by Paul Theroux
"There was drumming again last night," I said to Simon, stating the obvious, just to hear my own voice.
"There is drumming every night."
"And dancing?"
"Yes, Father."
I was sure it was as I imagined it, the lepers naked and stamping, Amina twitching before her blind granny.
"Is it some sort of harvest festival?"
"But we have no harvest, Father," he said. "We work in our gardens all the year."
"Then what is the chamba about?" I asked, using the word that meant dancing generally.
"It is not chamba but zinyao."
I did not know the word, and so I asked him to explain it.
Simon shook his head, as though he could not disclose the secret. "Perhaps you will see it sometime when you get well."
I had begun to sit up, to sleep better, and my head ached less. My fever was intermittent. I still swallowed many bitter-tasting tablets and six or eight aspirin a day. I felt better—not stronger, but less feverish. And then I began to eat more, a slice or two of Simon's crumbly bread with the soup.
Eating more did not make me well or even strong. It simply gave me diarrhea. So instead of using the chamber pot, I had to hobble to the latrine. I had always used the one outside the kitchen. But there was one in an overgrown part of the garden, all mossy bricks and weeds, just outside my room. It was as old as the house itself. It was a nightmare, but it was near.
This shed—mud walls, thatched roof, sagging door, spider webs—was built on to a back entryway near my part of the corridor. Now and then I heard it used, because its door hinges squeaked, sometimes at the oddest hours of the day. It had been part of my feverish hallucination, this squeaking in the dark before morning.
I was surprised to find that there were no door hinges. I stood, dizzy from being upright, and saw that the door was fixed with loops of knotted rope. But I had not imagined the rusty scrape of metal—I heard it again as I stood in the sun, just outside this old latrine. The squeaking was louder inside. When my eyes grew accustomed to the dark, I saw that bats—three or four rat-sized ones—had attached themselves with dirty claws to the rough edge of the wooden seat hole. I banged the seat with my fist and they took off, dropped into the pit, where they flew in fluttering batty circles. Still they flapped and squeaked under me while I sat wincing, trying to hurry the business.
A week of this: sleep, fever, dysentery; and Brother Piet. "Pepani." Sorry. Most nights, the drumming. My fever subsided, and one day I woke without a headache. My eyes did not hurt. The day was fresh, and the film of moisture on the leaves, darkening the dust under the trees with dew, gave the illusion that it had rained during the night. I marveled at the sky which was an ocean of light, and for the first time I felt hungry and wanted to eat, and I thought, I'm alive.
"What was wrong with me?"
"A fever," Father DeVoss said.
"What kind?"
"In Africa most fevers have no names," he said. "But what does it matter? You've pulled through."
6
And only then, more than three weeks after I had arrived at Moyo, did I understand the leper colony. Now, bleary-eyed, I saw it as it was. I was groping towards recovery, taking slow steps with Brother Piet's carved walking stick. The effects of the fever were settling within me. Light-headed and weak and trembly, I was still hungry but could eat very little. My heart was fluttering, my hands were unsteady; a walk to the bat-haunted latrine left me breathless, and a trip to the dispensary took all morning. I had survived the fever but I had not fully recovered.
In this watchful, passive state of convalescence I saw the leprosarium's indifference to the world. No one could explain exactly what it was. On my arrival I had accepted what they had said about the disease, but you had to be ill in that place to know where you were.
It hardly mattered what your illness was. Any high fever that was potentially fatal sufficed to put you in touch. My nameless fever had done it. The others were naked, and now I was naked too.
Naked here meant no clothes; it was not a figure of speech. That kind of talk was unknown. Words here had definite meanings. There were no metaphors, no symbols; nothing poetic or literary. Sick meant leprosy, fever meant a week of suffering, hot meant this pitiless sun, dust this sour powder that covered the ground and was the grit in every mouthful of food. And desire—I had seen it enough times—was a man kneeling against a woman in the dust, behind a blind of crackling corn shucks at the edge of the village, pumping while she thrashed, and it was brief and brutal.
This was the bush, and had its own bush rules. The leper colony was an oversize village. It was foolish of me to think that I could come here to teach English. And it was ludicrous for me to think of the outdoor kitchen in terms of a deadline. No one cared. Anyway, the leper village of the day was just subsistence and struggle: staying alive. The leper village of the night was pleasure. While the rest of us were sleeping, the leper village was alive, even frenzied. It had nothing to do with us.
But both day and night were outside time, because time had no meaning. Today was like yesterday or tomorrow, like forty years ago; and forty years from now there would be the same dust and drums and hunger. There were no expectations, there was only resignation. Used to their illness and grateful for their blessings, the lepers embraced life, they were roused by sex, they shrugged at sickness, they accepted death.
Moyo was a complete world, simple enough to see, all on the surface, all visible. It was changeless. It made no allowance for ambition or alteration. A casual visitor might see it as a prison, but it was more like a home—an enormous family, with a few easily breakable rules. Apart from gardening and a little basket-weaving, there was no work. There was a church, but few people attended services. Sex was almost constant, and often in view, the man and woman glimpsed, she on her back, he kneeling; and small mimicking boys were always chasing girls. It was the leper life, leper sex, leper idleness, a whole life of it in one place, and then they died. It now made sense to me.
I understood the meaning of words I had not known until then.
And still feeling brainsick and lame, I saw people clearly. They took me more seriously too—the lepers, their families, the nuns, Birdie. Amina now said hello to me, slyly murmuring and waving while her granny, hearing her, demanded, "Who is that?"
The priests and Brother Piet were, as before, somewhat remote on their low scrubby hill, concerned with the spiritual side, as Father DeVoss put it, saying mass, which was an unchanging duty. Because so few Africans went to mass it was like a private ritual, a daylit European version of the nighttime drumming.
The priests had sympathized with me in my fever but, believing in the afterlife, they were calm in the presence of any illness. I knew that from the way they spoke of the young man, Malinki, whom I had seen that first day. Still he lay without moving in a corner of the men's ward, wasted like a castaway—yellow eyes, his tongue swollen, struggling to breathe. Never mind his collapsing body and all his leaks. His soul was their mission. It was almost as though, trapped by his unknown illness, unable to move, he could be claimed: they'd snatch his soul while he was flat on his back.
We had resumed our after-dinner card game. Playing one night, just after Father DeVoss and I lost a trick, I asked how Malinki was. For my own morale in my period of convalescence I wanted to hear stories of recovery.
"He's very ill," Father DeVoss said, picking up his hand and concentrating on each card as he arranged them in a fan.
The next night, during the whist game—as though a lost trick were the reminder—Father DeVoss turned to me and said, "That young fellow didn't make it."
"Pepani!" Brother Piet said.
"We have the funeral tomorrow," Father Touchette said from across the room. He was not playing whist tonight. Simon had taken his place. Simon played without speaking, with a kind of anxious caution that made him lose.
"What would you have done if I had been as sick as that African?"
"We wo
uld have taken care of you," Father DeVoss said, surprising me with his vagueness.
"I'm talking about an emergency," I said. "Who would you have called?"
"We have no telephone."
"And there is no one to listen!" Brother Piet said bluntly in Chinyanja. Palibe anthu senga! And the card game resumed.
Few of the lepers ever attended morning mass, but when they were ill they were given the last rites—extreme unction. And when they died they had a funeral, with a mass, and were buried in the cemetery surrounded by the stone wall, in the shade of the mango tree, where I sometimes saw a man and a woman coupling.
"Maybe Paul will be our altar boy."
"All right," I said.
It was years since I had been an altar boy serving at mass, but with a little prompting I remembered the responses, from "Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meum," To God who gives joy to my youth, to thanking the priest when he said, "Ite, missa est," Go, the mass is ended.
The Africans at Malinki's funeral sang in a moaning harmony, the men groaned, the women shrieked, they all wept. And they carried Malinki's corpse in a battered coffin that would be reused after they dumped him out and buried him in a burlap sack.
Later, in the sacristy, Father DeVoss said, "That soutane looks good on you."
He stood and admired the white cassock that I had started to unbutton.
"You don't have to take it off. You'll find it very cool to wear, because it's loose. Better than your heavy trousers. Go on, try it."
I wondered whether I ought to. I knew I was too weak to work. Anyway, I had abandoned my English class and was sick of laying bricks in the outdoor kitchen. So I kept the cassock on, and I walked down to the dispensary. I needed more aspirin, but I also wanted to walk among the Africans while I was dressed as a priest, in this White Father's gown.
"Hello, Father," Africans said as I passed by. That was a usual greeting: "Moni, Bambo." Bwana, master, was more respectful; achimwene, brother, was more intimate. I thought "Father" was about right, even though I had only just turned twenty-three. Yet when they said it they hung back, bowed and clapped their hands, and some women and most children dropped to their knees.
Seeing me approach the dispensary, the nuns smiled, knowing that I was an impostor; nevertheless, they regarded me as an ally. And Birdie, who was doling out white tablets in paper cups to a long line of lepers, laughed out loud, as though seeing an old friend.
"Yes!" she called out.
She let her African assistant take over the pill pushing and hurried towards me, smiling.
"It gives you a feeling of power, right?" she asked, and touched my sleeve.
"It's just cooler, wearing it."
"Oh, sure."
And I remembered how I had seen her in her nun's outfit and her saying I'm naked underneath, and her watching my reaction.
Now there was a different look on her face—more sympathetic and animated, quicker to respond, brighter and kinder. Even the way she touched my sleeve seemed like a gesture of affection.
She said, "I'm glad you're feeling better."
"So am I."
"I was starting to miss you," she said. And perhaps detecting skepticism on my face, she added, "There are so few people here."
"Two thousand is a lot."
"I mean mzungus."
All this time she was glancing at my white cassock. Her scrutiny had started to make me feel uncomfortable, because she was looking at my clothes and not at me. I wanted to change the subject.
"Are these people getting their medicine?"
"The second batch," she said. "We give them a hundred milligrams a day, half in the morning, half in the afternoon."
"What is it?"
"Dapsone. It's a sulfa drug. We're getting low—not that the lepers care," she said. "We do their worrying for them."
"You don't look very worried."
"Does it matter?" She gestured to the line of men and women who were waiting to receive their dapsone tablets. There were some children, too. All this patience and submission. Towards the end of the line I saw Amina and her granny.
"Some of these people don't look like lepers."
"Looks are deceiving. A child may have leprosy but won't know it until he or she is an adult."
Seeing her staring at them, some youngsters in the line lowered their eyes.
"A bunch of these older people are almost cured," Birdie said. "But they have to go on taking medicine for ten years to be completely clear."
As she spoke, she glanced at me and saw that I was smiling at Amina. Birdie turned towards Amina and gave her a swift, pitiless look, as though sizing up a rival, and reached over and lifted up Amina's slender arm and pinched her skin and held it between her fingers.
"You see this hard, dry spot? It is dead. That's the body's reaction to the bacillus. It's like a wall, sealing off the germs. That helps, but it also makes parts of the body die."
Yet Amina was lovely—she was murmuring to her old blind granny who had asked, "Ciani?" What is it? I had not known until Birdie had pointed it out that Amina was a leper. I had thought she was there only to help the old woman.
"Arms and legs can become useless," Birdie said, still watching Amina closely. Was I imagining that she sounded triumphant? "It can turn the hand into a claw."
Amina touched the spot on her arm and seemed to shrink back into the line as her granny groped for her shoulder.
"It cuts off the nerves." Birdie indicated a man whose hand had become cup-shaped as it had withered. "He feels no pain."
But I was looking back at Amina. "I don't get it. I thought leprosy disfigured people."
Amina was standing shyly among the lepers, a turban wound around her head, her face so sweet and smooth, her hands clasped, her cloth wrapped around her so that she seemed like an upright bundle, very slender and straight. And just behind her the old blind woman, now gripping her shoulder with a diseased hand, to guide herself.
"On some people it doesn't show for years. And it's not the leprosy that disfigures, but the body's reaction to it. By fighting the bacillus, the body destroys its own tissue. It starves and hardens it."
"Is that how their fingers and toes fall off?"
"That's a myth. We amputate them when they harden and become useless."
I saw Wilson, the African man who had refused to help me with the kitchen. I saw Simon the cook, and Johnson Magondwe, and the rest of the people from my English class, including the deaf man and the feeble-minded man, some of them twisted and limping on bandaged feet, others looking perfectly all right. A few seemed much healthier than me.
"That disfigurement is the body's success. It stops the bacilli." Birdie turned away from the line of people. "It stops the body, too."
The lepers were moving past a barred window that was like a ticket window, and each of them took a paper cup of tablets from Birdie's assistant. They swallowed the tablets or held them in their mouths while a nun with a pitcher filled the paper cups with water, which they drank. Then they went outside.
"That girl you were staring at. She has a nodule on her arm. A lot of these people have nodules. That's why it's called tuberculoid leprosy."
The nun with the pitcher said, "But it's not all like that." And pouring water into a man's paper cup, she went on, "This man Yatuta is lepromatous."
He had a heavy face and a shriveled nose and thick, bunched-up skin that was as coarse as the bark of a tree. The nun explained that the cells in this type of leprosy did not fight the disease, which caused a slow destruction of the body and the collapse of the extremities—nose, fingers, toes.
"It's terrible," I whispered as the man gulped the pills with the water and moved slowly outside, stabbing his walking stick into the dirt floor.
Birdie was smiling at me, as though to ridicule my sympathy.
"These people aren't dying," she said.
I turned sharply at her, disliking the expression on her face and hating her dismissive tone. But what did I know?
/> "You don't die of leprosy," she said. "You shrink and become crippled. You live out your life. But you're disfigured and covered with scars."
I felt self-conscious talking about the lepers in their own presence, as they moved in the long line and took their medicine. They were glancing up at us and looking helpless, as though they knew they were being discussed. But Birdie went on chattering. In a hospital everyone was naked, and this leper colony was an extreme example of nakedness.
"That fever you had was much more dangerous," Birdie said.
I wondered whether she knew how sick I had been, and if so, who had told her.
"A fever's not contagious, though."
"This disease will be completely cured," she said, belittling leprosy the way she had seemed to belittle me. "But there are other diseases. Some of them aren't in the medical books. People are brought in ill. We think they have TB—they have all the symptoms. But they don't respond to treatment. They waste away, they die. We stand and watch and then we bury them, like that young guy Malinki. We never found out what was wrong with him."
The nun with the water pitcher said, "But we have a good idea of how leprosy is spread. Probably from mucus, probably from running sores." She shrugged and filled another paper cup.
"That's why we keep the wounds clean," Birdie said. She was standing very close to me, and still smiling, and her smile seemed to have nothing to do with what she was saying to me. "All this bandaging."
"If you have friends in America who can send us bandages or old bed sheets," the nun said, "we'd be happy to receive them."
"What about these children?" I asked, seeing some small boys and girls in the medicine line clinging to their mothers. "Do they have it?"
"We don't know," Birdie said. "But if a child is born to a leper woman, it's almost certain the kid will get leprosy."
