by Paul Theroux
Go into the hut and wash, he could have said. She would have done it. She would have turned away and allowed him to see her. She was shy, but she was willing—too willing; he couldn’t ask.
Yet she always seemed to be obliquely testing him with questions, even asking, “Is there anything else you want?” or in a single word, “Mbiri?”—More?
Hock shook his head and wondered if perhaps he was saying no because there was more power in his resisting her, that his rebuffing her gave him greater authority. But it was simpler than that, and obvious. He was a man in his sixties, a very old man for Malabo. He wanted only to be her benefactor, but the Lower River was a district without remedies.
“She respects you, father,” Manyenga said when he wandered over one day and saw Hock seated between Zizi kneeling and the dwarf squatting in the shade.
Manyenga knew Hock was being uncooperative. As a pretext for the visit—so it seemed—he had brought an old stumbling man, whom he led by one arm. The man held his face upturned in an attitude of listening. He stroked the air with his free hand.
“He is blind,” Manyenga said. “He said he wanted to meet our guest. He has heard about Mister Ellis.”
Hock asked the man his name, but it was Manyenga who answered, “He is Wellington Mwali, from an important family. But he cannot see, so he has no big position.”
The man mumbled to Manyenga.
“He wants to shake your hand.”
Hock reached for the man’s inquiring hand, and shook it, but the man did not let go. He spoke again to Manyenga.
“He says that he knows you are a friend to the snakes. He wants to tell you a story about them.”
“I’d like to hear it.”
“He is a storyteller,” Manyenga said. “That is his position.”
The man seemed to understand what was being said. He smiled with pride and spoke again in his feeble voice.
“He is tired now. He says some other time. But he is clever”—the old man was still speaking softly in a language or a dialect that Hock could not understand—“he knows there are other people, this little man, and this lovely lady.”
“She’s just a girl,” Hock said.
“Girls are better. You can take her as a wife. You can have any woman in this village. You can have anything.”
“No lobola,” Hock said, meaning bride price, because it was the man who paid the dowry in the Lower River.
“You have plenty.”
“I’ve given most of it to you,” Hock said. “And I don’t eat children.”
But Manyenga wasn’t rebuffed. He said, “She is old enough. She can bear you a child. She is making white flour for you!”
Zizi knew she was the subject of this talk. She raised her head, narrowed her eyes, and breathed deeply, and hearing her, the old blind man reached to touch her. She pushed his hand away, and he laughed. He kept laughing softly as Manyenga led him across the clearing.
Zizi still brought news to Hock—talk, the rumors of illness, the whisper that Manyenga’s motorbike was broken, or that a dance would be held. Hock asked about Gala. Zizi said she didn’t know anything, but later she had a story.
Gala was so sad, maybe disappointed. She had been happy to hear through a rumor that Hock had gotten away on the river, even if her heart was sore. But the news that he had been captured made her sad again. The reason was that she had warned him of dangers. And someone—maybe the laundry woman was to blame—had heard and told Festus Manyenga. They went to her house, some boys. They scolded Gala for warning him. They said they would beat her if she was cheeky again. She must not speak to Hock, ever. That was the story, much as she told it.
“I can talk to her,” Hock said. “They can’t hurt me.”
“But Gala, they can hurt her,” Zizi said. “She is very old.”
Younger than me, he thought. But he stayed away. And in her role as his protector, Zizi seemed unusually responsive; resourceful, too, revealing an intelligence and subtlety he had not seen before.
A few days after this conversation, she brought him news that a boy had returned to the village from Blantyre, where he lived, one of Manyenga’s family, a brother—but everyone was a brother.
“What is he doing in Blantyre?”
“Schooling,” Zizi said in English, and again, “Or wucking.”
“I want to see him.”
Zizi took the message to Manyenga—it would have been against protocol for her to go to the boy directly. And it was an indication of how eager Manyenga was to please Hock that the boy visited within a few hours. It seemed that he was prepared to agree with anything that Hock asked, except the only important one, his release. Let me go, he wanted to say again, but he knew what the answer would be. He would not sit and be defied, or lied to, or jeered at, so he didn’t ask. In everything else, he was obeyed. Manyenga had said, You can have any woman in this village.
His name was Aubrey, and he was not a boy—twenty or so —but had the thin careworn face of someone even older. Although it was nearing dusk when he arrived at Hock’s hut, he wore sunglasses. They were new, and there was something menacing in their stylishness. His short-sleeved shirt was new, not one from the secondhand pile at the market, the castoffs from America they called salaula, their word for rummaging. His trousers, too, looked new, and when he saw that Hock was studying them, he offered the information that they were from Europe, a present. He had the slight build and small head and short legs that Hock was used to seeing in the Sena, but he was more confident, somewhat restless, shifting on the stool that Hock offered him, the bamboo one with squeaky legs.
Aubrey had a way of holding his head down at an odd butting angle, with his mouth half open, as though anticipating combat. Just behind his lips, the inside of his mouth was pink. The parted mouth made him seem both hungry and impatient, breathing hard, and for a reason Hock could not explain, the open mouth seemed satirical, too, as if Aubrey was on the point of laughing.
“How old are you?”
“Funny question,” Aubrey said.
“Just a normal question.”
“Twenty-two,” he said, and jerked in his chair, revealing a cell phone in a holster at his belt.
“I want to make a call on your phone,” Hock said.
Now the mouth parted a bit more as Aubrey laughed. “No coverage here. This is the boonies.”
From the first he seemed to have an American accent, an affected one, something slurring and nasal in his delivery, a deliberate carelessness, a gratuitous rapidity. And boonies?
“Where’d you pick that up?”
“My English teacher was an American guy. Malawi’s full of Americans. Look at you. What are you doing here?”
“Funny question,” Hock said.
“Hey, just a normal question. But I know the answer. Americans like coming to the bush. Even big celebrities and rich people. They’re in Monkey Bay, Mzuzu, on the lake. Karonga, and up on the plateau.”
“How do you know that?”
“I see them. My job takes me around.”
“I thought you were a student.”
“I dropped out. It was a waste of time. And it’s a laugh what teachers earn here. I’m in community relations for the Agency.”
“L’Agence Anonyme, that one?”
“Yeah. The chief got me the job. He was a driver for them.”
“But he quit—or was he fired?”
“You have to ask him, bwana.”
Aubrey was quick, his English excellent, yet he seemed winded by the back-and-forth. As if from the effort of his replies, he perspired heavily, rare for a Sena man under a tree at dusk.
“How long are you going to be here in Malabo?”
“I’m day-to-day,” Aubrey said.
No one spoke English well in Malabo. Manyenga’s was generally correct and idiomatic, but his accent made it hard for Hock to understand him at times. This fellow Aubrey spoke English in a way that made him hard to fathom. He was a little too well spoken, evasive, quick to
deflect, so fluent as to sound glib.
“Maybe I’ll see a bit more of you.”
Aubrey said, “Whatever.”
“Community relations sounds important.”
“Not really. Mzungus get afraid in the villages. I run interference,” Aubrey said. “Sometimes damage control.”
Hock nodded, at first impressed by the deft replies, then put on guard by the casual jargon that had worried him with Manyenga.
“The Agency is mostly Europeans. They think we are dirty and dangerous.” Aubrey laughed. “Some of the villages are dirty, but they’re not dangerous. They love the food drops.”
“What’s a food drop?”
“Chopper flies into a prearranged site and unloads.”
“On the Lower River?” Hock asked, pretending ignorance.
“All over.”
“I’d like to see it sometime.”
“It’s usually a zoo.”
“Why is that?”
“Free food. Hungry people. Do the math.” Now Hock began to hate him, but before he could say anything more, Aubrey looked at his watch, which hung loosely, like a roomy bracelet, on his thin wrist, and said, “I gotta go. Maybe catch you later.”
23
THE DAYS BURNED BY, and on some smoldering late afternoons of suffocating aimlessness he felt that if he had a gun, he’d march Festus Manyenga to the creek and, in front of the whole gaping village, riddle him with bullets, then kick his bleeding corpse into the water. He sat on his slanting veranda, imagining this horror, sometimes smiling. Even in the times when they were talking—friendly enough, “We are liking you, father,” “I’m glad I came back,” all that—he wanted to twist a viper around the man’s neck and watch the hammer stroke of the fanged mouth against his terrified face.
Hock had, as well, an image of himself holding a cloth bag, like one of the food bags from the Agency that bulged with rice or flour, saying, “Money, take it,” and watching Manyenga reach into the bag that held—money, yes, but also a knot of venomous snakes. See how their wrist scars of snake medicine worked then.
He was ashamed of his smile and tried to stifle these thoughts —they were desperate, unworthy of him. But not having the strength to attempt another escape made him feel feeble. And though he tried to consider the villagers indulgently, he didn’t trust them. None had helped him; they knew he was helpless, and they were especially cruel to the weak.
Yet Aubrey, fresh from Blantyre, connected to the Agency, was someone from the outer world, moving easily in his new shoes from that world to the village and back; someone who might help him. Manyenga could be enigmatic in his demands—he was superstitious, irrational, excitable, oblique, a villager—but Aubrey, with his smart-guy English and his worldly sarcasm, was different. He was greedy, he was knowable.
“The boy who came yesterday,” Hock said to Zizi the next afternoon as she raked the flour into soft, salt-white heaps on the mat.
“With the shoes, with the watch, with the red eyes”—she had seen him clearly.
“Tell him I want to talk to him.”
Zizi flashed a twitch of understanding with her eyebrows. Adult and conspiratorial, this time she would not go to the chief first. She was Hock’s ally.
“But whisper.”
It was another of the English words she knew. “I weespa.”
Hock thought, I am going to miss you.
“Tomorrow,” she said.
“Better tonight.”
“He is not staying at Malabo.”
“Yes?”
“But at Lutwe. Pafoopi.”
“How near?”
Zizi twisted her lips in vexation, implying not near, an inexact immeasurable distance.
“Is this a problem?”
“Night,” she said.
Hock stared at her with the suggestion of a smile.
“Night is a problem,” she said, using another word for problem, mabvuto, serious trouble.
Now Hock was frankly smiling, challenging her.
“Night is dangerous,” and she used a more severe word, kufa, which meant death.
“Because of”—Hock tried to think of the word for monsters; all he could remember was large beasts. “Zirombo,” he said. “Zirombo zambiri”—lots of beasts.
Zizi frowned, suspecting she was being teased, but she didn’t relent, because she was certain.
“Man,” she said, another English word she knew. She made a face and clutched her body. “And boy.”
“Beasts with two legs,” Hock said in Sena, to lighten the mood. She seemed so glum, and was probably tired, too, from raking and piling the new flour.
“Men,” she said, “wanting women.”
“You could take a torch with you. My big torch.”
“That is worse,” she said in her own language. “With a torch I would be seen.”
He was fascinated by her disclosing her fears, she who never hesitated to help him. He was touched by her seriousness, standing before him, shaven-headed, in her flimsy cloth and bare feet. She was actually resisting him for the first time, trying to explain something to him that mattered to her. The instinctive reluctance of Sena people to go out at night was something he’d always known. Animals prowled at night: crocs crept out of the shallows onto the embankments and into the nearby bush, looking for the carcasses of abandoned kills; hippos browsed in the tall grass after dark; hyenas loped along in packs and grunted and dug in the garbage piles at the edge of Malabo, fighting over bones. Some people spoke of snakes at night, though Hock knew that snakes seldom lurked in the dark, never hunted at that time, even the boomslangs remained in tree branches, never dropping at night.
“Hippos. Hyenas.”
Zizi clicked her tongue against her teeth, emphatically no.
“Mfiti.” Spirits.
Zizi wrinkled her nose in annoyance.
“Just men?”
“Man.” She said the word without any lightness, and showed her teeth, as though she was naming a species of vicious animal.
“What do they want?” he asked.
She stared at him, impatient, as though thinking, Why these ignorant questions?
“They want,” she said, “what all men want.”
But he said, “You can ask the boy in the day. Tell him I want to see him at night.”
So it was another day before Zizi set out for Lutwe, going a roundabout way so she would not be seen, to find Aubrey, to whisper to him that the mzungu wanted to see him in the dark.
Aubrey returned after nightfall the day that Zizi delivered the message. He arrived suddenly, stepping into Hock’s compound with another boy—younger, who didn’t appear to speak any English, who knelt before Hock’s hut near the dwarf, looking nervous, the dwarf grinning at him, mouthing in spittle his mutter, “Fee-dee-dom.”
Aubrey stood aside, just out of the lantern light, scarcely visible.
Two things disturbed Hock about this second visit. One was the way Aubrey sauntered across the clearing, his hands in his pants pockets. He did not observe the customary greeting, calling out, “Odi, odi,” and clapping his hands as an announcement, asking permission to enter the compound. This was rude, and uncommon—Manyenga himself usually said “Odi,” though often in a satirical tone. Hock was keenly aware of the niceties, wary when they were flouted, like the boys in the village of children who had called him mzungu to his face. “Hey, white man” was pure insolence.
The other disturbance was different but just as troubling. Meeting Aubrey for the first time, Hock had taken him to be lean but healthy, certainly healthier and better dressed than anyone else in Malabo. But in the uneven fire of the lantern light Aubrey’s skin was gray, his eyes bloodshot, his face gaunt. He was not lean but thin, and with his sleeves rolled up the skin of his arms was dry, crusted with whitened flakes of scurf. Aware that he was being scrutinized, he removed the sunglasses from his pocket and put them on, to cover his reddened eyes.
Or was this all an effect of the slippery light from the
smoky orange lantern flame with an untrimmed wick? Hock was uncertain, and suspicious. He had lived too much on his nerves.
“You want to see me?”
Aubrey spoke in a low voice. He knew the meeting was secret. And his direct question was so strange to Hock, who was accustomed to the canny obliqueness of Manyenga and the others.
“Have a seat,” Hock said.
Aubrey motioned to Zizi, a two-part hand gesture that indicated “chair”—he pointed to the stool—and “bring it,” a beckoning with a stab of his skinny finger.
“No,” Hock said when Zizi moved toward the stool.
This surprised Aubrey, and the sudden expression revealed a slackness in his face to Hock, who saw how a person’s health is more obvious when making a physical effort.
“She’s not your servant.”
Smiling, Aubrey muttered in Sena to the young man who’d accompanied him. Just a few words, and the boy snatched the stool and moved it to a shadowy spot near Hock. As he sat, Aubrey glanced over at Zizi.
“She is proud,” he said in a tone of resentment, because Zizi had smiled when Hock had intervened.
“She’s got manners.”
“Because she works for the mzungu.”
“I’ve got a name,” Hock said, but before Aubrey could speak again, he said, “You can call me nduna.”
“Okay, chief.”
The boy was quick, in a manner he’d learned from foreigners, as Manyenga had. A sly alertness, not deftness but a slick evasion, and he had the words, too.
“She doesn’t work for me.”
“Whatever,” Aubrey said, tilting his head.
“I’m her guardian.”
Aubrey raised his head, facing Hock, but the sunglasses masked his expression. Was he looking at him in mockery?
“And I don’t want anyone to touch her.”
Aubrey tilted his head again, as though he was silently indicating “Whatever.”
“You understand?”