by Paul Theroux
The tolerance in Malabo for any outsider lasted just a matter of days. Then the guest had to do some work, or leave. Hock saw the boys lingering and, it seemed, running up a debt. Manyenga was too shrewd to endure these boys eating his food and drinking his tea and crowding him, unless something else was happening—a protracted negotiation, Hock guessed, like all the talk over the months it took to arrive at an acceptable bride price.
Strangers in a village usually caused a buzz of activity—speculation, giggling, whispers. But the presence of these boys created a greater silence, a solemn watchfulness; the villagers were more cautious, less talkative, brisker in their walk. And they avoided Hock in the way they avoided anyone with an illness. The days were hotter, the cicadas louder.
“Our friends are still here,” he said to Gilbert, who had called him mzungu and asked him for money. Gilbert was a fisherman, pushing his bike through the deep sand at the edge of Malabo, setting off for a riverside village near the boma. It would take him the whole day to ride those thirty-odd miles; he’d launch his canoe tomorrow morning.
Gilbert gazed at him with a blank deaf stare. Irony was lost on him. What friends?
“Those boys from the bush,” Hock said, “staying with Festus.”
“I am not knowing,” Gilbert said in English.
When anyone spoke English to him, it was a way of warning him that the conversation would be brief, vague, and probably untruthful.
No one now asked Hock for money, or for anything. Women walked past his hut without looking at him. Only children took an interest, but it was a form of play; nothing frightened them. And when he strolled through the village in the cooler early evening, searching for snakes at the edge of the marsh or in the low-lying dimbas, no one, not even children, acknowledged him. He seemed to drift like a ghost, as though he had no substance.
He was real only to Zizi. She brought him food, cleaned what clothing was left, crouched near him on his veranda, and sometimes in secret she danced for him, his only joy. The paradox of a naked girl, entirely dusted with flour, dancing slowly by lantern light in the suffocating hut, his greatest reality and his only hope.
“Why do you dance for me?” he asked.
“I dance because it makes you happy.”
Zizi brought him news of the brothers: they still lived at Manyenga’s compound. “Still talking.” Naturally suspicious, full of warnings at the best of times, she told Hock that they had designs on him.
“Gala told you this?”
“I can see them,” she said.
“They pay no attention to me at all.”
“That means they are always thinking about you,” she said. “They are proud.”
He said, “If I could bring a message to the boma—post a letter—my friends in Blantyre would help me.”
Zizi stared with widened eyes, swallowed a little, giving herself dimples, then said, “I can do it.”
“They’d see you.”
“Not at night.”
The very word “night” was like a curse. He said, “No one goes out at night. There are animals in the night. It’s not safe.”
He could see he was worrying her. He’d thought of sending her, but he knew it was too risky; and anyway, she couldn’t walk that distance. He told her that.
“Njinga,” she said. The jingle of a bicycle bell was the word for bike.
“You don’t have a bike.”
“But my friend,” she said, and swallowed again, “is having.”
He was past the point of allowing his hopes to be raised with any scheme. Nothing had worked. He was almost resigned to living here, to decaying here, like Gala. To dying here.
Yet in the long mute smothering hours of the night after that talk with Zizi, he kept himself awake in the dark, lying on his back, composing the letter in his head.
To the American consul, he began, murmuring under his mosquito net. This is an urgent appeal for your help. I am being held against my will in the village of Malabo on the Lower River, Nsanje District. There is no phone here or I would call. I can’t get to the boma. I am sending this message to you with the help of a trusted villager who is at considerable risk, in the hope it will reach you safely.
I have no money left. It has all been taken from me. I have no possessions to speak of, other than a change of clothes and a few other items. I came here in the belief that I might be useful to these people. That was a mistake.
I have made several attempts to escape, but each time I failed, and this has hardened the villagers against me.
I am not well, having suffered several bouts of fever, and the effects still linger. My health is gone and I am in fear of my life. I have no allies here other than the individual who is posting this letter. My medicine is used up.
The village of Malabo is known to you. I think someone came here from your consulate to deliver school supplies for me and was told I was away. That was a lie. I was seriously ill.
Please come at once. I will pay all expenses. I am absolutely desperate, and I’m afraid that if I am not rescued soon I will be taken from here, perhaps downriver into Mozambique, and kept as a hostage, for ransom. In that case, someone will have to search for me.
I am not sure . . .
But there he stopped, near tears, too sad to continue, fear making him wakeful, his misery keeping him silent.
In the morning he sat and wrote the message on a sheet of paper torn from a copybook, one of the many copybooks he’d bought for the school that had lain unused. He printed in block capitals, taking his time. When he was done, he reread it and began to cry, holding his hand over his mouth to stifle his sobs.
His own letter terrified him, as weeks before, at the Agency compound, he’d seen his face in the polished side of the water tank and been stricken by the sight of the defeated eyes and hollow cheeks of the old man staring back at him.
Until now, he had not put his plight into words, and so he had survived, even managed to convince himself that there was a way out. The days had passed with little to remember except for Zizi’s kindnesses. He thought, Something will happen, someone will help. He avoided the mirror in his hut, but his letter was a mirror of his feelings, and the very sight of it frightened him. His cheeks were dirty with tears.
He had not read anything, nor written anything in his journal, for over a month, since heading downriver with Simon and the paddlers. Something about his writing, the order of his sentences, his voice on the page, reminded him of his other life, the world he had left; and seeing his plea, the pressure of his inky pen point, the helpless words, left him in despair.
He folded the letter and sealed it in an envelope, not intending to send it but so that he wouldn’t have to look at it. The envelope was dusty, one of several left over from the bank, with melancholy smudges of finger marks on the flap.
Zizi saw the envelope but did not mention mailing the letter. She knew the risks of going out at night alone. Hock could not find a way of phrasing the request, so the question remained unasked.
In the days that followed Zizi hovered around the hut, alerting Hock to the movements of the boys. A week after their arrival they were still at Manyenga’s.
“They want money,” Hock said.
“Or maybe they are waiting for a vehicle.”
Yes, that made sense. They lived a three-day walk away, through the bush, around the marsh, along the riverbank. Even if they left in a canoe from Marka, it was a two-day downriver trip to their village.
“What vehicle?” he asked.
“The Agency helps them. Maybe Aubrey.”
Like the others, she gave the name extra syllables, Obbery, rhyming it with “robbery.”
“He’s still around?”
“He is sick.”
Hock kept his distance from her until darkness fell, and then he sat near her on the veranda, not lighting the lantern. Finally he crept into the hut, leaving the door ajar so that she could follow. She never spoke. She lifted the mosquito net and slid against him
in the cot, lying on her back, her hands clasped at her breast, breathing softly through her nose, and sometimes singing in her throat. She smelled of soap and dust and sweat and blossoms, familiar to him—no one had her odor. He plucked one of her hands and held it—so hard, so skinny, so scaly, like a lizard’s. Her whole life was readable in that hand, all her work; it was older than her age, not a child’s hand but a woman’s, someone who had known hardship, much tougher than his own hand.
“Ask me,” she said, as he held her hand.
Her body lay against him, without weight. She did not look at him. Her face was upturned, to the ridgepole of the hut. Hock saw that she was shy, but she was serious in her abrupt question.
In a whisper he could barely hear, needing a moment for him to translate, she said, “I will do anything.”
The words, whispered that way, nearly undid him, touched him so deeply he could not speak. It was a crucial moment, one of the few in his life, when an answer was demanded of him, when everything that followed depended on what he replied. He had a choice to make. Once, Deena had said, It’s up to you, Ellis. What do you really want? Make up your mind. And he had realized it was over, that he’d spend the rest of his life without her. Or Chicky saying, But what about when you pass? If you remarry, your new family will get it and I won’t get diddly. If I don’t get it now, I’ll never see it.
He held Zizi’s hand, that bony callused little claw, and thought, She is offering herself, I can have her. He had known from the busy way she hovered that she was telling him that. He had shown her that she was safe with him. A Sena woman, even a marriageable one like Zizi, was not looking for sex. Security was what mattered most, the need to be protected, to bear children who would be secure. The man could be old or young, but he needed to be strong for his wife.
Zizi was clothed beside him in the string bed, but what he saw was her dancing naked for him, dusted with white flour, in the seclusion of the room, while he lay before her, the girl lifting her skinny legs and lowering them, shaking the flour from them, her lips pressed together, her soft throat-song seeming to echo a melody in her head.
He said, “I want to send a letter.”
“I can take it.”
“It needs a stamp.”
“I can find one.”
“How will you get to the boma?”
“My friend’s njinga.”
“You can do that?”
“I can do more,” she said, turning aside and rolling away from him, partly in shyness but also submitting, seeming to present her small hard body. It was a kind of appeal, her posture of compliance, but he was too sad to answer.
“Post the letter,” he said. “And when you come back, when we’re safe, everything will be ours—whatever you want.”
“What you want,” she said.
At some point in the early predawn darkness, she left. He woke to find her gone, and the envelope too. He imagined hearing the jingle of a bicycle bell, like laughter.
The activity, the stirring the next day, made him imagine that everything he’d said to Zizi, everything he’d done, lying next to her, had been seen, was known. The boys were up and about, talking louder, ranging more widely in the village. With Zizi gone, he had no ally. Even Snowdon had been lured away from him by the novelty of the three brothers in sunglasses, and the protracted bargaining with Manyenga.
They had to be talking about money. It was now over a week since they’d showed up in Malabo, and they had insinuated themselves into the life of the village, staying in one of Manyenga’s many huts in the heat of the day, emerging in the late afternoon when the air was cooler, strolling away from the compound and sauntering through the village, staring at the younger girls, murmuring among themselves, seeming to pay no attention to Hock. Yet it was obvious they were closing in on him.
In defiance, Hock used these afternoon hours to go out and capture snakes. Snakes were his only strength. The adults of the village kept their distance whenever he walked with his bag and his stick. The children followed him, jumping and screeching, daring each other to go nearer.
Hock would find the fattest snake, a sleepy black mamba or a puff adder, and flourish it, allowing it to coil around his arm as he pinched behind its head. And then he returned to his hut, depositing the snake in a basket and fastening the lid.
The day after Zizi vanished with the letter, he went on a conspicuous snake hunt and found a viper. This he carried through the village to his hut, the children following, calling out, “Snake!”
Hock listened for the bicycle bell, but there was nothing, no sign of Zizi. That was the earliest she could have returned. In his heart he did not expect to be rescued; every attempt so far had failed. But he could not imagine remaining in Malabo without Zizi; he could not imagine living without her, as her guardian. Yet she was nowhere to be seen.
Another night, another early morning, another whole day of waiting. Hock walked to the edge of the village superstitiously, to the spot where, on his arrival in Malabo, he had first seen her walking slowly into the creek, lifting the cloth up her thighs as she went deeper, until she was in the water up to her waist.
Hearing rustling behind him, the swish of legs in dry embankment grass, he turned and saw Manyenga. He was smiling—always a sign of concealment for the man. The older, cap-wearing brother approached too, not smiling, looking sullen.
“Time to talk,” Manyenga said.
As though not recognizing either of the men, Hock pushed past them and walked down the path and across the clearing toward his hut.
Manyenga called out, “Wait, father.”
Hock kept walking, his shadow lengthening.
“You are going with those boys.” Manyenga caught up with him, breathless, sucking air. “They will help you.”
“How much did they pay you for me?”
“You are making a joke, father.”
Hock said, “Never,” as he reached his hut. He unhooked the lid of a basket on the veranda and, thrusting his hands inside, snatched two handfuls of dark vipers. Bristling with snakes, he filled his doorway, saying, “We are staying here.”
29
HOCK STILL HELD the knots of squirming snakes, which glinted in the last of the daylight—greenish marsh snakes, hissing, contending, their throats widened, their wagging heads flattened in alarm. The villagers in Malabo were terrified of them, and told stories of battling the marsh snake they called mbovi, because it was a good swimmer, and often darted at their legs when they were bathing in the creek. But the snakes were small, harmless, they had no fangs, and perhaps that accounted for the scaly drama of their aggression.
Shaking them into their basket, Hock heard a scuffing in the courtyard, and some whining adenoidal clucking. He turned to see Snowdon, who kept his distance because of the snakes, his stubby fingers protecting his face.
“Come,” he said. He never used Hock’s name, or any name; he hardly ever made an intelligible sound; and so this one uttered gulp of command got Hock’s attention.
Snowdon then stumbled and ran, and Hock followed him across the dimba of pumpkins and then to the back path. The dwarf labored ahead of him, his snorting audible, pulling his bandy legs along, working his elbows. Stumpily built, he moved as though he was pedaling a tricycle, his head and shoulders bobbing through the low bush. The branches tore at Hock’s arms as he tried to part them. Snowdon ducked beneath them, hurrying onward, in the direction of Gala’s compound.
The path was a streak of pale powder in the starlight. Hock had once felt daunted, standing under the glittering stars of the night sky of the Lower River. To the villagers his stargazing was proof that he was a sorcerer. None of them knew him, or cared. Malabo, a landmark in his life, had been trifled with, corrupted, then ignored, and finally forgotten, of no use to anyone. That was why, walking fast down this dusty gutter of a path in the bush, he felt he was going nowhere, that he was lost, following the dwarf, who was wheezing and tumbling forward.
Entering the smoke smell of Gala�
�s compound, Hock saw only one lighted window at the front—the door shut, no one on the porch, Gala’s chair empty. The lantern light in the room threw the figures into relief, enlarging them, turning them into the silhouettes of three people, hunched over, not moving, not speaking, the shadows as sharp as black paper cutouts.
They were praying. Hock caught some of the words, Gala leading the others in slow imploring moans.
Clapping his hands to announce himself, Hock plucked the slumping door and dragged it open. The praying stopped. The three women he’d seen through the window, looking naked in the echo of their pleading, were ranged around a mat on the floor. The only sound now was from the figure on the mat, unrecognizable, wrapped in a striped towel, lying face-up, sighing softly. The face was bruised, the head enlarged, and one of the women was bathing the raw cut flesh, patting it with a wet cloth. Big winged beetles swung in circles around the lantern light.
“My God,” Gala said, dithering at the sight of Hock. She said it again. Goad.
But Hock was peering at the figure lying flat. It did not look like Zizi; that was not her face. But who else could it be?
One of the ceremonies mumbled in the dark—forbidden by the missionaries in Hock’s time—had been the spilling of chicken blood on the head of a crudely carved foot-high idol—misshapen, foreshortened, the head the size of a coconut. The larger the carving, the more clumsily it was made, with bits of glass inserted in the eye sockets that gave it a blind, half-alive stare. And the blood wrung from the beheaded chicken was so sticky, a fuzz of pin feathers adhered to its wood. This secret fetish had no name that could be uttered aloud because, smeared with the dried blisters of blood, it was an ugly potent thing capable of repelling evil.