My Other Life

by Paul Theroux

  I had always disliked the way Father Touchette carried his breviary around with him, consulting it and seeming to wrestle with its verses. I resented his saying, "I have baptisms," when I needed help carrying bricks. The book seemed like a talisman against his ever having to work. He used it the way the lepers used their mutilation, as an excuse. The young priest wore socks with his sandals, which made him look silly. I thought how madness is often a way of dressing.

  "He is your friend?" Amina asked.

  "No."

  "But he is a mzungu."

  "I would rather talk to you."

  I wanted to tell her that I was glad to see him go. He was a worrier, a baptizer, a converter, a scold. "That's savage," he had said of the drumming almost every night. Perhaps I had alarmed Amina by being forthright, for after the Land Rover had driven off, she disappeared as the dust settled over us.

  The drumming was louder that night. There were shouts and yells, a kind of whooping, like panic. In my fever that same drumming had filled my imagination with vivid images of Amina dancing—her slender body gleaming, her mouth open, her glazed eyes looking drugged.

  Desire for me was always the fulfillment of a fantasy—not a surprise or a shock, but something studied in advance, dreamed and premeditated. It was pleasure prepared, the completion of a thought begun in a vision. Desire was familiar and fixed; not something new, but an older, deeper wish, with a history, an embrace that had already shadowed forth in my mind. It was something specific, like a gift I yearned for. And later, when it seemed to be granted—flickering into reality and becoming attainable—I seized it.

  I had heard that same drumming many nights before, rattling through the heat to reach me in my bedroom where I lay alone on my cot. It was also the sound the village women made when they pounded corn into flour, thumping a heavy pestle into the mortar. When there was more than one woman pounding, it set up a syncopation in the trees, and a chorus of grunts and thuds.

  "No cards tonight," Father DeVoss said. He did not have to explain that this was out of respect for Father Touchette, who hated our card playing. Among other things, the sight of us flipping cards and collecting tricks had driven him crazy. Never mind, we would play tomorrow.

  "No cards," Brother Piet exclaimed, taking up his sewing. "Pepani, palibe sewendo!" Sorry, no games!

  It was as though we were respecting the memory of someone who had just died. And leaving Moyo was like death: life outside it bore no resemblance to life here.

  "I hope he gets better," I said.

  Guessing what was in my mind, Father DeVoss said, "He won't come back."

  There was a great cry from the village and a surge of brightness, as though a mass of dry straw or corn shucks had been dumped in the fire and exploded into flames.

  "They never come back," Father DeVoss said.

  At just that moment it seemed that the only life was down in the leper village—the drumming like a faulty heart beating; not wood at all but the racing pulse of the place.

  Brother Piet was sewing by the light of the pressure lamp, and Father DeVoss sat near him, with shadows on his face. In any other place they would have been reading, writing a letter, looking at pictures. But this was Moyo, as stark as anything else in the bush. They were like an old married couple.

  I said good night and went to my room, where I stood by the window. I was restless, impatient, ready to leap into the darkness. The trees beyond that darkness were lighted by the fire in the village. Because of the flames each branch was distinct and black.

  Slipping down the back stairs, I went outside, avoiding the path but following the firelight and the sounds of the drumming.

  Though there was a thin circle of spectators, almost the whole village was dancing in the clearing, women on one side, men on the other, shuffling and stamping their feet, nodding their heads, raising their arms, calling out. Their heavy tread echoed in me as though they were moving flat-footed through my body.

  The men clapped their hands and the women yodeled in a shrill ululation that was both fearful and triumphant—a sort of war whoop. There were no carved masks, but there were painted faces, none more frightening than the man whose face was dusted with white flour. He was a leper and he was wearing a bed sheet and carrying a crucifix. A woman opposite him was also wrapped in a bed sheet. Priest and nun, writhing in a suggestive dance that was a riotous sexual mockery or a ritual, or both.

  The lepers danced on their dead feet that were swollen with bandages, making the sound of clubs. Small boys dressed as dogs or monkeys, naked except for the mangy pelts flapping on their backs, moved on all fours through the chanting, stamping crowd.

  Another group, entering from the shadows of the huts, carried a totem on their shoulders. It was a small building like a doll's house, and I guessed from its cupola, a crude steeple, that it was meant to be the representation of a church. It rested in the middle of a little platform that was set on poles, as though they were carrying a stretcher.

  I had missed the preliminaries, I knew. The dance had been going on for an hour or more. I had been listening to it throughout dinner and afterwards, while I had sat in silence with the two priests. The dance had now grown to a pitch of excitement that had bystanders jumping in and joining. It was impossible to tell the dancers from the spectators, there was so much movement, the stamping, the drumming, the clapping, the flapping rags.

  The man dressed as the priest and the woman as the nun were at the head of a frenzied procession. Just behind them was the fragile little church building made of sticks and paper. This was either exaggerated respect or elaborate mockery.

  I recognized many of the dancers as the people I had come to know since my arrival in Moyo. It was strange to see them so active, in motion. The leper dressed as a priest looked like Johnson from my English class. He carried a book—not a Bible or a breviary, but the message was clear enough. This was Father Touchette, and for their own reasons, because he had just left, they were dramatizing what they knew of him. He performed a baptism on one of the dog boys. He read his book with rolling eyes. He pranced, looking haughty. He rebuffed a flirtation from the nun. And the drumming was both music and hoarse, hectic commentary.

  Among all the moving bodies it was easy for me to pick out Amina. She stood to one side, in the shadow of a hut's eaves, the firelight on her face, watching while the rest of the leper village worked themselves into a state of hysteria. And her granny seemed to be made of stone, while just in front of her Amina nodded at the dancers and clapped to the stamping rhythm.

  The risen dust floated in the firelight and the moving bodies cast shadows in the trees that were broken and made more frantic by the picked-out branches. Some of the dancers looked tearful, almost tormented, with heavy faces. I saw how the lepers' dance was not many individuals but a mass of people that had one will and one shape, a swelling organism. This trembling creature filled the clearing.

  Amina remained apart. If she had been among the dancers I would not have been able to get near her. But because she was next to the hut, watching—nodding to the beat of the drums—I approached her. I touched her arm. All the physicality of the dance seemed to make this touching permissible. Amina did not draw away. That meant a great deal.

  "I want to visit you at your hut."

  She faced the throng of dancers, the dust, the lighted smoke, the dog children, the dirty feet, the drummers beating on logs and skins, the swaying totem of the church. She was too demure to speak the word. Her silence meant yes, all right.

  "But what will your granny say when she sees me?"

  "She will not see you," Amina said. "She is blind."

  10

  Now there was so much noise that I could not hear Amina clearly. I had been hearing those drums since the night of my arrival, when I had lain awake in my bare, whitewashed room, wondering why I had come here and what would happen to me. The drums had been part of my fever, they had been a feature of our card games, always pulsing in the background. I was cert
ain that they had driven Father Touchette out of his mind.

  That was understandable. The drums of Moyo had penetrated me too, but they had energized me. It was a physical sensation, like a drug or a drink. It was brainless, it whipped into my blood, it made me dumb and incoherent. It removed any desire in me to write—poetry or anything else.

  I was trying to speak to her. What next? I wondered. But I could tell from Amina's expression that it was no use. She could not hear me either. Perhaps that was for the best. It was sensible here to be silent, no more than shadows.

  Without a word, but touching her grandmother's hand, as though giving a command, Amina led the way, granny right behind her, with her leprous hand gripping Amina's shoulder. I followed, and I was glad for all these shadows, for the crowd and the confusion and the fire and the drums. How could they notice me? But even if they could, I thought, they were so dazed and heated by the dance that I did not matter.

  Amina's hut—more likely her granny's—was in the outer circle of older huts, the ones nearest to the bush that surrounded Moyo. It had its own tree—I could just make out its shape in the rising firelight, and it was larger than the other stunted trees. The smell of the old trampled corn shucks in the nearby garden was an odor that was linked in my mind with snakes and scorpions and biting spiders, which lurked in the warm broken rubbish of the shucks.

  Squinting down so that I would not stumble, I banged my head against a heavy pole that served as a rafter for the thatched roof.

  "What is that noise?" the old woman said, and reached for me. I guessed that was what she said: the meaning was clear enough from her gesture.

  "Fisi," Amina said. Hyena.

  The old woman had muttered in a dialect that was probably Yao, a bush language associated with Muslims and Mozambique that I did not understand. But I could translate Amina's replies. Perhaps she was speaking Chinyanja for my benefit—but it was not odd for the Africans at the leprosarium to converse in several languages. The granny was still talking.

  "Because I am very tired," Amina said in Chinyanja. She lit a candle and placed it in a large tin can that had holes punched in it.

  To the old woman's croak, Amina said, "I want to keep the hyenas away."

  Gabbling again, her granny seemed to be praying. She was at the far end of what was by Moyo standards a spacious hut, rectangular, a large single room, with two mats on the floor. She lowered herself to the distant mat and faced in our direction. She was at home in the darkness.

  Except for the two mats, the exposed floor was hard-packed dirt, and the walls were mud, and dust trickled from the straws in the thatch bundles of the roof. The room stank of dirt and termites, and on the looser and untrodden part of the floor there were worm casts. The only furniture was cardboard cartons and lanterns, and among this assortment a sturdy wooden crate shoved against the wall had the look of an heirloom.

  I held my breath while the old woman gazed with white eyes, and then murmured.

  "I am moving my mat," Amina replied. She motioned me to her mat and I sat down next to her, carefully pulling my legs under me.

  Amina's face in profile, with the candlelight behind it, was as smooth and simple as a carving. She had long lashes and her lovely mouth looked solemn in silhouette. She sat very straight, her neck upright and seeming so fragile that I could not help reaching and touching it. She hardly moved, not even when I touched her, and when I stroked her cheek she became motionless. That was not fear or even submission, it was pleasure. I passed my fingers across her lips and she opened her mouth and bit them with her pretty teeth. She was swift, and I could feel her hunger in the sharpness of her bite.

  The old woman grunted several words, her face on us, and I watched her closely as I slipped my hand under Amina's cloth, feeling for her breasts.

  The dance had grown louder. Was that what the old woman was saying? Now I could recognize some of the dancers' chanting.

  "Sursum corda! Habemus ad Dominum!"

  Cupping Amina's breast, loving its warmth and its contours, I moved nearer, and she sighed and moved towards me to make it easier for me. This thrilled me.

  "Agnus Dei, Filius Patris. Qui tollis peccata mundi!"

  I kissed her, and although I could smell the dirt floor, the ants, the sweat, the mice, the dust sifting out of the thatch, there was a sweetness on her lips that was like syrup, with the tang of ripe fruit, and her skin had the heavy sensuality of freshly turned earth. She received my kiss and moved nearer still, shifting to face me, the candlelight flickering in her eyes.

  Had we made any noise? The old woman uttered another remark.

  "It is the zinyao," Amina said.

  The old woman grumbled as I leaned over and whispered to Amina, "Let's go outside."

  She shook her head: no.

  I clutched her as though questioning.

  "The people will see us," she whispered as she stared at the blind old woman.

  Then we lay on the mat, side by side, while I went on stroking her breasts and breathing in shallow gasps, afraid that I might be heard. The old woman's face was fixed on us. She was still muttering, but nothing she said was clearly audible. I wanted her to sleep, yet she sat upright, her eyes unblinking.

  The drumming was so loud it made the thatch bundles tremble in the roof. The voices of the dancers cried out, "Christe, eleison! Kyrie eleison!" and other snatches of the mass responses, as though they were incantations.

  Amina's breasts were small, her body was hard and thin. It made me think of the saplings at Moyo, their long, slender branches and small leaves. And my fingers found parts of her body that felt like the healed scars of a young tree. Amina was so small I could caress her easily with one hand. And she was so smooth.

  I put my lips against her ear and said, "When I saw you at the English class I wanted to touch you."

  My face was so near to hers I could feel the change in expression on her face. She was smiling, I knew. But she did not reply.

  "So why did you come to the class?"

  "To see you," she said.

  "Did you want to touch me?"

  She hesitated, and then she sniffed. It was her shy way of saying yes, a kind of modesty.

  "Tell me." I moved so that her mouth was at my ear.

  "I wanted to play with you," she said at last. The word for playing was also the word for dancing and foolery.

  I stroked her arm and when my fingers touched the leprous patch, the disc of dead skin, I was not alarmed. I had been here long enough to know there was no danger to me. I slipped my hand into hers and guided it against my body, so that she would touch me. I did not have to go any further. She knew what to do, without my suggestion, and her knowledge excited me, because it showed she was a woman, not a girl. Then she took possession of my whole body with the nimble fingers of her small hands. Leaning towards the little lamp, she pursed her lips as though kissing the candleflame.

  Just then the old woman grunted again.

  "I am putting out the light," Amina said, and her one sigh against the flame killed it and brought darkness down on us.

  Seconds later, when my sight returned, there was moonlight making angular shadows in the room. There was also the glow from the zinyao dance shining on us. It was as though this light made us want to be smaller, and so we embraced, and touched and kissed, and moved our bodies closer. Yet even in this wonderful hug I could sense the other person in the room, the restless presence of the blind woman.

  She spoke again, sounding irritable.

  Amina, with a grip on my hand, said, "Ndiri ndi mphere kwabasi." I have a serious itch.

  Kwabasi. Brother Piet had taught me that word. It was one of the sexiest things I had ever heard, and as she said it she moved my hand between her legs and helped me, working my fingers on what felt like the lovely pulp of a ripe fruit.

  Amina was smiling at me as I touched her. The moonglow lighted her, and her face became even more beautiful, animated with desire. Her mouth was open in silent rapture as the old
woman spoke a whole rattling sentence as though uttering a proverb.

  Amina put her mouth against my ear again and spoke breathlessly. "She says, 'Then scratch it.'"

  She slipped her leg over me and clumsily steadied herself. I propped myself up on my elbows. And she opened her cloth as I fumbled with my shorts. Then she was on top of me, straddling me.

  The old woman had started moaning to the drumming and the yelling outside, while Amina shut her eyes and strained not to make a sound as she rocked back and forth.

  "Sursum corda!"

  "Deus meus!"

  Amina hitched herself forward and moved her hands to my face and held me as she drove her body against me, riding me. I could still see the old woman at the far end of the room, the light and shadow broken over her body like patches of liquid. It was like being in the presence of an old African idol, a great impassive lump that might spring to life at any moment and become a demon.

  Yet I had no fear. I took Amina by her hips and jammed her against me and she threw her head back as though convulsed. And when she bowed down and clutched me again I thought I heard her say, "I am not crying." I could not hear her cry, yet her tears were running down my face, and I tasted them to make sure.

  She was pressed so hard against me it was as though we were not two people anymore, but were so penetrated that we were like one wild, tearful creature. She tore at her breasts and then clamped her mouth over the fingers of one hand and wept. I was intent on one drumming rhythm. If sex was knowledge, and I believed it was, I was on the verge of knowing everything.

  It was heat and noise and skin and drums and fire and smoke, and the feeling of silk in every opening of her body. It was also the growl of the crowd, and it was our old blind witness. I struggled with Amina and held her tight, gorging on her like a cannibal. Soon my body was sobbing, caught in a desperate panic of possession that made me reckless. And then we too were blind.