by Paul Theroux
He was sure of everything he said, like a leader or a teacher, a man with no obvious doubts. So I listened, and I promised.
“Tell me what to read. I want to read something about this place.”
I recommended The White Nile.
“If only Alan Moorehead knew how to write.”
I told him I liked George Orwell.
“I have been compared with Orwell. Imagine. In a review. It was meant to be a compliment.” And he laughed again. “It was lost on me. I have a very low opinion of Orwell’s writing.”
I was reading Camus, I said.
“His collected fiction is a very slender book. I wonder about the achievement.”
He knew his own mind. He knew what he wanted. It was clear that he would not find what he was looking for in Uganda—anyway, he had already given up on us. He had impossibly high standards. He said there was no point in having standards unless they were high. He did not compromise. He expected the best, in writing, in speaking, in behavior, in reading. Martial? The Bible? Surely there were other books and writers he admired.
“It would be easier for me to tell you who I don’t like,” he said, and then listed, with a sour-taste-in-the-mouth expression, like the visible memory of a bad meal, the giants of literature: Jane Austen, Hardy, Henry James. “People tell me I should read James. I tried. I couldn’t see the point. There’s not much there.” He had not read widely in American literature. I was reading Emily Dickinson. He borrowed my book. The next day he said, “I’m afraid I don’t share your enthusiasm. Not much there for me.”
“What about African literature?”
“Does it exist?”
“Wole Soyinka. Chinua Achebe.”
“Did they write anything?”
“Novels,” I said.
“Mimicry,” he said. “You can’t beat a novel out on a drum.”
Naipaul was thirty-four but seemed much older, almost aged. He was opinionated and dissatisfied and restless, hard to please but still searching. This was a bad place for the search, however. For one thing, the whites were seriously unhealthy.
“Don’t be an infy, Paul,” he said. “I know I don’t want to be an infy.”
Africans were not infies. Most whites were. Some Indians in town he liked. Others he despaired of. He interrogated them, demanded to know their backup plans. He predicted that they would be thrown out and their businesses taken over. Some of them were infies.
To battle inferiority in the equatorial heat, he came with me to the sports field. He would practice bowling the cricket ball while I ran around the track, six times usually, sometimes more. He tried to do the same but his lungs gave out, and he ended up panting and sweating. “Must not be an infy!” The exercise gave me an appetite and a sweet tooth, and after each session we went into town and had tea and cakes. Stuffing myself, wolfing them down, I apologized, yet kept at it.
“The body knows,” he said. He was truster of instinct and hunches and cravings. “Keep it up. Your body needs it. Let’s get some more off the trolley. Waiter!”
To vary my craving for sugar, he introduced me to Indian sweets: laddhu, kachowri, rasgullah, gulabjam.
“These gulabjam are made from broken milk.” He repeated it. He liked saying “broken milk.”
In time he adopted, article by article, a mode of dress—first the bush shirt, then the bush trousers, the walking stick, and finally the bush hat. It was a floppy hat, the brim pulled down all around. Indians in Uganda never dressed that way, though tourists did. We saw them at the hotel entrances, climbing into zebra-striped safari vans or Land Rovers, heading west into the bush.
“Those African drivers tell me that the women tourists are always after them,” I said.
“That must make them frightfully happy.”
In his safari outfit, perspiring heavily, he walked in a district of Kampala called Wandegeya, where, following several steps behind him, I called out directions. I wanted to show him the colony of ten thousand bats.
He was not impressed by the bats. Instead, he said, “Notice how there are footpaths everywhere—across every lawn, crisscrossing the campus, up and down. There are paths, but Africans don’t keep to them. They make their own. Have you noticed that? They ignore the proper paths.”
I had not noticed, but it was true: a town of obvious shortcuts and trampled footpaths. I wondered why.
“Because,” Naipaul said, “the Africans did not make the proper paths in the first place. This society was imposed on them.”
A six-foot circular medallion in bronze, at the top of the arched gateway in front of the Uganda Parliament building, depicted the prime minister, Milton Obote, his toothy frown, his bushy hair, a likeness of his disapproving face and gappy teeth. The medallion was crude enough to seem satirical. It had been put there after Uganda’s first election, and the idea was that it would remain there forever, though no one ever questioned why. It was customary for African politicians to put up statues of themselves and give their names to colleges and main roads. We were, in fact, standing on Obote Avenue when Naipaul saw the Obote medallion.
“That is what is wrong with the country,” he said. “That is the reason Uganda will go back to bush.”
Until Naipaul arrived I had not paid much attention to these details. I was grateful to be here teaching rather than in Vietnam fighting. Kampala was a small, friendly town with no society to speak of. The Kabaka kept to himself, in a regal way, inside the stockade that surrounded his palace on Kabuli Hill, one of Kampala’s seven hills. Naipaul asked what I knew of the king and whether I had met him. It seemed an odd question, for the Kabaka of Buganda was much more remote than any American president, and in a place where each hilltop was occupied by an important structure—the main mosque on one, the cathedral, the university, the broadcasting service, the barracks, and so forth on others—the Kabaka’s was just another bushy and inscrutable hilltop.
Obote was the Kabaka’s main antagonist, but no one cared much about that. No one cared that Obote named streets after himself. No one paid much attention to politics. What was the use? In spite of Naipaul’s misgivings, Kampala was a prosperous place, busy on weekdays, full of picnickers on weekends, strolling Africans, promenading Indians. The villages were sleepy, the townships were drunk. The city’s bars and cafés were meeting places, and when I was not with Yomo at the Staff Club, I was with her at City Bar on Kampala Road. It was not a town of dinner parties or social functions, except among politicians and diplomats. It was movie theaters and nightclubs, restaurants and brothels. But I was happy with Yomo and she liked Kampala, although she always enjoyed pointing out how backward it was.
Into the green town of tall trees and friendly faces and natural wonders—the road carpeted with white butterflies, the tree branches full of bats, the marabou storks standing watch on the road to the dump, hungry for garbage, the crested cranes in the parks, and in many of the low-lying watery places masses of papyrus that had somehow crept on sodden roots up the White Nile from Egypt—into this drowsy place, where the locusts’ whines were as loud as machinery, came the forbidding figure of V.S. Naipaul, with his hands behind his back, doing calculations. He could be severe. He could also be funny. But his style of conversation was mainly interrogatory. He had many questions. He demanded answers.
“What is the name of that valley?”
We had gone for a drive. He had liked the view. He had got out of the car and stopped a passing African.
“I am not knowing the name, sah.”
“But what do you call it?”
“We are calling it just ‘the valley,’ sah.”
“How long have you lived here?”
“I am born here, sah.”
“What do you do?”
“I am wucking, sah.”
“Where do you work?”
“Wucking in shamba, sah.”
“He has a garden,” I said.
“Matoke, sah.”
“Bananas,” I said.
“Bwan
a. Mumpa cigara.”
“He wants a cigarette.”
And when the man had moved on, Naipaul waved his walking stick in a generalizing way over the lovely landscape and said, “Nothing has a name. They don’t name things.”
“They name some things.”
“Tell me.”
“The hills in Kampala.”
“That’s very much a colonial thing. The Africans were told those names—wait. What’s that noise?” He lifted his hat brim and winced. “You see? Even here. Bongo drums!”
“Bongo drums” was an all-encompassing term for the sound of a radio, for people singing or dancing, or for drums, which were never bongo drums but usually hollow logs that were beaten with sticks or tall upright cylinders that were thumped at sundown.
What he was hearing was Congolese music, trumpets and drums and marimbas, blaring from a radio in a hut.
“Music,” I said.
“I hate music,” he said as we walked on. “All music. Not just that shit.”
“Really.”
He looked sideways at me, and when I glanced over at him I saw he was still peering at me, intensely but obliquely, as though watching to see what I would do next.
He said, “You didn’t react. Good. I once told someone that and he burst into tears.”
It was not a pose. He really did hate music. He hated most sound, whether it was music or the human voice; he regarded all of it as noise. Loud laughter appalled him too, although he himself laughed a good deal. He had come to the wrong place.
Out of the blue, on one of those early days he said, “May I see your hand, Paul?”
He studied my palm, holding it to the light, squeezing it gently to make the lines more emphatic. He pressed his lips together and blew out his cheeks. He nodded, said nothing, but I had the feeling he liked what he had seen.
I was his interpreter, his guide, his companion. I was, most of all, his student. After a month or so he bought a car, a tan Peugeot, but at the beginning, when he had no car, I was his driver, and we went out every day. He had a sort of visiting professorship, courtesy of that dubious American foundation which was rumored to have links with the Central Intelligence Agency. He hated the foundation. He disliked his duties. He refused an office. He gave no classes. He ignored the other lecturers, though when they asked him his opinion of the university, he said, “It’s pretty crummy, but you know that, don’t you?”
It was largely a waste, he said; it was a farce. Here were these overpaid expatriates patronizing Africans and giving the impression of imparting an education. But it was theater. They were going through the motions, flattering themselves with notions of their own importance. The worst of it was the tameness of it all, the absence of criticism, the complacency, the extravagant way African effort was praised.
“Did I hear someone say ‘parliament’? ‘democracy’? ‘socialism’?” Naipaul made his disgusted face and repeated a bit of literary criticism he had just read. “The words are all wrong. These fraudulent people are trying to prettify this situation. It’s a huge whitewash, man. No—” The laughter began to tumble in his lungs. “It’s blackwash, that’s what it is. Blackwash.”
He avoided the Senior Common Room. He made one visit to the Staff Club, and mainly for his benefit, one of the jollier members told jokes that all of us had heard before. Naipaul sat stony-faced. Afterwards he said he hated jokes. He hated the English when they tried to be colorful characters.
“Your infies,” he called them. And he was remembered in the Staff Club for having referred to Britain as “that socialist paradise.”
“I’ve been a socialist all my life,” Haji Hallsmith said.
Hallsmith’s apartment revolted Naipaul. “It smells,” he said. “And have you noticed the way Hallsmith dresses? Those African shirts he wears are ridiculous. I had always thought of a university lecturer as someone rather grand. Why, he’s just a common infy.”
In an almost constant state of niggling annoyance, incessantly judgmental, he developed the notion that nearly all the expatriates were homosexual, living out a fantasy of sexual license in Uganda. He believed that their political views were insincere and mocking, merely a transparent justification for chasing boys. He laughed at the thought that they regarded themselves as liberals and intellectuals.
We were driving when he told me this. He was holding a cigarette—he tamped them and played with them as though fine-tuning them, packing the tobacco, smoothing the paper with his thumb, before he smoked them.
I said, “So I guess you would agree with George Wallace in thinking of them as ‘pointy-headed intellectuals.’”
He loved that. He repeated it twice, saying it was true.
“This place is absolutely full of buggers.”
“Please, Vidia,” Pat said from the back seat.
“And pointy-headed intellectuals.” He was smiling grimly out the window. He lit the cigarette and smoked it awhile, tapping the Sportsman pack on the back of his hand.
“How do you stand it, Paul?”
I was about to say how happy I was, living in Uganda with Yomo. It seemed a dream at times, to be in such a beautiful place with someone I loved. She was brave; she mocked the men who leered at her or who made remarks because she was holding hands with a white man. She didn’t mind the long dusty drives or the spiders or the snakes or the little crawling dudus. Even the thought of living in the bush behind Bundibugyo did not faze her. I liked my job. I found my students vague but teachable.
But before I could say any of this, Naipaul piped up, “Your writing, of course. If you didn’t write, you’d go out of your mind.”
He had read only a small amount of what I had written, but he seemed to see that it stood for more. I had written many poems and published some in American and British literary magazines. “Little magazines,” Naipaul called them, making a face. “Lots of libido,” he always said of my poems, but it was not a criticism. He liked one I had published in the Central African Examiner about an old car I had seen rotting in the bush. He quoted it word for word to me a few days afterwards. It was a trenchant comment about colonialism, he said; it was about Africans letting things go to ruin. I reread it and thought: Maybe.
My writing project at the time was an essay on cowardice, inspired by Orwell’s clear-sighted and confessional essays. I had been writing it for the American magazine Commentary. Naipaul had approved; it was not a little magazine, but the essay needed work. “I warned you, I’m brutal,” he said. “Forget Orwell for the moment.” I was on my fifth or sixth revision with him. It was like whittling a stick, but I was learning.
“It’s true, Patsy. You know that. He’d go out of his mind.”
I kept driving, heading back to town, wondering whether it was true. I had been content for two years at a bush school in Malawi. I had been writing the whole time. Had the writing kept me sane?
“More bongo drums,” Naipaul said as we passed a roadside market.
There was noise, for sure, but no bongo drums. I said, “The only bongo in Uganda is an animal that looks like a kudu. They’re hunted with dogs by wealthy tourists who go on safaris here. When the bongo turns to battle the dogs with his horns, the hunters shoot him. They’re mostly in the Ruwenzoris. In the bundu.”
“I want to see the bush,” Naipaul said. “The bush is the future.”
We were on the outskirts of Kampala, passing a row of Indian shops, where on the verandahs some African men sat at Singer sewing machines, working the treadles with their bare feet, running up missionary-style dresses. Another African was squatting at a box, looking serious and intent, writing a letter in clear copperplate script for a customer, a woman who knelt, wringing her hands.
“And the president of Gabon is called Bongo,” I said. “Omar Bongo.”
“Omar Bongo! Did you hear that, Patsy? Omar Bongo. Oh, how I don’t want to go to Gabon.”
He brooded for a moment, then asked me to slow down at the next row of Indian shops.
“It is
hopeless for them,” he said. “They should leave. You know that Indian boy, Raju? I told him to go away, to save himself. Of course I didn’t say it so simply. I asked him, ‘What is the message of the Gita?’ The Bhagavad-Gita. You’ve read it, Paul, of course you have.”
From the back seat, Pat said, “You were too hard on Raju.”
“‘The message of the Gita,’ I said to him, ‘is action.’”
“It’s just as bad for him to go as to stay here,” Pat said.
“Action. He’s got to take action. These people”—Naipaul was gesturing at the little shops and the people on the verandah, who were baffled by the gesticulating Hindi in the bush hat in my car—“will be dead unless they read the Gita and take action.”
“No, no!” Pat Naipaul cried out from the back seat. “How can you say that?”
A growling in my guts told me that a quarrel was starting. I had never been in the presence of a husband and wife having an unself-conscious quarrel. I felt fearful and helpless.
“They should forget England. The bitches will lie to them. India is the answer. It is a real country. A big country. They make things in India. Steel. Paper. Cloth. They publish books. What do they make here? Nothing, or some rubbish that no one wants, while the infies tell them how wonderful it all is.”
“It would be worse for them in India. You’ve seen it,” Pat said with passion, and she seemed to be sobbing. “They’d be licking the shoes of those horrible people.”
Coolly facing forward, Naipaul said, “You always take that simple senseless path.”
“India would destroy them,” Pat said, and I could see in the rear-view mirror that she was wiping tears from her eyes and trying to speak.
“I was offering him a real solution,” Naipaul said.
Pat replied, but her weeping made it difficult for her to speak, and while she faltered, saying how unfair he was, Naipaul became calm, rational, colder, and did not give an inch.
“Stop chuntering, Patsy. You’re just chuntering, and you have no idea of what you’re talking about.”
The tears kept rolling down Pat’s cheeks, and though she dabbed at her face she could not stanch the flow. There were tears on her pretty protruding lips. I was shocked, but there was something in her tear-stained face and her posture that aroused me.
