by Paul Theroux
“He’s dead,” my brother said, stopping the car.
But Noah did not seem completely dead. We heard a rattle rise from his throat to his nose, the last of his life bubbling from his lips, and very soon he was silent and so skinny he seemed deflated.
The day was ending in a low portion of reddened sky, and we sat by the roadside, thinking the same thing: that he had no family, no one to bear the cost, and that the hospital at the boma would not compensate us for the journey, because he had died on the way. He was dead, and so he was ours.
Sitting on this verge of the bush road in previous years, we were usually passed by a speeding vehicle, a Land Rover on a night drive, hunters who’d use lights. Or creeping past us, the shadowy figures of poachers, rifles slung across their backs, heading into the last of the day, that red skirt of light and the gilded trees. We saw none of these men as we hesitated here. We were used to their movements, because we were hunters too. We sat as though in the heart of a dead land, only a few baboons creeping toward a tamarind tree, to climb it for the night. But hunting had been bad, so we used our hunting vehicle for transport, as a bush taxi.
We couldn’t go farther. And what was the point in carrying the dead man to his empty hut in the village?
“That tree,” my brother said. I knew what he meant.
A fever thorn at a little distance looked important, singular in its size, a fiery witch tree among the tufted scrub.
Without discussing the matter we dragged the body from the back seat. It flopped like a sack on the stony ground. We arranged it, stretching it out, and with each of us holding an end, we bumped it through the bush to the thorn tree, where we let it drop near the rounded tower of a termite mound. I was uneasy with the face upturned, and so I rolled the body onto its belly, its nose in the dust. It was warm under my hand, and a brownish liquid ran from the mouth.
“We should eat something,” my brother said.
We had brought bread and chicken meat and fruit for the trip, but neither of us could swallow. Even a sip of water choked us, though we were thirsty.
Back in our village, no one asked what had happened. Noah had no family to inquire. People assumed that we had brought him to the boma, that we had been paid. We didn’t volunteer the information that he had died, that we’d dragged him under a tree and left him.
After a week, feeling guilty, we drove back to the witch tree to make sure he’d been eaten. But he was swollen and stinking, still whole, his body bursting his shirt, his bracelets cutting his flesh, ants on his face and scouring his eyes. Fearing that he’d be found, we dug a hole and buried him, thinking, Where are the animals?
Burial in a hole was something new to us, but a necessity. The body broke apart like overcooked meat as we tumbled it into the pit.
From that day, things began to go wrong. The first was the vehicle, problems with the motor that made no sense—leaks, belts decaying and breaking. Milk thickened and went sour when I drank it. Clay pots cracked like biscuits, the thatch roof rotted, my cows stopped eating and two died, my youngest son developed a fever. My brother’s experiences were no better, leaks, cracks, decay, and illness visiting his hut too.
My son died. It was a sadness, the fever worsening until he coughed out his life. And he was part of my wealth, a forager and a herd boy. My brother’s wife was found with another man. She had to be beaten, and she was too injured to cook or work after that. The guilty man was ordered to pay a fine—a blanket, a cow, a purse of money, a thickness of copper bracelets, a gourd of beer. But he vanished into the bush, and my brother’s wife had to be sent back on her bad leg to her family in disgrace.
My son’s was the first death in our village in more than a year. He was buried in the traditional way: the usual ceremony and the body left in a field for the lions and hyenas. But a week went by and my son had not been eaten. I was so sorry to see him bulging in the blanket and disfigured, rotting there, like Noah under the witch tree.
We concluded that so many animals had been hunted and poached and driven off there were none left to eat our dead anymore. Or was it that we’d buried Noah, whose spirit was still among us, blaming and making trouble?
My wife was sorrowing; even the chief was at a loss. But I said, “We will bury him.” We made a hole for my son and pushed him into it, as we had Noah in that first hole.
After that, there were many—buried bodies in the holes underneath the earth of our living places.
It was the only answer, but not a good one. We do not burn bodies as the Wahindi do. We prayed for the animals to come back, we used medicine, we left meat for the animals. The meat became infested by ants and flies. It seemed nothing would go right for us in this new ritual of burying, because in the ground they were with us, uneaten and angry.
The loss of the animals marked the beginning of the ghosts. And now nothing dies, the dead are always haunting us, and we spend so much time trying to settle their spirits, it has become our constant occupation, but without success, with no animals left to eat them, nowadays the dead don’t die.
Autostop Summer
ALL THROUGH FIVE courses of the lunch, listening to Vittorio, I was thinking how long-winded people seldom become writers, how long-windedness itself is a form of indolence. The besetting sin of talkers is not the talk, which might be witty, but the evasion, the laziness in it. Talkers never remember what they say. Welcome to Italy, I thought.
I was facing Vittorio but, eager to get away and be alone, I wasn’t listening. I studied the besieged look of the table, the sauce-splashed napkins, the oil stains on the linen, the spills of grated Parmesan cheese, the dish of ragged spat-out olive pits, the flakes of bread crusts lying where the loaf had been twisted apart, the lip-smeared wine glasses, the tang of vinegar-sodden salad greens flattening in a blue bowl. The cheese board came, and Vittorio picked up the peculiar notched knife and wagged it over a crumbly hunk of Asiago but didn’t lower it.
The other guest, Tito Frasso, nodded at Vittorio and dabbed at the smallest breadcrumbs on the tablecloth, collecting them on the tip of his finger and poking them onto his tongue. Vittorio was dressed in stylish hunter’s tweeds. Frasso, hardly more than twenty-five, had green hair and wore a stitched leather vest over a yellow T-shirt and bright orange sneakers. He had been introduced to me as a journalist. Earlier in the meal he said he had an idea for a book.
“I always found it hard to tell anyone I wanted to write a book,” I said.
“Strange,” he said, naïvely, I thought. Yet in contrast to his clownish clothes, Frasso was soft-spoken and serious and respectful of Vittorio, who had invited him along so that he could mention my newly translated book in his newspaper column. Frasso had added, “I would like to solicit your advice.” He licked crumbs from his finger. “About writing.”
“My advice,” I said, “is give in to temptation.”
He lost his smile, he squinted at me, and moving his lips he seemed to repeat the words I’d just said.
Being back in Italy always reminded me of my first visit long ago, my beginnings as a writer, my humiliations and little victories on the branching roads of the sunny, antique country that was then still its old self. It was a place of men in brown suits and old women in black, of rat-tatting Vespas and cigarette smoke as ropy as incense, the air thick with Italian life, the hum of freshly ground coffee as dense as potting soil, the rankness of damp paving stones in a piazza, the piercing fragrance of flower stalls, the chalky tang of old stucco house walls as yellow as aged cheese, the gleaming just-mopped marble floors of dark interiors, and the glimpse of fruit globes on terracotta platters, the confusion of odors making Italy seem an edible country.
“Che successo?” Vittorio said suddenly, lapsing into Italian as though from shock. He touched my shoulder to steady me, and Frasso leaned away to give him room.
“Nothing.” But my memory must have shown as melancholy on my face. I forced a smile, I told him to continue, and this time I listened.
“Bene. As I
was saying, if you have any friends in Florence,” and he made an operatic gesture, raising his arms in welcome, and pleading with them to embrace a body, “please, I beg you, invite them to the dinner on Thursday when we launch your book.”
I hesitated, because I knew that if I told him the name of the man I had in mind, I would have to lie about it, and the sorry business had such a strange history that I might regret it. But I was at that later unapologetic stage of life when one can be bluntly curious to know how things had turned out for people met long ago on the road, people who’d been kind or cruel to me. How had they fared, and what had they forgotten, and who were they now? Mine was the vindictive nosiness and intrusion of a ghost, with the ghost’s satisfactions.
“There’s only one man, and he’s a Fiorentino, but he might not be alive,” I said. In a way I hoped he wasn’t, because then I could explain the background to Vittorio. “His name is Pietro Ubaldini.”
“I know him,” Vittorio said, looking pleased. “Tito?”
Frasso shook his head and frowned. The name was apparently new to him.
“Tito is from Napoli. He remains a student of this place,” Vittorio said. “I can tell you that Ubaldini is alive.”
“That’s good news.”
Vittorio cocked his head at me, because I hadn’t spoken with much enthusiasm. “A great patron of the arts from an old family. He is”—and he shrugged and twirled one finger—“anziano now. I will have an invitation sent to him.” Vittorio folded his napkin, pressing it with the heel of his hand, and—more opera—from across the room asked the waiter in gestures for the bill, signaling with upraised scribbling fingers. “You’re okay with this dinner?”
“I’m fine.”
“You don’t mind saying some few words afterward?”
“I’m looking forward to it,” I said. “I want to talk about how Italy made me a writer.”
“Excellent.” Then he smiled, as though remembering something. “But how do you know the grande nobile Ubaldini?”
“Never met him. He’s the friend of a friend from long ago. I was told I should look him up if I was ever in Florence.”
That was a lie. I had met Ubaldini fifty years before, but not in Florence. I did not really care to talk to him again, but I wanted to look at him. If Vittorio had pointed to another table in the restaurant and said, “That’s him,” I would have been satisfied. I merely wanted to see his face, and I suppose I hoped he’d see mine. It was not an exercise in recognition, but in verification. So much time had passed that I sometimes thought I had imagined Ubaldini, but when Vittorio pounced on the name, I felt a bit winded, as if it had been an exertion to say it. It disturbed me to think that I would be seeing him again.
I had thought of him often over the years. It was in the fortified hill town of Urbino that I got to know what serious writing entailed. I had a free room, a job as a teacher, a small salary, and the love of a pretty woman who was studying at the university. But I had arrived there in such a roundabout way, I believed I was being plotted against.
In Amherst I had written stories, but many of my friends called themselves writers too. It was a comfort for us to be untested among bookish people in a college town, to talk about our writing and read our stories and poems to appreciative audiences at the local coffeehouse. We published them in our literary magazine, we complimented each other, and it was all a cheat for being self-serving.
Italy was the world, it was flesh and food and temptation, it was all those odors, the true test of my writing ambition. I hitchhiked to the coastal town of Fano and lived for a few weeks at the house of an American couple, the Shainheits. Fano was saturated with the aroma of grilled fish, the thick blue edge of the Adriatic Sea flopping against the hot sand. Benny Shainheit, a teacher of mine, was in Italy on a Fulbright and had invited me to stay. In the first week they were visited by another American academic, named Hal McCarthy. Over lunch at a café, McCarthy said he was headed inland. “Delicious Gubbio,” he said, working his lips around the words, making the place name sound like soupy dessert you’d eat with a spoon. “And what brings you here?”
I said I was writing something.
“Sunshine and blue sky everywhere,” he said, panting and slightly suppressing a furious giggle, “and you choose to sit in a dark room staring at a blank sheet of paper!”
“Not blank,” I said defiantly, but still I felt undermined, my first taste of the hostile envy of an idle academic for a young writer. That neither of the Shainheits said anything in my defense only added to my annoyance.
During the day, I wrote in my upstairs room while the Shainheits were at the beach with their little boy, and in the evenings I sat in a café, bantering with the locals, practicing my Italian. Late one night, about ten days into living with the Shainheits, I came back and found them—Benny and Laurie—sitting together at the kitchen table, as forbidding as my parents.
“Please sit down,” Benny said. He was stern, giving me an order. The “please” was hostile.
Seated across from them, I saw that Laurie had been crying, her face fixed and ugly with misery. For a moment I felt sorry for her, and then she gave me such a hateful look—dark glistening eyes, smeared cheeks, twisted mouth—that I knew they had something against me.
Benny’s chin was lifted in indignation, and it all seemed stagy and portentous to me, intended to impress me with its seriousness. He reached below the table to his lap, found what he was looking for—a notebook, which he slapped on the table and poked across to me. I saw at once that it was my own notebook, dirty at the edges, ink-smeared, and with a familiar white label pasted to the cover.
“So this is what you think of us,” Benny said. “After all we’ve done for you.”
I put my hand over the notebook to prevent them from snatching it back.
“I’m bald and toothy, am I?” he said, and never looked balder or toothier. “Neck flesh like a scrotum. Hairy ears. Chipmunk overbite. Goose-eyed.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” My voice was high and unconvincing.
“I habitually stand with my prehensile feet pointing at ten minutes to two.”
I made the mistake of smiling at that.
“And I’m beaky and old,” Laurie said. “Beaky and old! Who do you think you are to write that about me? I’m thirty-seven. You think that’s old?” But protesting she began to cry again with a scowling face, and she looked feeble as she clawed at her reddened eyes.
I said, “You have no right to read my diary. That’s an invasion of privacy.”
“You invaded our house,” Benny said. He remembered something else. “The Punch and Judy show.”
Laurie looked up from her hands. “Oh, and Jaunty’s a homunculus, is he?”
Jaunty was their two-year-old son, a whiny stumbling child with an enormous head. “Homunculus” was a favorite word of mine at the time.
“You’ve abused our hospitality,” Benny said.
“You read my private diary,” I said. “I call that abusive.”
“Laurie found it on the floor.” He looked anguished, as protesting liars often do. “When she picked it up she saw a few pages.”
“Bull.”
“He’s calling us liars,” Laurie said. She cocked her head. “Ever think you might be crazy?”
“You’re what we call a passenger,” Benny said. “We want you out of here. You’re just ridiculing us.”
What surprised me was the coziness of the “we” and the “us.” They were a couple who constantly quarreled—as I also described in detail in the “Punch and Judy” section of the notebook—who hated each other’s company, who seemed to welcome me for the novelty of their having the diversion of someone else to talk to. And now here they were, side by side, facing me, united in their hatred of me, their common enemy. It seemed theatrical and false when Benny clumsily put his arm around Laurie, who was still tearfully hiccupping, and she looked burdened by the arm.
By then it was too late for me t
o go anywhere but to my room, where I packed the little I owned in my bag and lay fully clothed on my bed, sleepless and hot. At first light, before the Shainheits were awake, I crept out of the house and walked quickly up the Via Nolfi to the center of the town. I knew a cheap hotel there, the Albergo Due Mori, two black marble cherubs on its Moorish gatepost wearing turbans. I stayed for a week, writing about the confrontation with Benny and Laurie, and avoiding the public beach, where I might see them again.
This seemed yet another obstacle to my becoming a writer. It was bad enough to be mocked (“staring at a blank sheet of paper!”); it was worse for my privacy to be violated, indeed to have no privacy. But at the Albergo Due Mori I had something to write, and I was undisturbed. An Englishman staying at the hotel told me that Robert Browning had come here and was inspired to write a poem after seeing a certain painting in a church: The Guardian Angel by Guercino. I found the church and the painting, and I wrote a poem too, wishing for a guardian angel.
Early one morning, seeing Benny Shainheit’s Volkswagen parked near the Albergo Due Mori, I checked out and walked to the coast road with my bag and put my thumb out—autostop, as hitchhiking was called, the random pickup. The first car that stopped held three Germans, two young men and a pretty woman, Johanna, going to Venice. I went with them; it was a day’s drive. We walked around late-afternoon Venice, we flirted with American girls, and then we pooled our money and drank beer and bought fruit to eat, washing it in a public sink. When night fell we drove to a hayfield outside the city, where we slept, the men on a blanket in our clothes, Johanna curled up in the back seat of the car.
Come with us on the road north, they said in the morning, being friendly. “Find us some American girls and you can have Johanna.” One of the men muttered to Johanna, who came over to me and shook her hair back with a movement of her head and kissed me on the mouth.
