and unzipped it so that no one could see what it contained—the fat envelopes of money. He extracted two five-hundred-kwacha notes and zipped the bag shut. Maso took the money with both hands, bowing as he did so, whispering, “Mastah.”
8
THE MOSQUITOES WERE humming in his dreams, torturing his head, whining in his ears, tickling his eyelids, inescapable. He woke clawing his hair and slapping at his eyes, and only then, just before dawn, in the thickened air like a suspension of ashes, breathing the mud walls of the hut, the dampness of the dusty floor, did he remember where he was. To keep the mosquitoes away he wrapped his head in the dirty sheet and lay back and laughed.
Someone had heard him wake. Someone was snapping twigs for kindling, a cooking fire began to crackle, a kettle lid was clapped down, and soon the clatter of enamel cups. A shy “Odi?” A small boy, moving forward on his knees, bowed his head and presented a cup of sweet milky tea. Hock gave thanks for his good luck.
At sunup he joined the men, sitting on a stool, eating a banana. The men were discussing yesterday’s crocodile, the sequence of particular events—the talk of evisceration, mention of the liver, and instead of a burial a cremation, conducted by Maso—as though to reassure themselves that they were safe. They were speaking so quickly, Hock found the argument hard to follow, but listening closely he heard above the words the blatting of a motorbike, growing louder. He looked up as it roared into the clearing.
“Manyenga,” one of the boys said softly.
The man parked his motorbike and approached Hock, saying, “The boy on the cycle said, ‘The American is here,’ and I said, ‘I am knowing him. My grandfather was his friend.’ Welcome, welcome. I am Festus Manyenga.”
“Hello, Festus.”
And there raced through Hock that feeling again, a lightness, a slackening in his flesh, of gratitude. He’d known the Manyenga family as important in Malabo. One of the older Manyengas, perhaps this one’s grandfather, wore a pith helmet, and pinned to his long-sleeved shirt was a brass badge, lettered Headman.
Now the ritual of hospitality was extended to Festus Manyenga: tea, some dry crackers, the offer of bananas, and friendly talk: about the harvest, the condition of the road, the shortage of cooking oil, and the news that Hock had come—what they had heard about him, speaking of him as the long-ago figure of their elders’ stories.
“I was a small boy when I first saw you,” one of the men said. He was old, toothless, in a tattered shirt, with reddened eyes, his skin shiny and loose like a reptile’s. “My father said, ‘That man comes from America.’”
“We thought America was in Europe,” Maso said.
“I never saw this man before. My ancestors, they were the friends,” Manyenga said.
They talked in this congenial way, in English, praising Hock, and finally Manyenga got up and began to thank the men elaborately, taking their hands in his, repeating his gratitude, and Hock knew it was time to go.
“What do you have in the pipeline?” Manyenga asked.
Hock smiled at the expression. “Nothing special. Just to see Malabo.”
“I can arrange, father.”
His duffel bag was tied to the rear carrier of the motorbike, and he swung his leg over and sat behind Manyenga. They traveled under the shade trees the short distance to the main road and, after riding a few miles south, raising dust, turned onto the back road to Lutwe, which ran parallel to the Mozambique border. In Hock’s time it had been a path; it was wider now but harder going. Manyenga settled the bike into one tire track and gunned it along the deep groove. After half a hour—twenty miles or so—Manyenga slowed the bike and plunged into the bush, not a road, hardly a track, just an opening in the high grass that led through the yellow bush to a clearing, a scattering of huts, the big upright baskets on legs that were granaries, the crisscrossed paths that marked the edge of Malabo.
Where the trees were greenest, on the banks of Nyamihutu Creek, a woman was beating a blue quilt suspended on a line. Near her a small girl was sweeping the smooth earth with a straw broom.
Though Manyenga had been shouting the whole way from Marka village, the engine of the motorbike kept him from being understood. Now that he pulled up at the hut, he said, “This is your home, father.”
“I can only stay a few days,” Hock said.
“You are welcome, father.”
The woman and the girl fell to their knees and called out their greetings, and children and older boys from the other huts came running. The village gathered, hanging back. He saw that they were afraid of him—some of the older ones were terrified. Their anxious faces made him self-conscious. He wanted to reassure them. He would have handed out money, but he knew it would have created a mob scene.
“My other wife,” Manyenga said of a scared-looking woman. “She was married to my brother.”
“And who’s this?” Hock asked.
The girl, too shy to speak, twisted her wraparound cloth in her fingers.
“Zizi,” Manyenga said, and hea
ring her name, the girl covered her face. “My cousin’s child. He died some two years ago. She was raised by her grandmother.”
Seeing that the girl had gone shy, one of the small boys ambled near her, seeming to limp, and chattered at her. The boy had twisted fingers and sores on his legs and a battered face, flaky patches where hair was missing from his head. He could have been the victim of a fight, but Hock guessed he was epileptic, with head wounds from continually falling to the ground—and now Hock saw that he was not a boy at all, but a disfigured dwarf, boy-sized, in rags, who could have been any age.
“Moni, moni,” Hock said, greeting the dwarf and cajoling him, to distract him from teasing the girl. And rummaging in his duffel he found some candy that he’d bought at the hotel. “Mankhwala,” he said—medicine.
The dwarf laughed and ate it, drooling, licking his fingers, then walked unsteadily on stumpy feet, giggling because the others were laughing at him and calling out an English word.
“What are they saying?”
“His name, Snowdon.”
Hearing his name, the dwarf said, “Fee-dee-dom!”
“What is that?”
“Freedom,” Manyenga said in his own way, friddom.
“You speak English,” Hock said to the dwarf, who made a face at him, then stuck out the quivering plug of his greenish tongue. He had the license of the fool, but the candy worked. “Medicine!” they cried. And though the girl did not look up again, Hock could see she was relieved that the dwarf was hobbling away.
“You can stay here, father,” Manyenga said. “The roof is bad”—it was thatch, the bundles loose—“because we had so many challenges. But it’s clean enough. Rest your body. My wife will bring water for your bath. Tonight we will have some chicken and rice. We can discuss your program.”
Another of those words. “I don’t have a program.”
“Your agenda, father.” Manyenga gestured, touching his ear. “Where is your mobile?”
“Cell phone? I don’t have one.”
“Not having?” Manyenga frowned, then drew his lips in a smile, as though expressing disbelief.
“Don’t want one.”
“Everyone wants a mobile.”
“Maybe that’s why I don’t,” Hock said, and saw that Manyenga was smiling broadly.
“Indeed, you are knowing what is best. You are a good example for partnering.”
Partnering—yet another. It was Zizi who brought the water in a basin, with a small chip of soap, and after Hock had washed, he lay on the string bed and let down the mosquito net that hung like a bridal veil, and he dozed, hearing the boys’ raised voices in the clearing, the sound of a ball being kicked. Where else in the world could you arrive unannounced and be welcomed on sight and given a bed? But Hock was still smiling at Manyenga’s choice of words—pipeline, challenges, program, agenda.
Seeing that it was growing dark in the hut, he got up and went to the door, where it was lighter. The sky exploded over Mozambique in a fiery sunset. He searched his duffel for the bag of gifts, then walked toward the rising smoke across the clearing where Manyenga was sitting in a chair. Another chair stood empty beside him.
Hock distributed the presents he’d brought. The ballpoint pen he gave to Manyenga, a shawl he gave to the senior wife, a pocketknife to the junior wife, some books for the children. And he set down a large can of powdered coffee.
“America,” the senior wife said, fingering the cloth.
Then the women served the food—slices from the goat leg that had been grilling on the fire, roasted corncobs, a bowl of nsima and stewed greens, plates of chicken and dried fish. Manyenga poured Hock a glass of nipa, and they toasted each other and drank.
The children sat a little distance away, and some other women were standing, holding babies in cloth slings.
Manyenga was talking, in English and Sena, and Hock nodding in agreement, though he slipped to the ground and rested his head against his chair.
He must have dozed, because he heard someone say, “Tired.”
He found himself on all fours, and then was helped to his feet. Accompanied by someone with a lantern, walking beside him but saying nothing, he tottered to his hut and crawled under the mosquito net into his string bed, his flesh inert, like clay.
He woke before sunrise, as a cockcrow tore at the silence and the darkness. He could not remember ever having slept so soundly: no dreams, a whole night with his mouth open, drawing shallow breaths. They had given him a good meal, killed a chicken for him, brought him smoked fish. He had been almost tearful, thinking, Suppose it had all changed and modernized? He’d have been devastated. But the place was still simple and still smelled of the marsh and the river and wood smoke. He had dreamed of this for many years, awakening in Malabo, his real life, the only one that had ever mattered.
He listened to his compact shortwave radio until it was light, and then he walked the length of the village through the scrub. In the courtyard of most of the huts, crouching women fanned the glowing embers of cooking fires. Hock looked into the woven barrels of the granaries propped near the huts, and was glad to see they were full of dried corncobs. He saw the schoolhouse in the distance—he would save it for the afternoon. It was like seeing an old flame, the thirty-year-old now seventy-odd, thin, pinched, gone in the teeth, with a wan smile. He continued walking to the road, and past it, to the creek.
The water of the pool beside the stream, perhaps a hollowed-out part of the embankment that served as a landing place, was perfectly still, reflecting the far bank, the few palm trees, a scrap of cloud in the sky, and after a moment a slim girl stepping into it. She kept her chitenje cloth wrapped around her skinny legs, tugging it up a few inches so it wouldn’t get wet.
As she stepped farther into the pool she kept raising the cloth, hitching it up against her legs. Now the hem was at her knees, now above her knees, still rising as she made her way into the deeper water.
She had a bundle on her head—laundry, he supposed. Maybe she intended to wash it at the nearby reach of the river, where there were rocks to lash it clean and the current was swifter and clearer, not the scummy green of this pool.
The solitary girl hiked her cloth up her bare thighs as she waded, the level of the water rising. Now the loose wrap was bunched in her fists, which held it at either side of her hips, the morning sun shining through her legs, flashing on the water as the cloth went higher.
The whole luminous process of the girl slowly lifting her chitenje wrap as she waded deeper into the still pool was one of the most teasing, heart-stirring visions he’d ever had. Yet she wasn’t a tease. The cloth inched up with the rising water, and when it exposed the small honey-colored globes of her buttocks and she half turned to steady herself, the surface of the green pool brimmed against the patch of darkness at the narrowness of her body, a glint of gold, the skirt-cloth twisted just above it, Hock felt a hunger he had not known for forty years. He stared at the spangled sunlight in the gap between her legs.
He must have sighed, his desire was that strong, because the girl glanced over and bowed and clutched herself in a reflex of modesty. Then she turned away and was soon waist-deep in the pool, her cloth sodden, spread and floating around her like the blossom of a long-stemmed flower, as she waded away, seeming to float like a dark aquatic plant. It was the dead cousin’s girl, Zizi.
Hock sat on a log watching fish nip at flies, disturbing the blur of scum in the stream. Then he returned to his hut. He shaved, wrote some notes in his journal. He unpacked his duffel bag, sorted his clothes, and hung up the empty duffel to keep it away from rats—he saw droppings on the floor, from rats nesting in the thatched roof.
All this, and it was not yet seven-thirty.
Announcing himself, calling out, “Odi, odi,” Manyenga visited after eight and invited Hock to breakfast. Now Hock saw how young he was, probably in his twenties, jaunty in a baseball cap and blue shirt.
“You were going about early,” Manyenga said.
; Someone had seen him. Now, an hour later, everyone knew.
“I slept so well,” Hock said. “I hate to leave.”
“So don’t leave,” Manyenga said.
They were standing before the hut, Manyenga frowning at the roof.
“But the roof must be replaced. I want to get an iron roof for you, but—eh! eh!”
Hock knew that grunting meant money.
“What about fixing the thatch? There’s plenty of grass.”
“The people who make the thatch are all dead. Even the women. Even myself I am not knowing. We are needing an intervention.”
Hock knew he was asking for money for the roof, and what made him smile was the clumsiness of it—his first morning. Usually such a request came later. But Hock was not dismayed; he was more at ease knowing that Manyenga was unsubtle, and easier to watch. But he was surprised, too—it had all happened so fast.
He said, “We can talk about it.”
“I’m going to the boma today. It is so far, but maybe they are having some iron sheets.” He mumbled, seeming to search for more words. “It’s a big priority.”
Hock knew that Manyenga, in his mind, had already received the money, and bought the iron sheets for the roof, and kept the change, and perhaps put aside the scraps to sell or trade. It only remained for the transaction to take place, for Hock to hand over the money.
“I have provided this table for your projects.” It was at the corner of the veranda; Hock hadn’t noticed it. “You can take your breakfast here. I will find you later, father.”
The girl Zizi brought the basin again and watched him as he washed his face and brushed his teeth. She returned with a plate of nsima, a puddle of oil in the center, and a bowl of vegetables in gravy and some tea. She stood in the shade. He spoke to her but she averted her eyes, perhaps ashamed from his having seen her hitching up her cloth in the stream.
As he was eating, Hock saw a creeping shadow come to rest: the little man, the bruised dwarf Snowdon, hunkered down by the veranda, rocking on his stumpy feet. Neglect and probably fits gave him the look of someone who’d been badly beaten. He was sad, his ugly face lopsided as if in pain, helplessly small, his wounds bright with infection.
