by Paul Theroux
Because all cities are possessed by an incapacity to be known, and so must be invented or imagined, these were questions I asked in cities. I never questioned being on safari in the zona verde. The bush was Africa’s salvation, and mine. Camus exhorted himself in his Notebooks: “Write the story of a contemporary cured of his heartbreaks solely by long contemplation of a landscape.”
It is the natural landscape that I have always yearned for — and human figures in that landscape. I cannot stand the thought of traveling from city to city, and cities were mainly what awaited me on the last leg of this ultimate safari. Long contemplation of a landscape was once the very definition of a trip through Africa. No longer.
Nor was my old passion to get away at any cost still driving me. “Starting in a hollow log of wood — some thousand miles up a river, with only an infinitesimal prospect of returning — I ask myself, ‘Why?’ ” So Richard Burton wrote in the Congo, in a letter to a friend. He answered himself, as I once did in my way, “And the only echo is ‘damned fool! … The Devil drives.’ ” But Burton was forty-two at the time. I was once a forty-two-year-old hearty in a dugout canoe on a river to nowhere. When he was nearer my age (Burton died in Trieste, at sixty-nine) he was more cautious, no longer a risk taker, but gouty and bronchitic, and happiest at home, indulged by his wife, his days spent fossicking among the books of erotica in his library.
“A question is commonly put to explorers: ‘Why could you not go further when you had already succeeded in going so far?’ ” Francis Galton wrote this in the preface to his Narrative of an Explorer in Tropical South Africa, because he headed home somewhat abruptly. “And the answer to this is, that several independent circumstances concur in stopping a man after he has been travelling for a certain time and distance.”
Galton then reviews these circumstances: the refitting of the expedition, finding more money, learning another language, studying customs, finding helpful information, making new plans. “But [the traveler’s] energies are reduced, and his means become inadequate to the task, and therefore no alternative is left him but to return [home] while it is still possible for him to do so. It is therefore not to be expected that any large part of the vast unexplored region before us will yield its secrets to a single traveller, but, rather, that they will become known step by step through various successive discoveries … It is probable that for years to come there will still remain ample room in Africa for men inclined for adventure to carry out in them, if nowhere else, the metier of explorers.”
That was also how I felt. Let someone else (proctologist, Piranesi, foolhardy wanderer, someone with time to kill) continue where I left off, and the rest of Africa might yield its secrets to this traveler. In my rigorous experiences with space and time I had just one guinea pig to torture — myself. And now, self-reprieved, back in Cape Town, revisiting some of the places I’d seen earlier, ending my trip, I was happy.
On my last day I woke as usual, meditated a little, took my gout pills, and wrote some notes over breakfast. Then I gathered my clothes, everything except what I stood up in. I was sick of the clothes I had worn every day of my trip. I made a bundle of them, with my silly hat on top, took the train to Khayelitsha, and, randomly stopping a woman at a market stall, asked her if she wanted them. She wasn’t surprised at the sudden offer, a perfect stranger hoisting an armload of old clothes at her. She reacted as if this sort of thing happened all the time and accepted them gratefully, saying, “These will fit my husband.” With a kindly smile she advised me to be careful in the township, to keep my hand on my wallet, and to leave as quickly as possible.
Not the end of travel, or of reckless essaying — there is no end to those for me — but the end of this trip and this sort of travel, marinated in politics and urban wreckage, where the only possible narrative I see (and am unwilling to write) is an anatomy of melancholy. There is a world elsewhere.
What am I doing here? I knew at last. I am preparing to leave. On the red clay roads of the African bush among poor and overlooked people, I often thought of the poor in America, living in just the same way, precariously, on the red roads of the Deep South, on low farms, poor pelting villages, sheepcotes, and mills — people I knew only from books, as I’d first known Africans — and I felt beckoned home.
* It was Arthur Rimbaud’s in Aden, in 1884, unemployed, writing home and lamenting in the heat. “What a deplorable existence I lead in this absurd climate and under what frightful conditions! How boring! How stupid life is! What am I doing here?” (quoted in Jean Marie Carré, A Season in Hell, 1931).
