My Secret History

by Paul Theroux

  “He looks so smug,” Lucy said.

  “I thought you were stuffing envelopes for him.”

  “No. I’m doing that for the Young Republicans. What’s wrong?”

  “Becoming a Republican is like becoming a protestant.”

  “I am a protestant,” she said.

  “I mean, it’s not like believing in something. It’s like putting on a hat.”

  “You think you have all the answers, don’t you?” she said, and she sounded so much like Mrs. Mamalujian that I began talking fast to change the subject.

  “Kennedy’s going to be the next president,” I said. “Nothing bad ever happens to him. He lives a charmed life. We’re going to be stuck with him for eight years.”

  “So you’re a Republican, too.”

  “I’m an anarchist,” I said.

  “God, you say some stupid things,” she said, and sighed.

  A man next to her said to the bartender, “Did you just fart?”

  The bartender said no.

  “It must have been me,” the man said, and frowned and raised his glass.

  “Let’s sit over there,” I said.

  Kennedy was saying We will go forward like a man reciting blank verse.

  In the booth, Lucy said, “I owe you some money.”

  “That’s okay,” I said, but I was also thinking how much I would like to have three hundred dollars. It was hard for me to brush it aside: that was a motorcycle. “I don’t want it. Hey, are you feeling all right?”

  We both knew what that was a euphemism for.

  She said, “I’m fine.”

  She wasn’t pregnant, that was for sure, or it would have shown.

  “I want to repay you,” she said.

  She seemed very tense. Was it what I had said about Republicans and protestants? She was a different person from the one who had walked along Pinckney Street with me last July—even different from the person who had shown me where the whale had washed up at Manomet. She was like someone I had known a long time ago that I was still forgetting.

  “I really do want to give it back,” she said. “Don’t you want it?”

  It was dark in the bar but she didn’t take her sunglasses off.

  I tried not to be tempted by the thought of her giving me the money back. But I was.

  I said, “I don’t care,” and hated myself for not having the guts to say no.

  Lucy said, “You’re just going to get on the bus and ride away, as if nothing’s happened. Just turn your back on everything and everyone. Just vanish.”

  I said nothing; I glared at her, because that was exactly what I wanted to do, and that she had nailed me down like that left me nothing more to say.

  “You probably have a girlfriend in Amherst.”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t even have a place to live.”

  “Know what I think?” she said—and her voice was nastier than I had ever known it, not her voice at all—“I think you’re going to be all right. Better than all right. I can see it. You’re going to be a success. I don’t know what it will be, but it’s going to happen.”

  It was the opposite of what I thought, and hearing her say that was like mockery.

  She said, “And I know you want the money back.”

  I shook my head, but it was too vague a way of refusing, and she could tell that I was weakening.

  She took her glasses off and wiped them with a napkin. She was either smiling or else on the verge of tears—it was that same look, an expression of hers that I now knew well. She put the glasses back on and faced me.

  “Someone gave me a phone number,” she said. “I called, and a man answered. He sounded grumpy, the way old people do. But he said he’d do it. I was to meet him in a certain bar in Brockton. I borrowed my aunt’s car and drove there. He was fifty or more and looked like a tramp. He wore old clothes. He hadn’t shaved. As soon as I saw him I wanted to go home and forget it. But I knew I couldn’t—it would be worse at home. He asked to see the money. But he wouldn’t leave the bar. He kept saying, ‘Just one more,’ and trying to get me to drink. I actually had one I was so nervous. And then, when I had just about given up hope, he said, ‘Let’s go.’ We went in his car. I think he had been waiting for it to get dark. It was all back roads. I lost track of where we were and I thought What if he kills me? He slowed down in the darkness and turned into a dirt road—so small I hadn’t seen it. I really felt lost but I was too frightened to cry. He stopped the car in front of a derelict house. I could see the broken windows in the headlights. He lit a candle inside. It was one of those places where kids go to start fires and smoke and scribble on the walls. There was a mattress on the floor and we had to be careful where we stepped because of the broken glass. He took my money and then said—”

  There were tears running from beneath her sunglasses.

  “Lucy, please,” I said.

  When she saw that I wanted her to stop she set her face at me and continued.

  “ ‘Take your skirt off,’ he said. And then he began swearing at me and pushed his pants down and just forced himself into me. I hated him too much to cry. He smelled, and I knew he was drunk. Now he’s going to kill me, I thought. But he didn’t. He fussed around and took some metal tools out of a paper bag. He had had that bag in the bar. I had wondered what was in it. His tools. Then he did it, flicking one of them into me. He told me that it would take about six or eight hours to work. He drove me back to my car.”

  “That’s horrible,” I said. I thought she had finished. I didn’t know what to do, but I wanted to go. It was far worse than I had imagined. I turned away. On the television above the bar a man was kneeling next to a small child who was hugging a cloth doll, and he was saying Has anyone told you that you’re a very brave little girl?

  In her dull determined voice, Lucy said, “As I was driving home I got a pain, like a knife in my side. I almost crashed the car, but I kept driving until the pain was unbearable. I pulled into a Jenney station and the man pumping gas pointed out back. I went into the ladies’ room and had it in the toilet. I thought I was going to bleed to death. I couldn’t move for about an hour. The man wanted to call the police, but I wouldn’t let him. When I got home my mother said, ‘You look pale—are you all right?’ And I said, ‘I’m fine. I—’ ”

  It was only then that she started to sob, and she did so in a subdued and suffering way that made me want to die for having caused it. Then she saw me watching her, and she sneered.

  “That’s your three hundred dollars.”

  I wanted the bus to crash and for me to be burned alive—or else to keep going, past Amherst and Pittsfield and out of the state. Was it enough to leave home?

  I was still reading Baudelaire, the opposite pages this time, in French. Anywhere out of this world, and a poem about his lover—naked except for her jewels, wearing makeup. Gleaming buttocks. Moorish slave. Like a captive tiger. In front of a fire with its flamboyant sigh. She was black, and she yearned for him.

  Keep going, I thought. Anywhere out of this world. I didn’t want anyone to know me. I didn’t deserve to be missed. But home was too big and too hard to get away from. Every state would tell me I was a failure. How could I leave? Home was the whole country.

  THREE

  AFRICAN GIRLS

  1.

  The barefoot student was being led towards my office from the clump of blue gums, where he had been hiding. But why was he smiling like that? When he came closer I could see his wild eyes did not match his crooked mouth. It was a ganja-smoker’s smile—Willy Msemba, at the hemp again. Rain was beaded on his black face.

  Like an executioner, Deputy Mambo jerked the boy along. Mambo’s mud-smeared shoes flapped beside Msemba’s bare feet.

  “Headmaster.” Mambo always sounded sarcastic when he said that word. He knocked and pushed open my office door in one motion.

  I told them to come in, but they were already in—water and footprints and clods of mud. Whole raindrops were caught and trembl
ed unbroken in the springs of their hair. Not many of the students had hair, not even the girls. It was a head-shaving country, because of the lice.

  Willy smiled at his toes. His feet had shed what looked like smashed cake. He was shivering in his wet shirt, and still smiling.

  “I found this boy smoking.”

  Smoking always meant smoking ganja.

  The wind shook the blue gums—shreds of stringy bark and pale fluttery leaves. It was gray cold April in Nyasaland, one of the months of blowing fog. The fog drizzled down and was so dense the country seemed tiny. It reddened the earth and made the roofs rattle.

  Just then, Miss Natwick dived out of her room across the schoolyard. She was one of those small, stiff-legged women who when they hurry look as if they are going to tip over. She was a part-timer, and one of her subjects was needlework, but, even so, she could not understand why she had not been put in charge of the school after Mr. Likoni left. Another reason was that she was a white Rhodesian.

  No sooner had she entered my office than Mr. Nyirongo passed by the window on the veranda. Instead of entering, or continuing on his way, he paused and began gaping at us, his tongue swelling between his lips. He was clearly interested in the sight: Willy Msemba dripping on my office floor, and on either side of him Deputy Mambo and Miss Natwick.

  I was pacing behind my desk. I had only been headmaster a short time and I was still self-conscious. I hated being observed handing out punishment. I knew I was an inept disciplinarian but I hoped that the students would see me as a fair and just headmaster and not take advantage of me. It was simple logic: if they liked me they’d behave. That was the American way. My predecessor, Mr. Likoni, used the British method. He bent wrongdoers over a chair and flogged them.

  “This boy is doing it every lunch break,” Deputy Mambo said. “Just sitting in the trees and smoking his ganja. I think some very severe punishment is called for.”

  In Deputy Mambo’s lapel was a gleaming button with a big black face on it—Doctor Hastings Kamuzu Banda. This scowling Banda would be head of the government after independence in July, when Nyasaland became Malawi. It was not a happy face, not even a sane one, and I sometimes felt that Africans in the country wore the button to frighten non-party members or foreigners like me.

  Perhaps Mambo saw me glance at the button. He said, “Doctor Banda wants firm discipline in Malawi.”

  “This is still Nyasaland,” I said.

  But we both knew that it was nothing. Nearly all the white settlers had left, and only the British governor general still hung on—he had been delegated to hand the place over to Banda.

  “I’d like to hear Willy’s side of the story,” I said, because I felt that Mambo was pressuring me.

  “They all smoke,” Miss Natwick said. “Heavens, where do they get the money from? They’re supposed to be so poor!”

  To her, smoking meant just that. She did not know what ganja was. It would have thrown her if she had.

  “I think he steals it,” Deputy Mambo said. “I hope the headmaster does not approve of stealing.”

  All this time Willy Msemba was smiling his crooked smile.

  “What have you got to say for yourself?”

  He looked at me and, though he knew me, in his drugged condition it was as though he was seeing me after a very long time. He seemed surprised: What was his old friend doing here! His eyes were loose and sort of drowned-looking.

  “Allo, Mister Andy!” he said in a gurgly voice.

  Miss Natwick went pah hearing him use my first name—and not even Andre but Andy.

  “Mr. Parent,” she said, in a correcting way, talking to him. “At Salisbury Academy we always said, ‘Headmaster, Sir!’ ”

  “I see him Farraday night,” Msemba said to Miss Natwick, and gave her the same strange grin.

  “What’s this about smoking under the trees?”

  But he ignored me. He was deaf and still smiling, his eyes rolling and his head wobbling. Now he turned to Miss Natwick.

  “He go jig-jig.”

  “Listen to me,” I said.

  “Mister Andy!”

  “I regard this as a serious infraction of the rules.”

  “Oh, yes, this guy like to dance too much!” the student said to the room at large.

  “I won’t tolerate smoking at this school.”

  “What is this imbecile talking about?”

  “Ask him how he came by the money,” Deputy Mambo said.

  Msemba said, “He twist and shout!” He stamped mud off his feet. He cried, “Beetriss!”

  “I don’t understand a bloody word of this.”

  He was saying Beatles but I decided not to translate.

  Mr. Nyirongo frowned through the window and turned his swollen tongue on me and stared with sad eyes, Miss Natwick was squinting. Deputy Mambo had loosened his grip on Msemba.

  For the fact was, I was now at the center of attention, not Msemba. I was twenty-three. I had been headmaster only two months, since Likoni left, and these people had wanted my job—still wanted it. They claimed I was not doing well, was not mature, dressed sloppily—was an American. And yet they could not deny that the school ran as smoothly as ever, and was certainly cleaner than it had ever been under Likoni. And I had plans.

  “Everybody like this guy,” Msemba said. “Especially the girls!”

  Rubber mouth, I thought. His lips were the texture and color of an inner tube, and they were still flapping.

  “For punishment,” I said, trying to shut him up, “make ten bricks.”

  “And especially—”

  “Twenty bricks! Now get back to your classroom. And what about you teachers?”

  No one was listening to me. Msemba took several odd sliding dance steps, and then he began to stamp, as if he were killing roaches.

  “Like this one,” he was saying.

  “Get him out of here,” I said to Deputy Mambo.

  “He is being insolent,” Miss Natwick said. “The bloody cheek!”

  Msemba nodded, seeming to agree. He said, “Dancing with African girls.”

  “Take him away,” I said.

  “African girls!” Msemba said.

  He had the African inability to pronounce the word Africa. It came out sounding like “Uffaleekan.”

  Deputy Mambo said, “What is this boy saying?”

  “Even my sister!”

  “That’s a euphemism,” I said.

  “Every day!”

  “That’s a lie,” I said. “Now off you go.”

  Deputy Mambo’s face had gone blacker, but it was creased with little whitish lines—his eyes tiny, his mouth clamped shut, his nostrils huge and horselike in fury. He wrenched Msemba’s arm and hustled him out of my office, taking his anger with me out on the boy.

  Mr. Nyirongo chewed his tongue a moment longer and then moved away, his chin at the level of the high windowsill.

  “Monday mornings at the Academy after prayers,” Miss Natwick said, “one would read off their names. The offenders would line up in front of the entire assembly. The headmaster took out his birch, and one by one he bent them over a chair and thrashed them. ‘Thank you!’ ‘Next!’ They passed out sometimes. Some were sick where they stood.” Her teeth were dull yellow bones. “Salisbury.”

  “Likoni tried that. It didn’t work.”

  “Because he didn’t hit them hard enough.”

  “This isn’t Rhodesia, Miss Natwick.”

  “That’s pretty bloody obvious.” And she left.

  Threshed, possed out, bleddy: it was an amazing accent.

  After school that day, and long after the students had gone home—their smell of soap and dirt and a stillness that was like a sound lingered in the empty classrooms—I saw Willy Msemba making bricks. He was no longer smiling. The effects of the weed had worn off and left him groggy and dazed.

  “Easy punishment,” Deputy Mambo said. “More like playing.”

  Where had he come from? But he often popped up. He had the envious
person’s habit of creeping out of nowhere, and he was critical in an envious way too.

  I decided not to hear him.

  We watched together. Msemba had trampled a hole full of wet clay that he had dug and soaked. He then softened it with his feet, and mixed it with straw, and crammed it into brick-sized boxes, and tipped it out on the ground to dry. He was nearly done. His legs were muddy to his knees, and there was clay from his fingertips to his elbows. That was the point, really—that and our necessity for the bricks: a new latrine.

  “He should have had a hundred bricks,” Deputy Mambo said. “He should have been beaten with a stick.”

  But he was staring at me like a preacher, and I knew what he was thinking: African girls.

  So now I was in the doghouse, not Msemba. I had been made headmaster after Mr. Likoni was appointed minister of education in the new government that was coming in three months. The promotion was not a comment on Likoni’s ability. He was a drunkard who had once taken a course at Aberystwyth in Wales. He had hung his certificate on the wall. There were no more than a dozen university graduates in the country. It was very easy to rise. I was a good example of that.

  I had been in Nyasaland seven months as a Peace Corps Volunteer. I was too far in the bush, on too bad a road, to get many visitors. There were angry stray dogs near the mud houses. Quail ducked into the grass. Owls sat on the road all night. We had greeny-black land crabs that looked like small monsters. We had hyenas—they tipped over my barrels. I used to see the hyenas loping off in their doggy seesawing way when I returned to the house after midnight. We had snakes. The hill behind the school was a huge rock that I had once thought of climbing; but now the idea tired me. We had thirty different kinds of birds but no one knew their names. Mbalame, people called them, and it was the same word for plane. My house was high enough so that I could see Mount Mlanje, the whole plateau, in the distance—blue and flat-topped, with dark green tea planted beneath it. There were no other Americans at the school. That suited me, because I regarded myself as something of a loner, and rather a romantic figure, in my squashed hat and wrinkled suit and stained suede shoes.