Mother Land

by Paul Theroux

  “Where have you been?”

  “Mexico.”

  “My brother Fran went to Mexico once. His company was building a bridge in the jungle. He was a civil engineer, very well respected.”

  “I was in southern Mexico.”

  “Oh?” she said, tightening her shawl against her shoulders.

  “I got a message you were ill.”

  Hearing this, she opened her mouth, unhinging her lower jaw in a sudden drop, like a lizard spotting a fly, and she coughed, the shallow keck-keck, to affirm that she was not well.

  But she said, “Not too bad,” and coughed some more, a dry choking that sounded like a stammer.

  “The others are sick.”

  “So I hear.” Her tone was mocking, or at least disbelieving, as though they were malingering.

  “I mean, everyone is ill. That’s the news.”

  “Is that a pineapple?” she asked, peering at the fruit basket, gesturing with her clump of knitting.

  “Yes, all for you.”

  “I like a nice piece of fruit,” she said. “Fred put me in the Fruit of the Month Club one year.” Then she squinted and seemed to recall what I had said about the others. In a stern voice she said, “They don’t know what sickness really is. Only a mother understands pain, because only a mother experiences it in childbirth. For me it was eight agonizing episodes—eight times in the valley of the shadow of death.” She put her knitting on her lap. “Hubby comes to me. ‘I’m diabetic, Ma.’” Her imitation of Hubby’s manner of speaking was cruelly accurate, down to his wagging head. “He eats candy. He always did. He’s overweight. And now he’s diabetic. Whose fault is that?”

  “Fred’s got something wrong with his legs. Maybe bad circulation.”

  “Flying. Dad never had that, but then Dad never went hither and yon to China. Nor did I.”

  “For Floyd it’s his gallbladder.”

  Mother gave me a twinkling smile, the lenses of her thick glasses shining in the light of her reading lamp, hiding her eyes. “I always said that Floyd had a lot of gall. Ha! Maybe it’s heartburn. I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  We were going nowhere. I said, “What are your symptoms, Ma?”

  “Like Dad used to say, when you’re old you never have a good day.” She lifted her ball of yarn and resumed poking one needle then the other through the loops of purple wool.

  “So you don’t think Floyd is really sick?”

  “I didn’t say that.” She was frowning at the wool, intent on the deft twists of her knitting. “All I’m saying is that if you have a lot of time on your hands you tend to make yourself sick. Ever notice, really busy people stay healthy. They don’t have time to get sick.”

  “But you’re ill, right?”

  “I’m old,” she said, rounding her thin lips like a grommet and drawing out the word.

  “I got an urgent message saying that I was to come home right away and look after you.”

  “Maybe you were better off where you were.”

  Exasperation made me breathless. I said, “I was happy.”

  “Where were you?”

  “Like I said, Mexico.”

  “Oh?”

  The click of her needles in the silence that followed indicated to me an utter lack of interest. No one ever wants to hear your travel stories; perhaps that is why so many travelers become writers, because no one will listen to a verbal account. It occurred to me that the news of the others’ ailments, one child after another falling ill, annoyed her and took attention away from her. She decided to develop symptoms of her own, not serious enough to warrant a doctor, or a hospital, or medicine, but serious all the same, requiring the concern of her children.

  And now that she had our attention, she decided that someone as old as she was not long for this world. Perhaps it was not medical care that she needed but rather a death watch. A doctor or medicine would create the distraction of hope, inconvenient to someone who had her sights set on the grave. It was not pills she craved but morbid concern, helpless fascination, ashen faces around her bed, her children sighing and desperate. “Mumma, Mumma, what are we gonna do?”

  She did not look different from the way she had when I’d left for Mexico on my magazine assignment. Perhaps she’d lost a few pounds, but that was a feature of her aging, a sort of physical shrinkage, but staying just as vital and, as I witnessed today, combative.

  “What can I do for you?”

  “Take care of yourself. Don’t you get sick too. I don’t think I could bear hearing about one more person’s ailments.”

  Above her head, hung on the wall, was a tapestry portrait of her and Dad, side by side in the sunshine, that I’d had copied from an old photograph and commissioned in the 1980s in a needlepoint factory in Shandong. At that time, such traditional work, the so-called forbidden stitch, was made to order, before the assembling of cell phones and toasters and beach chairs displaced it.

  Dad was smiling his uncomplicated, approving smile. I said, “I miss Dad.”

  Mother tut-tutted, clicking her knitting needles, and shook her head. She said, “I miss Angela.”

  Angela! Stillborn, seventy years before!

  “Like Dad,” I said, “she’s gone to her reward.”

  “You don’t understand,” Mother said, and on her upturned face her glasses flashed, her eyes crazed and distorted and unreadable. “I feel I can reach out and touch her. She is with me every waking minute.”

  Mother’s spooky certainty made me swallow hard, and I could not begin to frame a reply. I said I had to be going and slipped out the front door, the cold rain hitting my face. I came home from Chiapas to this.

  The sole benefit to me of all the illnesses was that it was inconceivable that anyone would suggest having a family gathering, two weeks away, for Thanksgiving—always painful and often rancorous. No one was well enough to host such a meal; no one would want to attend. Everyone had a coveted doctor’s excuse—mine was that I was looking after Mother. I’d bring her some turkey; I’d listen to her for an afternoon. With any luck, and some more malingering, Christmas would be canceled, the excruciating holidays put on hold, a relief from the days when the family was forced to sit in a room together, seething, hating every minute, thinking, Where did we go wrong?

  Holidays meant seeing one another and the possibility of knowing more, and proximity was potentially disastrous. Any sort of revelation meant a loss in power. A family was a peculiar cluster of misfits, an arrangement whereby people who did not want their privacies to be known were trapped in a place of maddening intimacy. As a consequence, being forced to share that space, none of us told the truth about ourselves, and we had a tendency toward calculated indirection and hollow boasts.

  I phoned Floyd’s wife Gloria, who said, “You haven’t heard? Floyd’s in the hospital,” and she gave me his room number. She said she’d appreciate my going to visit him, because she was commuting to Boston these days, doing some teaching.

  “I’ve been away.”

  “Where to?”

  “Southern Mexico.”

  She said, “Doing a story for a magazine?”

  Out of a habit of not wishing to let anyone in the family know what I was actually doing, I said, “No, I’m thinking of investing in a mineral operation. Amber mines in Chiapas. Not well known, big opportunity.”

  “Oh?”

  “So Floyd’s got something serious?”

  “It started with chest pains—gallstones. He’s had the operation, laparoscopic surgery. He’s much better now. He’ll be in the hospital for the rest of this week, recuperating and getting tests.”

  She spoke slowly, with feeling, and I was touched by her tenderness toward Floyd—so unusual, since in the family, Floyd was a figure of fun or else a bogeyman, to be mocked or feared.

  “Did you tell my mother?”

  “Not really. We don’t want her to worry. Marvin’s the big worry. He thinks he’s going to die.”

  Gloria was relatively new to the family. H
ow was she to know that for almost the entirety of my adult life I had been hearing stories of Marvin’s ailments—his flat feet, his stomach ulcers, his high blood pressure. One year it was cellulitis, some sort of infection, and there was always “he’s struggling with his weight.” Whenever I felt the urge to jeer at him, he would reveal that he was afflicted with something serious or life-threatening, as when he had the stroke, impossible to fake, the slack jaw, the dead arm, the shuffle, and the amputation of his left leg. And now it was “incontinence issues” and “restless leg”—his remaining leg. Mother had always belittled him for being a hypochondriac who guzzled pink pills, but there was sometimes truth in his symptoms and stark fear in his pale plump face.

  As soon as I put the phone down on Gloria I hurried to the hospital. I found Floyd propped in bed, a drip in his arm, an old thick book with a flaking spine in his lap.

  “Billy Hazlitt—it’s a tonic. I’m force-feeding him to my students next semester. It will serve to enlarge their livers, and they will be like Christmas geese, the carcass fit for the table, the innards perfect for foie gras. Bear with me.”

  He adjusted the tube in his arm and tugged the sleeve of his hospital pajamas. He licked his finger, skidded it across some pages, and slapped the book. With an upraised finger for emphasis, he began to read.

  “‘Nature seems (the more we look into it) made up of antipathies: without something to hate, we should lose the very spring of thought and action. Life would turn to a stagnant pool, were it not ruffled by the jarring interests, the unruly passions, of men. The white streak in our own fortunes is brightened (or just rendered visible) by making all around it as dark as possible; so the rainbow paints its form upon the cloud.’” He sat up and stared at me. “‘Is it pride? Is it envy? Is it the force of contrast? Is it weakness or malice?’” Then louder: “‘But so it is, that there is a secret affinity, a hankering after, evil in the human mind, and that it takes a perverse, but a fortunate delight in mischief, since it is a never-failing source of satisfaction. Pure good soon grows insipid, wants variety and spirit. Pain is a bittersweet, which never surfeits. Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust: hatred alone is immortal.’” He snapped the book shut.

  “William Hazlitt? I don’t know that one.”

  “‘On the Pleasure of Hating.’ And here’s something else you don’t know. Hazlitt’s father was a Unitarian preacher who brought the family, including young Billy, to Boston, at a time when it was a hotbed of sedition and whining colonists.”

  I had been in the room perhaps fifteen minutes, I had hardly spoken, and my head was ringing: I was exhausted from his barracking voice.

  “What are you doing here?” Floyd said. “I understand you were dallying in the Limpopo, attended by buttocky tribeswomen by day, crawling on all fours to unspeakable rites at night.”

  “Mexico,” I said.

  “Even better. Our bean-eating neighbors.”

  “Chiapas,” I said.

  “Stoutly defended in the sixteenth century by the Dominican friar Bartolemé de las Casas,” Floyd said. “To some, a heretic. To others, a theological extremist. To me, a paragon of virtue. Like you, he was obsessed with his bowels.”

  Instead of doing battle, I said, “Sorry to hear about your gallbladder.”

  “It’s gone! I’m cured. The doctor’s a genius. He made a tiny incision and plucked it out with the expertise of a fisherman twitching an eel from a boghole. When I get my bandage off I’ll show you the amazing small cut, a mere nick in my abdomen.”

  “Everyone’s sick.”

  “So it seems,” Floyd said. “To varying degrees. Mother most of all.”

  “The usual competition.”

  “Yes. Never mind that I was at death’s door. Mother gets the medal.”

  “I saw her yesterday. She looked fine. She said she missed Angela.”

  “Her guiding spirit, who will no doubt materialize one day, like the incarnation of Lono among the Hawaiians. We’re savages. This is rank ancestor worship!”

  “Mother seems indestructible,” I said. “I think she’s right that medicine is bad for you.”

  “Did she give you her cough?” He went keck-keck, mimicking the sound with cruel exactitude. “She is—what?—ninety-eight? The Ling people of Burma deal with their old and futile relatives by eating them. The Inuit send them into a winter storm to freeze solid. The Ik people, according to our friend Colin Turnbull, leave the oldies to starve to death on a distant hillside. What do we do? We’re the worst of all. We allow them to decay before our very eyes.”

  “So what should we do about Mother?”

  “The eternal question,” Floyd said. “Fred’s sick. Gilbert and Hubby are ailing. Rose has problems. How clever of Mother to trump us all.”

  “You forgot Franny and Marvin.”

  “Marvin is an anthology of complaints,” Floyd said. “I love to hear about him, because I adore the language of illness. Chancres. Buboes. Blebs. Pustules. Angor animi—anguish of the soul, the sense that you’re toast. The conviction you’re about to die. I think Marvin was diagnosed with a gangrenous leg before they turned him into Captain Ahab. The thing about illness, the mood of affliction, is that it endows the sufferer with great predictive powers—thus, angor animi. Marvin knows something, he has the prescience of illness . . . Jay, for the love of God, say something.”

  I had been thinking about how Mother always mocked Marvin. Competing with him for Franny’s affection. When they lopped his leg off at the knee she said, “It’s not as though he was ever a great walker, so maybe he won’t miss it.”

  “I was in a lovely place in Chiapas, living with a local family,” I said. “I got a message to come back. I was really happy in that household.”

  “Don’t brood. Employ your customary expedient—write about it.”

  That very idea had occurred to me. A man like me goes to a remote village. He is generous. He buys food and tools and pays people’s bills. When he then decides to leave, they won’t let him go. They keep him captive for his money, a lesson in corruption in a simple place, a parable of do-gooding and a creative way to deal with my disappointment at having been forced to return home from my idyll beside the river.

  Floyd flung the curtain aside next to his bed. He said, “There was a man languishing in that bed until two days ago. He would sleep for eighteen hours, then be awake for twenty-four. He was melancholic, and his antipsychotic drugs weren’t working. The diagnosis? Refractory depression. What a great pair of words! He, too, had fits of angor animi.”

  “Looks like I’m the only one who’s not sick,” I said. “Just a touch of gout.”

  “That’s right. You’re the only healthy, rational one in the family. So you present yourself in your work. As for the rest of us, we are simply meat and plumbing.”

  It was Floyd’s usual criticism, that I depicted myself in my writing as objective and sane, coolly viewing the madness of the wider world. My narcissism, he said. But he was lying in a hospital bed with tubes in his arm and a bandage on his belly and a catheter up his leg, so I resisted arguing with him.

  “And when you visited Ma, did you deign to mention that she was sitting in a house that she handed over to her daughter? That, in effect, Mother is a tenant in her own house?”

  “No, I didn’t bring that up.”

  “You complain about Fred to me, but do you ever tell him that he’s a perfidious weasel and a traitor, who traduced the family, allowed the coffers to be opened in a land ‘that hath yet her maidenhead, never sacked, turned, nor wrought . . . the mines not broken with sledges, nor their images pulled down out of their temples’? Source?”

  “Raleigh, in Guiana. You’ve quoted it before.”

  Repetition—of stories, of remarks and rejoinders—was a cultural habit in Mother Land, perhaps apparent in this narrative.

  Annoyed that I remembered his quote, he shouted, “And now it has all been sacked, turned, and wrought by the Wobbling Weird Sisters
in the Year of the Big Word.”

  He was sitting forward now. He’d taken his thumb out of the Hazlitt book and was yelling at me. The only thing that prevented him, it seemed, from leaping on me was the restraining tangle of tubes in his arm and up his leg.

  “You’re as bad as the rest of them,” he shouted.

  “I came home because I was summoned,” I said. I got up and kicked the chair back, because I didn’t want to hear this.

  “You should have stayed where you were. It seems you were better off there.”

  “I promised to look after Mum.”

  “You hate all of us. Your delight in mischief is a never-failing source of satisfaction.”

  “Bull.”

  “She’s healthier than you. She’s healthier than all of us,” he yelled after me.

  That was not Mother’s story. After a week of my visits she said she needed Franny’s attention. She still talked to Franny by phone three times a day, but she wanted a visit—and Franny, who had received the house as a gift, could not refuse Mother’s demand. Marvin will be fine, Mother said, believing him to be faking. And on one of those visits to Mother—a Sunday, Swedish meatballs, a tray of manicotti, ginger ale, and Hydrox cookies—the phone rang: Jonty, in tears. Marvin was dead.

  49

  The Survivor

  Mother never looked stronger or more superior than at Marvin’s funeral, tapping her stick down the main aisle of the church, her head high, the queen reviewing her troops. And the troops were suffering, still recovering from their various ailments: Fred limping, Gilbert in the straitjacket of a back brace, Floyd clutching his chest, Franny and Rose wheezing, dragging themselves to the family pew. We were together again, and furious, all of us in the church, as the priest reminded us what a great soul Marvin was, while everyone else saw him as the mall cop armed with a can of Mace, a martyr to donuts.

  Seemingly strengthened by Marvin’s death, and now with Franny to herself, Mother forgot she’d been ill and stopped coughing as a reply when we asked how she felt. She began taking afternoon constitutionals, walking up and down her neighborhood. She asked to be driven to the beach, and she started a weekly routine of going to a nearby restaurant, the Oyster Bed, and eating eighteen raw oysters, served in three waves by an admiring waitress, and finishing with a bowl of vanilla ice cream.