by Paul Theroux
I stopped talking, and in the silence I created so that this might sink in, Murray Cutler said, “Why are you telling me this?” in his gargly voice.
“I’m Jay,” I said. “Remember me?”
I was not sure it registered, nor was I certain he knew who I was. I said, “I’ll be back.”
But two days went by, the days of the wake at Gaffey’s. I tried to stay in the background as relatives filed in to greet my mother, to embrace her and remind her that she was a widow, to tell Rose and the rest of my siblings, Fred and Floyd and the others, what a great man their father had been.
My cousin Eva came up to me and said, “I dated a guy, Charlie Saurin, who was in Africa like you. Middle of nowhere. He was a medic in one of those jungle clearings. No roads. The only way in was by small plane. He said visitors made him feel lonely. Know how he survived it? He said, ‘When you don’t think about leaving, a place seems bigger.’”
“I used to fantasize about being in the bush like that, isolated and in charge. The solitary bwana.”
“So where were you in Africa?”
Standing near enough to my father’s casket, I could smell the heavy perfume of the flowers. He lay with his face lightly powdered, his cheeks rouged, his pale hands crossed over the handle of his Knights of Columbus sword. His presence, and that sword, cautioned me. He was a practical man who believed in the economy of the plain truth, that fiction was folly, and only jackasses and liars made up stories.
“I lived in a friendly city—Kampala. I was a teacher at a good university. I had a nice house and a lot of friends. I had a cook from the coast who was full of Swahili wisdom.”
“Sounds wild to me.”
“It was pretty tame.”
After they closed the lid of the casket and the last mourner had left, my mother went silent, looking shrunken and depleted. Rose sat next to her and bent to whisper something, but this seemed to provoke tears and Mother’s clotted voice saying, “I don’t know if I can handle this.”
I went over to them. I said, “I just remembered Eddie’s other story. He found another woman online who said she was single and looking for a date. They texted back and forth, sent pictures, and made a plan to go out to dinner.”
“Eddie’s a game guy,” Rose said. “You could take some tips from him, Jay. What’s his thing?”
“Maybe he’s lonely,” I said.
Mother said in a clear voice, “Did it work out?”
“He washed and waxed his car to make a good impression,” I said. “Then he drove to her house. But as he entered her driveway a man jumped out of the bushes, yelling at him—a little guy, going ape.”
“Who was he?” Mother asked.
“Ex-husband. He’d been stalking her. The woman came to the door and screamed at her ex. He threw his shoe at her. Eddie said to her, ‘Hey, I didn’t sign up for this. Call him off.’ The guy rushed at him. Eddie told me, ‘I punted him into the next yard and drove off.’”
Mother was smiling. She said, “Good for him,” as Rose took her by the hand and led her away.
When I returned to the hospice the next morning Murray Cutler looked weaker, vaguer, but hearing me speak he became attentive, as though the sound of my voice woke a memory in him. If he did not remember me, at least he remembered my stories.
“Earthquake,” he said. He raised a skinny finger and poked it at me. “False alarm.”
In English class, if any of us pointed at him, or pointed at anything, he said, “Be careful. There’s a nail on the end of that thing. That’s not ambiguous—what is it?” And he’d answer, “That’s transpicuous.”
But I was also thinking, Wonderful, he remembers what I told him.
“Story,” he said, slurring the word.
“Okay. I was in Africa, in a place so remote I could only get there by small plane in the wet season. I ran a clinic. This was in western Uganda, near the Congo border, the Ituri Forest. We were so far in the bush and so neglected that we had to be self-sufficient. The people grew cassava and maize. I ate the local food, ugali and beans, and occasionally we killed a chicken. No one thought of leaving. Apart from the clinic there was nothing, not even a school, and no church. The nearest mission was at Bundibugyo—and most people regarded that as the end of the earth. It was not a happy village, but it was settled and resigned to its solitude. We never got visitors. My contract at the clinic was for two years, but I agreed to another two. I liked being in the middle of nowhere, a clearing in the bush. When you don’t think about leaving, a place seems bigger.”
Murray Cutler shifted his hands, clasping them, looking satisfied, perhaps imagining the desolation of this African village.
“Over the patter of rain on my tin roof—a sound I loved so much for its mournful tap-tap that it sometimes put me to sleep—over that peaceful repetition, I heard a plane circling the grass landing strip. Usually a plane brought mail and medicine, but today it brought a big smiling man named Charlie Saurin. This was a surprise. His first words were ‘Jambo, bwana—habari gani?’ He seemed to want to make a point, speaking Swahili to me. Swahili was the lingua franca in this nowhere place. I said I was fine, but that I wasn’t expecting him. ‘I was sent from Kampala. Mr. Bgoya’s orders. I’m here to help.’
“Bgoya was a government minister. What to do with Charlie Saurin? He was older than me, about forty-five, but with a full head of prematurely gray hair, combed back and upswept in a way that made him seem conceited. I’m wary of men who are vain about their hair. They behave as though they’re wearing a special hat. To keep him away from my bungalow and the clinic I gave him the small house the pilot used when heavy rain kept him from taking off. That pilot, Bevan, once told me, ‘You don’t really know anyone until you’ve seen him drunk.’”
I repeated this to Murray Cutler to see whether he’d been listening. He nodded and smiled, but this approval in such a sick man seemed like self-mockery.
“I invited Charlie Saurin to my bungalow for drinks—locally brewed beer served from a plastic basin. ‘Nakupenda pombe,’ he said, ‘I like beer,’ sipping it from the tin dipper, and though he lapsed into Swahili from time to time—he was conceited about his fluency, too—he became gentler, more polite, more solicitous, speaking to me slowly and deferentially. ‘Are you sure there isn’t some way I can pay for this?’ But he didn’t repeat that in Swahili.”
Becoming restless and impatient again, Murray Cutler shifted in his bed. He sighed and said, “And the point is?”
“Whenever he spoke from the heart he said it in Swahili. Just before he staggered home, he paused and hung on the doorknob and laughed, saying, ‘The history of mankind in four words: Mimi nyama, wewe kisu.’”
“Whaaa?” Murray Cutler said, throwing his head back.
“He started to teach classes, using his house as the school—there had never been a school in the village. You’d think this was a good thing, but it disrupted the rhythm of the village. The children weren’t available to hoe the gardens or bring water from the stream. But the children didn’t mind—being in school freed them from the hard labor and menial chores.
“The parents began complaining about this to me. One of the aggrieved men brought his son, Junius. Junius said, ‘The bwana Mr. Charlie is taking me to America.’ Junius’s father said it was a tatizo kubwa—a big problem, and that Charlie Saurin’s being there was a shauri—an issue.
“So I invited him over to my bungalow again, but this time we didn’t drink. I told him I had run out of pombe. We ate chicken and roasted cassava and a stew of greens. And I saw how he ate, English style, a fork in his left hand, a knife in his right, two deft hands at work, spearing the meat and cutting a small piece, then slicing a bit of cassava and adding that to the fork, and lastly plastering some limp greens to it and lifting the whole business to his mouth. He worked his implements with affected skill, raising his elbows, making a whole operation of it, squinting at the fork of food before he made it a mouthful, and then champing on it. That told me mor
e than his drunkenness had, and I remembered what he’d said.”
“What did he say?” Murray Cutler murmured, raising his head.
“I’m the meat, you’re the knife.”
His head fell back on the pillow, and he worked his lips as though tasting what I’d just told him.
“The boy Junius told the other children that he was going to America. I heard them repeating it at the clinic. I was too busy to pay much attention to the school—and Charlie Saurin had only been there a month. I sometimes saw him walking with the children past the gardens to the edge of the bush, sometimes singly, sometimes in groups.”
I fixed my eye on Murray Cutler.
“I knew he was trifling with the students, either with promises or actual deeds. I was strict with them. I never mentioned the world beyond our clearing. But he apparently talked about it all the time, America especially, and by doing so he made himself bigger than me. There was nothing I could do. The students felt familiar toward him, they hung around his house, and they were so convinced of his affection for them that they began to take liberties with his house, his food, some of his possessions. It was the casual, entitled way of rural Africa—after all, he had a great deal, and they had nothing. And there were his rash promises.”
Murray Cutler closed his eyes, and I stopped speaking. He opened them again and seemed disappointed that I was still sitting by his bed.
“When he discovered they were stealing his things, he was enraged. How dare they take advantage of him! He stopped teaching. He told them that no one was going to America with him, least of all Junius, who had stolen his alarm clock. The next time the mail plane came to our clearing in the bush, he got on board, and as we all watched him take off, he turned his face away from us. He said we had destroyed him. But of course it was we who were destroyed, or at least corrupted, which comes to the same thing. No one was the same after the visit of Charlie Saurin. The villagers began to resent me, and now spoke of wanting to leave the clearing, but there was no easy way out.”
I fell silent, Murray Cutler squinting at me. He snatched at the cord that hung beside his bed, to call the nurse, and yanked on it.
“This one man ruined everything by his meddling intrusion,” I said, staring at him in defiance. I got up from the chair and left the room before the nurse arrived. His last look was one of uncertainty, perhaps fear. I was relieved to breathe the sweet air outside the hospice.
But then, driving away, I remembered a better detail, how Junius’s father had gotten to Charlie Saurin. Mistaking this man for someone important, he had encouraged Junius to go with him, and had entrusted the boy to the intruder, and that was why Charlie Saurin had so much access to the boy.
Mother said, “Is there something wrong?” when I saw her that evening, alone in her house. Rose had left her to meet with the rest of the family, to see to the arrangements for the funeral at St. Ray’s. She had urged me to keep Mother company at this critical time, and so I slept these days in my old bedroom at the top of the stairs.
“I’m fine. I’m glad I’m here.”
Mother seemed doubtful, and this uncertainty looked like anxiety. The way she sat, hands clasped, knees together, slightly hunched, was like that of a peasant on a hillside weathering a storm.
“This is where I was born,” I said. “That’s an amazing fact to me. I’ve been everywhere, and yet this is the only place on earth where I truly belong.”
“Oh?” And she looked up hopefully.
“It’s kind of humbling to realize that.” Mother didn’t seem to hear me. I said, “Did you ever hear the expression ‘forgiveness is final’?”
“What does that mean?”
“This is what it means. A guy I know who’s also a writer found out that a man who’d hurt him was suffering a terminal illness. The writer was down on his luck, not much happening in his life—vulnerable to any slight. He had always resented the man who’d hurt him, but when he visited the man, he said, ‘I forgive you.’”
“What did the man say to that?”
“He couldn’t speak. He looked like he’d been slapped in the face. He was disarmed. There was nothing he could do. Because forgiveness is final.”
“That’s beautiful,” Mother said, and took my hand. “I’ll cherish that lovely thought. You could write about that.”
I looked away. I said, “And I keep meeting old friends here. Some of them are having health problems. I feel as if I can be useful.”
“You’ve always been kind that way, Jay.”
I returned to the hospice the following day. Murray Cutler looked at me with dread when he saw me enter the room, but he was too inarticulate to object, and, bedridden, unable to do anything but watch me seat myself and stare, he was the helpless one now.
“I knew a couple, very creative woman, very entrepreneurial man, partners in the trucking business”—just the sound of my voice made Murray Cutler hug himself in fear. “They split up. She said to me, ‘You have no idea. He was always hearing voices. His mother visited him in his office. The voices said, “Stab her in the eye! Stab her in the eye!”’ He explained this in detail to his wife. ‘You need to know.’ His father had died in a plane crash. He refused ever to get on a plane, but that was all right—his whole business plan concerned freight in long-haul trucks. His other quirk was that he had to take thirty steps whenever he entered a room, so if a room only used up twenty steps he marched in place for ten more, but very subtly. I asked her, ‘What was the attraction?’ She loved him, and she told me, ‘He had the charm that all psychopaths have.’”
In the time it took me to tell this story, the tension left Murray Cutler’s body, and when I finished he said in his usual mutter, with a half-smile, “What’s the point?”
“No one knew that he was crazy.” I shifted to be closer to him. I said in a harsh whisper, “Only she suffered, and when she told her story no one believed her. But I believed her. And as for the man, his punishment—he still heard the voices.”
The door opened, one of the nurses pushing a trolley with food trays on it. I was near enough to Murray Cutler to whisper to him without being overheard, “I’ll be back.”
The day of my father’s funeral was so scripted, and adhered so closely to the script, it seemed that his death was the fulfillment of a long-range plan, that this was the last act in the ritual. I was grateful for that, for the sequence of events that numbed me by their routine, following a set of cues: our designated seats, the vases of flowers, the chanting priest, the candle flames, the kind words, nothing jarring; and then the casket on wheels, the silent hearse sliding importantly to the cemetery, where the grave had been thoughtfully dug and the muddy hole disguised with a rectangle of purple satin fringed with gold ribbon; more prayers, more flowers, and then another procession, the withdrawal, all of it expected. We were sad, but no one cried. The nature and purpose of a ritual is to meet expectations; it is the unexpected that is upsetting.
Murray Cutler cringed when I appeared the following afternoon, later than I usually visited. He must have thought with relief that I was not coming, but then to see me at the end of the day, when he was tired and having to face another story, was demoralizing to him.
He tried to cover his face as I pulled the chair close to his bed and began speaking.
“I knew a woman who visited Greece on vacation,” I said. “A man stopped her on a back street in Athens, where she’d been buying souvenirs. He said, ‘I had a dream last night of Jesus Christ. Jesus said to me, “You must go to this particular street. There you will meet a beautiful woman.” And here you are.’ When she turned to get away, a man in a doorway said, ‘Come here. I will help you,’ and the woman fled into his house. The man locked the door and raped her. And when he was done, the other man was waiting to do the same.”
Murray Cutler, seeming to undergo a seizure, raised his arms as though to defend himself, and he cowered behind a tangle of plastic tubes.
“Raped her,” I said, leaning over and showi
ng him my teeth.
Sitting beside my grieving mother, helping her answer the condolence notes, took almost a week. My father had many elderly friends, and none of them used a computer. Rather than send a printed card as thanks for these spidery scrawls, my mother felt—and I agreed—that it was best to write each person a reply that reflected their degree of intimacy toward my father. It was a sensitive business, but it brought my mother and me closer. When she grew weary she put her hand on mine as I was writing, improving her responses to these people, and said, “Everything’s going to be all right.”
Murray Cutler was much worse the next time I saw him, a few days later. I locked the door to the room, and he groaned when I sat down and started to speak.
“There was a man who, when he lusted after someone and didn’t want to be caught, pawed his prey in public places—in the bleachers at baseball games, in the back rows at concerts, in popular campgrounds. He possessed them by pawing them openly, looking like a dear friend and benefactor, and that was the paradox, because the victim was too fearful to make a scene. And when the victim went home he couldn’t report what had happened. He had to think of a story, but in his story he was not a victim. He was triumphant. He invented dramas and dialogue. He became such an expert at evasion that the oblique habit of storytelling became his profession.”
Murray Cutler faced me and never looked more like meat, and he tried to turn away, but he was too weak. “Yet one story always stood for another. He invented the truth,” I said. “Now you tell me a story.”
I sat watching him, and it was as if a succession of episodes might be running through his mind, all their cruel details twitching on his face.
