The Lower River

by Paul Theroux

  Such reading was futile, frivolous, self-deceiving. You didn’t need to devise a rocket journey to another galaxy to find alien life forms, for while the science-fiction writers were squinting into space, imagining insectile creatures and sentient sticks of matter and crystal cities and greenish almond-eyed mutants in boots—all of this fantasy—there were people in Malabo who were more remote, more cut off, less accessible than Martians or moon creatures.

  Scientists had dreamed or imagined outer space into being and made a reality of space travel. But no one else on earth ever thought of the Lower River. Malabo was more distant than Mars. It was perhaps not all that remote in miles, but it was unknown, so it was at the limit of the world. Because of its isolation it was absurd, fantastic, unreal, a place of the naked and the misshapen. Alone in Malabo, Hock concluded that the villagers were unlike anyone he knew—they were different, too, from the people he’d lived among here years ago. They had changed, regressed drastically in their small subterranean hole in the world through which a river ran as dark as any in classical myth. The villagers on this riverbank did not look like other people, they did not think about the wider world, they did not talk like anyone else—and when they did speak, they didn’t make sense. They didn’t walk like other people, or eat or drink like anyone he’d ever known. And so from the beginning he saw that they were different, and what was more disturbing, they saw that he was different—utterly unlike themselves, a visitor from a distant place that was unknown but whispered about, impossibly far, unreachable from here, where they lay buried in their belowground river world.

  At night, looking up, he was dazzled by the masses of stars and the winking planets and the streaking long-tailed comets, the big moon that at times looked as though it was made of bleached coral; and it seemed that those bright stars and that crusted moon were nearer than Medford.

  Time, too, was retarded—or else crazed, circular, inverted, as it might be in deep space, one of those black holes into which the science-fiction writers tucked their voyagers. Hock could not remember when he’d arrived. He could not count the days that had passed, even the names of days had lost their significance, since they were indistinguishable. Market day was no longer observed, because there was nothing to sell. Sunday didn’t exist in a place where no one went to church, and the church itself had fallen into ruins. He remembered the progression of his first day—his nap, the meal, the sound sleep. He remembered his first glimpse of Zizi, of the dwarf, of Manyenga’s initial demand for money. After that it was sunrise, heat, sunset, the night sky, the stars, the suggestion that he was on another planet—that he was lost.

  Some days he’d forgotten why he’d come, and Manyenga would show up for money, and only then would he think, I must get away.

  Manyenga said after breakfast one day, following Hock so that no one would hear, “What are you looking at, father?”

  “Nothing,” Hock said, bewildered by the ambiguous question.

  “In the night, father. Looking with your eyes.”

  How had they spotted him at midnight in the grove behind his hut, his arms crossed, his face upraised? Hock was reminded that he was happier in Malabo at night. He’d never used a flashlight, because any other light would have dimmed the stars. Standing in the darkness, he had not moved, only gaped at the sky. Yet they knew—they knew everything. Someone had seen, and here “someone” meant everyone.

  “Mphanda,” Hock said. “I like to look at it.”

  Instead of placating Manyenga, the answer seemed to disturb him. Hock had given the Sena name for the Southern Cross, their word for the ridgepole of a house, which is how it looked to them. He realized, too late, that he should have said, “Not looking at anything special.” But he had been specific in identifying the stars, and he knew such a reply was suspect, witch-like, as though the murmur of an element in a spell that might relate to a person’s house.

  “Some people think the stars can control us,” Manyenga said.

  “Which people?”

  “Many people. Even those people at the Agency where I worked. One mzungu lady with much schooling, she herself said so.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “I am a simple man,” Manyenga said, and saying this, he had never sounded more complicated or crafty. “Myself I don’t know these things. But you, father, you are the expert.”

  He said exputt, which could have been “expat” or “expert.”

  “I was just thinking how far away we are,” Hock said.

  Manyenga laughed, whinnying Eh-eh-eh in his throat, genuinely amused.

  “Far away from what, father? We are here, right here in the middle of the world on our great river. We are having—what? We have food, we have water, we have ujeni, the river. I have my big wife and my little wife and my children.” Manyenga stamped his foot in the dust and said again, “We are here!”

  “At the center of the universe,” Hock said.

  “Yes. In the middle. We are having everything.”

  With a thin querying smile, Hock said, “You have everything?”

  “We have much,” Manyenga said, and he was returning that thin smile. “And you have much.”

  Hock didn’t reply to this. He knew what Manyenga was saying: You belong to us.

  Manyenga was hesitating. Finally he said, “You tell me you are observing the ridgepole. So what are the stars saying to you?” And he laughed. “That is what the people are asking. Not me. I know you are just taking refreshment in the cool air. But they are asking, ‘What are the stars saying to the father?’”

  Hock couldn’t say “nothing.” No one would believe him. Nothing was a concept no one understood. Every act, every word, every event had a something to it, a direct cause. The fall of a branch was motivated by someone; a dead animal was always an omen; a person’s illness or bad luck was caused by someone who not only had a grudge but had the power to bring illness down upon that victim, or sour the person’s luck.

  Someone staring at the night sky was studying the heavens, monitoring the approach of events, conspiring with the stars to bring misfortune upon an enemy, wishing to visit destruction on someone.

  “They are fearing,” Manyenga said.

  Hock said, “Fearing what?”

  “The mzungu. The father.”

  Hock said, “Sometimes I can’t sleep.”

  “And they are saying that, too. The mzungu is awake when we are sleeping. He is like the fisi.”

  Hock laughed at the word. “They think I’m a hyena?”

  “The fisi is awake at night. They are fearing for that reason, too. A sorcerer can be any animal. And they presume you are looking for a lightning bolt in the sky.”

  “Why would I look for a lightning bolt?”

  “Because you are a friend of the snakes, and the lightning is a snake from the sky, as the rainbow is a snake from the earth. A sorcerer can be able to join them, heaven and earth. You think we are stupid?”

  It was impossible for Hock to tell whether Manyenga was teasing. Hock had heard of the rainbow as a snake, rising from the river or a pool, but the lightning as a snake from the sky? Was that something new, or a resurrected belief of a people who felt they had been bypassed? He was from another world, and knew he needed to be careful: he was ignorant here. The remote village had strict rules and fixed beliefs and many suspicions. In the forty years that had passed since he’d last been here the villagers had drifted farther off, they were more distant, the shadows deeper. Or was it all, he sometimes wondered, a shakedown?

  “What was this Agency, the charity you worked for?” Hock asked.

  He was merely trying to change the subject, but Manyenga was silenced by the question; he stared at Hock as if this question was somehow related to his inquiries about the stars, the suspicions that Manyenga had voiced.

  “They were from Europe,” Manyenga said. “And some people from America.”

  “The Agency was the name of their charity?”

  “Why are you wanting to kn
ow?”

  “I have friends who give money to these people. I can tell them their money is useful.”

  “The money is rubbish,” Manyenga said. “They don’t give it the right way. They were cheating me.”

  “I’m just asking what the organization was called.”

  “And they were false witnesses,” Manyenga said.

  “Did they come here to Malabo?”

  “That was the badness. They promised to deliver us. But they were telling blue lies.”

  Manyenga had grown angry, and looked sullen as he spoke. Hock was reminded again of how this simple conversation about the stars had veered off course.

  “Never mind,” Hock said, and began to walk away.

  Following him, toeing the dusty path with aggrieved steps, Manyenga said, “And they were causing trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “And bringing deadly diseases,” Manyenga said, still treading angrily. “They were false friends.” He tugged the loose sleeve of the khaki shirt that Hock wore as protection from the sun and the insects. “But you yourself are not like that, father. No, indeed, you are being a true friend.”

  In spite of trying to keep a straight face, Hock found himself smiling, with a slight heave of laughter in his throat, because he knew what was coming next.

  “And those people who were whispering when they saw you at night observing the stars of the mphanda in the dark sky—no!” Manyenga, overdoing it as usual when he pretended to be indignant, worked himself into a fury, popeyed, clawing the air with his fingers. “I told them, eh! He is our father and our friend. He will never make magic against you. Don’t! I am telling them”—he made a chopping gesture with his big square hand as a froth of spittle flecked the corners of his mouth—“don’t be fearing.”

  “Thanks, Festus,” Hock said, but no more than that.

  “Please, father. Do not thank me for saying the truth. How can I lie? It is not natural for me.”

  “People here used to know me,” Hock said. “No one knows me now.”

  “I am knowing you, father.” Manyenga whipped his hand, snapping his fingers for emphasis. “I am knowing you too much.”

  “But if the people I’d known before, long ago, were still alive, you wouldn’t have to tell people about me.”

  “Some are alive.”

  “Who?”

  “Elders.” He named a few families, mentioned people whom Hock didn’t know. He listed the men in the riverside villages of Marka and Magwero, whom Hock had met that first day—children, grandchildren of men he’d known.

  “And the teacher, that old woman.”

  Hock shook his head and squinted for more.

  “Gala Mphiri.”

  Hock regretted his show of surprise, the “What?” that escaped him as a grunt. But he couldn’t help it—the name was an echo of the name in his mind.

  Manyenga didn’t smile. He held the smile back, kept it in his mouth. He knew he had made his point. And it was then that he asked for money.

  11

  AS A YOUNG TEACHER in Malabo, stricken with a love hunger he had never known before, he had desired Gala, had to have her or he would be ill. She was aware of his hot gaze, often turning her head to look aside and smile at him, sensing his eyes on her. It was also a measure of his happiness in Malabo that he wanted her. She was slender and strong, she was aloof, striding alone from her hut to the school—white blouse, long dark skirt, red sandals. What would I give up to have her? he sometimes thought, answering himself, Everything. He would stay there, become a Malawi citizen, live in the bush, raise children, never return home. Some people did that, Fogwill for one, which was why it had been such a shock to see toothless Fogwill in Blantyre: the man he might have been.

  But Norman Fogwill had married a village girl who wanted brighter lights, and Mrs. Fogwill, a Yao villager from the lakeshore, had left the country to live in England. Gala was a different sort. Hock guessed that she would never leave, but it surprised him to know that she was still alive.

  She was not more than twenty at the time of independence. She had the flattish, vaguely Asian face that some Sena people had, the high cheekbones, the slanted hooded eyes. Her shaven head revealed its sculptural symmetries, her neck was slender and fragile-seeming. She was very thin, with tight muscles in her arms and legs that gave her a loose springy walk, her small high buttocks beating against her swinging skirt or her wraparound, the red chitenje she sometimes wore.

  Hock had hesitated, but he had been confident that he would persuade her to marry him. He hoped she would sleep with him first, but so what? He could offer her everything. It was only a matter of time. How could she refuse? He knew the power a mzungu had in the Lower River—something magical, almost godlike. He didn’t want to think how he’d overwhelm her with his aura of being a white man in a remote place that had seen so few of them—always armed, in Land Rovers, wearing boots and shouting, sturdy, pink, and indifferent among the naked skinny Sena people. Some of them, the toughest, were Portuguese planters who had wandered over the border at Villa Nova, or crossed the river looking for animals to shoot. None had been teachers, like Hock. They had never seen anyone like him.

  “We need to discuss the syllabus,” he’d said.

  “I am ready.”

  “Come to my house.”

  “Yes, I will pop in.”

  The day she dropped by his house, he sent his cook to the market. The cook was so surprised that in the midst of his sweeping he left his broom in the bucket. Hock made tea, he talked, he offered her cookies, he procrastinated, he knew night was falling but did not light his lamp. He tuned his shortwave radio and got music from Rhodesia Radio.

  “Beatriss,” Gala said.

  The word was unpronounceable on the Lower River. The Beatles had just reached southern Africa. Hock poured the only alcohol he had, two glasses of warm vermouth from a dusty sticky bottle.

  “What is this?” She sipped and made a face.

  Behind her head, out the window, across the clearing, the sky was alight in the thickened flames of sunset, and a lamp was glowing on the veranda of a hut, the orange flare in a glass chimney. Night thickened around it. Hock wanted darkness, his face hidden, his jittery fingers unseen.

  In the darkness of his own house, so far from home, among people he liked and trusted, he was surprised at his eagerness, even more surprised by how he seemed—single-minded, slightly breathless, all his attention fixed on Gala. She sat on the creaking rattan sofa opposite, her small rounded head framed by the window and the glow from the distant lantern, her face in shadow. He knew she was smiling by the way she asked about the vermouth, sipping it, the smile an indication of her uncertainty, the sweetish medicinal taste.

  “It is wine?”

  “A kind of wine.”

  “From Portuguese East?”

  All the wine they knew there came as contraband from Mozambique, and the empty bottles were coveted as containers, used as lamps or as water bottles in canoes.

  “From Italy. You like it?”

  She shuddered, she laughed—a new taste in a culture where all tastes were age-old.

  “It is alcoholic, like kachasu.” It was the polite word for nipa.

  “You drink kachasu?”

  “Myself I never take.”

  She wasn’t drinking, only sipping. Hock thought, If she drinks a glass or two, she might get woozy enough to listen. But the vermouth was warm, syrupy even to him. She was politely pretending not to dislike it, to accommodate him. For months she had been a friend, a fellow teacher, but this was the first time he’d been alone with her in the dark.

  “If only we had ice,” he said.

  “Ha! Ice in Malabo, a miracle,” she said. “Even the word we are not having.”

  “Next time, I’ll get some ice from Blantyre,” he said, standing up, delivering the statement like a piece of news, using it as an occasion to take three steps to the sofa, to sit next to her.

  The crackling of the
brittle rattan seat under him, the shiver of the frame as she moved aside, stirred him, as he draped his arm across her shoulder, stroking the white blouse.

  “Put the light, please,” she said.

  “I like it like this.”

  She held herself and said, “I always imagine snakes coming in the dark.”

  “The snakes are afraid of me,” he said.

  “But not of me.” And she sniffed for emphasis. She was quick like that; no one else in Malabo would have had that answer.

  “I’ll protect you.” He hitched nearer and settled his arm on her. She shrank, even under his light touch.

  In that moment he became aware that she was humming the music that was playing on the radio, the song a throbbing murmur in her throat: She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah. She didn’t know any of the verses but she had the rhythm perfectly, and now it was rising in her throat, ringing softly in her head.

  He touched one of her breasts, shaping its softness through the cloth of her blouse. Breasts had no magic in Malabo—most of the women went bare-breasted. Gala didn’t object. She patted his hand as though in chaste friendship.

  “I like you so much,” Hock said.

  “Alice,” she said, her version of Ellis, but nothing more. She held her face away, as if anticipating that he’d kiss her. But though her body was turned to the opposite wall, she held his thigh, seeming to steady herself. And she was canted against him, in his arms, as he stroked her breast. It fitted his hand and the underside had a softness. Her breast was as firm as fruit under her modest buttoned blouse.

  He moved to touch her between her legs, but she resisted with such sudden force it was as though he’d pinched her.