The Lower River

by Paul Theroux

  But they knew he was beguiled. A man with brown blotches on the whites of his eyes, a cousin to Manyenga (he said brother, but brother was a general term), came to him and said he wanted to buy a motorbike. He did not mention money; that was understood.

  “And what will you do for me?” Hock said.

  “Zizi will dance for you, sure.” The man stared at him, a smile in his spotted eyes, and he said no more.

  Hock handed him some money, saying, “But I want a ride on your bike to the boma.”

  “I will give you, father.”

  Hock was ashamed. He wondered if money alone was sufficient atonement for his lapse of judgment. But he also knew it was a setup. And he longed for Zizi to perform her ghost dance again, but secretly, so that no one would see.

  Manyenga visited after that. Hock told him of the man who claimed to be his brother.

  “He will eat the money. He will drink the money,” Manyenga said. And then he asked for another loan.

  They knew how much he had. They’d stolen some; they could take the rest at any time.

  But as a way of jeering at him, Hock said, “Remember the law of diminishing returns?”

  The day of Manyenga’s visit, Hock set off across the compound with Zizi and Snowdon. He heard the warning whistle, and ignoring it, still walking, the whistle became more insistent, drowning out all other sounds, even the shrillness of the birds. Some of the older boys followed him, keeping just behind him. Hock walked in an almost stately way, holding a basket to his chest. It was the basket in which he kept his money with the snake.

  At the creek bank, he stooped and released the snake onto the hot sand, but before the snake could gather itself and slip away, Hock pinned it with a forked stick and let it thrash, whipping a pattern into the swale of sand with its thickened body. The village saw him bearing the empty basket from the creek and across the clearing to his hut, Zizi and the dwarf following him in a shuffling procession. The snake, a puff adder, was not especially venomous, but to Malabo it was deadly. They would know it was safe to steal from him again, and when the money was gone they’d release him.

  After that, they didn’t whistle in the same way after he left his hut—it wasn’t the rising note of urgency that became shriller; it was a softer note, like birdsong, just a signaling tweet. And he knew why.

  He walked to the ruined school, looked in on the orphan boys in their lair at the old school office. He went to the clinic and the creek bank, or to the graveyard near the mango tree, where no one ever went because of the azimu, the malicious spirits of the dead, that were invisibly twisted in the air there—Zizi and the dwarf hung back, crouching at a distance, as he sat in the shade of the tree, unapproachable, among the tumbled piles of burial stones.

  And whenever he returned to his hut, almost without fail some money was missing from the basket where he’d kept the snake.

  During this week—the week of the separate raids on his stash of money—he fell ill again. This time it came quickly, wrenching him sideways. It hit him as he was walking back from the ruined school, first a dizziness, then an aching throat and pain behind his eyes, a soreness in his limp muscles, and an urgent thirst.

  He wondered whether it was the return of his malaria, or dehydration. He sat down on the bare ground and pressed his eyes. He could not walk any farther. He called for water, though he knew he might be past the point of being able to absorb any liquid.

  “Water with salt,” he murmured to Zizi, and remembered mchere. But she smiled at the word and seemed too bewildered to move. “And sugar.”

  Women carrying babies in cloth slings on their way home from hoeing weeds in the pumpkin fields stopped and watched him, more out of curiosity than pity, as he clutched his head.

  “Mzungu,” he heard them whisper. And, “Sick.”

  What happened to “chief”? They surrounded him as they would have a dog in distress, or any dying creature, and therefore a diversion and not a threat.

  Snowdon was near him. Hock saw him from between his numbed fingers, creeping close.

  “Water,” Hock said, and repeated it in Sena.

  The dwarf scuttled away on his wounded feet, and was soon back, approaching Hock with an enamel cup. But leaning over, he stumbled and lost it. The women laughed and clapped, excited by the spectacle, the slumped man, the patch of dampened dust, the dirty cup, the dwarf on his knees.

  Snowdon retrieved the cup and gave it to Hock. Even though the cup was empty, the dark dust clinging to its rim, in a lunge of desperation Hock gripped it as if for balance. He held it to his face and licked at it and tasted grit. And the women screeched again.

  Encouraged by the laughter, the dwarf snatched the cup from him. The women laughed so loudly that more people came to see—the orphan boys, some men kicking through the dust with their T-shirts hiked up to the top of their heads to keep off the sun. Hock was surrounded by the whole village, it seemed. But only the dwarf dared to come near him.

  “Fee-dee-dom,” the dwarf cried out, and the women laughed.

  Zizi tried to protect Hock, scolding the dwarf, but the women shouted her down. One woman pushed her aside, and the dwarf poked Hock with his own walking stick. Hock was helpless to resist, and when he looked up the dwarf was drooling through his broken teeth, with a bruised eager face, rushing at him wild-eyed.

  Although Hock was enfeebled, struggling to sit upright, the dwarf seemed reluctant to touch him. But he threw pebbles at him, and he mock-charged him. He grunted—he used no language, only low notes bubbling from his snotty nose. But when Hock tumbled into the dust, and a cry went up, the dwarf began kicking him, straining with snuffling grunts, to the rejoicing of the crowd.

  Hock’s tongue was so swollen when he woke, he could barely breathe. He was still clothed, on his string bed in the hut.

  “Chief.”

  They must have seen his eyes flutter. Without moving, he saw two figures backlit at the window, big and small. One of them was speaking.

  “Mfumu.” It was Manyenga, murmuring the word for chief.

  The smaller figure was Zizi, creeping toward him with the same sort of enamel cup that the dwarf had offered him. Hock raised himself and drank, expecting water, but it was thick and salty—soup—and as he lapped at it he sensed it easing his throat, seeping into his flesh, his body greedy for the salty liquid.

  “More,” he pleaded when he’d finished.

  Manyenga ordered the girl to fetch more soup, and lemon water mixed with sugar and salt. When she was gone, Manyenga spoke again, and though Hock could not tell whether the man was speaking English or Sena, the word “chief” was repeated.

  With more of the soup, Zizi kneeling, ready to receive the empty cup, Hock was able to sit up in the string bed, propped against the woven back wall of the hut. Manyenga was standing with his back to the light, but even so, Hock knew that the man was smiling, and something in his posture said that he was relieved to see Hock’s strength returning.

  But that was just a fleeting moment. After another drink Hock sank back, twisted on the string bed, his mouth open. Just before he slipped into another doze, he heard Manyenga speak again, and became aware from a rustling of voices that a throng of people had gathered outside the hut.

  “Mfumu yayikulu,” Manyenga was saying in a voice that sounded awestruck and almost fearful. “Great chief.”

  In the morning Hock sat up with a clearer head and felt well enough to walk, shuffling like an old man. Zizi knelt on the veranda. The dwarf crouched in his usual place, with a torpid smile that showed his cracked teeth.

  “Bring me some food,” Hock said.

  Zizi ran to her hut, fed her smoldering fire, and began to prepare a meal, with a clatter of tin pots.

  Hock went to the basket that he’d shoved under his bed. He didn’t stoop over—it made him dizzy to move his head. He kicked the basket, and he knew before it tipped over that all the envelopes of money were gone. Seeing the empty basket, he laughed. His laughter must have made an eeri
e sound, because when he turned toward the doorway, the dwarf rolled sideways through it, then stood and tottered away.

  Zizi brought a dish of porridge and some bananas and a cup of milky tea. As she set them down on the table, Hock reached over and held her hand. It was scaly, the skin almost snake-like, slippery, her fingertips hardened from work, the whole hand toughened and yet slender and small. She moved closer, biting her sucked-in lips. He saw mingled pity and gladness in her eyes.

  “Dance,” he whispered.

  Her giggling made him release her. Snowdon clapped his hands against his face, as though mimicking a shocked schoolgirl, scandalized by what he was seeing.

  The spell of dehydration had slowed him and made him watchful. For the rest of the day he sat in the shade of his veranda, moving only to slap at flies. As the sun dropped to the level of the trees at the edge of the clearing, he broke a branch from the tree that overhung his hut and made himself a stick.

  Followed by Zizi and the dwarf, he walked along the barrier of elephant grass, crossed the clearing, and pushed through the waist-high weeds to the ruined school. In a spirit of visitation, Hock looked in where he knew there were snakes. He poked at the trash piles of dead leaves and roused the black-lipped mamba. Seeing the snake whipping its tail, Zizi stepped back and the dwarf grunted through his nose. Just as darkness was gathering in the clearing, and the orphan boys were kicking a ball, he walked to the decaying baobab stump. He saw the puff adder, though it was almost indistinguishable from the flakes of old bark, thickened inside a widened cleft of the wood.

  He was studying the adder when Manyenga appeared, but warily, keeping his distance, because he understood that Hock, staring hard at something he could not see, was probably looking at a snake, and very likely the snake was speaking in its own wicked way to him.

  “I’ve been expecting you,” Hock said.

  “Chief,” Manyenga said with a head-shake of respect.

  “The money, it’s all gone,” Hock said.

  “But we are so poor. What can we do?”

  “Maybe you’ll have to take me to Blantyre so I can get some more.”

  Now the man was uncertain, clumsy in his excessive politeness, eager to please but confused by Hock’s suggestion. He turned and called out in Sena, “Kill a chicken for the chief!”

  The orphan boys scattered. And Zizi and the dwarf dropped back too. Manyenga leaned toward Hock and, without pointing, but nodding in a knowing way, whispered, “She is waiting you.”

  Hock pretended not to hear. Feeling fragile, he squatted near the stump, and as he did the snake stirred. Manyenga stepped back.

  “Please, father. Whatever you want.”

  Although it was dusk, there was enough light from the reddened sky for Hock to see, at the far edge of the clearing, some women holding babies, and some old men, the orphan boys, and girls with firewood on their heads. He was reminded of the crowd that had encouraged the dwarf to mock him when he’d fainted. But this was different. He had not seen them like this since first arriving back in Malabo and being welcomed with apprehension. In his days of illness and being thwarted by them, he had almost forgotten how fearful they’d been. He smiled as he had that first day. Perhaps they were afraid again.

  He waited in his hut, the lantern resting on the floor so that the light would be subdued. With his heart pounding, anxious, ashamed, unable to stop himself, he went eagerly to the small window. The suspense of knowing she was coming to him sharpened his pleasure. He saw Zizi hurrying from the courtyard of her small hut. When he heard her bare feet on the wood planks of his veranda he was almost breathless with expectation.

  And then she entered, shot the loose bolt, flung up her cloth, and draped it over the window. Her sighing had the earnestness of sensuality. She stood before him, her naked body whitened with the fine dust of flour that adhered to her sweat-dampened skin, like a tall girl drawn in chalk.

  Again Hock remembered her reply when he had asked her teasingly what it was that the men in the darkness want.

  They want what all men want, she had said, and the memory shamed him. She was wiser than he, and now she looked at him, standing still, the only movement in her body the dark light in her eyes, her eyelashes dusted white.

  Then she curtseyed with a formality that moved him, as though beginning not a village dance but a ballet, and this time she was calmer, her dance more graceful and measured than before.

  She came to life in the dance, and was transformed, no longer the village girl with the kettle and the bowl of porridge, but a woman the shape of slender, spirit-like scissors, suspended in air, the suggestion of a trance in her whitened face and wild eyes.

  The light of the lantern brightened the dusting of flour and gave her a new body, with subtle curves and shadows. After a series of small jumping and turning steps, she stood tall, rising on the balls of her feet, presenting herself to him. She marked out a semicircle on the floor with her whitened pointed foot, then slid her foot along the floor with her front knee bent, performed a full knee bend, with her heels off the floor, and kept her slender arms upraised, and in the course of the soundless dance shook the flour from her body and let the powder sift to the floorboards of the hut, each dance step a white footprint.

  27

  HOCK HAD ONCE tried to imagine a day like this, but hadn’t been able to understand how to achieve it. And now the day had arrived: no money in the snake basket, none in his wallet, his pockets empty. He was unburdened. He saw that arriving in Malabo with a bag of money had been his first, and most grievous, mistake; handing the money out, another. Long ago, as a teacher, he’d had nothing, and was invisible for having nothing. He should have come this time with nothing—nothing to steal, nothing to tempt or distract them, as a visiting bystander, detached, on the periphery where foreigners belonged, with only the clothes he stood up in and a ticket home. But he had become involved, entangled, and trapped.

  Zizi’s dancing, dusted in flour, was his only pleasure, but a chaste one—the powder was like armor. He didn’t dare touch her. As for the rest, he was finished, nothing else could happen. The truth was stark, the village inert, encrusted, crumbled under a cloudy sun. Rain never fell. He felt skinny, picked clean, as naked and hungry and poor as anyone in Malabo. Nothing left—he had no money, and most of his spare clothes were gone, including his belt, which he needed now that he’d lost so much weight.

  Snowdon lingered, drooled eagerly, and scratched his dirty palm with his stubby fingers, his way of asking for money. For a few coins he bought stalks of sugar cane, which he chewed and spat out, sucking the sweetness from the pith.

  “Nothing,” Hock said, and was relieved.

  Zizi never asked for money, but she represented his one joy, his strength, was his only friend. The village women expected some kwacha notes when they presented him with bananas or pumpkins. One of the women had helped Zizi with his laundry, bringing it in a stack that Zizi scorched to kill the putzi fly eggs embedded in the weave. But there was little laundry these days, because his clothes had been stolen too, and he owned no more than a thickness of threadbare cloth. The sight of it made him sad.

  “Father,” the laundry woman said, setting down a folded shirt and a tattered T-shirt she’d wheedled from Zizi, in the hope of making money. She held a baby in a sling to her side.

  “I have no money,” Hock said. He took a wild delight in declaring it.

  The woman whined a little and gestured to the baby.

  “All gone!” Hock said.

  The woman implored him. Flies settled on the baby’s face and sucked at the edges of its eyelids and its prim lips.

  “Now I’m like you,” he said.

  Just like them, he was a wisp of diminishing humanity, with nothing in his pockets—hardly had pockets!—and he felt a lightness because of it. With no money he was insubstantial and beneath notice. As soon as everyone knew he had nothing, they would stop asking him for money, would stop talking to him altogether, probably. Yet tugging at t
his lightness was another sensation, of weight, his poverty like an anchor. He couldn’t move or go anywhere; he had no bargaining power. He was anchored by an absence of money, not just immovable but sitting and slipping lower.

  More than ever they called him chief and great minister and father. The women were calmer and less competitive than the men. They wanted food for their children, or a tin pot. The men wanted motorbikes, or bus fare, or had a scheme for selling fish or obtaining contraband from Mozambique on the river. They asked for large amounts, and they resented the fact that Hock had no money left. They believed he was lying. And so they kept poking around his house when he was out walking. He encouraged them to do this by taking long conspicuous hikes, leaving his front door ajar.

  “They went inside again,” Zizi would say.

  But he wanted them to know that he had nothing left. And he hoped they would see that they themselves had had a share in reducing him to this. They had taken all his money, and everything of value. And they were no better off.

  They were not diabolical; they were desperate. But desperation made them cruel and casual.

  “Mzungu,” a man named Gilbert said, to get his attention. Some mischievous men called him “white man” to his face. No one used his name. It was as though when he lost all his money, he lost his name, too.

  Gilbert said, “The woman Gala wants to talk to you.” And then, becoming even more familiar, the man said, “I am needing a scooter.”

  Many of them believed he still had money, and some of those people called him mzungu, not father. Gala would never have called him that. She might have called him Ellis, since she knew him by that name, but they would have heard it as “Alice.”