The Lower River

by Paul Theroux

  Zizi walked with him under the mopane trees and through the thorn bushes on the hot path to Gala’s hut. He guessed that the old woman had divined that Zizi’s relationship with him had changed. Not that it was explicitly sexual: there was something pure and resolute in Zizi’s virginal face and her frowning mouth and the way she stood and moved. But Gala would have known—either from village whispers or a guess—that he had seen Zizi naked, dusted with white flour, and had possessed her with his gaze, which was true. It was not a question of his daring to go further with her; he had no right. As for the dancing, there was nothing scandalous in that, since she wasn’t truly naked: the flour was her costume, her adornment.

  Walking in front of him, Zizi cleared the way, only hesitating at the point where, a month or so before, he had seen the snake rattling through the clutter of dry leaves. He watched her body as she pushed the branches aside, and he thought: Once you have seen someone lovely naked, she is never anything but naked for you, no matter how she is dressed. She was sinuous on the path, her velvety skin glowing, her shaven head beaded with sweat, her neck shining.

  Gala was waiting for them. Someone must have seen them on the path and told her they were on their way. Yet she looked impassive, monumental in her bulk, her eyes slanted in her fleshy face.

  Hock clapped his hands and called out, “Odi, odi.”

  The old woman was sitting in the same chair as before, on her veranda, on the planks worn smooth by bare feet, in the same posture as when he had left her—how long ago? And this time, too, she tried to heave herself out of the creaking chair to greet him. To spare her—he could see her effort, the deliberate stages of her hoisting herself, her struggling arms, planting her feet—he mounted the steps quickly and took her hands, and she laughed in helpless apology.

  “Come, sit,” she said to Hock, and to the woman Zizi had called Auntie, “Bring tea. Go help them, Zizi.”

  Smiling, patting her great fleshy face with a damp cloth, she shooed the children away.

  As with all visits to huts like this, Hock sensed a brimming odor of human sweat, damp clothes, dirty feet, hot bodies; a rippling curtain of stink that was sharpest now in the heat of the day.

  “Yes, go help,” Gala said to the last of the children, speaking as always in a mixture of Sena and English.

  When they were alone, in the shade of the veranda, she lost her smile. It vanished into her plump smooth face and she became darker, heavier, and spoke in a growl.

  “You did not heed me.”

  He smiled at the word. Heed, reckoning, victuals—she was of the generation that used pulpit words.

  “Even now you are not attending.”

  Another of those words. He said, “I am—I always listen to you.”

  “Ellis, my friend. One month ago I told you my opinion. It was a mistake for you to come here. Of course, I am glad for selfish reasons. Because the man I liked so well—I can even say loved—showed himself to be a righteous person. But you are not listening.”

  The word “loved” was still glittering in his head.

  He said, “Then I’m glad I came.”

  “It should have been a holiday. But you lingered,” Gala said. “Sometimes the tourists and the aid workers visit here. They go to the Mwabvi park at the boma side to look at wild animals. Or they get lost here and ask directions. They spend some minutes and then they go away and we never see them again. That is what you should have done.”

  “I think you mentioned that.”

  “Indeed I did. But my words fell on deaf ears. You know we say muthu ukulu and so forth—a big head gets a knock.”

  Her face was leathery, bruised by age and the harsh sun, with freckled cheeks, her eyes staring out of dark sunken skin. He could see her concern, and it alarmed him. Her proverb made her seem obtuse and simple-minded.

  “I tried to get away,” he said. “I went downriver, almost to Morrumbala, and I was abandoned.”

  “You fetched up at the children’s village.”

  “The Place of the Thrown-Aways, they called it. How do you know that?”

  “We have no secrets here. We know that Festus Manyenga brought you back. We know the Agency rejected you. We know those boys that call themselves ‘the brothers.’”

  “I didn’t like the Agency,” Hock said. “I don’t trust those people.”

  “They could have arranged safe passage for you. They have planes. They have vehicles.”

  “I thought that young man Aubrey might help.”

  “We know about him. He is sick.”

  “I thought so. But he doesn’t look too bad.”

  “He is taking the drug, like some others. They get it from the Agency. It is so dear, only a few people have it. It makes them stronger. It makes them dangerous.”

  He guessed she was talking about the anti-retroviral drug that he had read about, but Gala would not have known those words. He said, “Aubrey said he was taking me to Blantyre. Manyenga had a different story. I don’t know what the truth is.”

  “This looks such a simple place. But no, everyone lies, so you can’t know it at all. The truth is absent here.”

  “Why do people lie?”

  “Because they have been taught to lie. It works for them better than the truth. And they’re hungry. If you’re hungry, you will do anything, you will agree to anything, you will say anything. And they’re lazy. This is a terrible place. Why are you smiling?”

  Hock said, “When we were both young, you said, ‘This is my home. This is my life. This is my country. We can make it better.’”

  She laughed, but bitterly, and said, “If I were young again, I would say, ‘Take me far away from here.’”

  “Where to?”

  “Anywhere at all.” She saw that Zizi was pouring hot water from the kettle into a teapot. “I worry about her. She is still a namwali. Still a maiden.”

  “Maiden” was another pulpit word, and it suited the thin girl, canted over and delicately filling the teapot. Her posture, so precise and poised, seemed proof of her innocence.

  “But she’s strong,” Hock said.

  “I was strong once, but look at me,” Gala said. She laughed, and it was true—she looked ruined, puffy-faced, her sad eyes glassy with fatigue, her ankles swollen. “And she is alone.”

  “She’s been looking after me.”

  “Yes, I know that,” Gala said.

  What did she know? Perhaps the talk of Zizi dancing naked, and the detail that she rolled herself in flour and bewitched him, ghost-dancing like a priestess. Hock was abashed, felt he ought to explain, but did not know how to begin. He said, “Please don’t worry about her.”

  “I am worried about you. Those people—Festus, Aubrey, the others. They are not to be trusted.”

  He said, frowning at the absurdity of it, “I have no money left. I have nothing.”

  “Then you are in greater danger.”

  “I want to get away,” Hock said. “I don’t know how.”

  “You must find a way. Zizi can help.” Gala saw Zizi and the other woman approaching the veranda with the tea things on tin trays—a plate of misshapen cakes, the teapot, the chipped cups, the small punctured can of evaporated milk, the sugar bowl. Before they were within earshot, Gala said, “This was a safe place once. Now it is so dangerous.” As the women mounted the steps, she said, “Malawi tea. From Mlanje Mountain! Please help yourself, my friend.”

  They sat drinking tea, talking of the weather, how because the rain had stayed away, the roads had deteriorated. And how to fix them?

  “A swing needs to be pushed,” Gala said, and tapped Hock’s arm to get his attention. “It means you can’t do anything alone.”

  Zizi followed him home, down the path, in silence.

  At the hut, she hung her head—politeness, averting her eyes— and said softly in Sena, “Do you want me to dance?”

  But the visit to Gala had made him self-conscious, apprehensive, and he said no.

  What had Gala heard? Obviou
sly something, because the next day, around noon, a small boy appeared at Hock’s hut. Zizi had intercepted him and explained that the boy was carrying a message from Manyenga, who wanted to see him for dinner.

  “I’m not hungry,” Hock said.

  But that was no excuse. Food that was offered had to be accepted, even if the person had already eaten.

  “Some boys have come,” Zizi said.

  “Which boys?”

  “They are from the other side,” she said, meaning the Mozambique border.

  “How do you know?”

  “People talk.”

  People talked, but not to him, and that was the worst of it, that he lived in the village and all the while life continued apart from him. The talk did not reach him, or if it did, he did not understand. He was not only a mzungu, but a ghost, an ignorant ghost, existing outside of everything, merely watching, seeing only the surface of things, listening but missing most of what was said, not understanding the shouts or the drumbeats. At other times he was like a pet cringing in the doorway, a creature they kept to be stroked and murmured to, another species, captive and dumb and looking for a smile. He had been reduced to that. And the money was gone, so what was he worth?

  Later in the afternoon, nearing Manyenga’s compound, he recognized the boys at once—the brothers, in their sunglasses, the one with the cap lettered Dynamo Dresden. And as before, he was struck by how American they looked in their T-shirts, sneakers, and shorts, not the castoff clothes distributed by a charity like the Agency, but new clothes that gave the boys a street style Hock recognized from Medford. They were the sweatshop products that had undone his business. Who would wear a button-down shirt and flannel slacks and a blazer if he could get away with a Chinese T-shirt and Chinese sneakers? He looked resentfully at the boys, thinking, China clothes the whole world!

  “Father,” Manyenga called out, and failing to get his attention, he shouted, “Chief!”

  But Hock was still watching the three boys, who sat picking at food on the plates that had been set out on the mat. The boy with the cap was sitting on a chair near Manyenga, the others squatting at the mat’s edge.

  Another rule was that no one ate until the chief took the first bite, and when the chief appeared, or an elder, the younger members at the meal stood up, turned aside, eyes down, or knelt to show respect.

  None of this. They were indifferent, as when Hock had seen them downriver at their makeshift village, as reckless as when they’d led Hock to the football field for the arrival of the Agency helicopter and the celebrities—the food drop. They had all started to eat, they chewed, they licked their fingers, they didn’t smile, and when they glanced at Hock it was in an appraising way, as you would look at merchandise in a market stall.

  Hock saw that Zizi had not followed him, and guessing that she was back at the hut, he was confused, reluctant to meet these boys again. In their village they had taken no interest in him, even when he’d been starving. He recalled the ease with which they had handled the money he’d given them, fingering it expertly. Now they were in Malabo and talking with Manyenga, who had rescued him from them at the field, amid their scavenging, and had warned him against them. They had seemed like enemies then, and Manyenga a friend to him, but now he couldn’t tell the difference. He had no money, he had no friends. What did it matter whether he paid his respects to Manyenga by dining with him and these boys? Life went backward here, and he was more the stranger now than before.

  “Eat!” Manyenga cried out, seeing Hock turn and, bent over, limp away. “Eat!”

  He spoke as though to an obstinate animal, or a child, or a prisoner, and Hock realized that to them he was all three.

  So he returned to his hut, and as an hour or so of daylight remained and it was too hot in the slanting sun to go inside, he lay on a mat on his veranda and shut his eyes and pitied himself for being there, at the mercy of the village, and having to endure the contempt of Manyenga’s having a meal with the three boys dressed as rappers. How had they gotten here from that far-off village? Well, he had made it here from there.

  Then he slept, the sudden honking, sweating, late-afternoon slumber brought on by heat and despair.

  He dreamed of being in a dusty sunlit room, hearing voices. And then he knew he wasn’t dreaming—the voices were those of the boys, talking about him to Manyenga, murmuring.

  “He is sick.”

  “Not sick, my friend. He is strong.”

  “Old, too”—another voice.

  “White men can be old and still have heart.”

  The first words had woken him, but instead of sitting up he remained still, crumpled on the mat, his eyes closed, listening to the mutters.

  It was as if they were haggling over him, Manyenga dealing with the boys—he was the salesman, they the reluctant buyers.

  “And he can be insolent.”

  The word was chipongwe; it was how he had seen them.

  “You are strong. You have connections. You can handle him.”

  “I think he is listening.”

  “To what? You are not saying anything.”

  “He is older than my father.”

  “Your father is dead.”

  “That is what I mean.”

  Some weeks before, when he’d had his fever, he had lain in his hut and heard voices like this. And he had grown sad, unable to move, feeling chills and a skull-cracking headache, and he had been an eavesdropping wraith.

  It was like that now, but worse, and the scene that came to mind was the Somerville woman—what was her name?—lying in her bed with the python beside her. That snake had flattened itself and Hock grew alarmed, knowing that it was preparing to flex its jaws and swallow her.

  When they fell silent he opened his eyes and rolled over to face them. He saw them walking away, and Zizi beside him, bug-eyed.

  He spoke what he was thinking: “They want to eat me.”

  “Not eat. But to buy you.” Zizi took a long breath. “The big man Festus is wanting money for you.”

  Exhausted, Hock slept well that night, and was alarmed only when he woke up in daylight and remembered what had happened the evening before, and was appalled.

  Zizi was standing beside the bed, looking ghostly against the mosquito net. She said, “They are still here in the village, those boys.”

  He saw that she was holding a kettle.

  “Put the kettle down.” She set it down with a clank. “Come here.” He parted the mosquito net and she crept in, ducking the curtain of net. She lay on the cot, but held herself compactly, facing away. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I just want to talk.”

  28

  ANYTHING THAT HAPPENED at night was so muffled and menacing that to the villagers nothing happened at night. In the Lower River, darkness fell in a blinding way, a swift and sudden collapse of light, and in the morning the village was as it had been left at sundown—that overturned bucket moistened with dew, the pucker of footprints so deep in the gray dampened sand they could have been fossils, the scattered and sucked mouthfuls of sugar cane fibers and the bitten stalk, the bunting of torn shirts hanging limp on a line, the blackening stem of bananas twisted on a rusted coathanger on a tree branch, out of the reach of rats and hyenas. Only the Nyau ceremony, a ritual in darkness, was allowable at night, but the last Nyau had been danced long ago, when the presiding image had been Hock’s own face—the long nose, the scraps of white rags and plastic—and he had believed that he’d been granted power. But time had shown his power to be no more potent than the rags.

  For weeks he believed a miracle might happen. He imagined it this way, as in a movie. On a tray on a desk in the American consulate in Blantyre was an accumulating stack of letters from Roy Junkins, sent from Medford. And a voice: That’s odd. Another one. This guy Ellis Hock doesn’t pick up his mail. Maybe we should go down there and see if everything’s okay. The concerned consul would act quickly. Hock extended this scene into a hopeful drama of rescue, the sleek consular vehicle drawing into
Malabo and an American in a suit greeting him, then bearing him away. Hock would halt the vehicle, saying, “There’s someone else,” and call to Zizi.

  He played the scene in his head, to console himself, but it only made him sadder.

  He was now so far from that hope he’d begun to think that he might never leave, that he would go on suffering here as he had for more than two months, living on lumpy steamed nsima, dried fish, boiled slimy greens, bread and tea, a mango, a wedge of pumpkin, groundnuts seethed in their shells. That nothing would change. Already he knew what it was like to be elderly, to be feeble, to fall ill, to walk with difficulty and hate the sun. He’d lose his teeth like Norman Fogwill. In his recurring mood of bitter pettiness he remembered how in the hour or more that he had spent with Fogwill, the man hadn’t stirred or been particularly friendly, and when Hock had risen to leave, Fogwill had remained in his chair.

  At one time he might have been strong enough to make a dash to the boma. In the first few weeks he’d felt up to it, but procrastinated in the African way. He might have been lucky. But he had weakened, and declined. He’d come to Malabo a healthy man, active for his age, with the idea of fixing the school and being capable of putting in a day’s work at the building. He’d felt optimistic, and he imagined leaving a lump sum with someone like Manyenga for the upkeep of the school, perhaps depositing money in the bank at the boma, the Malabo account.

  Too late. His health was gone, and he could tell almost to the day when he’d realized he was too old. Malabo had made him an old man, had tipped him into near senility. He needed those long nights, that silence, that darkness, not just to be restored by sleep but for the illusion that he was free to dream—good dreams, of home and friends and health. He forgave everyone at home, forgave Deena and Chicky. They had not hurt him. Deena had freed him, and Chicky had merely turned her back on him. But when he woke in his hut in Malabo in the monotonous heat of the morning, he was reminded that he was a prisoner.

  The boys—the brothers, as they called themselves—did not leave the village, as he assumed they might. They remained, sitting in the shady area of the courtyard at Manyenga’s compound, and Hock knew they could do that only with Manyenga’s permission. He saw them chatting with Manyenga during the day, as he himself had once done, believing he was a friend. He saw them being brought black kettles of hot water, and in the evening he saw them seated on mats near Manyenga’s cooking fire, where he had once sat as an honored guest. They had displaced him, these boys in sunglasses, and he had the sense that they were hovering, waiting—for what?