Mother Land

by Paul Theroux

  I gave him an answer but did not know what I was saying or who was speaking. I thought: I am whoever you take me to be. I am living five lives at once, and in one of them, of course, I am also working on a freighter. None of these lives represented the person I knew myself to be.

  Mona and I saved whatever we could, and so we had no spare money. We were like everyone else we saw in San Juan: strollers, bus riders, eating the deep-fried meat pies they called pastelillos, treating ourselves to the slushy cones they called piraguas, sitting in the plaza, going to bed early. We had no telephone, no radio. The TV in the bar on the corner was tuned to soccer and news and boxing matches. We never read the newspaper, though I sometimes glanced at the headline in the daily El Imparcial. We had no idea what was happening in the world beyond Puerto Rico, but one day the landlady said that the dictator Trujillo had been assassinated in Santo Domingo, and the drama of this news made our nearby plaza festive with the laughter of chattering men.

  I grew fond of the disorder that concealed us, the friendly crowds, the narrow sidewalks, the heat and sunshine that seemed to soothe people and soften their mood.

  One day I saw a man I recognized from a provocative lecture he had given in Amherst, at the time when Mona and I were sharing a room. He was the Reverend William Sloane Coffin, a well-known political radical, walking with two other men. They pushed past us, talking, and entered the Zaragozana, and because that was a restaurant we couldn’t afford, I stopped seeing him as a radical. He was a privileged, prosperous man from the other world.

  Our only way of communicating with people back home was by letter. I wrote a few more, explaining that my ship, the freighter, was in port. I fictionalized myself as a seaman, all of the details secondhand from my reading of Jack Kerouac. Mona wrote regularly to her family. Her story was that she was still working in New York as a teacher, living at Fred’s address. Fred stamped and forwarded her letters home; he sent her the letters from her family.

  And every morning I woke with a film of damp sweat on my face and remembered that I was living with Mona, who was pregnant, in a room in Old San Juan, and due at work at the Hilton restaurant at five-thirty. And I went numb, thinking: Hold on, stay calm, the days are passing, no one knows. There was a baby in Mona; there was a darkness inside me and a woeful weight on my soul. My thoughts were for Mona and myself, but the woe was: my family must not find out about this shameful wicked business.

  Mona was obsessed by the same need for concealment. This need made us quieter, gentler with each other, like a pair of felons, moving with stealth, keeping close to avoid detection: fugitives from justice. We never ceased to think of ourselves as sneaks, and though we talked about the pregnancy, we seldom spoke of the baby except as a problem we were solving.

  I was at home in San Juan’s disorder: hot, littered, poor, the cracked yellow stucco, the scrawled-on walls, the slum beyond the battlements of the city wall called La Perla—the Pearl—where people were much worse off than we were: barefoot children, ragged women, drunken men.

  One day in August Mona got a letter from an agency in Boston with the pitiful name The Home for Little Wanderers. The message was that they would accept Mona, see her through the birth of the baby, and then take the child. Hopeful families were waiting for such children. Please rest assured that we will find a loving home for your child.

  Mona cried at the letter but admitted that it was what she wanted: a relief, a solution.

  She woke that night and sobbed, saying that because we both wore glasses, the child would have bad eyes. She wept at the thought of sending this myopic child groping into the world.

  We bought tickets to Boston. I told the Peruvian manager I would be leaving. He said, “Just as I was getting used to you.”

  “Lo siento,” I said, as a joke. Sorry.

  A few days before we left San Juan, the landlady handed us a letter with an American stamp and the Calle San Francisco address—not a letter forwarded from Fred. It was from Mona’s mother. We know everything, it began. Mona’s father had gone to New York, to Fred’s apartment. He had asked to see his daughter. Fred told him the whole story and then had given him our address. Dad’s on the warpath, Mona’s mother wrote, and so is JP’s family. I had a long talk with them.

  The next days were tense. We expected Mona’s father to descend on us. But of course we were too far away. Choosing San Juan had been a leap in the dark, but it had saved us. No one came. We left for Boston one hot night. We had brought all our extras—pots, towels, sheets—to La Perla and put them in the arms of a grateful woman.

  Mona sat awkwardly on the plane, eight months pregnant, and we arrived in Boston at dawn. We had breakfast in a diner on Boylston Street near the Public Garden, and afterward walked into the garden. I had gotten used to walking very slowly with Mona at my side. Mona said she felt ill. She sat down on a bench and vomited onto the grass. I held her as she wiped her mouth on my shoulder. As she lay against me, heavy with trust and resignation, we were like lovers on that hot August morning. At nine o’clock we walked to the street and hailed a cab.

  “Don’t come with me,” she said. She was sparing me. She got in and told the driver to take her to The Home for Little Wanderers.

  “Joy Street,” she added.

  The names snatched at my heart. I called home from a phone booth at Sullivan Square and took the bus to the Cape, walking up the long hill to my house, feeling dizzy from the heat and my sleepless night on the plane.

  I was returning from all my lives to the one life that I hated, and I dreaded what was to come.

  On heavy feet I scuffed up the front stairs to the porch, announcing myself on the wood planks. The front door was open. No one met me. The screen door slapped shut on its spring, the coil lashing the doorframe. I was aware of wooden steps, wooden porch, wooden door, like the splintery portals to the Day of Judgment.

  “In here,” Mother called from the kitchen. She had heard me.

  She was seated grimly with her arms on the kitchen table. Floyd sat in a chair at the far wall, trying not to smile, though he did so, horribly, half gloating, half in pity. Then he crept out of the room, and his eyes said, Oh, boy, you’re in for it.

  Mother’s face was fierce and hawk-like, her nose pinched, her lips compressed. “Well!” She seemed to be staring me down, and at last she said with a screech of triumphant sarcasm, “I hope you’re proud of yourself.”

  I hung my head, defeated by what I had done, as she berated me. “You should be ashamed,” and “How could you do this to us?”

  “And look at your jacket.” She was scowling at the fresh stain of vomit on my shoulder.

  The next days and weeks were easier, because Mona and I had managed to conceal our crime—we thought of it as a crime, a misdeed at any rate, much worse than an error. No one knew that she was living with a foster family. Only I knew where she was. I visited her secretly. She was impatient, we held hands, she said, “I think it’ll be soon.” That family took her to the hospital for the birth, a boy. I visited her and held the baby—he had a reddened and contented face. No one but us ever saw the child.

  The second time I went to the hospital, Mona said, “The other mothers were laughing after you left. They said, ‘How old is he? He’s just a kid.’”

  That was the last time I saw the baby. And I did not see Mona until after she left the hospital. Then it was late September, and we were in Amherst. We were two students again, back in the world, feeling helpless, altered, burdened with a sad story of a lost boy that we could not tell anyone. I was sad but relieved; Mona was simply sad and looked small. Some nights she begged me to come to her room, just to hold her while she sobbed. We lay clothed in her narrow bed. I turned nineteen. Mona graduated early, in January, and went away to teach. She wrote a few times, then stopped writing altogether.

  I somehow knew that I would never again feel so desperate, so despised, so weak and blamed, as I did that year. And I was right. The experience of the year did not make me strong,
but it gave me a vivid memory of helplessness that I carried with me through my life. I could always compare this example with whatever hardships I faced. Sometimes, in a dilemma, I smiled. Someone would say to me, “You’re not going to like what I’m about to tell you.” I didn’t smile, but I knew even before I heard it that I had known much worse. I was prepared, remembering that year.

  As for the child, wherever he was, he was better off. Now and then I dreamed that he had found me, and cornered me, and was screaming at me for the fate I had assigned him.

  Sometimes people talk about an illness or a terrible accident they had in childhood when, bedridden, confined to a room, they read a great deal or learned a language or gained a skill. It was like that. I had learned to live by my wits, how to survive, to trust my instincts, to be secretive. I knew that my life was elsewhere. I had suspected, long before Mona’s first phone call, that I could not rely on my family, that whatever they knew of me they would use against me, to undermine me. I had been right.

  Afterward, I never went into the details with anyone. I could not bear to. That hard year, though, made the rest of my life easier, and its awful episodes were mild by comparison. I knew what desperate passages were: a whole year of them that had left their mark on me. “The worst year of my life,” I used to moan, but as time passed I grew to know it, for all its struggle, as a good year, with a beginning, a middle, an end; a whole plot that had been lived before by other people, but had to be lived by me to understand it; my best year.

  11

  Secrets

  Forty years passed, my writing years, my years on the move, away from Mother Land. That pivotal episode of fatherhood tempered me, prepared me for the worst, and made me a man. Nothing so hard was ever to test me again.

  Those four decades were the years of my active life, as a traveler, borne by the currents of the world, a wanderer in distant cities, a resident in dusty republics and happy islands, a husband, a father of two more boys, twice divorced. And, after a slow start, a successful writer with faithful readers, though none of them members of my family.

  After all this—the struggle in words to describe the struggle in my life that became my obsessive subject, my life depicted in the tangles and thickets of my prose—I had thought that was it, that my life was over, time to . . . not fade, but to grow more compact, with the economy of a small trembling animal that wrinkles its wet nose and hugs itself into a ball, warming its limbs, to await the end, having left behind wives, children, property, books, a mountain of paper, savings, and, at last, hope abandoned. So when I was summoned to the Cape for Father’s death watch, I went without hesitation. I had nowhere else to go.

  Going home to live was a sure sign of personal loss. Failures ended up back where they started. I had always felt this to be true. “He lives with his mother”—you couldn’t be worse off than that. But I told myself that it was temporary. I wasn’t desperate, I wasn’t living in Mother’s house, just in the general vicinity, in Mother Land. I would be fine. So it seemed at the time.

  Soon after I got back, Father’s health declined, we were called to the hospital to witness him die, Mother became queen, and we were all children again, returned to our long-ago roles and rivalries. I was at first startled. I had forgotten how dangerous we were, how angry, how vicious we could be.

  “He’s a nonce, he’s a numpty,” Floyd said of Fred, and when Gilbert’s name came up, “He’s an exile.”

  “Ma says Floyd’s poems are porno,” Hubby said. And of Franny, “She’s a moose.”

  “Ma finds Floyd upsetting,” Franny said. “It’s his attitude. ‘Gimme, gimme.’ He has bad energy and he yells at traffic. She hates driving anywhere with him.”

  “All she does is worry about her two spoiled brats,” Rose said of Franny and her kids, Jonty and Max.

  “I dread Angela’s birthday,” Fred said. “Ma’s mourning gets darker every year.”

  “Hubby eats too much,” Franny said. “It’s always the wrong food. I know he’s good with his hands, but have you seen the size of him? Floyd calls him a parade float.”

  “I’ve memorized most of Floyd’s poems,” Gilbert said, and without a flicker of irony, “One of their characteristics is that they’re very easy to memorize.”

  What did they say of me?

  As a child I had been watchful, secretive, suspicious of all interest in me, such questions as “What are you doing?” and “Where have you been?” I usually answered with lies. The terror I felt when Mother said, “I’ve got a bone to pick with you!” made me defiantly untruthful. But I seldom told Mother the truth, or revealed anything personal to her. She would betray me; she would use the disclosure against me; she would entrap me. And Mother must have known that I habitually lied to her. She always looked sideways at me in annoyance, wondering what I really felt, and perhaps fearful of finding out, for it had to be obvious to her that I was a lonely fantasizing child, yearning for a life elsewhere.

  My childhood dilemma was easy to explain, if anyone cared to hear it, though no one did. I was not adrift, I was stuck. Being fifteen years old was like living on the lower floor of a house where, on the floor above, a man was speaking to a woman in a different room, who couldn’t hear him but was talking back to him, though he couldn’t hear her. To a shout, which might be tedious or revealing or shocking, life-altering or wise, each yelled, “What?” Other people, too, were calling to one another in the rooms above me, each deaf to the other.

  I could hear every word. But they didn’t know I was listening, or even that I existed. That was not my dilemma. My dilemma was: What do I do with all the things I am hearing?

  It was my first intimation, not that I would be a writer in any important way, but that writing what I heard, or imagined, might help ease my mind.

  After I left home the first time, struck with the trauma of my best year, I found it simple to invent a life for myself. I was a student, so schoolwork prevented me from going home often, and the need to work meant I had to travel and save. The scholar-traveler was the person I described in letters home, though this earnest and prudent young man did not in the least resemble me. These were the waning years of letter writing, of three or four inked sheets of notepaper folded in half and stuffed in an envelope, or two double-spaced typed pages beginning, Dear Family.

  The late 1980s and email ended that with forgettable, untraceable, disposable, disputable cyber-messages and telegraphic memos, more like garbled conversations shouted into the wind than the stacks of letters I sent home, amounting almost to an epistolary novel. My letters were so substantial I could conceal myself in them and create a new man. I hid in my inventions, and my ardent fictionalizing in these letters home helped make me a novelist: sharpened my imagination, gave me a plausible fluency in whoppers.

  The memory of my intrusive family made me choose to live off the map. I have said I was a teacher in Africa. This was partly true. “Teacher” was a heroic euphemism, for my residence in Africa seemed a laborious sacrifice, if not a martyrdom. I was learning the local language, I lived in the bush, I got my news from the shortwave radio, the mail was always late. In my letters, Africa was work. I suppressed in them the details of my real life, which, besides students and grading homework, involved writing and village beauties and beer drinking and long rides on bad roads—the riotous excesses and mythomania of an expatriate in the African bush, indulged and forgiven by a system that usually failed and expected little except poor results and phenomenal delays.

  I was lazier than anyone I knew in Africa, and I laughed with shame when expatriates claimed Africans were idle. I was so appalled at how I did my job that I knew I must succeed as a writer, because I would fail at teaching or anything else. And when I published poems and stories, I felt vindicated and reassured, yet I still knew that I had cheated the Uganda Ministry of Education, my employer. I had written my stories on government time, and when this became obvious, I used the excuse of student riots in Kampala to leave for Southeast Asia, to cheat
the Singapore Ministry of Education. By then I was married. My children, born in musty, smelly equatorial hospitals, where lizards flicked their tongues on white stucco windowsills, grew up pink and cranky with heat rash.

  Why would any woman put up with a tiny, non-air-conditioned house abutting an open storm drain on a back street of Singapore and a selfish, single-minded husband upstairs writing stories at a desk under the croaking fan? Well, she wouldn’t. My wife left me. I married again. The second time was impulsive and it lasted less than two years—no children. I lost more of what I owned, yet I had usable skills. As a teacher I could work anywhere, but teaching interfered with my writing day. I abandoned teaching, settled in England, and continued to write.

  And it must have seemed that I was writing stories, book reviews, novels, travel books, magazine articles, essays, newspaper columns, more novels, more stories, another travel book. But it was not an unsorted stack of vagrant scribbles; it was in words a sort of edifice. What I was doing was giving form to a continuous account of my existence, my disappointments and obsessions, my reading, my secrets, writing every day. All these books and pieces could be laid end to end as a long linking account of who I was, bringing order to my living and publishing it, in thousands of pages of print, bound on three shelves of a bookcase, which represented my attempt to make sense of my life.

  But I had never written about my family. I couldn’t bear to, even obliquely. In those millions of words there is no description of a big rivalrous family. Until I returned home for Dad’s death, I had not realized that the greatest subject for me was not couched in the pretensions of poetry or the imaginative vagaries of a novel or the exploration of a landscape, but would be a truthful account of my family, my long experience as a traveler in Mother Land.

  All the time I’d been away, I must have seemed to Mother sober and studious. She had no idea what I was doing, but when I published my first book, a novel, she wrote me a stern letter telling me how much she disliked it. The powder-blue, tissue-thin aerogram (No Enclosures Permitted), with its narrow border of red and navy-blue chevrons and an eleven-cent John F. Kennedy stamp, was dated May 6, 1967.