Fresh Air Fiend

by Paul Theroux

  We did not really know what would happen You never do But it got worse, and many of us left. Rajat stayed and got thrown into jail for sedition—criticizing the Ugandan government, something he had been doing for years. His detention in prison might have broken him. Or was it disillusionment? It was revealed that for some years the magazine had been partly funded by the CIA, the grubby money dispensed by the clean hands of the Farfield Foundation (Encounter magazine was another recipient). He took Transition to Ghana in 1970 and edited it for two years. He then went to the United States, and he just about vanished. I saw him once: he looked frail, unsteady, and he had no interest in pursuing any conversation.

  Rajat was found dead on December 3, 1995, in the San Francisco hotel that had been his home for a number of years. He was fifty-seven. After he left Africa, he was not the same. But when I knew him, thirty years ago in Africa, he was brilliant and his friendship meant everything to me.

  The Exile Moritz Thomsen

  I

  A TRAVEL BOOK may be many things, and Moritz Thomsen's The Saddest Pleasure seems to be most of them—not just a report of a journey, but a memoir, an autobiography, a confession, a foray into South American topography and history, a travel narrative, with observations on books, music, and life in general—in short, what the best travel books are, a summing up.

  Thomsen, the most modest of men, writes at one point, "Though I have written a couple of books I have never thought of myself as a writer. I had written them in those pre-dawn hours when the land still lay in darkness, or in days of heavy winter rains when the cattle huddled in the brush dumb with misery....I had always considered that all my passion was centered around farming."

  The books he refers to are Living Poor (1971), the best book I have yet read on the Peace Corps experience, and The Farm on the River of Emeralds (1978), which is a sort of sequel, and describes an exasperating series of reverses Thomsen had as part owner of a farm on the lush and muddy coast of Ecuador.

  To my mind, this farmer is a writer to his fingertips, but he is an unusual man, and his writing life has been anything but ordinary. Writing for him is a natural and instinctive act, like breathing. It is obvious from The Saddest Pleasure and his other books that he loathes polite society and shuns the literary world (in meeting the writer João Ubaldo Ribeiro, in Bahia, he found a kindred spirit). Thomsen is no city slicker; he is not possessive or acquisitive. He mocks his physical feebleness and jeers at his old age and his sense of failure. He wishes to write well and honestly, and is not interested in power. A great deal of foolishness or a little wickedness makes him angry. He always tells us exactly what he thinks, in his own voice. He is the least mannered of writers, and he would rather say something truthful in a clumsy way than lie elegantly.

  I liked him the instant I met him, and even then, eleven or twelve years ago, he seemed rather aged, frail and gray-haired, wheezing in the thin air of Quito. I could see he was a good man, tenaciously loyal to his friends, and a serious writer. He was in his middle sixties and had published his Peace Corps book, and he mentioned that he was working on several others, including a memoir of his father. He hated his father, he said, and since literature is rich in such hatreds, I encouraged him in his memoir.

  Moritz tantalized me with stories of his father's odious behavior: the time he hanged his wife's pet cat, the time he tied a dead chicken around a collie's throat with barbed wire because the collie had been worrying the hens. In addition to this sadistic cruelty, his father was also a poisonous snob and a liar; this pillar of the community—for indeed he was—made poor Moritz's life a misery. Clearly it went on for a long time. We read in The Saddest Pleasure how, at the age of forty-eight, Moritz was still being berated by this paranoid maniac for joining the "communistic" Peace Corps. The only other person I have met in my life who hated his father as much was a German who told me that his father had been a member of the precursor of the SS—the Sturmabteilung, or SA—and, long after the war ended, was still ranting. Thomsen Senior and this Nazi would have gotten along like a house on fire.

  I am happy to see this monster in the narrative. Whatever else travel is, it is also an occasion to dream and remember. You sit in an alien landscape and you are visited by all the people who have been awful to you. You have nightmares in strange beds. You recall episodes that you have not thought of for years, and but for that noise from the street or that powerful odor of jasmine you might have forgotten. Details of Thomsen's life emerge as he travels out of Ecuador, through Bogotá, and around Brazil: his childhood dreams, his shaming memory of a shocking incident one long-ago Halloween, his years in the war (twenty-seven combat missions flown in a B-17 in 1943 alone), his father's death and funeral, his disastrous farming ventures, and the outrages he witnessed in various coastal villages in Ecuador.

  By the end of the book, you know Moritz Thomsen intimately, and what is more, he is a man well worth knowing. In many respects this is a self-portrait, but in this case the artist is painting himself naked. He is candid. He withholds nothing. When we get a glimpse of his body, he is never sentimental: he describes poor, weak human flesh. In Rio, for example, he is in a room with a mirror. (He has no mirror in Quito.) "I am looking at myself for almost the first time in ten years, and can see at last that I had been truly broken by that time in the jungle and that old age."

  He was sixty-three at the time of the trip, but he had been very ill beforehand. His illness and his sense of failure make him morbid, but also ghoulishly humorous. He gives most people a lot of latitude, but he is always hard on himself. He laments that he doesn't look Latin. He reflects on his own appearance: "Pure gringo, but more bum than working man."

  Moritz Thomsen is rare in an important way. He is a true Conradian, and his distant literary ancestor is someone like Axel Heyst in Victory— although I should quickly add that Heyst's father was a different sort of devil from the elder Thomsen.

  In the 1960s many middle-aged men and women joined the Peace Corps. It was not unusual for a man in his forties or fifties to head off to Africa or South America, to teach school or show people how to raise chickens. Three little old ladies and an elderly gent were in my own Peace Corps group, which left the States in 1963 bound for central Africa. People at home would say, "Lordy, I don't know how they do it," but the fact was that they didn't do it very well. Moritz Thomsen underplays his Peace Corps successes, but the records show that he was an exemplary volunteer. That is not his rarity, however; he is rare because, twenty-odd years later, he is still in Ecuador, still committed to the place and the people, still an anarchist at heart, and still poor.

  He is the man—there are not many in the world—who stayed behind. Americans seldom do. You meet the odd German, the tetchy Englishman, the panicky Hindu, the refugee Pole, or whomever, but seldom do you see the cultured, civilized, widely read American in the Third World boondocks. Throughout his books, Thomsen says—but never so explicitly as I am putting it now—that going away made him a person, made him a writer, sharpened his sensibilities. His subject is not suffering humanity but rather loneliness and fellowship. He sees himself as the ultimate tramp, but then so was Thoreau, so was W. H. Hudson, so was Gauguin—so, for that matter, is Wilfred Thesiger, in spite of his Eton tie.

  Because Thomsen stayed behind, he saw the dust settle, the sun drop behind the mountains, and another generation of vipers appear in the Ecuadorian government. He is watchful, patient, and, in his way, very strong. He remembers everything. His writing is not that of someone who is merely visiting, but that of a man who has taken root; and after the initial uneasiness he feels in traveling—his hatred of planes, his superstitions, his irritation with other passengers or officialdom, his worry over money, his deep loneliness and isolation—he begins to drift and relax, and he begins to encounter Brazil.

  In this sort of travel there is catharsis, but few travelers are so honest in their reactions or so skillful in documenting them. Moritz is happier in the hinterland and on the Amazon River; there
, his writing begins to sing. It is no coincidence that on his river trip he described the diesel rhythm of the boat as "slow and languorous, like the heartbeat of a sleeping woman."

  I should have declared my own interest at the outset—he is a good friend of mine. I am glad he used a line of mine as the title for his book. It occurs in my novel Picture Palace, in a conversation between the photographer Maude Pratt and the writer Graham Greene:

  "I'm going to wind it up. Call it a day."

  "Whatever for?" Greene said.

  "I'm too old to travel, for one thing."

  "Which Frenchman said, 'Travel is the saddest of the pleasures'?"

  "It gave me eyes."

  Our friendship is, I suppose, characteristic of many Moritz must enjoy. We met in Ecuador twice in the late seventies and have corresponded irregularly since. He goes on boasting of his ailing health, his failing fortunes, his insignificance. For these reasons and many others I am proud to know him. There are so few people in the world like him who are also good writers.

  II

  When he was forty-eight, and faced with a farm that was going bust (he had been raising pigs in California), Moritz Thomsen joined the Peace Corps and was sent to Ecuador—more farming, but this time in profit, earning the Peace Corps wage of $50 a month. He stayed for twenty-five years, and died in Guayaquil on August 28, 1991. I thought of Thomsen as the vanished American. The hardest thing about being an expatriate, he used to say, was that everyone else eventually went home.

  Because of a promise to an Ecuadorian friend, Moritz remained in the country, in the coastal province of Esmeraldas, to continue farming. The farm was a flop; he was robbed, taken advantage of, lied to, and browbeaten. As he had done in Living Poor, Moritz turned misery into literature. The result of this failed attempt to farm at the coast was his second book, The Farm on the River of Emeralds.

  Events that would devastate most of us made him smile. He was one of those fatalistic people for whom misfortune was a kind of tonic that confirmed his view that the world was arbitrary and unfair, and only the wicked ever succeeded. "See, I told you so!" he would say when the worst happened.

  But he kept writing, which itself is a kind of optimism. And writing is for its practitioners a fair profession; it seems perverse and unrewarding only in the short term. Anyone who cared about Ecuador, expatriation, suffering humanity, and travel cared about Moritz's books. Like many who have chosen to observe the doctrine of silence, exile, and cunning, Moritz was sought out in his seclusion in Quito. He pretended not to notice how he was admired. He was a constant reader, a responsive letter writer, and had a great heart.

  Finding the thin air of Quito hard on his already damaged lungs, he moved to sea-level Guayaquil. He continued to write, and it was a considerable satisfaction to him when a small press began reissuing his books in Britain. His emphysema worsened to the point where he could not leave his room, and at last he was bedridden. In August he came down with cholera. Knowing he was dying, he refused to go to the hospital, nor would he allow himself to be treated, feeling it would just prolong his agony.

  Still, he suffered and he died alone, in a city he disliked, in a country he often despaired of, and he died poor. His cremation was delayed because the oven was unworkable. Meanwhile, the bill for keeping his corpse in the shabby mourning room was mounting up. His name on the signboard was spelled wrong. There were six mourners. One of them, his Ecuadorian doctor, subsequently sent his executors a bill for the hours she had spent in the room where Moritz lay dead and at the cemetery.

  "Moritz would have appreciated that," one of his friends told me.

  Yes, he would have cackled. He was alive and unselfish in everything. The opposite of love is not hate, Moritz Thomsen said. It is boredom.

  Part Eight

  Fugues

  Unspeakable Rituals and Outlandish Beliefs

  ONE OF THE EXCITEMENTS of travel is the chance to become acquainted with bizarre customs, unspeakable rituals, and outlandish beliefs, many of which have perhaps never been described before. In my thirty-five years of wandering, I have recorded many such encounters, some uniquely unpleasant, others mirroring practices we believe to be peculiar to our own lives. The Gond people of south-central India clean their teeth with fresh brushlike twigs of the neem tree and say the green (chlorophyll) keeps them bright. The Naulu people of Amboyn smoke their dead like kippers to preserve them. That sort of thing. But I have a greater interest in the odd, the irrational, and the truly monstrous.

  That I had no prior notion such people existed was my main reason for making scrupulous notes; another was that on further investigation I learned that the people in question had been ignored in anthropological studies, or that they had been so inadequately described that they had been seriously misrepresented.

  There was also the question of tact—"Let's skip over this ritual, since it might be used as ammo by bigots"—or of taste: certain practices were regarded as so shocking that a detailed description was thought to be out of the question. Such considerations are beneath my notice. My only ambition is to be faithful to what I have seen, no matter how strange or sad.

  I have written elsewhere of the urine ceremony of the Baciga; the Jon Frum cargo cult on Efate, in Vanuatu; the harvest bingeing on three-penis wine in rural Shandong; the riotous bachelor houses of the Trobriand Islanders; the diet of lightly cooked caribou droppings among the Naskapi Indians; ritual fellation among the Asmat; wife inheritance, or chokolo, among the Sena people of the Lower Shire River in Malawi (and how the widow is required to engage in sexual intercourse with the male relative while the husband's corpse lies nearby); and the manner in which people in India wag their heads negatively to mean yes.

  "In Mali, best friends throw excrement at each other," Robert Brain writes in Friends and Lovers, "and comment loudly on the genitals of their respective parents—this to us unnatural and obscene behavior is proof of the love of friends."

  Rather than being exceptional, and thus misleading, I think of such supposed oddness as the most telling, arising out of the heart of the culture. What ought to interest us is the enduring nature of the customs and beliefs—that they have not changed at all, nor are likely to change, as long as the people remain isolated and wholly themselves. An Englishman, wishing to be contemptuous, expressed a tolerance greater than he intended when he wrote of the Chinese, "These people are unlike any others on earth and can therefore be judged from no known standpoint, and not even from their own, if it can be found."

  With regard to the stranger practices, I prefer not to disclose the extent of my own participation, though an old motivating memory of mine is the line in Heart of Darkness that speaks of how Kurtz would "preside at certain midnight dances ending with unspeakable rites." I also kept a record of such customs because in general they seemed to bear no relation whatever, even metaphorically, to the way we live in the United States.

  The Mouse Missions of the Plashwits

  Among the Plashwits, a pastoral people in central Asian Turkestan, the ability to carry a live mouse in one's mouth for a great distance without harming the creature is regarded as an essential skill, acquired in the passage from boy to man.

  A Plashwit boy becomes a warrior by feeding flesh from his own body to the mouse, and once the mouse is fattened in a way that impresses the commander of the Plashwit army, it is eaten.

  The male organ in Plashwit is also known as a mouse. Plashwit women are forbidden to look at a mouse or even to utter the word.

  The Smoke Sickness of the Balumbi

  The Balumbi are the dominant pygmoid people of the Ituri Forest, on the lower slopes of the Mountains of the Moon. In order to prove their strength, they enter smokehouses, in groups of fifty or more, where they remain for long periods, inhaling the smoke of a vine peculiar to their part of the forest. The Balumbi are well aware that the vine is noxious, that the priests who administer the rite are corrupt, and that, far from being a proof of strength, inhaling is addictive and leads
to a fatal condition known as smoke sickness.

  The Bowl Cult of Baojiang

  What began in the antiquity of Baojiang as an annual feast to which bowls of food were brought has become a ceremony of display in which in our time the bowls alone take precedence.

  Only women, known as votaries, take part in the ritual of presentation. The votary carries her bowl, always a clay pot, and shows it to the others, who sit in a circle.

  What makes the cult especially unusual is the intervention of a master potter, and the fact that clay is unknown in the sandy Baojiang desert of Qinghai. The potter supplies perfect bowls at great cost.

  One other curious feature is that Baojiang is also an area where famine is recurrent, though this has far from diminished the bowl cult. It could be said to have enhanced it, since bowls, some of them very lovely, with a sort of scrimshaw worked into the cranial bone, are occasionally fashioned from the skulls of those who have died of starvation.

  Body Sculpture Among the Mongoni

  The first Mongoni I saw, I took to be the victim of a tragic accident. This was in the early 1960s, in an isolated district of Nyasaland. On closer acquaintance with these remote and deeply insecure people, I learned that the "accident" was the result of deliberate mutilation. As one group will prize the accumulation of muscle and flesh, the Mongoni notion of beauty is skeletal: physical contours are the more beautiful for being unnatural.