The Lower River

by Paul Theroux

  “I hear you.”

  Hock felt himself growing angry. He had not realized until now how strongly he felt about Zizi’s virginity. He was certain she was a virgin—Gala herself had said so.

  “I know she is still a girl,” Aubrey said. “She has not had her initiation. People call her kaloka, the little lock.”

  Zizi frowned, hearing the word.

  “Who’s got the key? Maybe you, bwana.”

  “No one has the key,” Hock said with force.

  “I hear you,” Aubrey said, suddenly contrite. That was his manner—a boast, a wisecrack, and then a retreat when he saw he’d gone too far. “It’s special, you know. Most of the girls her age are”—he shrugged—“unlocked. They even have kids. But not her. We say of such a girl that she has all her cattle.”

  Zizi said something under her breath, hissing at Aubrey.

  And after her sharp reaction, Aubrey gave a tight smile, as though he’d just been slapped. He said, “She’s being rude to me,” and laughed, because the young boy with him had also reacted. “A wet snake, that’s what she said.”

  “Maybe that’s what you are.”

  “In our language it means something else.” He became angry again and sat more stiffly, keeping his face out of the light. “Did you want something?”

  Hock stared at Aubrey’s gray twitching hands before replying. Finally he said, “I’ve got a job for you.”

  “Some kind of favor?”

  “A job.”

  “It’ll cost you,” Aubrey said without hesitating.

  But Hock was glad. That’s what he wanted, not friendliness, not a favor, which always carried a penalty with it, but a paid-for job. Aubrey, in his crass knowing way, was the man he needed.

  Hock said, “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of you.”

  The smile on Aubrey’s thin face was sly, snake-like, ingratiating. He jerked his head to indicate, “Go on.”

  “You’re going back to Blantyre soon?”

  “That depends.”

  “On what?”

  “If you want me to go.”

  “What if I do?”

  Aubrey agitated his fingers, but subtly, touching his fingertips, his city gesture for money.

  “I’ll give you two payments—one now, the other when you come back.”

  “Who says I’m coming back?”

  “You’ll be coming back with my friend, to show him the way.”

  Now Aubrey smiled, and nodded almost imperceptibly, a tremor of his head, seeing another opportunity.

  “You’re going to take something to Blantyre for me.”

  “Like what?”

  “A message.”

  “That’s easy,” Aubrey said, and as though he’d regretted saying it, he corrected himself. “I can do it. But you’ll have to pay me in dollars.”

  “I’ll give you fifty.”

  Aubrey shrugged. “A couple of hundred at least.”

  Although Hock had pretended to be relaxed, defying him, Aubrey seemed to understand that Hock was desperate, seemed able to smell it, the hopelessness, the anxiety. And Hock knew that Aubrey could not have seen any other mzungu in a hut like this, sitting in ragged clothes, with the skinny girl and the dwarf and the mat of pounded flour in the courtyard.

  Tapping his finger on the arm of his chair and leaning close, Hock said, “You get a hundred now and a hundred when you show up with my friend. That’s a lot of money.”

  “I need bus fare. And my small brother”—he indicated the staring boy—“he is needing too.”

  “You know the American consulate in Blantyre?”

  “Everyone knows it,” Aubrey said. “There’s always a long queue of people wanting visas.”

  “That’s the place. I want you to go tomorrow.”

  Aubrey said, “What’s the hurry?”

  “No hurry. If you want to do it, you go tomorrow. That way I know you’re serious.”

  Nodding, Aubrey said, “Okay, bwana.” And then, “Where’s the message?”

  “When you’re ready to go, I’ll give you the message, and the money.”

  As they had talked, the moon had risen, a nibbled crescent in a sky of stars, with high thin veils of cloud. Shadows brimmed around them, and they sat in the small pool of light from the lantern. Normally, Zizi would set a row of lanterns along the veranda at this time, because it was too early to sleep, too hot to retreat inside. But tonight, as though understanding the secrecy of the meeting, she merely sat, her knees drawn up, her chin on her folded hands, her cloth wrap gathered for modesty.

  Hock could see the whites of her eyes, the dull gleam of her shaved head in the moonlight. He was too moved to speak, because she was pure. The night sky gave him hope, the way it was dusted with streaks of gray and masses of stars, a great flawless capsule of light—hopeful because it represented a bigger world than the small flat shadow of Malabo, like a crater, in lamplight, the moths fluttering around the sooty chimney, bumping it and burning.

  In the silence, Hock sensed that Aubrey was eager to help— greedy for money; impatient, too, for the trip to Blantyre. But out of pride, or to keep the upper hand, he didn’t show it.

  “You were born here, eh?” Hock said.

  “Yes, but . . .”

  Hock could sense the young man recoil. He said, “But you don’t like it here.”

  “Yes, I don’t like.”

  “What is it about Blantyre you like?”

  Taking a deep reflective breath, Aubrey sighed. He did not reply at once. Hock could see that he was trying to formulate an answer. They sat in the shadows thrown by the lamp, and in the silence some talk carried from across the clearing, and smoke from cooking fires filled the night air with buoyant sparks.

  Finally Aubrey said, “The lights.”

  He had to repeat it, he spoke so quickly. But later that night, after Aubrey and the boy had left, and Zizi had gone to her hut, and Snowdon had stowed himself away among the litter and the branches behind Zizi’s hut, Hock lay in his cot and said the words to himself, the simplicity, the truth of them, the lights.

  Aubrey came before dawn, in the dim light of the thin fading moon. He knew the matter was serious, and he knew how to be covert. He had tapped softly on the screen door. Hock was reassured by Aubrey’s early arrival, by his obliqueness, and especially by his greed.

  Hock had prepared his message—the photocopy of his passport page that he always kept handy, showing his picture, his details, with the message he had printed before going to bed: I am seriously compromised and possibly in danger. Please help. This man will lead you to me, and his signature under his printed name.

  Folding it small, Hock handed it over with the hundred-dollar bill tucked into it. Aubrey pocketed the pieces of paper, and then he raised his face to Hock’s, looking defiant.

  “This is going to cost you a little more,” he said.

  Hock had been in the village long enough to expect that. He had the twenty-dollar bill handy, also folded.

  As Aubrey palmed it, Hock said, “Don’t let anyone see you.”

  24

  UNTIL NOW HE had not dared to hope, because all he’d found here was failure. He’d known the Sena people before they’d become artful, and he wondered if their plotting against him now was something they’d learned from the mzungus at the Agency. Or had they always been artful, and he too beguiled to see it?

  He hated to wake each morning in the heat and remember that he was trapped. Yet after all this time the idea of saving himself, being freed from the village, was a mental leap that left him saddened; the very thought made him gloomy, for its futility. In the dust of his confinement the prospect of freedom was so absurd that he seldom left his own courtyard. In the past he had wandered around the village, chatting to people, adding to his word list, looking for signs of snakes. Now he sat under his tree, inhabiting a mirage, blinking away the flies, like other old men in Malabo.

  Like the children, too, who never strayed far from their huts and their m
others. In his captivity, his inability to get away from this insignificant village, Hock had become childlike. The feeling had stolen upon him, making him smaller, his avoidance of strangers amounting to a fear he hated to acknowledge. He had come here as a man, with willingness and money, assured of meeting friends and—knowing the people, speaking the language—with a confidence that amounted almost to a sense of superiority. Not racial, it was a complex sympathy, the suave generosity masked as the humility of a passerby pressing a fifty into the hand of a beggar at Christmas, knowing that it would make a difference, and pausing a moment to hear, “Bless you, sir.” He had meant well, but that conceit had made him the beggar. He had become reduced; he was a child now, sitting in the shade. And during that time, as he’d become smaller, Zizi had proven herself stronger, almost motherly, someone he trusted and needed, who looked after him, someone older, wiser. He wanted to thank her but could not find the words, and she would have been startled to hear I would be lost without you.

  He stayed near his hut because lately, when he had taken a walk in the village or out to the road, small children—some skinny and potbellied, others cadaver thin, all wearing castoff T-shirts—had followed him and, laughing, had thrown small stones at him, or darting closer tried to hit him with dried maize cobs or the large blown-open fruit from the sausage tree. He tried not to be angry—anger was not a source of strength here but something that could be dangerous. He cautioned himself to take care.

  After Aubrey had left, backing out of the hazy shadows of early-morning darkness, Zizi’s mood changed. She became unusually silent, which Hock took to be sullen resentment, seeing Aubrey pocketing the money. Hock approached her and put his arms around her, to comfort her.

  “My friend,” he said.

  She stiffened, her body like a bundle of sticks wrapped in loose cloth.

  Instead of saying more, Hock let a day pass. Zizi brought him his meals as usual, with tea; she had her own cooking fire now, and no longer depended on food from Manyenga’s compound. She pounded maize, she spread the flour to bleach on the big mat, and by now she had several fat bags of flour she’d made, stored on the veranda of her small hut in the proud manner of Malabo women, visible proof of their hard work and their homemaking.

  Seeing that she was unresponsive, Hock said, “That man Aubrey, do you like him?”

  Zizi said nothing, but sniffed a little, which he took to mean no. She was holding a bucket of plates in soapy water, from the meal, which she intended to wash.

  Assuming she had spoken the word, Hock said, “Why not?”

  Zizi made her reluctant face, nibbling her lips, twisting her mouth, then said, “He is not afraid of you.”

  Burdened by the heavy bucket, taking short steps, her shoulders wagging as she shuffled, she walked away, the plates knocking and gulping in the water. With the bucket bumping against her leg she seemed slow and careworn, like a little old woman—skinny body, big feet. But when she swung the bucket up and hoisted it on top of her head and she straightened, balancing it, she became tall, erect, poised, and Hock desired her again. But it was futile desire. She was the only friend he had; he couldn’t risk changing that friendship to anything else, nor did he have the right.

  Normally, Snowdon would have chased her and watched her do the dishes. But he sat near Hock with his stumpy forefinger in his mouth, gaping at him, perhaps smiling, perhaps wincing because of the strong glare.

  When Zizi returned, Hock said, “Maybe it’s true. Maybe he’s not afraid of me.”

  “It is true,” she said.

  “What about you?”

  Zizi folded her arms as if to defy him, and seemed haughty with her head lifted.

  “Are you afraid of me?”

  She said, “Now I am.”

  “Why?”

  She mumbled some words. He heard the word for rat. He asked her to repeat it. She gave him part of a Sena proverb he recognized: Koswe wapazala—the fleeing rat . . .

  “The fleeing rat exposes all the others,” he said. “That’s what you think of him?”

  She crouched near the dwarf and made that face again, twisting her mouth like a reluctant child, screwing up one eye.

  That was another reason his desire was dampened: she was not a child, but she could seem childlike. She was still whole, as Aubrey had slyly intimated—locked, kept from her initiation. Still innocent: Hock couldn’t take that from her. In the village it mattered more than anything. Her virginity was a form of wealth, the value of her bride price, her pride, her only possession.

  The day was hot, and the fact that Aubrey had already set off for Blantyre helped raise Hock’s hopes. If Aubrey succeeded, he might not be in Malabo much longer, but Hock quickly dismissed this forbidden thought. It was still early. How to give a point to the day was always a problem. The days in Malabo were shapeless and empty, and he felt assaulted by them—the emptiness, the screech of the cicadas, the squealing of bats; the days were idiots.

  Toward noon, he said to Zizi, “Help me find some snakes.”

  She frowned, pretending to sulk, but she got to her feet, gathered the basket, the burlap sack, the forked stick, the collecting equipment. And in the heat of the day, when everyone else was inside or in the shade, they walked across the clearing in the weight of the full overhead sun, to the creek, to look for snakes.

  Hock was happy. A hunt for snakes—one of his pleasures from long ago—gave the day a purpose and some meaning, gave the flat and hot and undifferentiated landscape certain subtleties: the sandy patches where the snakes slept, the overhanging limbs that might hold the drooping length of a boomslang, the shallows in the creek where small narrow snakes like the snouted night adder whipped along just below the surface. The presence of snakes gave features to the monotony of the land, and looking for them, he was able to revisit his previous life here and to forget he was a captive.

  Walking just ahead of him, the basket on her head, Zizi stirred him, since she was like the embodiment of his other, earlier Africa. Her granny, Gala, had seemed like a new woman then—educated, self-possessed, quick to respond, unexpectedly witty. Yet Zizi had no education, could not read, wore that simple wrap, went barefoot, and shaved her head, and apart from being kept by Gala from her initiation, she observed all the other customs of the Sena people that Hock remembered, even quoting proverbs to make a point. She was restrained in the old way, too, merely frowned at Hock’s wristwatch, and had taken no interest in his radio—chuckled when he told her it had been stolen.

  The strangest habit she had, and the most endearing, was her singing deep in her throat when she was anxious. The melody was usually a dark, many-angled descant, a growly harmonizing that Hock followed with an aching heart.

  She was singing now, the growl growing fainter, as they trod the gravelly hard-packed sand of the worn path at the perimeter of Malabo, through the head-high elephant grass.

  Was it fear? It seemed that fear inspired her singing—or, not singing, but a vibrant harmony that rang through her whole slim body as she steadied the basket on her head, the basket in which they’d bring back the snakes.

  “What else are you afraid of?” he asked.

  Zizi whinnied in reply, a singing in her sinuses.

  “Tell me.”

  “I’m afraid to get married,” she said, and that sentence ended with a melody that seemed like an equivocation.

  “Yes?” He wanted to encourage her to say more, but he was distracted, searching the hot gravel for snakes.

  “But I’m not afraid to die.”

  As she spoke the words, he saw her dead. It was an amazing pair of pronouncements and made her seem both wise and vulnerable. Virgins were so often martyrs. He thought of Aubrey again, who seemed to mock her for being innocent and yet was intimidated by her. And he remembered his asking her what men wanted, and her replying, They want what all men want. He wondered how to tell her that a man can be kind, that marriage can bring children. A husband would protect her and give her status: the Sena pieti
es that were part of the initiation. But Zizi was wise enough to know that a villager in Malabo chose a wife as he would a field hand, and that the role of a wife came to much the same thing.

  But he didn’t say anything, because just then he saw a snake and all other thoughts left his head. She saw it too, raising her voice, an alarmed ascending song in her sinuses, and stepped back, reaching to steady the basket on her head.

  The puff adder lay on the hot coarse sand but near enough to some dead leaves to seem like part of the trash of twigs and grass nearby, the thick brownish snake as unmoving as vegetable matter, its jaw resting against the sand.

  In stepping back, Zizi had braced herself, keeping her knees together and slightly bent. As she murmured her fearful song, now softly slipping it into her throat, Hock could see that her face was beaded with sweat, not from effort or the heat, but wet as though from terror.

  So transfixed was she by the sight of the fat snake that she had not noticed that her wrap, the faded chitenje cloth that had been hitched under her arms, had slipped its knot and drooped, exposing one neat breast and a swollen nipple, like a pure unsucked fruit at the top of the smooth bulge. She had a body almost devoid of curves, which made her hard muscled bottom and her small breasts so noticeable.

  The snake was facing away from them, flicking its tongue, a slitted eye staring from each side of its head. Hock saw what perhaps in her fear Zizi did not see, that the adder had started to swell, slowly thickening. It had seen them. It had not changed its position on the sand, yet it was now almost one-third fatter than a moment ago, when they’d stopped six feet away.

  Absent-mindedly, Zizi touched her throat as if registering the vibrato of her song on her skin. Then her hand slipped to her breast, cupping it, her fingertip caressing the nipple. Her mouth was open, the whining melody from it worrying a strand of saliva that was like a lute string vibrant between her parted lips. Her teeth were just visible. She seemed terrified, she’d gone rigid, her eyes glittering as though in ecstasy.

  “Pick it up,” Hock said.

  But she didn’t move. Her eyes were fixed on the fattening thing.