by Paul Theroux
Her village was nearby—walking distance. She took off her shoes for the hike.
When we were alone on the road I realized I had nothing to say to her. But she did not notice. Silence was another aspect of her patience.
Suddenly she stopped, knelt down and put her shoes on. I soon saw why. There were mud huts ahead, the grass roofs showing through the stunted trees. The entrance to the village was through a pair of fat baobabs—a sort of gateway. The huts were rounded and brown, like a certain kind of bread, and cracked in the same way, walls like crusts. There were about a dozen chubby huts. Naked dirty boys followed us. She knew them: Winston, Snowdon, Blair, Baldwin, and her small brothers Redson and Walton.
Some women yodeled when they saw us. It was the usual gleeful greeting in Nyasaland. Then they began chattering with Gloria in a language I did not understand.
I was pushed onto a stool and served a meal—porridge and stew. It made no difference that I had already eaten. Food was friendship here. Gloria seemed absorbed by the women, and then she brought me a bottle of beer, and some dry cookies, and at last a basin of water. I washed my hands.
“They want you to rest.” She was speaking for the women behind her. “I must go and see my father.”
They were so eager for me to rest, I agreed, to please them. They brought me to an empty hut, and I lay on the string bed. The walls were dry mud and the floor smooth earth and the air heavy with dust. Dirt flakes sifted down from the thatch. Just lying there made my breathing difficult and I began to wheeze.
I sneaked out and saw why they had wanted me to have a nap: the whole village was asleep—no one stirred. It was the hottest hour of the day, two o’clock.
The sun was a force. It pressed on my eyes, it lay upon me, and I had to struggle against it in order to walk. I left the sleeping village and followed a path. Yet when I had gone too far I saw that it was not a path, but a furrow in a field. The furrow grew shallower, and then was gone, and I was lost. I came to another path, another furrow. It led to a field of broken-down corn shucks, and before I had gone twenty feet a shadow beneath me came alive—a long black snake, as thick as a garden hose. It scraped on the corn shucks as it slid past my feet. A superstition in Nyasaland said that a person had to turn back if a snake crossed his path. I did so, and went in the opposite direction. Five steps later I saw another snake—much bigger than the last one, and blacker. I imagined that there were nests of black mambas beneath all these corn shucks. It was the most poisonous snake in the country.
I was in a wide, snake-infested field. I picked up a stick and beat the shucks ahead of me in order to frighten the snakes. I had a dread of stepping on the creatures. After almost two hours of this I came to the road of pale dust. It was growing dark when I found my way back to Gloria’s village.
“My father wants to see you,” she said. “His name is Maxwell.”
No one asked where I had been.
Maxwell lay in a cot, in the largest hut in the village. He looked much sicker even than any of the men I had bathed at The Queen Elizabeth, and I was sure he was dying. It was a bare room. There was no medicine near him, only a glass of water and a Bible.
I watched him for a moment. Perhaps he was dead already?
His voice came gasping out of the stillness.
“Are you saved?”
I said I didn’t know.
“Then you aren’t saved,” he said. “You would know if you were.”
There was a long silence, during which I realized that he had spoken to me in English.
Finally, I said, “I thought you wanted to talk.”
“If you’re not saved I have nothing to say to you.”
Gloria was waiting for me outside. She seemed stupid and eager. She took my hand and led me away. She did not mention her father.
She said, “Tonight I will come to your hut. It will be easy. You are sleeping with my two small brothers.”
I was shocked. First the father’s Are you saved? and then the daughter’s plan to make love in the same room where her two brothers were sleeping, the little naked boys, Redson and Walton.
Seeing that I was hesitant she said, “You were once such a dog that you took me and that little girl home with you and you screwed both of us.”
That was true, but it seemed a long time ago. And I hated to be reminded of it. I believed that I had changed a bit, but when I was forced to think about it I saw that I had not changed at all.
I said, “What if the kids wake up? Do you want them to see us?”
“They never wake up.”
“I can’t screw in the same room with children, sister.”
“They are used to it.”
“And your father would hate it if he knew. You didn’t tell me he’s a religious man.”
“He is so foolish. These village people are primitive”—she said “primitive” in English—“They don’t know anything.”
“I am a guest, so I have to behave myself.”
“You are my guest, so you have to do what I say.”
I had always thought she was submissive. What was this? I said, “What do you want, sister?”
“Jig-jig.”
“Sorry. Not with your brothers near us.”
They didn’t sleep in beds. They had mats, which seemed to me much worse. The mats were beside the bed and under it. We would be screwing on top of them.
“We can do it somewhere else,” she said.
I thought of the snakes I had seen that afternoon.
“Here,” she said. “My man.”
We were standing beside a dead tree in the darkness, whispering.
“There are snakes on the ground here.”
“We will screw standing up,” she said. “Come near. Near.”
The word was pafoopee—an easy word to say lewdly.
I said no, but she insisted, and she got me started with her rough hand. She leaned against the tree and held the hem of her dress. Then she balanced herself on an upraised root and we went at it like a couple of monkeys. When we were done I remembered that her father was dying in a hut on the other side of the village. She wanted me again. Pafoopee, she said.
All night I heard the two children snoring beneath my bed. I was wakeful, fearing that Gloria would come in. But she stayed away.
She gave me a basin of water and a chunk of soap the next morning. No matter how thoroughly I washed I still felt filthy afterwards. Africans always looked clean. It was their secret. How did they manage to keep clean in mud huts? I was very grubby, and having washed only my hands and face, the rest of my body itched. I didn’t shave, and I was too unsure of the water to brush my teeth with it.
But Gloria looked even worse than me. Her dress was dirty, and what was this dancing dress doing here? The buttons down the back were undone, and I could see the row of knucklebones on her spine. By the second day, which was Sunday, she looked very slovenly, and the other women and girls seemed embarrassed by her. She was cranky, her feet were dirty, her dress was torn.
She was oblivious of this. She said the other women got on her nerves. In the town of Zimba she was known as one of the stylish girls from the Beautiful Bamboo; but in this little village she looked whorish and silly.
The women were quiet and rather shy. They were solicitous towards me, urging me to stay in the shade and eat. They brought me African beer. It was sour, almost rancid, but I was flattered to be treated in a traditional way.
Gloria said something which I was sure was, “He doesn’t drink that crap.”
She told me to give one of her brothers some money to buy a bottle of Castle Lager in Balaka. I didn’t want it, but rather than make a scene I gave in.
“These people are stupid.”
I thought what a horrible person she was and regretted that I had come. But I was ashamed of myself too, for the more I thought about her the more convinced I was that she was like me. Had I made her that way? It was not that she was Americanized. She wasn’t that, by far. It was that she wa
s a scold and a slob and very stupid.
“The old man wants to see you again.”
He lay in the darkness.
“I have been thinking about you,” he said.
That mattered to me and moved me. He was a wise man. Perhaps what I had sought in his daughter he would offer me. I imagined folk stories and proverbs, and memories of the settlers. He was over seventy, which meant he had been born in the nineteenth century. I looked upon his sunken face, this man from another age. He had been thinking about me.
“Yes, you are lost,” he said. It seemed to me that he was chuckling. “You are damned.”
I thought: That’s what everyone says.
The mail train left Balaka at midnight. We boarded it, and I stretched out on the wooden slatted seat, inhaling coal smoke from the chimney. The insects shrieked at the open windows, from the black woods. Gloria was also sleeping. At one point she woke me up crying, “Help!” She said it was not a nightmare but a song. I woke at dawn, as we drew into Blantyre. My back ached; but I was glad, the sun was up, the air was cool.
But when we walked to the bus depot I knew that something had changed between us. I had seen her village. She had been ashamed of it, ashamed of her father and the “primitive” people. She was distant with me now, as if I might make fun of her. I had seen her secret. She thought I knew too much.
She said, “Bye-bye.”
She never showed any affection in public, but then Africans in Nyasaland seldom did.
She was going back to her life and I to mine.
Rockwell was waiting in my office. He wanted the key to the tool shed.
I saw that his whole face was swollen. It was the same pinky bareness that his chin had been, but it was an entire mask of it.
He gave me one of his hacking laughs that meant Watch out! and told me that he had plucked some whiskers out of his chin and that had given him an idea. He wondered if he could do more. Over the weekend he had had nothing to do (“Because you took the key to the tool shed with you, Parent, thanks a million”) and had plucked all the hairs out of his upper lip, the mustache area. He had used a pair of tweezers. He said it hurt at first.
“Then I thought what the heck. I started again yesterday and did my whole face. Hey, what if it doesn’t grow back?”
8.
The African girls never talked about politics. There had been no mention of it in Gloria’s village. The British had gone, a black government was coming—everyone knew that. But for now no one was in charge. It was not anarchy, it was peace. People walked in the road there were so few cars, and poor people put on their best clothes and went to get drunk, men in ties, women in dresses. Strangers talked to each other: “Hello, father,”
“Hello, sister.” Everything was very simple. All the African girls seemed like one girl, uncomplicated and enthusiastic and pretty. I was probably no more than a white person to them, but a sympathetic one, and an American. I spoke the language, I knew how to make them laugh.
One said, “I love you because you dance with us.”
We were dancing to “Mrs. Brown You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter.”
Then the political talk was talk of independence. It was a kind of nervousness that trembled through the country—or at least through Zimba, and the Beautiful Bamboo Bar, and Chamba Hill Secondary School. It was like the expectation of a parade, the way people get to their feet and fidget just before they hear the band. The day was only two weeks off.
After morning assembly one day I had a visit from Deputy Mambo. He was wearing a red shirt, flapping shorts, and knee socks. He carried a stick. He also wore new shoes. Africans wearing new shoes always made me wary. They looked as though they wanted to kick something.
“I must speak to you,” he said, and then added slyly, “Headmaster.”
“Come in, brother. Who are you supposed to be?”
“I am a Youth Leaguer,” he said. “I am organizing our students for the independence celebration.”
He did not seem to recognize me. It was as though he was peering dimly out of his uniform, sort of hiding behind it.
“What does that badge say?”
It was a stiff embroidered disk pinned under his Doctor Banda button.
“Chamba Youth League.”
Chamba had a Youth League?
“No one told me anything about it.”
“I am telling you. We are arranging the independence. There will be flags, fireworks, demonstrations, and what-not.”
“What are the students supposed to do?”
“March,” he said.
“What if they’re busy?”
“They cannot be busy.”
This was a very different Deputy Mambo. I wanted to kick him out of my office. But it was not my independence celebration. I could not complain that no one had told me about the Chamba Youth League. It had probably begun on some weekend, when I had been attending to other things.
That same afternoon two soldiers arrived in a Land-Rover. They wore khaki uniforms and polished combat boots. I took them for Germans. They said they were Israelis. Yonny was about my age; the other one, Moosh, was a fat, older man. Deputy Mambo had sent them. They showed me a letter authorizing their visit.
I said, “Mambo teaches Third Form geography—rainfall, our friends the trees, and what is a volcano. No one gave him permission to invite the Israeli army to the school. Know what I mean?”
“You can check,” Moosh said, and turned his back on me.
I called Ed Wently from the post office in Zimba after school, but while I was describing Mambo the Youth Leaguer and his Israelis, Wently said, “Play ball,” and hung up.
I had never minded when Miss Natwick had implied I was incompetent as headmaster, and it had pleased me to see Rockwell take the latrine seriously. But Mambo in his red shirt I found disconcerting. It seemed he had a secret life, too. And the Israeli soldiers at what I considered my school irritated me. Apparently I could not get rid of them.
Yonny tried to be friendly in a bullying soldierly manner. I said I didn’t like soldiers marching around the school. He turned this into an antisemitic remark and said, “No one likes Israelis.” Yonny lisped. I had an irrational feeling that people who lisped usually told the truth. Moosh was grumpy. One day he surprised me by saying that he liked to dance. This slob liked to dance? But he showed me a few steps and for those seconds he was a different person, and very light on his feet. I complimented him and in return he criticized me for being friendly towards the students—too easy on them, he said.
It was not long before they began criticizing Rockwell, too. They said they could not understand why he spent all that time shingling the building.
Rockwell said, “Because I want to have it finished by Independence.”
They wanted to know what the thing was.
“Sanitary facilities. Rest rooms.”
“It’s a latrine,” I said.
“You Americans,” Yonny said, showing me his tongue when he lisped the word.
Moosh said that this latrine was too good for Africans.
“They can be happy with a hole in the ground.”
“Ever hear of cholera?” Rockwell said, and I admired the fight in him. “Africa’s number one killer?”
Yonny said, “Human life means nothing here.”
After school, the Israelis drilled the students, showed them how to march in step and twirl banners, and they screamed at them unmercifully. I heard the drums beating from the cleared piece of ground they called the football pitch.
I asked a Fourth Former named Malenga what he thought of the Israelis. He used a word that he had once applied to Americans, that meant “skilled in everything” (nkhabvu).
“Give me an example.”
Just today, Malenga said, the younger one Yonny had taught several of the boys how to get free of an enemy interrogator. While you were standing, facing each other, you looked him straight in the eyes and without blinking or moving your head you kicked him furiously and broke
his shinbone.
“They’re tough guys,” Malenga said.
I hated Deputy Mambo for arranging the visit of these soldiers. But now I saw Rockwell in a new light. I had thought of him as crazy and possibly dangerous, but in contrast to the Israelis Rockwell seemed a man of principle and good sense. He had his eccentricities, this toiletmaker from Pasadena, but beneath it all he had a humane mission. I had been too hard on him. While I had spent my weekends at the Bamboo Rockwell had put in extra hours on the latrine.
He had just about finished the roof. On rainy days he worked inside, painting and tinkering.
“I think I’ve got these urinals licked,” he said, and then in a whisper, “Hey, what about these Israelites? Are you going to let them push you around?”
“Wently told me to play ball.”
“I got the name of the Israeli ambassador,” Rockwell said.
“Are you going to report the soldiers?”
“No. The name spooked me.” Rockwell was still whispering. “Ambassador Shohat. Get it?”
I said no.
He said, “Sometimes names are messages. Like Lorne Greene, like Faye Dunaway, like that Scotch guy that runs the Nyasaland Trading Company, Dalgliesh.”
I said, “Ward, please—”
“See, Lorne Greene is really ‘lawn green.’ And Faye Dunaway—‘fading away’. Huh? You have to really think to get the message.”
“What about Dalgliesh?”
“Dog leash,” Rockwell whispered. “And that guy Shohat is ‘shoe hat.’ In other words, head to toe. It kind of worries me.”
After revising my opinion of Rockwell, here he was again, getting weird. But I blamed the Israelis for this.
I was putting in extra time as headmaster, to prove that I was still in charge. I stopped seeing Gloria and went back to taking the Bamboo girls home at weekends. On weekdays I started at seven, unlocked the buildings, met the teachers at seven-thirty, and then banged the piece of railway track to call the students to assembly.
In the last week of June, Deputy Mambo came into my office, this time without knocking. It was one of his red-shirt days—shorts, knee socks, badges. How could he wear that cruel face of Doctor Banda and not expect to scare me?
