The Lower River

by Paul Theroux

  The blood gave it subtlety and strength, simplified its hacked angles as if with thick paint, the coated splinters and plastered-on feathers making it more artful, with an aura of power, the gleaming blood lending it the sinewy density of bruised meat.

  That was what Hock saw on the floor, a dark swollen head, the scalp split in places, with the chopped-apart raggedness of torn fabric. Puffy eyes, purple lips, the whole skull crusted in darkened drying blood that looked sacrificial.

  Only the extreme grief of the women conveyed to Hock that it was not a big stiff fetish doll—that it might be human. The wide helpless hands and feet, their familiar size, the way they lay in repose, told him the bloody thing was Zizi.

  “How is she?” He was far too fearful to ask the blunter question, whether she was alive.

  “She was beaten,” Gala said. “And worse.”

  Wuss meant everything. And now he heard a groan—she was alive. She opened her eyes, saw Hock in the lantern light, and began as though hiccupping to cry.

  Yet her tears made him hopeful. He sensed life in her explosive sobs, a kind of self-awareness, the sobs coming from deep within her, from a part of her that was not broken.

  Hearing her cry, Snowdon, peeking at the doorway, began to chuckle, as if the tears from someone in worse shape than he was provoked him to mock.

  “Get out!” Gala said, and spat at him, as the dwarf limped to the door and cowered, covering his mouth. She repeated the cry distractedly in Afrikaans, as older people in the Lower River sometimes did, perhaps for its force: “Voetsak!”

  Zizi was alive, she was murmuring, she shifted on the mat for a better look at Hock. He frowned, thinking that she had never looked younger, more childlike, less sexual; that an injured body aroused no desire in him, inspired only the wish to protect, and an acute fear for its appearing so vulnerable. She had cuts on her hands, and there was blood on the covering cloth and the old towel; the sheet was dotted with blood spatter. The woman who had been bathing her face began to dab her cuts with gentian violet. They wiped it on all the wounds, painting her purple.

  “They found her near the boma, two women who are known to me,” Gala said. “They were form-two students here. Thanks be to God, they rescued her.”

  “How did they bring her here?”

  “They didn’t have a lift all the way. They were dropped by one of the fish trucks on the road, and they walked, just footing the rest. That is why she is so tired.”

  This talk reassured Hock. He had not had to ask the dreadful question of whether she would live. She was badly injured, but he gathered from what Gala said that she would make it. And in the short time he’d been in the room, Hock could see that she’d begun to stir.

  “Tell me what happened,” Hock said.

  “Don’t trouble her,” Gala said in a whisper. “She is hurt. She is weak. And she is ashamed.”

  It was apparent that she’d been attacked—she looked as though she’d fought off an animal. She is hutt. Baboons disturbed in the night would bare their doggy teeth, and bite and scratch. Hyenas were nocturnal and would attack a solitary person if they had the advantage. Worst of all—in the Lower River, anyway—were the packs of wild dogs, which snarled, circled their prey, and closed in, snapping their jaws.

  But if it was any of these animals, none of the women said so; and he’d had the suspicion since entering the hut and hearing their sorrowing that it was a peculiar attack that went beyond a beating. They were grieving for her pain, and for something that had been lost: she had been violated.

  She is ashamed meant only one thing. Zizi owned nothing, not even shoes, had no money, no ornament; not even the cooking pots were hers. She was a stick figure with no spare flesh, wrapped in a faded purple cloth. But she was a namwali; she had the glory of her virginity. She was known in the village for her aloofness, and it was this, in the beginning, that made her a prize for Hock—Manyenga’s prize. Her wholeness gave her power, made her desirable, and was perhaps a devious test for Hock. He knew this, which was why he had resisted, for in resisting he had proven himself stronger than them.

  Besides, he knew that in her eyes he was hardly human, an old beaky mzungu in flapping trousers and a torn shirt. He would see himself with her eyes and be disgusted. All he could offer her was his protection. And he had made a point of keeping her safe, until three days ago, when out of desperation he’d floated the idea of mailing the letter at the boma at night. She’d been afraid, knowing it was the only thing he wanted, yet she’d set off alone. And now she was back from the boma, lying in her own blood. Bloodstains were stiffened in places on her cloth in dark, disc-like patches.

  She seemed to rally a little since he’d arrived. She was inert, yet she followed him with her weepy reddened eyes.

  “I think she’ll be all right,” Hock said to Gala, looking for reassurance.

  “With God’s help,” she said, which left the question unanswered.

  Hock crouched, about to kneel, when Gala tapped his shoulder, cautioning him, and she turned, making a downward gesture of her hand, paddling the air, urging him away.

  The dwarf limped from the door, seeing Gala beckoning Hock onto the veranda. Zizi became fierce, her face set in anger, her lower jaw protruding. He had never seen this expression. She was indignant, refusing to die, clearly insulted—the abuse was apparent in the welts and scratches on her body—but something else showed through: the strength of her anger. She was trying to speak to Hock through her bruised lips.

  She muttered a word Hock could not understand.

  “Come away, Ellis,” Gala said, tugging his shoulder.

  Turning from Zizi’s pleading, Hock followed Gala to the veranda. In the distance, at the edge of the slant of light thrown by the lantern at the open window, Snowdon knelt, scratching the scabs on his arm and murmuring—Hock guessed—“Fee-dee-dom.”

  Hock said, “What do you know?”

  “Only what the women told me who found her and fetched her here. They knew her. Why are you surprised?”

  “Because the boma is so far from Malabo.”

  “She is namwali. She is known. Girls suitable for marriage are well known in the district. I was her guardian until Manyenga took her for you.”

  “You didn’t mind?”

  “I knew you would look after her. An elder person is a swamp that stops a fire. But she wandered off.”

  “You mean to the boma?”

  “Yes. And at night. On a bicycle.”

  Hock wondered whether he should tell Gala the reason for Zizi’s journey. He was about to speak when Gala resumed.

  “The women could not recognize her at first, her face was so bloody. Her chitenje cloth was torn.”

  Hock said, “Was Zizi going toward the boma or traveling away from it?”

  “What difference does it make?” she said.

  Then he knew he couldn’t tell her about the letter, because it seemed so petty, worrying about a letter when Zizi was lying injured inside the smoky hut. But the question was crucial. If the attack had occurred on her way to the boma, it meant she hadn’t mailed the letter, and he would be stalled again, and have to face the brothers.

  “It was a blessing that the women were there.”

  He said, “Why were they there at night?”

  “Because of the hunger. You know the harvest will be poor?”

  That and the lack of rain were the most common complaints of the villagers who had come to him for money, so common he’d begun to think of it as an excuse, perhaps a lie, because Manyenga always had food.

  “There is little rice. There is no millet. Not much flour. We are eating cassava most of the time,” Gala said. “The Agency vehicle is making deliveries of bags of flour and rice and beans, taking them to the boma. The women wanted to be early—first in the queue for free rice.”

  “But it’s not safe for them either.”

  “They are women with small children. They are safe. They have nothing—no money, no valuables.”

/>   “Zizi has nothing.”

  In a reproachful tone, the light flashing on her face, Gala said, “She has what all women want. She is a maiden. She was a maiden. Now she is bleeding, because it was taken from her.”

  Hock said, “That’s terrible.”

  “You don’t understand. You are innocent. You don’t know anything.” The words were contemptuous, but Gala’s tone was rueful, softened by her fatalism.

  “What don’t I know?”

  “That such girls are taken by sick men. Men with the AIDS” —she said eddsi. “They take the girls if they can find them. They also take small children.”

  Hock said, “I’ve heard of this.”

  “They believe that sex with a virgin is a cure.”

  He was too shocked to speak. He groaned, wishing he hadn’t heard.

  “That is why Zizi was taken—sure.”

  “She must have fought hard,” he said helplessly.

  “So hard,” Gala said. “They had to beat her, to subdue her, and then they just”—she whipped her hand, the fatalistic village gesture, snapping her fingers. “It’s a shame.”

  “Tell me she’ll recover, please.”

  “With God’s help. No bones are broken, but you know what happens with wounds and bruises. They go septic so fast. We must prevent it.”

  Then Hock remembered. “You said the women were going to the boma to get food from the Agency vehicle?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did they get the food?”

  “They found Zizi. They never saw the vehicle.”

  “Maybe it came and didn’t drop the food,” he said.

  “Why do you say that?” Gala frowned at him. “It makes no sense. The job of the Agency vehicle is to deliver the food.”

  “I don’t know,” Hock said. “I think I should go, but I want to say goodbye to Zizi.”

  “She may be sleeping.”

  But she was awake, her eyes half closed, her jaw set in the same determined way, as though enduring pain, struggling to stay alive. All her cuts had been painted with the gentian violet, and the patches of purple made her seem like a broken doll.

  Putting his face close to hers, Hock said, “Zizi, can you hear me?”

  She did not speak, yet she made a characteristic tightening of her face, a slight eyebrow flash, lifting them in recognition.

  “Who was it?”

  She groaned, her lips were dry and cracked, she could not form a word, though she showed her teeth, beautiful teeth, flecked with blood.

  “Was it Aubrey?”

  She winced as if pierced with a knife blade.

  Hock considered this, and he wondered whether his whisper had been heard by Gala or either of the women, who’d kept their distance, to give him some privacy.

  “The letter,” Hock said, and let this word, kalata, sink in. “What happened?” When she did not react, he said, “Did you post it?”

  He waited, but she only rolled her head from side to side, snared by pain, and it seemed she was saying No or I don’t know.

  Shortly afterward, when he left, Snowdon led him back through the darkness of the bush, chattering the whole way, perhaps feeling frisky after seeing the broken girl and the blood.

  30

  THE HEAT OF the Lower River, trapped beneath the white sky, penetrated the dust with the steam of its stillness, driving away all energy, sapping the strength of the people, withering the leaves that dangled limp on the low thorn bush. Malabo had never seemed flatter, quieter, more colorless, the heat baking it to a monochrome, like an old sun-faded photograph of itself.

  Or was it their hunger that kept the people idle? Since the news that the upcoming harvest would be meager, Hock had noticed a perceptible slackening, a greater silence. He’d become used to shouts, yelps, the loud teasing of children, the singsong of scolding women. Now there were only murmurs. Something in the screech of the cicadas, like the scrape of a knife being sharpened on a wheel, or the burr and crackle of winged beetles, made the heat seem more intense. In the blinding muted daylight and humid air, in the village of mud huts that were crumbled like stale cake, he heard despair in the whispers, and the small children had stopped running.

  He visited Zizi again, tramping through the tangle of bush at midday so he could gather snakes on the way. He plucked one from a swale of drifted sand, another from near a termite mound that rose like a cracked minaret of red dirt. And when he arrived at Gala’s, calling “Odi, odi,” she looked out from her veranda and saw two weighty flour sacks.

  “What have you brought?” she asked, in the expectation of food.

  He held the sacks up and swung them. She knew, she laughed, she said, “Snake Man Ellis.”

  “Some people eat them.”

  “But the Bible does forbid. Creatures that crawl on the belly are abominable and unclean. It is the law.”

  “I agree,” he said. He knotted the tops of the sacks and slung them in the shade under the veranda. “How’s Zizi?”

  “A little better.”

  Zizi lay just inside the hut, propped against a pillow but still on the mat. Flat on the floor, she looked more like a casualty. She raised her hands to her bruised face when she saw him, as though in shame. “Pepani,” she said. Sorry.

  He said, “Don’t worry,” and sighed at the futility of his words as soon as he spoke them—worse than futility, they represented helpless anxiety.

  Behind him, holding a pitcher, Gala said, “I can’t offer you anything. Water only. Or tea.”

  “What are you eating?” He took the plastic tumbler of water. The water was cloudy. He touched the tumbler to his lips but didn’t drink.

  “Cassava alone. The rice is finished.” Gala arranged a bead-fringed doily over the top of the pitcher. “I would like to make scones for you. We have some dried fish. Some few bananas. Naartjies too. It is the situation.”

  Hock lingered, and then went outside and leaned over the rail to look at the flour sacks quivering under the veranda, the squirming snakes inside. The sacks from Malabo were stamped with the shield logo and the words L’Agence Anonyme.

  “I wish I had something to give you,” Hock said when he reentered the hut.

  “You have given Malabo everything you had,” Gala said. “Your food has been eaten. Your money has been eaten. Your hope, too, all gone. We have eaten you.”

  That made him remember why he had come. He knelt before Zizi and whispered, “The letter—did you post it?”

  Her hands had slipped from her face as she’d watched him talk with Gala, but now with her fingers splayed, she covered her face again and began to cry.

  And Hock thought: Why am I even asking? I don’t deserve for the letter to have been mailed. I’m responsible for this skinny bruised girl lying here, her cracked lips, her swollen eyes, the scales of dried blood peeling on her ears, and a much worse wound I can’t see that will never heal.

  When he turned to go, gathering the sacks of snakes from the shade, Gala said, “Snake Man,” and nodded. “Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves. Be ye therefore wise as a serpent.” He leaned to kiss her, but she hissed into his ear, “The people are hungry. They will do anything.”

  He wanted to say: Until I saw Zizi, I doubted that. Now I am prepared to believe anything.

  But Zizi was better than yesterday, so he was hopeful for tomorrow. Still, given that he had sent her to the boma, he felt he did not deserve to be rescued.

  “We are in God’s hands,” Gala said.

  That was like surrender. Any mention of God filled him with despair.

  Manyenga was waiting for him at his hut when he returned from Gala’s. Odd, the big man standing in the heat, because he seldom left his compound these days. He was someone who had plenty of food, and he guarded it.

  “I hope you have something delicious in your gunny sacks,” Manyenga said.

  “We shall see,” Hock said.

  “I like the way you say that. Not yes, not no. Like a wise man.”

&
nbsp; “That’s me, Festus.”

  Manyenga said, “I have arranged a ceremony.”

  “What ceremony?”

  “To make you our chief.”

  “But I’m already your chief,” Hock said in a weary voice, slinging the sacks onto his veranda.

  “Of course, but we must have a proper ceremony, with dancers and drummers and music. That old blind man Wellington can play the mbira with his fingers. And then the voyage in a canoe. The float on the river.”

  “And what would be the point of that?” Hock said, playing along. “You are my people.”

  Manyenga laughed, then just as quickly scowled and became serious. “Yes. You belong to us.”

  Until Manyenga had said that, Hock had been thinking, Everything this man says is a lie. The remark about “a wise man,” the references to the chief, the business about the “proper ceremony”—all lies. And that had been the case since the day he’d arrived. He had forgotten again the length of time he’d been in Malabo—three months now? But it was a guess. Maybe more. He knew the date of his arrival; it was stamped in his passport. But he did not know today’s date. No one in Malabo knew it. He was like them in this respect. He’d arrived after the planting, the rains had failed, the maize stalks were tiny, crowded by weeds, the pumpkin vines were withered and whitened with rot. Those were visible facts. The harvest would be poor. Everything else was a lie, every word he’d been told by Manyenga, most of what the others had said. Gala told the truth, but her only message, from the moment he’d seen her, had been: Get out, go home, save yourself.

  The way that Manyenga had said, “You belong to us,” not with respect but with a growl of menace, reminded Hock that it was the one truth in a world of lies. They had always felt that Hock had been delivered, and his money had been taken. But much more serious than his money, his hope had been stripped from him.

  “Festus, I’ve given you everything I have,” he said.