The Lower River

by Paul Theroux

  Having survived, he was wiser if not stronger. And the order of his life here helped. He wasn’t alone. Sitting there, flicking at flies—they were tsetses, small and quick, biting flies that left a pinch on his skin—staring into open space, he tried to work out how long he had been in Malabo. He had believed it to be six weeks. But was it? The arrival week was vivid in its reminders, because it was all he had planned to spend there. The second week was emphatic with disappointment—the ruined school, his pointless labor. After that, an effort to get away. The dance. The visit to Gala and finally his fleeing downriver, now over a week ago. More than six weeks, now into the seventh, maybe two months. He was mocked by this passage of time in which he had accomplished nothing, made more futile by the thought that he was not sure exactly how much time had passed—he who had measured every hour of every day he’d spent at his store in Medford.

  He could not find the confidence to think about leaving now. He was physically well, but his mind was too battered to have answers, and it took him a long time to concentrate. He was content to sit, to do nothing, to contemplate his small shady courtyard. He was oddly reassured by the girl Zizi, waiting for him to ask something, and by the dwarf Snowdon, who sat blinking at the flies gathered and hurrying around his eyes.

  The next day, Manyenga was back. Hock had seen him crossing the clearing from his cluster of huts, and he could tell from the way Manyenga walked—determined, forcing himself to march—that he had a favor to ask or a demand to make. It was an importuning walk, elbows out, head forward. He wanted something.

  “Yes, father,” he said, and uttered all the formulaic Sena greetings—that too indicated that he’d be demanding. At last he said, “You instructed me to come back, and myself here I am.”

  “With your hand out.”

  Instead of standing, out of respect, or asking Manyenga to sit, he remained on his creaky chair, enjoying the man’s discomfort as he rocked on his heels.

  “Because you are owing us too much of money.”

  “Why do I owe you?” Hock said. “I came here many weeks ago to visit you. I was going to leave, but somehow I am still here.”

  “As our honored guest. As minister. As our friend.”

  “Is that why I owe you?”

  “No, my friend,” Manyenga said, and looked fixedly at him. “At the Agency you came away with nothing at all. They didn’t respect you—no.”

  The truth of this was hurtful. He remembered the sneering man, the African servant offering him a drink of warm water, his being threatened and sent away, and his turning and walking into the bush, on a muddy game trail, tramping the leaf litter.

  “And myself I rescued you.”

  The memory of all that was so painful that Hock cut him short, saying, “How much do you want?”

  “Petrol, food, transport,” Manyenga said, beginning to itemize, his way of nagging.

  “Let me go,” Hock said. “I’ll send you money.”

  “You never will.”

  “I promise.”

  “Just words. How will we know?”

  Manyenga wasn’t sentimental; he wasn’t even pretending to like Hock. He was fierce and toothy, with cold eyes, and he seemed to enjoy reminding Hock that he was a hostage by telling him he was a guest.

  “How much?” Hock repeated in a lower voice.

  “What is the price of one human life?” Manyenga asked.

  What Agency hack had taught him that sentence? Hock had kept some money in his pocket for just such an occasion, so he wouldn’t have to rummage for it in Manyenga’s presence. He took out some folded-over bills and handed them over.

  Manyenga did not close his fingers around the money. He let it rest on his open palm.

  “See? We are worth nothing,” he said.

  As though suspecting that Hock had the advantage, the dwarf crept over to Manyenga and clawed at his trouser leg, setting his head to the side as if he was going to bite him.

  Manyenga kicked out at him, and the dwarf tumbled into the dust, honking in protest.

  But already Hock was on his feet. He stepped off the veranda and stood so close to Manyenga that his chin was in the man’s face. He was at least six inches taller than Manyenga.

  “Don’t you ever do that again,” Hock said, and nudged the man back, bumping him with his chest. At this the dwarf looked up and smiled, showing his broken teeth. “Say sorry.”

  Manyenga faced him with reddened eyes.

  “Say pepani.”

  Now Snowdon understood and looked pleased.

  “Pepani to you.”

  “Now leave us alone,” Hock said.

  “Not until I say one thing more, father. Remember this. When your rival stands on an anthill, never say ‘I have caught you’ until you are up there yourself.”

  With that, he left, the same determination in his stride that he had on his arrival. And Hock remained among the screaming cicadas in the thin hot air and the dusty trees and the gray sun in a sagging spider web of sky, and the dwarf mewling, all of it like aspects of his futility. He was miserable, but there was grim precision to it, and he took comfort in his condition, knowing that it was true, that it was exact, that he was not being fooled in his suffering.

  22

  HE RESENTED BEING captive in this flattened vegetating place, and he had come to hate the idiot wisdom of the proverbs these ragged people subjected him to. I never want to hear another proverb, he thought, or another opinion from someone so obviously doomed. If there was anything true or lasting in the village, it was in their dancing, but like so much else, this authentic expression of the past had become flat-footed. Instead of grieving for himself, he lamented the village that had disappeared utterly, its school buildings fallen, its well gone dry, its spirit vanished; lamented the evaporated essence of a place that he knew from its bitter residue of dust, like the skid of a footprint of someone who had fled for good. Malabo had become an earlier, whittled-down version of itself, recalling a simpler, crueler time, of fetishes and snake doctors and chicken-blood rituals.

  The Lower River he’d dreamed of as a happy refuge for almost forty years; the embankment of beached canoes that had been hewn from ancient fat trees; the shaded village of dried mud, of thick-walled huts with cool interiors, and of smooth swept courtyards of strutting cockerels and plump chickens; the dense foliage of low trees like parasols of green; the narrow footpaths, the half-naked women and the men in neatly patched shirts, the coherence of the tidy weeded gardens of millet and sorghum and pumpkins, and the veiled drapery of strung-up fishing nets; and most of all the welcome, the warm greeting that was without suspicion or threat; something golden in the greenery lighted by the river, the warmth that kept him hopeful for all those years—gone, gone.

  What he recalled now on these days of recovery after his thwarted escape was his reluctance to leave, all those years ago, the sadness he felt, not because he was going home to be with his ailing father, but at having to uproot himself from a life he had come to love, the school flourishing, the diligent hopeful students, the self-sufficiency of the people in the village. Back in Medford, among the shelves and glass display cases of expensive clothes, he remembered how in Malabo they mended their shirts, the small picked-out stitches, the sewn-up slashes, the new knees on trousers, the thick thready darns on elbows. Nothing was thrown away, nothing wasted. He had smoked a pipe then. The flat empty tobacco cans of the Player’s Navy Cut he bought at Bhagat’s were coveted in the village and became utensils, along with his occasional cup-like cans emptied of Springbok cigarettes. He too wore patched clothes. “My grandfather was a tailor,” he told the man who worked the treadle-powered Singer sewing machine on the veranda of the Malabo grocery shop. He was proud of his patches. People stood straight, worked hard, and were grateful for the smallest kindness. They asked for nothing.

  All that had vanished, and what was worse, not even a memory of it remained. The villagers hadn’t been innocent before—there’d been petty thieves in Malabo, and he’
d been robbed of a knife, a pen, books, money, an alarm clock, all stolen from his hut or the school. And there had been some bad feeling over his dalliance with Gala, but nothing audible. Now the big trees had been cut down for firewood, and there was no shade in the glary place. The baobab was a stump and a snake nest. The people had seemed unusual to him before, in their gentleness, in the way they had managed the land, their obvious attachment to it. The earth is our mother, a man might say, standing in a furrow with a mattock. They weren’t corrupt now; they were changed, disillusioned, shabby, lazy, dependent, blaming, selfish; they were like most people. You didn’t have to come all this way to be maddened by them. You could meet them almost anywhere.

  He could not tell how this had come about. He hardly asked, he didn’t care, and he was disappointed in himself for his indifference. Yet he did not want to care more than they themselves did. He hated their extracting the trickle of money from him, hated the lies they told him, the lies he was telling them.

  And now that he’d traveled partway down the river toward Morrumbala, the humpy, steep-sided rock pile of a mountain, and seen the smaller villages and the settlements on the embankment of the wide river, the strange hideout of children, the free-for-all in the open field, the militaristic depot of the charity, L’Agence Anonyme—after this failed escape, an exposure to the hinterland around Malabo, he was more disillusioned than ever. The flourishing Lower River was gone, its very greenness faded like a plucked leaf. He was trapped in a rotting province that he had once known as promising and self-sufficient and proud. He wanted to forget it all, to leave, but they frustrated every attempt he’d made. No one had hurt him, but their sullen stares suggested to him a greater menace. He simply did not know what to do and where to go. He was broken; he was part of the chaos.

  Nothing in his life had prepared him for this. Now he remembered a particular day when Roy Junkins came to the store. Roy was thinner, not pale but sallow, yellowish even, his eyes set deeper in loose ashen sockets, as though he’d been ill and was still recovering. When he smiled, Hock saw missing teeth.

  Hock was straightening jackets on a display rack, shaking them to free their sleeves. “Royal—haven’t seen you for a while.”

  “Been away,” the man said, and looked sheepish, because it seemed there was no more to say. And there was a gentle laugh he had, of self-deprecation.

  “You feeling all right?”

  “I’m Kool Moe Dee,” Roy said, one of his formulas. “I am back in the world. Heh.”

  A note in his voice, of relief, suggested that a story of struggle lay behind his sudden good humor.

  “You been far?”

  “Very far, Ellis.” That laugh again. “Concord.”

  Hock smiled at the absurdity of it—Concord wasn’t far. And then it hit him: Concord Prison.

  “Why didn’t you get in touch?”

  “I needed time to think about how I ended up there,” Roy said. “Not a thing you coulda done to help me. My sister visited. But the headline about being inside is, you are on your own.”

  And then, in a matter-of-fact way, Roy told Hock the details, how from the first he had been picked on in prison, his dinner plate snatched from in front of him, and he’d had to fight to defend himself. He’d been hit in the face by a man (“white dude”) swinging a sock with a lump of metal inside, a steel padlock perhaps. “And that’s how I lost my grille”—his teeth missing. He’d been intermittently bullied after that, but in time had found a degree of protection with a black faction in the prison. “Imagine—me!”—because Roy had always taken pride in distancing himself from any cause, rejoicing in being a loner. “But the brothers helped me,” he said, shaking his head at the memory of it. “They were good.”

  His stories were of confinement, insecurity, threat, and intimidation. He’d been hurt, he’d been robbed, his cell ransacked. Younger, weaker, fearful inmates were raped.

  “You couldn’t tell the guards or—what?—the warden?”

  “Guards don’t run prisons,” he said in his growly comic voice. “Prisoners run prisons. They make the rules. And they got some hard rules. If you snitch, you die. And you learn a few other things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Learn to say ‘sir.’ Heh.”

  “How long were you inside?”

  “Almost a year.” Then, rubbing his hands and moving sideways to a display case, he said, in a subject-changing tone, “Show me some shirts, man. Something fine.”

  He never told Hock what the conviction was for: a year—probably drugs, a small amount. But the details stayed with Hock, the stories of being bullied, the extortion, the threats, his being alone, confined, under siege.

  Malabo was a prison now, and the only strength that Hock had was bluff. Why did he not feel self-pity? He grieved for the vanished village, as Gala had done, and he thought of Chicky, but not as the selfish young woman who had demanded her share of his settlement, on the granting of his divorce, saying, “If I don’t get it now, I’ll never see it.”

  Chicky at her smallest and sweetest was the face he saw: at her most unsuspecting, the way she laughed, her chattering in a big chair, her bluish lighted face in front of the TV set, laughing at something silly. And to please him once—because he’d begun to smile—she lip-synched to a reggae song, hunched her shoulders and mouthed the words to “Dem Get Me Mad,” and told him the singer was someone called Yellow Man. One day, missing her, he’d leafed through her school notebook and found, in her scrawl, I want to be cool, and had to fight back tears. Another time, he watched her through a crack in the door to her room, putting on lipstick—she couldn’t have been more than eight or nine. The little neat bundle of bus tickets, held by a rubber band—what urgency in her heart had made her save them? On a walk in the Fells, she was probably twelve, she saw a robin and said, “Turdus migratorius,” and blinked and pressed her lips in a kind of mild pedantry. On the same walk, pleased with herself, she took his hand and said, “When I grow up I want to live in a little cottage.”

  She hadn’t been a lonely child. She’d been confident enough. But he’d seen her in the purity and blindness of her innocence. She did not know what was coming, the blight, the cynicism, the disappointment, and then her marriage, which was for him a sorry giveaway; and at last as a young woman she demanded money from him, and that poisoned everything. He needed to remember that she had once been blameless. He grieved for that child.

  There was no consolation for him in the thought “Everything happens for the best,” because that was general and his misery was particular. Hock did not dare to consider his own plight. The thing was to become strong again. Oppressed by the heat, the bad food, and his futile escape attempt, he was dazed, sensing that he might be dehydrated. He knew the symptoms, and he had them—headaches, lassitude, muscle aches, and sometimes he could barely speak.

  Zizi was unchanged. She was like Gala, whom he had known all those years ago: uneducated, but just as strong, like the original women of the Sena. She gave him hope. In his weakened condition, Zizi acted for him, brought him the hot kettle for tea, and filled the basin so he could wash. Since arriving back from his weeklong escape, he’d stopped eating at Manyenga’s, or even visiting, as an act of rebellion. Zizi brought him food. Though he offered to share it, she refused. She squatted with the dwarf, watching him eat, waiting for another order. She saw to the washing and ironing of his clothes, and the ironing was something he insisted on, because of the eggs of the putzi flies. He’d been through that before. Zizi was patient, obedient, observing him with large dark eyes, her knees drawn up, her chin resting on them, and wrapped in her purple chitenje cloth. While he’d been away, thinking he’d gone for good, she had mourned him in the traditional way, by letting her hair grow—only a week, but it showed. On his return, she shaved her head and held it proudly erect.

  A few days after he returned, Hock woke at first light to hear a familiar thumping outside his hut, the thud-thud of a pestle dropped into a wooden mortar. He
saw that Zizi was crushing maize into flour, standing under the tree, the air heavy with the static heat of morning stillness. She hugged the heavy pestle, lifted it, and let it drop, and as it did, her head jerked from the effort, her whole body falling back. Her face and head gleamed; she was never blacker than when she was sweating. She lifted her shoulders and, taking a deep breath, saw Hock at the window and smiled, then shyly covered her mouth.

  Later that day, he saw that Zizi had spread a large mat on the ground in the sunniest part of the courtyard and scattered the newly pounded flour on it, to bleach in the bright light. In Malabo there was an informal competition among the women to make the whitest flour. From the veranda, he saw Zizi on her hands and knees sweeping the flour, turning it on the mat with a paddle, and his heart ached.

  He could have said, he knew, “Go into the hut. Take your chitenje off. Get into the bed and wait for me.” She had obeyed him without a word the morning of his escape, crawling into the bed. He could have summoned her into the hut at any hour of the day or night.

  But because of this power and of her obedience, because he could demand and receive anything from her, whatever he wanted, he didn’t ask. He only watched: Zizi’s bones, her skinny legs, her big feet, her full lips and shining eyes, the glimpses of her small breasts, the way she stood at times like a heron, on one leg. His wish was to see her crossing the stream to bathe, as he’d done on his first day, the way she danced, stepping deeper and deeper into the water, lifting her cloth higher against her legs. He wanted to stand behind the mango tree at the embankment and watch her strip naked, soaping herself, her black skin gleaming with creamy bubbles. But someone would see him.