My Other Life

by Paul Theroux

  This African train, burning wood and coal in its firebox, clattered deeper into Africa. The children in the coach stared at me. The older people were polite, even a bit fearful. I dozed, and was wakened at one of the stops by the anvil clang of the coupling—and I smiled when I looked out at my black arms, from the soot and smuts settling on my skin.

  I compared arms with the small boy next to me.

  "Mine is blacker than yours."

  "My arm is not black," he said.

  At one that afternoon we came to the town of Balaka, where dogs slept in the middle of the street. Balaka, a railway junction (another line went to Fort Johnston and Monkey Bay), was hotter and flatter than any place I had ever seen. Walking along the platform to ask the conductor what time we were leaving ("Not before tree," he said), I saw that one of the forward coaches had a good paint job and shuttered windows. A shutter rose as I watched and a small blue-eyed child looked out—it could only have been a missionary's child—and I realized that I was looking at a first-class passenger. I had not known about first, the one good coach on the train, shutters down, doors locked.

  I had no desire to hide in there and travel with my fellow mzungus, first class on soft seats. I did not want to listen to them complain. "Shocking train," they would say. "Filthy weather..." "Bloody Africans..."

  That was expatriate life in Blantyre. I wanted wooden seats and strangeness. I imagined the mzungus behind the locked doors of their first-class coach, grumbling, hiding, killing time by reading the yellow-bound copies of the Daily Mirror, months old, that were sent sea mail to Malawi from London.

  There was an African restaurant behind the goods shed at Balaka station, and for four shillings and a tickey—threepence—I was given a chipped enamel bowl of chicken and rice. Afterwards I sat in the shade of the verandah, watching the hot street and the white sky, the earth like pale powder, and everything still except the insects. I walked into the sun and immediately felt the weight of it on the top of my head. I stood alone in the middle of the street on the small black island of my shadow, and thought: I am where I want to be.

  The whistle blew at about two-thirty and after some hesitation—shunting in the Balaka tracks—the train set off again, north, through the dusty landscape of yellow bush and low skinny trees and the elephant grass that was taller than the Africans. On this blazing October afternoon there was no movement. Nothing stirred, no birds, no people, nor any animals. The bush was dead still and looked stifled of air. The train was the only moving thing in that whole hot world. We raised dust and smoke and noise, but after we passed—I could see out the back window of the rear coach—our commotion subsided and all was still again.

  No animals, no people, not even any gardens or huts. Just miles of sunburned bush—"miles and miles of bloody Africa," the mzungus said. And the howl of insects, like a fever; a high temperature, going higher.

  The sun had made an arc over the train, rising above the windowsill on the right when we left Blantyre, drumming on the metal roof of the coach at noon, and now it had slipped sideways again and was shining through the windows on the left-hand side. I nodded and dozed to the clanking of the wheels on the long, straight rails, hammering more insistently where the rails butted, and at each stop there was the clutch and clawing sound of the brakes, the screech of metal against metal.

  I had never been on a train like it, and it did not seem to me like a train at all. My earlier impressions of it as a vessel were truer. But not a ship—it was more like a paddle steamer with its gasps and its shrill whistle, rattling along a coast and then penetrating the land by plunging up a narrow river that led sinuously through the bush. Here and there a station or a siding appeared, like a man-made feature on a jungly riverbank.

  Most stations were wooden sheds with tin roofs and no sign giving their name. On their dirt platforms, packed hard by all the tramping feet, women and small girls sold greasy dough cakes and bananas and peanuts, carrying them in tin basins on their heads. They were skinny, ragged, barefoot, and the farther north we went the more naked the women became. Now most of them were bare-breasted on this hot lake-shore plain. It was the Africa of my imagination at last.

  I sat at the window, squinting through the coal smoke at Africa, and waited and watched and went deeper. Through the late afternoon I saw shadows rippling in the trees like phantoms, Africans whispering, watching the train, and I knew they had seen my white face. They were like glimpses of strangeness. On a passing embankment I saw a funeral procession, a mass of chanting people marching behind a wooden coffin. I saw naked children. I saw two people, a man and a woman, rolling on the ground in panic away from the train, startled in the act of love.

  Now the sun was below the tattered trees, and dusk was gathering in shadows under a briefly bluer sky.

  "Ntakataka," an African said to me.

  That was the station for Moyo.

  It was almost six. I had been traveling in a state of great happiness for over twelve hours.

  Father DeVoss met me. He was tall and gaunt, and although he was not old he was gray. He wore a dusty white cassock and looked at me—fondly I thought—with a sad smile.

  "Good to see you," he said. "You play cards?"

  2

  The dark house on the only high ground here looked haunted, one of its windows lit by an overbright pressure lamp, the rest of the windows shuttered or in darkness. Its shadows and its size and its crumbling stucco gave it a ghostly wolfish look. But I soon realized that was misleading. The house was mostly empty, a relic of an earlier time when the mission had been much bigger and there had been more lepers and more priests. It was like the rubbly ruin—of a fort or a palace—that lay neglected and overgrown in the African bush. Inside, the priests' house seemed forlorn.

  We had passed through the village below it, which was a place of fires and wood smoke and voices and yapping dogs. Because of the crude lamps flaring inside the huts, all the shadows were active and black. There was a smell, too—human, sweetish, like decay—the smell of illness and death.

  An old priest came fussing forward on the stone stairs. He managed to snatch my bag over my protests, and he passed it to an African in khaki shorts and a white shirt, an African servant's basic uniform. Another priest, much younger, stared at me from behind the fussing priest, who was speaking in Chinyanja and who I now realized was talking to me, not to the African, slapping at my bag.

  "Moni, bambo, muli bwanji? Eeh, nyerere! Eh, mpemvu! Pepani, palibe mphepo..." Hello, how are you? What's that? An ant! A roach! Sorry, there's no breeze here...

  The old priest went on jabbering and sweeping away the insects from my bag, and it was clear to me that he did not speak English and, as I did not speak Dutch, this would be our way of communicating. But he tended to use very precise words when he was speaking the language, such as majiga for railway station—most Africans just mangled the English word "station." And that night he taught me the word mberetemberete when I glanced down at the village, at the lamps showing through the ragged curtains of the mud huts. It meant "shining faintly through," like a woman in a loose dress with a light behind her, a sight that made me pause many African nights.

  "Dzina lanu ndani?" I said, asking him his name.

  His reply sounded like "Fonderpilt," but when he added in English, "The poor ones, not the rich American ones," I understood that his name was van der Bilt. To everyone he-was Brother Piet.

  The younger priest was Father Touchette, newly arrived from Canada, still sallow from the trip and rather confused by this torrent of Chinyanja. The African, Simon, put my bag in the corner and then returned and dished up some food. Father DeVoss sat and simply watched and listened. He had an air of gentle authority. He seemed at once kindly and remote. He had a melancholy smile.

  I was thinking how white their cassocks had seemed when I had approached the men on the verandah, and how dusty and stained and torn they were when I saw them up close.

  Washing my hands at the sink in the kitchen, I glanc
ed at my face in the mirror and hardly recognized myself—my sooty hair and skin, my sunburned nose, my exhausted bloodshot eyes. Brother Piet sat me down and gave me the food that Simon had prepared—beans and boiled greens and boiled peanuts and roasted corn and a lump of steamed dough they called nsima: African food.

  Brother Piet asked me about the train. He traveled on it now and then, he said, to get to the market in Balaka.

  "I always go second class," he said. "Then I have someone to talk to."

  "But Holland is your home," I said in Chinyanja.

  "Pepani! Sorry!" he said. "The noise of Amsterdam! The tramcars! The crowds of people! It hurts my ears. Chinthunthumira! Misala!..."

  "He shivers," Simon explained. "It is madness."

  "...Sorry. I stay here where it is peaceful." Brother Piet repeated the African word, mtendere.

  He was seventy-four and had last been on leave in Holland in 1951, thirteen years before.

  "When did you come to Africa?"

  "So long ago"—and the phrase he used, za kale, meant "in ancient times"—"that I traveled down the Nile River from Cairo to Juba. Yes! And I drank the water of the Nile!"

  I went on eating, scooping up food with my hands, using a ball of nsima, in the African way.

  "When I die, maybe," he said, and laughed, "they send me back to Amsterdam. Then I won't mind the noise! I am dead, eh?"

  I liked his humor and oddity, speaking Chinyanja in his boisterous way and occasionally throwing in an English word.

  Father Touchette did not have much conversation. He was new, fearful, with the tense demeanor of a stria believer; no jokes—pious perhaps because he was afraid. He clutched his breviary as though it were a brick he wanted to throw at a sinner.

  He seemed to be listening at the window, one ear cocked in the direction of the African shouts and laughter, and the random dribbling sound of the drums.

  "And how did you happen to come here to Moyo?" I asked.

  "I was sent here," Father Touchette said sternly, as though it had been a punishment.

  "It is his good luck," Father DeVoss said in a cheery voice, and it seemed to me that he had detected a grievance in what Father Touchette had said and was trying to make light of it.

  "I am happy to be here," I said, truthfully, and I had the sense that they were glad to have a visitor. My smile revealed my weariness—I was tired from the trip, and from the hot meal in that humid room, all the dark heat of the night hanging like black curtains at the windows.

  "Does Paul know where his room is?" Father DeVoss asked, seeing that I was tired.

  I said good night, and with a candle in a dish Simon led me down a long hallway and showed me to my room.

  "This is a good place," I said.

  "Yes," he said.

  "But some people are sick."

  "This is where they are cured," Simon said. "That is why it is a good place."

  He had put the candle down and was throwing open the shutters.

  "In the villages"—he meant everywhere else—"people are sick, but they stay that way."

  After he slipped away into the darkness I lay on the hard bed with dust in my nostrils, in the cool room, the candle flame making shadows twitch on the plaster wall. It was like being in the antechamber of a castle—strange and spooky.

  I had been reading Kafka. But it was more than Kafka's imagery that inspired this feeling. It was the experience of the train trip, and the heat and the dry yellow landscape and the black night and the smell of poverty and illness.

  The next morning everything was different. In darkness Africa seemed enchanted. In daylight it was hot and pitiless. Most of the trees were so wraithlike, their leaves so slender, there was no shade under them.

  The light at Moyo was more intense than where I lived in the south of the country. Was it some effect of the lake near here, the surface flashing sunlight back? But the lake was twenty miles away. Perhaps it was the flatness of the land, the high clouds, the thin bush, or perhaps the time of year. Whatever, it was something that made for glaring leaves and a shine on some rocks and pale soil and white skies. It made for nakedness.

  The scorching light exposed everything so completely it even burned shadows away. It was not sunshine, not warm and bright, but a fiery African light that swelled in the sky and seemed to drum against the land. It came rattling straight through the threadbare curtains into my room, waking me like a blade piercing my eyes. I saw that the walls were cracked plaster and dusty whitewash, with a wooden crucifix of a skinny, suffering jesus over my bed. The floor was dusty, the wood doorjamb was pitted with termite holes, and the whole place smelled of ants. It had seemed so substantial last night, the whole building on its hill, but in this harsh, truthful light the structure was frail and elderly.

  In the kitchen, Simon poured me a cup of milky tea. The large screened-in box that looked like an animal cage was, I knew, a meat safe, and its contents—plates of chicken—were going rancid. That was the smell that hung in the room, dead meat. On the table, the bread, the papaya, the margarine, and the jam all smelled of the meat safe.

  "Where is Father DeVoss?"

  "He is saying mass."

  So I sat at the worn table in the blinding light, with my bottle of Koo ketchup and dish of Springbok margarine.

  "Are there nuns here too?"

  "Yes, there are three," Simon said.

  "What do they do?"

  "The nuns take care of our bodies. The priests take care of our souls," he said, with the sententiousness of a convert. "And one American mzungu."

  "What is the American's name?"

  "I don't know. But they call her Birdie." He pronounced it in the African way, "Buddy."

  "Like 'bird'? Mbalatne?"

  "Yes. She is a sister."

  It was British usage: a sister also meant nursing sister, a nurse.

  "Is the convent nearby?"

  "It is near to the hospital."

  "How long has the woman Birdie been here?"

  "She was coming this side in July."

  Three months ago.

  "What about Father Touchette?"

  "He was coming this side in April."

  I asked no more questions, yet Simon sensed unspoken ones and told me that the old priest, Brother Piet, had helped build the church at Moyo, and that Father Touchette did not like to hear the drumming from the village, and that when Father DeVoss first came to Moyo, Simon had been a small child, and Simon's father had pointed him out and told Simon not to be afraid.

  "We thought that white people were ghosts who would eat us. But my father said, 'No, he is a good man.'"

  "What was your father doing here?"

  "He was sick with mkhate."

  A leper.

  Father DeVoss appeared soon after that. His look of distraction, a dreamy vagueness and inattention, made him seem kind and gentle and a little sad.

  "Did you have a full house?"

  "Attendance at mass is not so good."

  "Maybe I should go."

  "If you wish," he said, as though he hardly cared.

  "I was about to prepare some lessons. I thought I might start my English classes soon."

  "That is a good idea," Father DeVoss said. "But there is no hurry." He was smiling sadly out of the window. "Would you like to see the church?"

  I said yes, because I suspected that he wanted to show me. It was a short walk from the priests' house, on the other side of that same low hill, and it was large and dusty, smelling of lighted candles—the tallow, the flames, the burned wicks. A few of the windows were stained glass, and the Stations of the Cross were African carvings.

  "Some of the lepers made them. They are not bad, eh? They are crude, but they have emotion."

  He looked around the church with a crooked smile that seemed like skepticism, as though he only half believed what all this represented. He pointed to a plaster statue.

  "Saint Roche. You know about him?"

  "No," I said.

  Father DeV
oss smiled and said nothing more. There were other plaster statues, and plastic flowers, and small gilt ornaments, but even so, from the light alone, streaming through the cracked windows, the church had an odor of sanctity.

  "What about the hospital?"

  "If you want to see it," Father DeVoss said, as though surprised by my interest.

  Ever since I had arrived the night before, the leper village had been audible. It smoldered and crackled beneath the trees at the foot of the priests' hill. There were always voices and shouts and laughter, the continual cockcrows the Africans called tambala, and the thump of the pounding of pestles in mortars as the women made ufa, the corn flour that was one of the village staples. The village was also the smell of wood smoke and that other, obscurer odor, of decay, of human bodies, the smell of disease and frailty and death, which was also the smell of dirt.

  Father DeVoss was offhand introducing me to the nuns, like a man bringing a stranger to meet a wife or close relation. He hardly looked at them, and he did not tell me their names, but only told them who I was.

  "Paul insisted on seeing the hospital," he said. "As you know, this is all strange to me."

  He laughed softly and then left, to return to the priests' house.

  In his self-conscious way he made me understand that the hospital was not his operation, but theirs—a clumsier, cruder business than saying mass, perhaps, the inexact science of doctoring in the bush—knives and sutures and purple disinfectant, and lepers always in line, waiting for bandages or pills.

  This central building with the tin roof and the verandah was the dispensary, the oldest nun said. There were several other buildings, lined with cots, for seriously ill people or disabled ones who had no families. But most of the lepers lived in their huts and were looked after by relatives. Their bandages were changed in the afternoon, they picked up their medicine in the morning, and except for the severe cases who were bedridden, the lepers lived at home in their nearby village.