by Paul Theroux
It was bad enough that he spoke no Chinyanja. It did not help that his English was peculiar. Innerteenmint, he said and hoorible.
“Hey, that cook. When I tell him to inner, I want him to inner.”
It took me awhile to work that one out.
“The cook’s name is Captain. He doesn’t speak English.”
“Everyone spoke English in Sierra Leone, even the servants.”
I thought of three rejoinders to this. But we were in the bush. An ill-judged remark could cause weeks of miffed silence. I decided not to risk it just then.
“But my cook in Kenema was minilly deficient,” he said, and made his first and only joke in the year I knew him. “Kenema was an enema.”
He had the California way of saying hamburgers, heavy on the ham and swallowing the burgers.
He was pudgy and lumpish and he had the heavy person’s curse: terrible feet. They were visibly twisted and made him totter. “I’ve got wicked arches,” he explained. “I have to wear cookies in my shoes.” He made the word sound like shees.
The word hygiene made him show his teeth, and he said it constantly. It occurred to me that all his talk about cleanliness was just a way of talking about filth; and his bowels were his favorite subject. He was preoccupied rather than obsessed, and not disgusting enough to be truly interesting. But his cast of mind made him an untiring latrine-builder.
Only a few days after he arrived there was progress. He staked out the footings and started digging the runoffs, and near the clay pit was a rising stack of new bricks. I showed him my design for the chimbuzi but he said it was not ambitious enough. He took me around the site and showed me how he was going to enlarge it. I helped him measure the new dimensions. He talked about his bowels as he worked on the latrine, like a gourmet cook rejoicing in his hearty appetite.
Captain did not like him. He asked me if the new bwana was a Yehudi. I hated having to answer but the answer was no in any case.
Rockwell could only speak to Captain through me. “Tell him I hate hard-boiled eggs,” “Tell him not to inner my room,” “Tell him—”
“Look,” I said. “Captain works for me. Don’t keep giving him orders. If you don’t like it here, find another place.”
“It’s okay here,” Rockwell said. “But I sometimes wonder if that guy washes.”
“He’s a muslim. He washes more often than you do.”
“Yeah,” he said doubtfully.
“Five times a day.”
This impressed Rockwell. “Bodily hygiene is real important.”
He washed his own floor, he scrubbed his own clothes, he disinfected the bathroom every day, he hung a container of chemicals in the cistern that turned the toilet water blue. Sometimes he did not talk to me for several days, and then he would talk nonstop, often incomprehensibly, about a mail-order business he wanted to start in California. And he talked about our chimbuzi. He took that very seriously. He dug test holes, drainage ditches, and laid some of the foundation stones. “It’s the basics and the insides that really count. It’s like your body. You’ve got to be clean inside, get all the poisons out—”
A parcel was delivered in a Land-Rover from the Nyasaland Trading Company. It weighed ten pounds and even well-wrapped its odor made my eyes sting.
Rockwell was delighted when I gave it to him.
“It’s urinal candy,” he said. “For our new sanitary facility.”
He was very methodical, which made him heavy going in conversation, because he talked the way he worked. His political conservatism seemed like another aspect of his toilet-talk, and he had stories to support his theories. One revolting one was about some Africans in Sierra Leone who refused to flush toilet paper down the hopper.
“See? You can’t teach these people anything.”
“Not true. The Peace Corps brought oral sex to Nyasaland.”
“That turns my stomach,” he said, and looked genuinely wretched. “Think of the germs.”
But I had wanted to upset him. The only way I could live in the same house was to disagree with everything he said. It was a way of doing battle. I discovered that doing that, disagreeing on principle, meant I was wrong a great deal of the time and often made a fool of myself.
Rockwell did not usually answer back. If I hurt his feelings he sulked. He wouldn’t fight. He said, “Words! Words!” and ran to his room. But after his silences he opened up: bodily hygiene, what happens to food in your intestines, the new sanitary facility—and sometimes it was Africa and the Peace Corps.
“When I go back I’m going to write a book. I’m going to call it The Big Lie.”
“I thought you were going to start a mail-order business.”
“The mail-order business will give me the free time to write,” he said. “By the way, I notice you write. Always whacking away at your typewriter. What is it?”
It was my other secret; but so dark was the riddle of writing that even though I did it every day I was afraid to think about my ambition, and never said a word to anyone else about it. Rockwell had heard me typing, that was all. It was a source of pride to me that no one in the world had ever seen me write a word of fiction.
“Letters home,” I said. “Anyway, what kind of mail-order business?”
“You promise you won’t steal my ideas?”
“I promise. That’s a performatory utterance, you know.”
“Words.” He was grinning. “Words are neat.”
This was late one night in front of the fire. The fire always gave him frightening features, and his eagerness tonight combined with the jumping flames on his face made him seem much crazier than usual.
“Do you know how on labels it says, ‘Keep in a cool dry place’? All sorts of bottles say it—alcohol, shoe polish, you name it, thousands of them. But what is a cool dry place? Most people don’t really have one. So that’s going to be one of my main items.”
This was insane, and his friendliness only made it worse. What was he talking about? I decided not to alarm him by asking, but simply said it was a tremendous idea.
“Think so? I do too! I figure it’ll be a kind of really neat box. Sort of lid, lined inside, little chambers”—he was shaping and hacking with his hands—“and on the outside it’ll say The Cool Dry Placer.”
“Sounds terrific,” I said, and wondered whether he would guess what I really thought if I excused myself and went to bed. I said mail order had great possibilities.
“But Ward Rockwell’s going to have thousands of stock items. Ever notice how bottles of polish and stuff like that has directions saying, ‘Wipe with a clean soft cloth’? And you can never find one when you need it?”
“You’re going to sell them.”
“Right. In a little see-through pouch. I’m going to call it The Clean Soft Cloth.” He looked very pleased with himself. He said, “In the same line I’m going to have that other essential product. Guess what?”
“Can’t guess,” I said. I could have but I knew it would be a mistake.
“The Damp Rag. Ever see the label that advises you to apply whatever it is with a damp rag? I’m going to sell them. In hermetically sealed envelopes, pre-dampened rags. See, the thing about rags”—his voice was cracking—“rags are filthy. But my rags—”
I wanted him to stop. He went on. He told me of his elaborate system of shelves for directions that said “Keep out of the reach of children” and his specially engineered coin for “Pry up with a coin.”
At last I went to bed. I assumed that his nutty ideas were a result of fatigue and isolation. He was tiring himself in the building of the chimbuzi. I decided to break a vow I had made and introduce him to the Beautiful Bamboo. He was a slow steady drinker, and beer made him even more monotonous. When he was drunk he was solemn. He sat in the noise and music, ignoring the girls. He drank and sweated and sulked. And then he went home, putting one foot ahead of the other.
“Guess what I hate about that place.”
“Tell me.”
“
You can’t talk there,” he said. It was very dark on the road. “The thing is, Andy, I feel I can really talk to you.”
That alarmed me. I said, “You know, those girls are friendly. All you have to do is say the word and they’d go home with you.”
He made an exasperated noise and then said, “The word is germs.”
I had arranged for Gladys to meet me at the house, because I wanted to keep my secret safe from Rockwell. But his attitude affected me. It was more than disapproval—it was horror. I could not perform. It was his fault. Gladys just laughed and squeezed the useless thing. It seemed to me the worst fate on earth to be impotent.
The next night was a Monday. Rockwell had worked all day on the latrine—I could tell by his glazed eyes. I hoped that he would go to his room and calm himself by polishing something, but instead he joined me in front of the fire. I had wanted to sit there and brood about my impotence.
“Words,” he said. “Words like ‘bored housewife.’ That turns me on.”
He had been thinking.
“Words are real funny. Words can be neat. ‘Semi-naked bored housewife.’ ”
What was he doing in Central Africa? He should never have gone so far from home. This country was having a bad effect on him—the distance, the isolation. He was probably a very ordinary person, but being here was turning him into someone else. Yet I did not pity him. I resented him. I thought: What if I stay impotent?
He took the poker and hit the fire and grinned.
“People say ‘I’ve got to drive out to the airport’ or ‘He misses his kids’ or ‘It needs a new cartridge.’ It’s all words. People never said those things before. Someday we won’t say ‘It has to heat up before it’ll work.’ It’ll just start. I mean, ‘heat up’ is very physical.”
He was talking to the fire in a slow droning way.
“We’ll be moving into advanced electronics. ‘Heat up’ is like sex. We’ll stop having machines like that. They’ll be cool and clean instead. And very small.”
Saying that, he made his eyes small. Then I tried not to look at him. I wanted him to talk about hygiene. Why didn’t he?
“Words like ‘bottle.’ Bottle’s really strange. The more you say it.”
I thought: Bottle is not strange. You are.
“ ‘He’s not ready for that kind of commitment.’ A few years ago you’d never hear anyone say that.”
Out of the corner of my eye I could see that he was smiling at the fire.
“Or ‘My eyes are my best feature.’ People never used to say that. They do now.”
I said, “I don’t think men say it.”
“I mean women,” he said. “See, I figured it out. I was putting in some pipe today and thinking—there’s man words and there’s woman words.”
“What are woman words?”
“ ‘I’m going to cry my eyes out.’ ”
He said it quickly and looked very pleased with himself. And then he spoke again.
“ ‘I haven’t got a thing to wear.’ ”
He was droning but I knew he was animated, and I had never seen him so absorbed, even on the subject of his bowels. I wanted to stop him. I wanted to say: Ward, Africa is outside the window. Look at it.
“Hey,” and he poked the fire a little too roughly, “a few years ago you’d never have heard anyone say, ‘Her semi-nude body was found in a shallow grave.’ ”
That smile. And he did not need me to encourage him.
“You wouldn’t have read, ‘Clad in only her torn underwear she was floating facedown in a ditch.’ ”
“No,” I said.
“There was evidence of sexual assault,” he said. “Her bruised and partly clothed body was found by a jogger.”
He was still smiling.
4.
That same week I moved into a tiny two-room house in Kanjedza. They called it a township. It was one step up from a slum, literally so, because it was on a hillside, and lower down at the foot of the hill was a slum of mud huts called Chiggamoola. Kanjedza was a settlement of about a hundred concrete sheds—tin roofs, no running water, outside chimbuzis, no trees. Paths eroded by rain to gullies. Smoky fires. Mad scabby dogs. I always carried a stick because of the dogs. In the African locations the dogs barked only at whites.
I had a neighbor, Harry Gombo. I complained that the houses were damp.
“At least they are not mud houses,” Harry said.
He was embarrassed by crumbly mud walls and thatched roofs. “He is mudding his house,” he said of a poor man he disliked. He often used the word “primitive.” He never saw that the virtue of a mud house was that it was disposable. It was abandoned after two or three years. Yet these cement huts in Kanjedza would go on rotting and stinking forever.
But I was happy there. I saw my move as brave and stylish. I was the only mzungu in the area. It was a bit like being an explorer. Look at this white kid in the middle of an African township. The other thing was that these townships were regarded as very dangerous—but I knew better. My rent was five pounds a month. Captain had one room, I had the other. He said he had lived in worse places, but I gave him more money nonetheless: Hardship Allowance. I had simply moved out and left Ward Rockwell my house at Chamba Hill. I wanted to live in an African way.
The roads through the township were so steep and rutted I could not ride my bike. When it rained the roads were sluices. Some of the huts had been undermined by rushing rainwater and were tipped and slumped into deep ditches. Others were cracked from having subsided. Weeds grew in the tin roofs. There were chimneys but there was smoke everywhere—and furious dogs and skinny chickens.
It was a peculiar mess of a place. Harry Gombo said Africans were not used to this sort of hut. They cooked inside and scorched the walls and sometimes set them on fire. They pissed against their walls. They did not plant anything—the ground was pitched too sharply and was too stony. They had chopped down all the trees and used them for firewood. Their goats had eaten the rest of the greenery—the bushes, the grass. The chickens pecked at rubble, the dogs fought over old corncobs. There was always a rubber tire smoking beside the road. It never caught fire, it never went out, it always stank.
To keep warm in this cold season the Africans built fires in buckets. Sometimes they asphyxiated themselves. None of the huts were painted. Each one was ugly and uncomfortable and had a nasty smell. Just behind, where there should have been a garden or a bougainvillaea, was a latrine in a shed—the chim.
Captain hated it here, I knew, but he did not complain. It was most of all a blow to his pride. It was also harder for him to cook properly in such poor conditions—no more scones, no more meat pies, no breadmaking, no slowly roasted joints. He was used to the electric stove at Chamba; the oven; the refrigerator. Here we had a screened-in box—“the meat-safe.” I urged him to cook African food, which was easy enough. He finally relented and then every meal was the same—a lump of steamed dough served with a dish of thick stew. You broke off a piece of dough, rolled it into a dumpling, made a deep thumbprint in it and pushed it through the stew. When it was very wet you ate it. I drank tea, I drank beer, and like the Africans I varied my diet with cookies and hard candy: biscuits and boiled sweets, the British legacy. Captain brought home finger bananas and sour oranges from the market. I killed the taste with black cigarettes which cost a penny each—a tickey for a box of three.
This was my home—at last, an African hut.
The girls I brought to it were not so intimidated as they had been by my house on Chamba Hill. One of the girls was a neighbor. Her name was Abby. She worked at the Rainbow Cinema, taking tickets. She was nineteen, she had two children, she was long-legged and pretty—and strangest of all, she was a runner on the Zimba town track team.
She said she was a very fast runner. “I do not know why!”
It was a mystery to her why she was able to run the two-twenty in less than 33.2 seconds. She was not interested in distance running; she was a sprinter. She was that way in bed, too: v
ery frantic and then it was all over.
More than anything Abby wanted to run in Rhodesia. Rhodesia seemed distant and glamorous. She was sure she could win the women’s two-twenty in Nyasaland and be sent to Salisbury to compete.
Nyasaland had these prodigies—the natural athlete (a mother of two); the math genius (barefoot village boy); the long-distance traveler (the young man who walked two thousand miles to Nairobi “for an education”). One of my students, a tiny Tonga with a swollen face, was brilliant on the penny-whistle; and another, a ball boy at the Blantyre Sports Club, was an inspired tennis player. But these exceptional people were seldom taken seriously, and indeed most of them saw themselves as clowns. They would do little more with their gifts than be messengers or hawkers, and they would all die young.
Harry Gombo was a book salesman. He wore a cowboy hat, which contrasted oddly with his buck teeth and his pin-striped suit. He liked the singer Jim Reeves. He wondered whether I had met the man. Harry sang “This World Is Not My Home (I’m Just A-Passing Through).” He wrote long abusive letters to his district manager in Salisbury.
“I have sent another fizzing rocket to the bwana.”
He wanted a company car.
He said he was glad to have an American for a neighbor. He admired me for romancing Abby, the track star. He worried about her and her two children. He said I could be their daddy. He sang the Jim Reeves song, “That Dear Old Daddy of Mine.”
Abby brought her two children over to my house when she worked late at the Rainbow. That did not help. It changed my mood when I came with her and had to step over their little sleeping forms—so still on the floor, like mealy-sacks—in order to get into bed with Abby. She roused them and sent them to sleep in the narrow hallway between the two rooms. They picked up their ragged blankets and tottered sleepily away, and they were soon asleep again. But that took away all my ardor.
One night I took Rosie home, and the next morning I saw that she had a bulging belly.
“Are you pregnant, sister?”
She said yes with that click of her teeth.
