The Lower River

by Paul Theroux

“What is it?”

  Saying nothing, he opened his mouth wider, as though his gaping mouth, his long bony teeth, helped him hear better. And perhaps they did, because, straining to listen, he began to nod.

  “The fishermen are just now going out.”

  A group of young men in Malabo kept a canoe on the embankment at Marka. They sometimes set off in the middle of the night to walk the twenty miles to the riverside village so they could launch their boat before dawn, enter the channel, and be on the mainstream of the river in daylight.

  “So what?”

  “Moon,” Aubrey said, and made a sweeping gesture with his hand.

  The ruts on the dusty road had the whiteness of new ashes, and the bushes beside them were blue in the moonlight. The tree branches were iced with the same eerie light, for though the moon was a crusted disk, half in shadow, no clouds obscured it. The sky was clear, and the whole landscape glowed, seeming to lie under a coating of frost.

  “They can see,” Aubrey said, without moving but still breathing hard.

  One of the characteristics of the Sena people that Hock had noticed was their ability to sit without stirring for long periods. It was not repose; it was an almost reptilian trait. They kept alert—watchful, anyway—like bush creatures, snakes in dead leaves, lizards on rocks, blending with their surroundings and only their eyelids flicking. Aubrey seemed to slip into this state of immobility, resting against the steering wheel, his head tilted to the side windows, his eyes on the landscape of cold lunar phosphorescence.

  They were near enough to the shallow creek that ran along the right-hand side of the road to hear the gulp of frogs, the odd suck and chirp of insects, and another noise, a rattling like pebbles in a pot, which Hock knew to be the vocalizing of a certain nocturnal heron, with a fish in its throat.

  Hock whispered, “Did you give my message to the Americans?”

  Aubrey sniffed, an ambiguous reply that in its evasiveness Hock took for no.

  “But that’s what I paid you to do.” Hock was still whispering, but more harshly.

  “This is more better.”

  That was a definite no. “So you read my message,” Hock said, louder now. “I gave you something simple to do, but you didn’t do it.”

  “I am helping you,” Aubrey said, and he wheezed the words so softly they were scarcely audible.

  “Where’d you get this van?”

  “The Agency.”

  Now, parked at the edge of the road, Hock felt only confusion—the uncertainty of night and the seeming indecision of Aubrey. He felt that he was about to be subjected to a greater ordeal, perhaps robbed.

  He said, “Listen to me,” and moved his head closer to Aubrey’s. As he did so, he got a whiff of dirt—not just sweat on old clothes but illness, the doggy odor of human decay, the stink of rotting lungs. The darkness inside the van seemed to make the odor sharper and inescapable. Hock winced and went on, “I don’t have much money.”

  “No matter.”

  That answer surprised Hock. He said, “In fact, very little money.”

  Hock wanted to make sure he wasn’t being taken away to be mugged and abandoned. But Aubrey simply nodded, accepting the fact, and faced Hock without blinking. Perhaps Aubrey didn’t really care. Perhaps he was resigned to the hundred dollars Hock had given him, and the promise of a hundred more when they got to Blantyre.

  “So where are you going?”

  “Where you want.”

  “I want to go to Blantyre,” Hock said. And, getting no response, “Now.”

  “Too much moon,” Aubrey said. He hitched himself close to the windshield and twisted his face to look at the sky, making a false smile from the effort, his teeth showing in his narrow face, the shadows of his sharp features turning his face into a mask. “But some clouds are coming.”

  Hock saw a mass of purple clouds, whitened at their edges by the moon, rising from where the river entered Mozambique, like smoke swelling upward from a bush fire. He watched the clouds advance, broadening, thinning, in the same way as smoke in still air. He found himself silently urging them on, and when the first wisps flickered past the bright moon and veiled it, lifting into shadow, Hock stamped his foot as though on the accelerator.

  “Okay, let’s go.”

  Too slowly for Hock’s liking, Aubrey cocked his head again, then turned the key and started the engine. He held the wheel awkwardly, gripping it at the top with both hands, hanging on it like a new driver. Then they were moving again, bumping over ruts, brushing the tall grass at the side. Aubrey switched on the fog lights, and they showed the road ahead as bouldery and crusted with mud like a dry streambed.

  Aubrey was nervous, he drove badly, and Hock thought, He’s going so slow I could jump out here and walk back to Malabo. He knew this bend in the road. They were passing the bank of the shallow creek that lay just past the tall grass, where the village women washed their clothes on the flat rocks and often bathed in the seclusion of the reeds.

  Then Aubrey groaned. Hock heard him above the engine that was racing, then slowing, as Aubrey thumped the gas pedal, too hard, then too softly, uncoordinated, the clumsiness of a beginner—or was he as ill as he seemed?

  He was moving jerkily, accelerating over each bump, braking as he faltered forward.

  “What is it?” Hock said, peering through the windshield. The dirty glass distorted the road.

  “You did not give him money!” Aubrey shouted.

  Up ahead, in the feeble glow of the fog lights, the ragged boy stood with Manyenga.

  Behind this man and boy, spectral in the dim light, a tree lay across the road. Fresh chips that had flown from the stump littered the ground—the tree had just been chopped down—and though it was slender, it was an obstacle. There was no way around it. Manyenga, looking fierce, like an executioner, held the panga he had used on the tree, and the ragged boy from twenty minutes ago, beside him, scowling.

  “Back up,” Hock said.

  “Cannot.” Aubrey had slowed the van to a crawl.

  “It’s not my fault.”

  “It is being your fault one hundred percent,” Aubrey said hoarsely. “You sent the boy away with nothing.”

  “Why didn’t you give him something?”

  “You are the mzungu.”

  “So what?”

  “You are the money!”

  But by then Manyenga was at Hock’s side of the van. He snatched the door open. He was in shadow now, but Hock could smell his strong odor—a whiff of anger, the sweaty effort of hacking down the tree, his body reeking of hostility.

  Manyenga spoke rapidly in Sena to Aubrey, hissing at him. It must have been insulting, because it had a physical effect on him: Aubrey slackened his grip on the steering wheel and looked beaten.

  “You want to stay with him?” Manyenga said to Hock.

  Aubrey had turned his face away from the men.

  “You want to die?”

  “I want to go to Blantyre. I want to go home,” Hock said in a whisper of fury.

  Manyenga laughed so hard it brought on a coughing fit. He smacked the panga against his thigh, the big knife slapping at his dirty trousers.

  “This is your home, father.”

  Out of pride, seeing it was hopeless, Hock got out before Manyenga ordered him to, and he walked a few steps from the van, keeping away from the light.

  “Mzungu,” the ragged boy said in two insolent grunts—zoon-goo. Now Hock understood: because he had not tipped him, the boy had run to Manyenga’s to tell him that Hock was fleeing. Malabo was only minutes from the left-hand side of the road. The boy would get something from Manyenga.

  On the footpath through the tall grass, Hock picked his way in the half-dark of the cloud glow, parting the moonlit blades of grass.

  “Why do you hate me?” Manyenga asked.

  Hock said nothing, but Manyenga was aggrieved, or pretending to be, slashing at the grass with his bush knife.

  “I have been protecting you!”

  Swis
hing through the grass, Hock said in a small defeated voice, “I want to go.”

  “You are so ungrateful,” Manyenga said. “And you are ignorant, too.”

  The night was peaceful, not cool, though the heat was softened by the darkness. Hock knew without seeing any huts that they were at the perimeter of the village—he could smell the mud huts, the dead cooking fires, the human odors, old food, dead skin, dusty faces, sour feet, the stink of latrines.

  “He was kidnapping you,” Manyenga said. “These people are thieves. He is a thief. I know this boy Aubrey. His father is my cousin. They think they are powerful. They work for the Agency. You don’t know!”

  “How do you know so much?”

  “That small boy told me everything. He knows the secrets. He was so angry. He said, ‘The mzungu gave me nothing.’”

  “I should have given him something. Then I’d be free.”

  “No, bwana. Don’t you see what they were going to do with you?”

  “What were they going to do with me?”

  Manyenga didn’t answer. Instead, he said loudly, “You are our chief, dear father.”

  The talk had woken the roosters, which began to crow, unseen in the darkness. Across the clearing Hock could see a flashlight, and a length of its yellow beam wagging, coming closer, maybe Zizi.

  PART V

  Ghost Dance

  26

  ALL DAY LONG in Malabo the heat sank lower, darting its tongue at him, licking at his head, swelling, growing heavier, dropping over him, creeping closer as the day ran on, encircling him. Often there was no sky at all, nothing that matched the word, the sun just a ragged patch of muted light in a threadbare blanket overfolded above him, no blue anywhere, nothing but the fuzzy canopy of gray over the colorless village. The dimmer the sun got, the hotter it was, squeezing his eyelids shut, offering dancing mirages, like sprites flitting across his closed eyes. The heaviness stifled the last of his energy, and he thought, Never mind, and decided to stay in his chair. The heat turned him into someone else, someone he hardly knew, and in a voice he hardly recognized, he called out to Zizi for a drink.

  That was probably how everyone here always felt, the reason so little happened. He did not despair at the lack of effort; he was astonished that anything was accomplished at all. Another escape attempt had been a failure, and with each successive failure he became smaller, emptier, narrower, feeling slowly devoured and different. They will eat your money and then they will eat you.

  You come with money to the poor, and they are so frenzied by hunger that all they see is the money. They never see your face, and so when the money is gone, you are revealed as mere flesh: a surprise. They don’t know you. Who can you be?

  Manyenga, believing he was a virtuoso, never understanding how barefaced he was, came back again for money. Hock hesitated at first, but gave him some so the man would listen to him.

  “I was once a businessman,” Hock said.

  “That means you are lucky, like an Indian.”

  “That means I understand the law of diminishing returns,” Hock said. “That’s the only law that operates here.”

  Manyenga smiled and cocked his head, as though he’d heard a phrase of music. Then he folded the money into his pocket, saying, “Thank you, father.”

  He was mocked by the memory of the grateful man he’d been on the first day. And he saw he was changed, a different man, not bitter but sad, and more accepting. He was exhausted by his failed escapes, and the malaria from weeks back had not completely left him. A residue of tainted blood remained in his veins, bringing him down again, with symptoms like the flu: fever and muscle aches and weakness and no appetite. He felt a lassitude from the heat, from his disturbed sleep, from his being continually thwarted. He was unsteady on his feet, and the surprise to him was not that he despaired of his captivity, but that he was often in his smallness absurdly grateful to be waited on.

  “Make hot water—tea,” he called again to Zizi.

  He had always thought of himself as strong for his age, still willing—hadn’t this strength taken him back to Africa? But for the first time in his life he had an intimation of old age. These days in Malabo he felt like a fossil, like Norman Fogwill in Blantyre, or like those toothless elders—younger than he was—gabbing under the tree at Marka village by the river. He was weary, with a shaky hand, and he smiled to think of Manyenga’s plot to tempt him with a teenage girl. Zizi, his only friend!

  Yet he was resentful, and some days after “You are our chief, dear father,” he grew sullen, knowing that this flattery was no more than an elaborate insult, Festus Manyenga trapping him with lies. He was in his hut, unable to stand the pressure of the heat on his body and the way the heated air raised the stinks of the village. He lay in his string bed, his mouth half open, breathing slowly. He was dazed, groggy from the heat.

  Someone knocked, then he heard two handclaps, and Zizi’s voice, her soft singsong inquiry, “Odi?”

  She entered, padded to the side table. The mirror shook as she set the cup of tea down.

  Lying on his side, too tired to move, he was studying her reflection in the mirror. He spoke to the mirror. “I want to see you.”

  Bewilderment showed on her pinched girl’s face for a moment, which gave way to a half-smile, almost womanish, as if she was quietly pleased he was asking something of her.

  “Yes, father.”

  “Take off your chitenje.”

  She drew in her lips and bit down on them, vexed, her face compressed in thought. Hock made a spiraling gesture with his finger that meant “unwrap.”

  Zizi hesitated, and then, as though remembering, became calmer, turned away, and unknotted her cloth. She draped it over the chair back and faced him again, her hands clasped below her waist for the sake of modesty.

  Still watching her in the mirror, Hock said, “Dance.”

  She didn’t move, she simply blinked at the command, uvina.

  “Dance,” he said, pleading.

  It was late afternoon, the hottest time of day, the afternoon sun like a gray coal glowing in the glare of a smothering fattened cloud, slanting through the windows of the hut, the heat trapped in the motionless air under the tin roof. Zizi was perspiring, looking confused, hesitating on the uneven boards of the hut floor.

  Picking up her cloth, she wrapped it loosely around her hips and left the hut, her feet thumping on the veranda planks and then on the steps as she fled.

  I have lost her, Hock thought. He pressed his feverish head, tried to ease his burning eyes by massaging them with his fingers. As soon as he’d made the suggestion, he knew it had been a mistake. She was a girl, devoted to him—but a girl. And it was a great mistake because he had no other friend in Malabo. He rationalized what he’d said by telling himself that he was in despair. He had not embraced the village, but had decided to do just that, wishing to lift his spirits, by asking Zizi to dance for him, the only sweetness that Malabo was capable of offering him. But it was selfish and ill-timed. I have gone too far.

  He heard the thump of feet on the loose planks of the veranda, the door opening and closing quickly, a gasp of effort, the small crooked bolt shot. Zizi stood in the hut, against the afternoon sun at the window. He could not see her face, only the outline of her long skinny body in silhouette, no features, no face, only darkness defined by the glare from outside.

  She turned away and hung her cloth on the window, to serve as a curtain, and when she faced him again, with light on her body, Hock could see that she was white from head to toe, and looking closer, he understood. She was dusted in white flour. She had stepped outside and rolled herself naked on the mat of maize flour that she herself had pounded and spread to bleach in the sun. She had sprinkled the flour on her head, rubbed it on her face, her breasts, her whole body.

  Some dancers whitened their faces with flour, some women sprinkled flour on themselves in order to achieve trance states, believing the spirit would come to inhabit this suitably decorated body. But Hock had n
ever seen or heard of any woman this way, coated in white flour, with smooth powdered skin.

  Thus arrayed, entirely whitened in flour, she danced for him. Her body was so thin it seemed incomplete, unfinished, yet her nakedness was softened and made sculptural with the dusting of white.

  Untwining her fingers, lifting her hands, bending slightly, she parted her legs, then raised one knee and then the other, rolling her head—all the time looking aside, meeting his gaze only in the mirror. She planted her feet lightly, as she’d done at the feast. She had slender arms, spindly legs, and small staring breasts; her eyes gleamed with anxiety. As she danced, humming softly, stepping forward then back, raising her arms, she shook the grains of flour from her body. They dropped to the floor, and stepping in the flour, she left a pattern of dusted footprints.

  Lying on his cot, glancing from the mirror to Zizi and back again, without moving, almost unable to breathe, Hock lay watching her whitened form. He ached with desire. He had never known such an agony of pleasure as this simple performance, the slow ghost dance, the powdered legs rising and falling, her head twisting on her long agile neck, the grains of flour sifting to the floor as she danced.

  ***

  Someone must have seen. It took only one person to see, for everyone to know. She had been reckless: she’d gone outside and rolled on the mat of flour in front of her hut, near the mortar. She’d taken the risk to please him; in his wildest fantasies he would not have thought of her doing that, and if he had, he would not have dared to ask her. But once she had started, he could not bear the thought of her stopping. And when, after a long while, she found herself dancing in darkness, she giggled a little and snatched her wrap from the window and ran out of the hut.

  He had not gone near her, only watched. The flour was a barrier—perhaps she knew that. Dusted that way, she was untouchable.

  Soon afterward, the whole village seemed to know what happened. And that incident, an example of his weakness—resentment, boredom, a pang of desperation—had the effect of convincing the village that he meant to stay, that he’d found a way of being happy, that at last Zizi had devised a strategy to satisfy him, perhaps to please him. Was it considered odd in Malabo that Zizi had coated herself in flour to dance for him? Perhaps not. And it was not unknown for a woman to dance with a whitened face. To do so naked was simply taking it to the extreme. It had worked; it had cost nothing; and the mzungu was satisfied. They could not have known his true feeling, that he had watched her with inexpressible delight.