by Paul Theroux
Table of Contents
Title Page
Table of Contents
Copyright
Epigraph
PART ONE
1
2
3
4
5
6
PART TWO
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
PART THREE
1
2
3
4
5
About the Author
First Mariner Books edition 2014
Copyright © 1973 by Paul Theroux
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
www.hmhco.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN 978-0-544-33995-8
eISBN 978-0-544-33996-5
v1.0914
Action will furnish belief—but will that belief be the true one?
A. H. Clough, Amours de Voyage
PART ONE
1
IN ANY MEMOIR it is usual for the first sentence to reveal as much as possible of your subject’s nature by illustrating it in a vivid and memorable motto, and with my own first sentence now drawing to a finish I see I have failed to do this! But writing is made with the fingers, and all writing, even the clumsy kind, exposes in its loops and slants a yearning deeper than an intention, the soul of the writer flapping on the clothespin of his exclamation mark. Including the sentence scribbled above: being slow to disclose my nature is characteristic of me. So I am not off to such a bad start after all. My mutters make me remember. Later, I will talk about my girls.
I was going to get under way with an exchange which took place one morning last year between Gopi and me. Gopi was our peon—pronounced “pyoon,” messenger, to distinguish him from “pee-on,” the slave. He was a Tamil and had a bad leg. He sidled into my cubicle. He showed me two large damp palms and two discolored eyes and said, “Mister Hing vaunting Mister Jack in a hurry-lah.”
That summons was the beginning. At the time I did not know enough to find it dramatic. In fact, it annoyed me. Though it seems an innocent request, when it is repeated practically every day for fourteen years it tends to swaddle one with oppression. That “hurry-lah” stung me more than the summons. Mr. Hing, my towkay, my boss, was an impatient feller. I was a sitting duck for summonses.
“No one tells Jack Flowers to hurry,” I said, turning back to my blue desk diary. I was resolute. I entered a girl’s name beside a circled day. He can whistle and wait, I thought, the bugger. “Gopi, tell him I’m busy.”
Carrying that message made the peon liable to share the blame. I suspected that was why I said it—not a cheering thought. But I couldn’t go straight up to Mr. Hing. Gopi left slowly, dragging his bad leg after him. When he was gone I slammed my diary and then, as if stricken with grief, and sighing on each rung, I mounted the narrow stepladder to Mr. Hing’s office.
Mr. Hing, a clean tubby Cantonese, got brutal haircuts, one a week, the sort given to inmates of asylums, leaving him a bristly pelt of brush on top and the rest shaven white. He had high Chinese eyebrows and his smile, not really a smile, showed a carved treasure of gold teeth. His smile was anger. He was angry half the time, with the Chinese agony, an impulsive bellyaching Yin swimming against a cowardly Yang: the personality in deadlock. So the Chinese may gaze with waxen placidity into your face, or refuse to reply, or snort and fart when you want a word of encouragement. The secrecy is only half the story. In the other half they yell and fling themselves from rooftops, guzzle weed killer and caustic soda and die horribly to inconvenience their relatives, or gibber in the street with knives—Chinese fire drill. What kept Mr. Hing from suicide was perhaps the thought that he couldn’t kill himself by jumping from the crenelated roof of his low two-story shophouse. The two opposing parts of his nature made him a frugal but obsessive gambler, a tyrannical philanthropist, a tortured villain, almost my friend. He had a dog. He choked it with good food and kicked it for no reason—he may have kicked it because he fed it, the kindness making him cruel. When it ran away, which was often, Mr. Hing placed an expensive ad in the Straits Times to get the poor beast back. Mr. Hing was short, about my own age, and every morning he did exercises called burpees in his locked office. He had few pleasures. Until six in the evening, when he changed into striped pajamas and dandled his grandson on his knee, he wore an ordinary white shirt, an expensive watch, plain trousers, and cheap rubber sandals he kicked off when he sat cross-legged on his chair. He was seated that way the morning I entered his office.
He was slightly more agitated than usual, and the appearance of agitation was heightened by a black fan on a shelf moving its humming face from side to side very rapidly and disturbing the clutter of papers on his desk. Papers trembled and rose, and Mr. Hing clapped them flat as the fan turned away; then it happened again, another squall, another slap.
Mr. Hing’s brother perched beside him in a crouch, his knees drawn up, his arms folded into the trough of his lap. He was wearing a T-shirt, the collar stretched showing his hairless chest, and large khaki shorts. I thought of him as Little Hing; he was skinnier and younger, and his youthful hungry face made him seem to me most untrustworthy. Together, their faces eight inches apart, staring at me from behind the desk, they resembled the pair of fraternal faces you see fixed in two lozenge-shaped frames on a squareshouldered bottle of Chinese patent medicine, Tiger Tonic, Three Legs Brain Fluid, or (Mr. Hing’s favorite) Rhino Water. Big Hing was especially agitated and saying everything twice: “Sit down, sit down,” then, “We got a problem, got a problem.”
True Chinese speech is impossible to reproduce without distraction, and in this narrative I intend to avoid the conventional howlers. The “flied lice” and “No tickee, no shirtee” variety is really no closer to the real thing than the plain speech I have just put in Big Hing’s mouth. Chinese do more than transpose r and I, and v and b, and s and sh. They swallow most of their consonants and they seldom give a word an ending: a glottal stop amputates every final syllable. So what Big Hing really said was, “Shi’ duh’” and “We go’ a pro’luh’”; there is no point in being faithful to this yammering. Little Hing’s English was much better than Big’s, though Little spoke very fast; but when they were in the same room, Little didn’t open his trap, except to mutter in Cantonese. That morning he sat in silence, his teeth locked together, the lowers jutting out, fencing the uppers with yellow pickets.
The conversation, I knew, would be brief, and the only reason Big Hing asked me to sit down was that I towered over the desk like a sweaty bear, panting with annoyance, my tattoos showing. My size bothered them especially. I was a foot taller than Big Hing, and a foot and a half taller than Little—when they were standing. I sat and sank into a chair of plastic mesh, and as I was sinking Big Hing started to explain.
A month before, he had been told that a man was coming from Hong Kong to audit our books. There was another Hing in Hong Kong, a towkay bigger than Big Hing, and the auditing was an annual affair. It was also an annual humiliation because Big Hing didn’t like his accounts questioned. Still, it happened every year. At one time it was a sallow little man who always arrived ravaged from traveling deck class on a freighter; then, for a few years, a skeletal soul with a kindly smile and popping eyes, who hugged a briefcase—turned to suede by wear—to his starched smock with frog buttons. The auditors stayed for a week, snapping the abacus and thumbing the ledger; Big Hin
g sat close by, pouring tea, saying nothing. Last year it was a man called Lee, and he was the problem, though Big Hing didn’t say so. All he said was: meet this man at the airport.
It was why Hing was agitated. He assumed Lee was Cantonese or at least Chinese. But he discovered, I never learned how, that Lee was an ang moh, a redhead. The ang mohs were my department. It was the reason I was employed by Hing—Chop Hing Kheng Fatt: Ship Chandlers & Provisioned, as the shop sign read. Hing was peeved that he was mistaken about the name, and furious that his books were going to be scrutinized by an ang moh. He beamed with anger and banged his fist down upon the fluttering papers, repeating Lee’s name and my orders to meet him at the airport. I drew my own conclusions, and I was correct in every detail except the spelling, which was Leigh.
“My car’s at the garage,” I said. I was not being difficult. It was a noisy ten-year-old Renault with 93,000 miles on the clock. One wheel, the front right, had come unstuck from the chassis and made the front end shimmy at any speed, a motion that rubbed the tread from the tires. “I’ll have to take a taxi.”
“Can, can,” said Big Hing.
Little Hing whispered something, staring at me, keeping his teeth locked, a coward’s ventriloquism. For Little Hing I was the ultimate barbarian: my hair was once reddish, I am hairy, my arms are profusely tattooed—a savage, “just out of the trees,” as Yardley used to say.
“Bus to airport, taxi to town,” said Big Hing. That was Little’s whispered suggestion.
It was a two-dollar taxi fare; the bus was forty cents. There was no direct bus. I hated sitting at an out-of-town bus shelter, in the heat, with twenty schoolchildren. But I said okay because I could see Big Hing’s anger makes him determined that I should save one-sixty and know who was boss. I didn’t start arguments I knew in advance I was going to lose. Big Hing was my towkay: I couldn’t win. But my dealings with him were small.
He counted out $2.40 from petty cash and looked at his watch.
“What time is his plane due in?” I asked.
Big Hing thought three-thirty; Little murmured in Cantonese, and I expected an amendment, but Big stuck to three-thirty and gave me the flight number. I went down to consult my bus guide.
So far it had been an unpleasant day, ruined first by the peon telling me to hurry and second by the command to take the bus all the way out to the airport. After looking at the bus guide I saw that several things were in my favor. I was right about there being no direct bus, but the 18-A Singapore Traction Company bus passed by Moulmein Green. I could have lunch at home for a change, and if I hurried, a quick nap. The transfer would have to be made on Paya Lebar Road—a stroke of luck: I could see if Gladys was available before continuing on the 93 to the airport. None of this would cost a penny extra; out of two humiliations I had rescued a measure of self-respect. And if Gladys was free and Leigh was interested I stood to make nine dollars. In any event, I was anxious to meet him. It was nice to see a new face, and an ang moh’s was more welcome than most. We were lonelier than we admitted to; after many years of residence in Singapore, we all went for the mail twice a day, even Yardley and Smale, who never got any.
This is the beginning of my story, and already I can see that it represents my fortunes more faithfully, in the haphazard recollection of a single morning’s interruption, than if I had planned it as carefully as I once intended and began with the rumbling factual sentence I used to repeat to myself in the days when I believed my early life mattered, before I went away—about being born in the year 1918, in the North End of the city of Boston, the second child of two transplanted Italians; and then the part about my earliest memory (the warm room, my wet thumb and velvet cushion, my father singing with the opera on the radio). There is no space for that here.
2
FOURTEEN YEARS AGO, lowering myself on a rope from the rusty stern of the Allegro, anchored then in the Straits of Malacca (“the financial straits,” Yardley said), I did not think I was an old man—though if anyone had insisted I was old I would have believed him. Most people are willing to make fools of themselves with a little persuasion, and the question of age is answered by the most foolishness. Now I know that old and young make little difference: the old man talks easily to a child.
They say every age is more barbarous than the last. It is possible. If there is an error in the statement it doesn’t matter, because the people who say this are either very young or very old, just starting out and with no experience, or musing in life’s sundowner with false flickers of half-forgotten memories. The age, as they call it, is too big to see, but they have time on their hands: it is too early for one and too late for the other to worry about being wrong. What they don’t know is that however awful the age is, it is placid and hopeful compared to a certain age in a man.
Fifty: it is a dangerous age—for all men, and especially for one like me who has a tendency to board sinking ships. Middle age has all the scares a man feels halfway across a busy street, caught in traffic and losing his way, or another one blundering in a black upstairs room, full of furniture, afraid to turn on the lights because he’ll see the cockroaches he smells. The man of fifty has the most to say, but no one will listen. His fears sound incredible because they are so new—he might be making them up. His body alarms him; it starts playing tricks on him, his teeth warn him, his stomach scolds, he’s balding at last; a pimple might be cancer, indigestion a heart attack. He’s feeling an unapparent fatigue; he wants to be young but he knows he ought to be old. He’s neither one and terrified. His friends all resemble him, so there can be no hope of rescue. To be this age and very far from where you started out, unconsoled by any possibility of a miracle—that is bad; to look forward and start counting the empty years left is enough to tempt you into some aptly named crime, or else to pray. Success is nasty and spoils you, the successful say, and only failures listen, who know nastiness without the winch of money. Then it is clear: the ship is swamped to her gunwales, and the man of fifty swims to shore, to be marooned on a little island, from which there is no rescue, but only different kinds of defeat.
That was how I recognized Mr. Leigh, the man they sent from Hong Kong to audit our books. I knew his name and his flight number—nothing else. I waited at Gate Three and watched the passengers file through Health and Immigration. First the early birds, the ones who rush off the plane with briefcases, journalists and junior executives with Chinese girl friends, niftily dressed, wearing big sunglasses; then the two Chinese sisters in matching outfits; a lady with a little boy and further back her husband holding the baby and juggling his passport; a pop group with blank faces and wigs of frizzy hair, looking like a delegation from New Guinea, anxious to be met; the missionary priest with a goatee and a cheroot, addressing porters in their own language; a few overdressed ones, their Zurich topcoats over their arms. Lagging behind, a lady in a wheelchair about whom people say, “Lord, I don’t know how she does it,” a man with a big box, a returning student with new eyeglasses, and. Mr. Leigh. I knew him as soon as I set eyes on him: he was the only one who looked remotely like me.
He was red-faced and breathless; and, unaccustomed to the heat, he was mopping his face with a hanky. He was a bit heavier than he should have been—his balance was wrong, his clothes too small. I waved to him through the glass doors. He nodded and turned away to claim his suitcase. I went into the men’s room, just to look in the mirror. I was reassured by my hair, not white like Leigh’s and still quite thick. But I wished I had more hair. My face was lined: my nap had made me look older. I was disheveled from the bus ride and looked more rumpled than usual because I had rolled my sleeves down and buttoned the cuffs. It was my tattoos. I hid them from strangers. Strangers’ eyes fix on tattoos as they fix on scars in unlikely places. A person spots a tattoo and he has you pegged: you’re a sailor, or you do some sort of poorly paid manual labor; one day you got drunk with your friends and they got tattooed, and to be one of the gang so did you. It did not happen this way with me, but that is th
e only version strangers know of a tattooing.
Mr. Leigh was just pushing through the glass doors as I came back from the toilet smoothing my sleeves. I said hello and tried to take his suitcase. He wouldn’t let go; he seemed offended that I should try to help. I knew the feeling. He was abrupt and wheezing and his movements tried to be quick. It is usually this way with people who have just left a plane: they are overexcited in a foreign place, their rhythm is different—they are attempting a new rhythm—and they are not sure what is going to happen next. The sentence they have been practicing on the plane, a greeting, a quip, they know to be inappropriate as soon as they say it. Leigh said, “So they didn’t send the mayor.” Then, “You don’t look Chinese to me.”
I suggested a beer in the lounge.
“What time are they expecting me?” he asked. He had just arrived and already he was worried about Hing. I knew this man: he didn’t want to lose his job or his dignity; but it is impossible to keep both.
“They weren’t too sure what time your plane was coming in,” I said. We both knew who “they” were. He put down his suitcase.
One reason I remember the first conversation I had with Mr. Leigh (or William, as he insisted I call him, but I found this more formal than Mister; he didn’t reply to “Bill”) is that I had the same conversation with every ang moh I met in Singapore. We were in the lounge having a beer, sharing a large Anchor; every few minutes the loud-speakers became noisy with adenoidal announcements of arrivals and departures in three languages. Leigh was still keyed up and he sat forward in his chair, taking quick gulps of beer and then staring into his glass.
I asked about the flight and the weather in—William being English, I attempted some slang—“Honkers.” This made him look up from his glass and squint straight at me, so I gave up. And was it a direct flight? No, he said, it landed for fueling at Bangkok.
