The Mosquito Coast

by Paul Theroux

  “That is why I looks out the window,” Mr. Maywit said, in the same mystified voice. “I ain’t know why. I sees this man from Nighted Stays. Standing in the grass. That is why.”

  Mr. Haddy said, “I have a dream. Bout a man. And this is the man, wearing the same cloves as the man in the dream and a peaky hat. I meet him in my dream.”

  But I knew that what Mr. Haddy said was a fib. He had told me himself that he had met Father on La Ceiba pier and thought he was a missionary from the Moravian Church. I did not contradict him now, because the mood around this Jeronimo campfire had become solemn.

  “I was sent here,” Father said. “I’m not going to tell you who sent me, or why. And I’m not going to tell you who I am or what I aim to do. That’s just talk. I’m going to show you why I’m here. You go ahead and watch. And if you don’t like what you see, you can kill me.”

  Tiredness had made his voice harsh. He hissed this again (“You can kill me”), then let it sink in. There were murmurs. Mr. Haddy scratched his big toe and said he would not dare do such a thing as kill Father, though he was sure hoping to get his launch fixed pretty soon.

  Father resumed, saying, “I didn’t come here to boss you around. I came here to work for you. If I’m not working hard enough, you just tell me, and I’ll work harder. You come up to me and say, ‘Mister, you’ve got to do a whole lot better than this.’ I’m working for you people, and you’re going to see things you’ve never seen before. What do you want me to do first? It’s up to you.”

  No one spoke.

  “You want some food?” Father said. “You want a bridge and some beans and a paddle pump and a chicken run?”

  Mr. Maywit cleared his throat.

  “I heard you,” Father said. “I’ll obey. And those Indians up in the hills are going to look down here and they’re not going to believe their eyes. They’re going to be absolutely feverish with amazement.”

  Every listener was transfixed. The only sounds were from the jungle, and here and there a smack when mosquitoes were slapped. Beyond our tents and our little fire, the jungle was black. The blackness screeched, it grunted—it had risen up and wrapped us in its noise and in its sweet-sour folds. The hidden insects were excited and the darkened trees made a sound like brooms.

  “Now let’s get to bed,” Father said, “before we all get bitten alive.”

  But he remained by the fire.

  “Ain’t you sleeping?” Mr. Haddy said.

  Father said, “I never sleep!”

  ***

  The next day we planted the miracle beans. Father made a ceremony of it. He lined up the men and had them dig with homemade shovels—planks that Father had planed into blades. Mr. Haddy did not dig. He said, “I ain’t a farmer—I am a sailor.” And Father said, “He doesn’t want to get his prehensile fingers dirty.” The men stood shoulder-to-shoulder, stabbing the dirt. It was not difficult. The German Weerwilly had had a garden here—most of his beanpoles were still standing.

  By mid-afternoon we had turned over an acre of weeds. Father dragged out his bean seeds. They were called miracle beans, he said, because they were a forty-day variety. The first ones he planted he gave names. “This is Captain Haddy,” he said, and held up a bean. “This is Francis,” and he held up another one. Then he poked them into the holes. “This one is Mr. Maywit. This is Charlie. This is Jerry—”

  He straddled the furrows and when he ran out of names, he planted faster. Half the field was miracle beans, the rest was Wonder Corn and tomatoes and peppers—the seeds we had bought in Florence, Massachusetts. It rained in the afternoon. Father said he had been expecting it. That was part of the ceremony, too, he said.

  Mother said to him, when we were alone that night, “Aren’t you laying it on a little thick, Allie?”

  But Father just laughed and said that it had been his intention to get us out of the States and save us. He had not thought that he would be saving other people as well. Yet that was what had happened. If we had not come here, these people would have been bone-idle, and the vultures would have made a meal of them.

  “I want to give people a chance to use their know-how,” Father said.

  The following day, he asked Mr. Maywit what his occupation was.

  “I been a sexton in my time. Up in Limon,” Mr. Maywit said. And he explained. “Polish the brasses, make em shine. Set out vesmins. Hang the numbers on the board. Tidy out the pews.”

  Father looked discouraged.

  “Also I kin do some barbering.”

  “Hair cutting?”

  “Cutting and dressing. And ironing hair. And twisting. Heating it flat. And I know how to wax—flows.”

  Small night rats, called pacas, gnawed through the corners of the nylon tents. We ate the pacas. They were good-tasting, and Father said it was poetic justice. We made a wooden platform for the tents to keep their floors dry and hold the tents straight—the stakes had not held in the wet ground. Down at the river we made a trap that funneled fish into a wire cage, and from a simple roof and frame and some of the mosquito netting we built a mosquito-proof gazebo where we could congregate. These were gadgets, not inventions, but they made life more comfortable, and within very few days I could see the skeleton of a settlement in Jeronimo.

  Every evening, the Zambus turned their backs on us and crept into the jungle. Every morning, looking wrinkled and damp, they reappeared. They had a camp there, Father said. Toward the end of the first week, Mr. Haddy left Jeronimo with some of the Zambus. Mr. Haddy did not come back immediately, but the Zambus did, towing log rafts on harnesses Father had made for them. On these rafts were the last of our supplies from Little Haddy.

  The boilers, the tanks, and the rest of the scrap metal were dragged away and stacked. Some of the pipes Father used for his first real invention at Jeronimo—a simple paddle wheel that moved a belt of coconut cups up a tower on the riverbank and filled a drum with water. The height of the drum gave it enough force to pipe the water anywhere we liked, but most of it went to an enclosed shed that became known as the bathhouse. We washed clothes there, and took showers, and boiled water for drinking, and altogether it improved our lives.

  The excess water flowed through a stone culvert and under the bathhouse to a privy at the edge of the clearing, where our latrine stood. The privy was always clean, but the Maywits’ latrine was mucky and so fly-blown that Father said, “Anyone who uses that throne is Lord of the Flies.”

  The first invention, a pump made on the spot, was a piece of primitive technology. The Maywits and Zambus were greatly impressed by its flapping and splashing, but they said they could not understand why Father had made such a thing in the rainy season, when there was water everywhere.

  “We’re building for the future, the dry season,” Father said. He said it was a civilized thing to do. “And know why it’s a perfect invention?”

  “Cause you ain’t have to walk down there with a bucket,” Mr. Maywit said.

  “That’s blindingly obvious,” Father said. “No, it’s perfect because it’s self-propelled, uses available energy, and it’s nonpolluting. Make one of these up in Massachusetts and they’d have you certified. But they’re not interested in perfection.”

  Some days later, after a heavy rain, the river rose and the paddle wheel was torn off its brackets and rods. Father strengthened it with metal straps and it continued to supply us with water and went on sluicing the latrine.

  Each time he made something, Father said, “This is why I’m here.”

  It was Father’s policy that no one should be idle. “If you see me sit down, you can do the same,” he said. But he even ate standing up. Part of the beanfield was divided into plots—one plot for each kid, who had to keep his portion weeded. There were other tasks assigned to us, such as collecting firewood and keeping the fish trap mucked out. And when our chores were done we were to gather stones the size of hen’s eggs and use them for paving the paths. So there was always something to do, which was perhaps just as well because
it took our minds off the heat and the insects. And the uncertainty, too, for though Father said confidently, “This is why I’m here,” we did not know why we were, and were too scared to ask.

  The work in the first few weeks was mostly land clearing. The process of clearing the land of bushes and small trees revealed more of Weerwilly’s activities and uncovered some of the implements he had abandoned. We found a plow and bales of chicken wire and any number of small tools, a lantern that worked pretty well, and an oil drum with enough fuel in it to last us for months. These discoveries filled Father with enthusiasm and convinced him that Weerwilly had failed because he was careless, like the people in America who junked perfectly good lumber and wire. And he said that if the Maywits had been a little sharper, they would have found this stuff and used it themselves to improve the place, instead of playing Lord of the Flies.

  One day, following some of the Zambus who were clearing land, I came upon a bird jerking in a clump of grass. But it was not the grass that held it—it was a web, a thick wet spider web, like a hank of wool. I knelt down and untangled it, and I had let it go before I thought to look for the spider. Then I saw it—as big as my hand, and brown and hairy, and matching the color of the fever-grass roots. The Zambu Bucky said it was a Hanancy spider and not only did she catch birds but she ate them as well, and she would eat me too if I was not careful. The bird, a peachy-gray color, was one that Bucky said just came a few weeks in the year. I guessed it was a migratory bird, too innocent to be wary of the spiders in the jungle grass. It worried me to think that we were a little like that bird.

  There was everything in this grass—scorpions, snakes, wire, chicken bones, mice, pacas, wine bottles, ant nests, and shovelheads. We cut the grass so that mosquitoes would not have a place to breed, but in the process we often found other useful things. For example, while the clearing went on (it was supervised by Mother, who was infected by Father’s desire to shave the whole of Jeronimo and rid us of bugs), Mr. Maywit and Father were digging postholes for our new house. Father kept saying that what they needed was a posthole digger. Later that day, Francis Lungley clanked his machete against a metal object. He brought this thing to Father, who said it was the business end of a posthole digger.

  He worked its blades, which were like jaws, and said, “All she needs is a couple of handles and we’re on our way.”

  It took him less than an hour to get it working.

  “I needed a posthole digger, and a posthole digger was found. Now I ask you—was this accident or was this part of some grand design?”

  The best find in all the land-clearing was a stack of wood, cut into planks. Father said it was the best grade of mahogany—so good, he said, that he had half a mind to make it into a piano. It was too heavy for the house, but he said he knew just what to do with it. It was put aside, and the snakes swept out of it, and it was left to dry.

  “Find me some more of that lumber over there,” he said, and that same day some more wood was found. The Zambus laughed, because it was right where Father said it would be.

  Mother worked alongside the Zambus, wearing one of Father’s shirts, with her hair done up in a scarf. This was Father’s idea—he said that none of the Zambus would stop working while a woman was on her feet cutting brush. Soon, most of Jeronimo was slashed and burned. It looked as though a battle had been fought there—black land, black stumps, steam and smoke issuing from cracks in the earth. Mr. Maywit’s rusty hut stood hanging with morning-glories on an island of its own banana trees. What was to be our house was a rectangular corral of thirty posts sticking about six feet out of the ground. Once the floor was set on these posts, the cooking apparatus was moved to it from the guanacaste tree. This underfloor part of the house became our kitchen.

  Some corrugated iron sheets were uncovered in the land-clearing. But Father did not like the look of them, and for a number of days he went upriver with three of the Zambus to cut bamboo. He left early in the morning, and an hour or so later the bamboo in eight-foot lengths would appear, floating down the river into Jeronimo. These were brought ashore by the other Zambus, the Maywits, and Mother. But most of the carrying was done by the river, Father said. He had a genius for simplifying any job.

  These bamboos, about five inches thick, were carefully split in half and smoothed inside to resemble gutters. By laying them over the roof beams and fitting them like tiles—locking them together lengthwise and cupping the line of grooves with an overlapping series laid face-down—a completely watertight roof was made. Father was so pleased by this, he sang.

  ***

  Under the bam!

  Under the boo!

  He made the walls in the same way—we had four rooms and a porch, which Father called the Gallery. The whole thing had overhanging roof eaves, like an enormous birdhouse.

  Father was so taken up with the house and the work projects in Jeronimo that our lessons stopped. Mother said they were neglecting us. They ought to be spending some time with the kids, she said. What happened to our education?

  “This is the very education they need,” Father said. “Everyone in America should be getting it. When America is devastated and laid to waste, these are the skills that will save these kids. Not writing poetry, or fingerpainting, or what’s the capital of Texas—but survival, rebuilding a civilization from the smoking ruins.”

  It was his old speech, War in America, but now he felt he had a remedy.

  The Maywits and Zambus regarded the bamboo house as a miracle.

  Father said, “They don’t paint pictures, they don’t weave baskets or carve faces on coconuts or hollow out salad bowls. They don’t sing or do dances or write poems. They can’t draw a straight line. That’s why I like them. That’s innocence. They’re a little touched with religion, but they’ll get over that. Mother, there’s hope here.”

  During the house raising, Father encouraged us to watch him with the Maywit children. Clover and April got on well with the Maywit girls—though Clover bossed them by making them recite the alphabet over and over again—and Jerry played with the boy called Drainy, who was also ten. None was my age, so this left me free to help Father, or play by myself.

  Drainy was a bug-eyed boy with a shaven head and spaces between his teeth. He had a collection of little cars and toy bikes made out of coathanger wire. As he was playing with Jerry, I found some of these wire toys and rattled them along the ground. Father asked me what they were.

  I showed him. They were ingeniously made. They had moving parts, and one resembled in the smallest detail a tricycle, with pedals and wheels.

  Father was fascinated by anything mechanical. He sat down and studied them. After he had meditated over them for several minutes and tried them, he said, “These were made by some very sophisticated instruments. See how that wire is twisted and joined? There’s no soldering at all, and the angles and bends are perfectly formed.”

  He looked at me and winked.

  “Charlie,” he said, “I think someone’s hiding tools from us. I had these people all wrong. I could use the kind of precision tools that made these.”

  He showed Mr. Maywit, who said sure enough, they were Drainy’s. Drainy was summoned to the Gallery.

  “Where did you get these?” Father asked.

  “I make um.”

  “Take your time, son,” Father said. “I want you to show me exactly how you made them. I’ll give you some wire. Now you get your tools and make one for me.”

  Father gave the boy some fine strands of wire, but Drainy did not move. He held them dumbly in his dirty hand, and sucked his teeth.

  “Don’t you want to show me your tools?”

  Mr. Maywit gave the boy a poke in the shoulder.

  “Ain’t got no tools.”

  Father said, “So you can’t make them after all?”

  “Kin,” Drainy said. He squatted and took the wire in his teeth, and by chewing it and drawing it through the gaps like dental floss, and champing it like a marrow bone, he formed it into a
sprocket and held it up for Father to admire.

  Mr. Maywit’s excitement made him gabble—“He make em wif his teef!”

  Father said to Drainy, “You take care of those choppers and brush them every day. I’m going to need you later on.”

  13

  IT WAS NOT an easy life these first weeks in Jeronimo. It was no coconut kingdom of free food and grass huts and sunny days, under the bam, under the boo. Wilderness was ugly and unusable, and where were the dangerous animals? There was something stubborn about jungle trees, the way they crowded each other and gave us no shade. I saw cruelty in the hanging vines and selfishness in their root systems. This was work, and more work, and a routine that took up every daylight hour. On the Unicorn and in La Ceiba, and even in Hatfield, we had done pretty much what we pleased. Father had left us alone and gone about his own business. Usually I had helped him, but sometimes not. Here, things were different.

  There was a bell at sunup, by which time Father already had the fire going and the coffee on. The Maywits always joined us—they had stopped cooking for themselves the week we arrived in Jeronimo. After pineapple and oatmeal, Father yelled for the Zambus and told us our “targets” for the day. On Mondays he gave us our targets for the week: finish the house, or get so many bushels of stones, or clear a certain amount of land, or cut beanpoles, or dig trenches for culverts. The Maywits were mainly the gardeners, the Zambus mainly the landclearers and builders, and the children—the Maywits and us—the collectors and cleaners.

  We did our jobs throughout the morning, and by lunchtime the heat was terrible—it was now July. Lunch was always hot soup, because Father had the idea that it was necessary for us to sweat buckets: it kept us cool, nature’s way. Afternoon work was often interrupted by rain, but the downpours did not last long and we were soon back on the job. All work stopped in the late afternoon, for it was then that the black flies and mosquitoes appeared, and their bites were torture.

  Just before sundown we took turns in the bathhouse, washing up. One of the rules was a shower bath every day. In Hatfield we had never kept so clean, but here Father became a maniac for cleanliness. He made us change our clothes every day, too. Clothes to be washed were dumped in a tub. and one of the smells of Jeronimo was this skunk stew of boiling clothes. Mrs. Maywit had always washed her family’s clothes in the river, but now she used the tin clothes tub. Father was pleased that the Maywits had begun following our example in taking a daily shower. Only the Zambus remained the same—they steamed like tomcats, as Father did when he was very angry.