The Lower River

by Paul Theroux

  “I want to be released now.” Hock heard the gulp of a whimper in his own voice.

  At this, perhaps maddened by the whimper, Manyenga screamed and lost his British accent. “You mzungu can go anywhere! You people can do what you like. You are free to just come and go because you have maahhnee! This is a little holiday for you, but this is our whole life, as we are condemned to live on the Lower River forever!”

  Hock said simply, “I’ve given you all my money.”

  “Because you hate us and demand us to stay here,” Manyenga raged, bug-eyed, obstinate in his evasive temper. “You insult us with food, you throw it to us like animals. We are not your monkeys now. Take him away!”

  “Help me,” Hock said to the women standing near him.

  Manyenga laughed, and with a bleak fanatical stare he put his sweaty face against Hock’s. “They will do nothing for you. If my people do not obey me, their paramount chief, it will mean a lifelong infamy for them.”

  Seeing Manyenga’s defiance, the women began to jeer at Hock, and the children took up the cry. Hock remembered his fever, the time he’d fallen in the clearing, severely dehydrated. Then, the women had laughed so hard that Snowdon was emboldened to kick him in the face, occasioning more laughter. And oddly, with that memory present in his mind, Hock believed he saw Snowdon hurrying into the darkness with his lopsided gait—the way you might be thinking of a person for no reason and then, coincidentally, the next moment you see him walking down the street.

  As he was led to the van—again he felt like a condemned man—Hock heard cursing, a deep serious denunciation, its helpless abuse in great contrast to the hilarity and the speeches and the children’s laughter. He heard Manyenga conferring, and Manyenga’s consternation.

  “You are a devil,” Manyenga said, drawing his lips back from his big teeth.

  Hock was too weary to react, but if he’d been able to summon the strength, he would have jeered at Manyenga as the villagers had jeered at him.

  “Someone has slashed the tires,” Manyenga said with venom. “One of your people. It was done with your knife. We have no knife sharp enough.”

  The cheap knife from Blantyre, with the serrated edge, had been stolen from his hut. Had it been Snowdon, whom he’d almost certainly just seen in the shadows near the van? And now, though it was an effort—he wanted them to know how he felt—Hock did laugh.

  “This is bloody stupid,” Manyenga said. In his anger, he lost all his guile.

  So the ceremony of farewell ended as many of the ceremonies in Malabo ended, in confusion and disorder, and with an air of exhaustion, around a dying fire of black skeletal embers.

  As the disappointed villagers vanished into the darkness, Hock returned to his hut. He wasn’t saved—he knew that—but he was reprieved for the night. He was being watched: the brothers glared at him as he left. He went to bed and, wearied by fear, slept soundly.

  In the morning, nothing had changed. The village was no different from the first morning of his visit months ago—hot, passive, with the burned-toast smell of wood smoke, the thick damp air under the white sky, the sight of scarred mopane trees and dusty leaves and the perimeter of elephant grass, and a sepulchral suggestion of decay from the latrine. Malabo had felt like this forty years before. It was why he had come back. It was why he now waited, hopelessly, to leave. But he had been sold to the brothers. He would probably be transported to the village of children on the riverbank and confined until he was ransomed. He became aware, with alarm, that the only sound he heard was the gasp and catch of his own breathing.

  The white Agency van was still parked at the edge of Manyenga’s compound, on flat tires. Another day of heat and hunger, another day of his thinking, This is my life now. He knew he was living like a sick man. But nearly everyone in Malabo lived that way, either sitting or lying down, and the tone of every remark, even the lies and the sour hopes, was part of the sickness. He smiled at the thought that the long Agency van looked like an ambulance or a hearse.

  A number of villagers—the women who would have been hoeing the gardens, the men who usually lolled under the mango tree, and many children—gathered at his hut, knowing that he was soon to be taken away. In the foreground, Snowdon squatted, gnawing the fingers of one hand with a befuddled smile, his fool’s license. In the other hand he held the knife with the serrated blade.

  Standing in his doorway, Hock held up two of the bulging sacks that he’d removed from the veranda to the shadows under his bed. He shook them to prove that they had weight.

  “Tell Festus Manyenga that I still have money and food in these sacks in my hut. And there are more,” he said. “After I’m gone, he can have them. You can all have them.”

  He had spoken in Sena, so even the children understood, and some of them ran to inform their chief of this good news.

  And when, in the middle of the hot morning, lying in his string bed, he heard an engine straining, he knew the van had been repaired, the tires patched and pumped up. He guessed that Aubrey—the rapist—was at the wheel of this van, which had been paid for by donations from sympathetic people all over the world. The van, emptied of its food, for which he had been traded, food that was now Manyenga’s, would carry him away to be kept as a hostage.

  The engine sounded querulous as the van maneuvered in the clearing, being put into position so he could be loaded into the cargo hold where the boxes had been. He was a reasonable swap for the food stolen from the Agency; he’d be held and haggled over and sold again. He was no more than a carcass, but he knew they’d have to feed him and keep him alive if they were to sell him. That gave him a flicker of comfort.

  Yet in his heart he believed he would die. He had felt that for some time—that he’d returned to Africa to die. In his months in Malabo he’d had intimations of death; in an African village, death was ever present. He had lost the strength to object, and not even his anger could rouse him to resist.

  But looking out through the patched screen of his hut window, expecting the van, he saw instead a sleek black Jeep. Accustomed to being subverted, he felt a greater despair at the sight of the newer, more powerful vehicle, probably another from the Agency. This one was a sinister intimidating size, with fat unslashable tires.

  Just then, as he faced the Jeep, a quacking American voice was raised across the clearing, a disbelieving voice, harsh in its contradiction, saying, “But we know he’s gotta be here somewhere!”

  Repeating its complaint, the quacking carried all that distance, from near Manyenga’s compound—stern, scolding, full of authority.

  Hock stepped out of the hut for a better look, and saw, crossing the stony ground near the baobab stump, a pink-faced man in a shirt and tie. The man caught sight of Hock and walked faster. Then, all business, he turned and called out behind him to his driver.

  “Bring up the car!” He wiped the perspiration from his face with a neatly folded white handkerchief. He was near enough to offer a handshake. “You must be Hock—almost didn’t recognize you. Quite a letter. Where are your things?”

  A kick of hope in his gut made Hock tearful. “I don’t have any things.”

  “Take it easy, sir,” the man said. Hock knew him from Blantyre but in his muddle could not think of his name. He was young, dependable, with a good shirt, a silk tie, a linen jacket. “You’ll be all right.”

  Swallowing a sob, Hock said, “There’s someone else coming with us.”

  In the small screen of the rearview mirror skinny arms and small faces were sucked into the distance, jumping children and staring men, pinched by the receding road and the shaken curtains of elephant grass. From the dark water glinting at the end of trampled paths he saw that he was leaving the river behind, surfacing after months of holding his breath.

  Now he could breathe. The girl—no longer a girl—sat upright in the speeding Jeep. Even seated she was stately; even wounded, with blood crusts of damage on her face, she was radiant for seeming unafraid; innocent, too, gladdened by the strangenes
s, smiling at the turbulent grass in the slipstream. She’d never been up this road before. Strengthened by her smile, Hock felt purposeful with her beside him.

  The dust rose behind the van, a brown rearing dust-snake. Each time he looked there was more dust, uncoiling in pursuit, but so like a dissolving mirage that he stopped looking back, and lifted his eyes from the mirror to the wider road ahead.

  1. TRAVEL IN BRIEF

  The Necessity to Move

  Comes over one an absolute necessity to move. And what is more, to move in some particular direction. A double necessity then: to get on the move, and to know whither.

  —D. H. Lawrence, Sea and Sardinia (1921)

  Homesickness is a feeling that many know and suffer from; I on the other hand feel a pain less known, and its name is “Out-sickness.” When the snow melts, the stork arrives, and the first steamships race off, then I feel the painful travel unrest.

  —Hans Christian Andersen, letter, 1856, quoted in Jens Andersen, Hans Christian Andersen (2005)

  The Road Is Life

  Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.

  —Jack Kerouac, On the Road (1958)

  But to look back from the stony plain along the road which led one to that place is not at all the same thing as walking along the road; the perspective, to say the least, changes only with the journey; only when the road has, all abruptly and treacherously, and with the absoluteness that permits no argument, turned or dropped or risen is one able to see all that one could not have seen from any other place.

  —James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

  You go away for a long time and return a different person—you never come all the way back.—DSS

  A painful part of travel, the most emotional for me in many respects, is the sight of people leading ordinary lives, especially people at work or with their families; or ones in uniform, or laden with equipment, or shopping for food, or paying bills.—POH

  Travel is a state of mind. It has nothing to do with existence or the exotic. It is almost entirely an inner experience.—FAF

  The exotic dream, not always outlandish, is a dream of what we lack and so crave. And in the world of the exotic, which is always an old world peopled by the young or ageless, time stands still.—SWS

  It is sometimes the way in travel, when travel becomes its opposite: you roll and roll and then dawdle to a halt in the middle of nowhere. Rather than making a conscious decision, you simply stop rolling.—GTES

  Whatever else travel is, it is also an occasion to dream and remember. You sit in an alien landscape and you are visited by all the people who have been awful to you. You have nightmares in strange beds. You recall episodes that you have not thought of for years, and but for that noise from the street or that powerful odor of jasmine you might have forgotten.—FAF

  Because travel is often a sad and partly masochistic pleasure, the arrival in obscure and picturesquely awful places is one of the delights of the traveler.—POH

  In travel, as in many other experiences in life, once is usually enough.—POH

  In travel you meet people who try to lay hold of you, who take charge like parents, and criticize. Another of travel’s pleasures was turning your back on them and leaving and never having to explain.—KBS

  Travel is flight and pursuit in equal parts.—GRB

  All travel is circular ... After all, the grand tour is just the inspired man’s way of heading home.—GRB

  It is almost axiomatic that as soon as a place gets a reputation for being paradise it goes to hell.—HIO

  No one has ever described the place where I have just arrived: this is the emotion that makes me want to travel. It is one of the greatest reasons to go anywhere.—POH

  It might be said that a great unstated reason for travel is to find places that exemplify where one has been happiest. Looking for idealized versions of home—indeed, looking for the perfect memory.—FAF

  When strangers asked me where I was going I often replied, “Nowhere.” Vagueness can become a habit, and travel a form of idleness.—OPE

  Travel holds the magical possibility of reinvention: that you might find a place you love, to begin a new life and never go home.—GTES

  One of the happier and more helpful delusions of travel is that one is on a quest.—GTES

  I had gotten to Lower Egypt and was heading south in my usual traveling mood—hoping for the picturesque, expecting misery, braced for the appalling. Happiness was unthinkable, for although happiness is desirable it is a banal subject for travel; therefore, Africa seemed a perfect place for a long journey.—DSS

  Invention in travel accords with Jorge Luis Borges’s view, floated beautifully through his poem “Happiness” (LA DICHA, that in our encounters with the world, “everything happens for the first time.” Just as “whoever embraces a woman is Adam,” and “whoever lights a match in the dark is inventing fire,” anyone’s first view of the Sphinx sees it new: “In the desert I saw the young Sphinx, which has just been sculpted ... Everything happens for the first time but in a way that is eternal.”—DSS

  Traveling is one of the saddest pleasures of life.

  —Madame de Staël, Corinne, ou l’Italie (1807)

  Two Paradoxes of Travel

  It is a curious emotion, this certain homesickness I have in mind. With Americans, it is a national trait, as native to us as the rollercoaster or the jukebox. It is no simple longing for the hometown or country of our birth. The emotion is Janus-faced: we are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.

  —Carson McCullers, “Look Homeward, Americans,” Vogue (1940)

  To a greater or lesser extent there goes on in every person a struggle between two forces: the longing for privacy and the urge to go places: introversion, that is, interest directed within oneself toward one’s own inner life of vigorous thought and fancy; and extroversion, interest directed outward, toward the external world of people and tangible values.

  —Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature (1982)

  Solitary Travel

  Solitary Travelers: Neither sleepy nor deaf men are fit to travel quite alone. It is remarkable how often the qualities of wakefulness and watchfulness stand every party in good stead.

  —Sir Francis Galton, The Art of Travel (1855)

  Travel is at its best a solitary enterprise: to see, to examine, to assess, you have to be alone and unencumbered. Other people can mislead you; they crowd your meandering impressions with their own; if they are companionable they obstruct your view, and if they are boring they corrupt the silence with non sequiturs, shattering your concentration with “Oh, look, it’s raining” and “You see a lot of trees here.”

  It is hard to see clearly or to think straight in the company of other people. What is required is the lucidity of loneliness to capture that vision which, however banal, seems in your private mood to be special and worthy of interest.—OPE

  In the best travel, disconnection is a necessity. Concentrate on where you are; do no back-home business; take no assignments; remain incommunicado; be scarce. It is a good thing that people don’t know where you are or how to find you. Keep in mind the country you are in. That’s the theory.—GTES

  Travel is a vanishing act, a solitary trip down a pinched line of geography to oblivion.—OPE

  The whole point of traveling is to arrive alone, like a specter, in a strange country at nightfall, not in the brightly lit capital but by the back door, in the wooded countryside, hundreds of miles from the metropolis, where, typically, people didn’t see many strangers and were hospitable and do not instantly think of you as money on two legs. Arriving in the hinterland with only the vaguest plans is a liberating event. It can be a solemn occasion for discovery, or more like an irresponsible and random haunting of another planet.—GTES

  In the best trave
l books the word “alone” is implied on every exciting page, as subtle and ineradicable as a watermark. The conceit of this, the idea of being able to report it—for I had deliberately set out to write a book, hadn’t I?—made up for the discomfort. Alone, alone: it was like proof of my success. I had had to travel very far to arrive at this solitary condition.—OPE

  There was no concept of solitariness among the Pacific islanders I traveled among that did not also imply misery or mental decline. Reading as a recreation was not indulged in much on these islands either—for that same reason, because you did it alone. Illiteracy had nothing to do with it, and there were plenty of schools. They knew from experience that a person who cut himself off, who was frequently seen alone—reading books, away from the hut, walking on the beach, on his own—was sunk in Musu, the condition of deep melancholy, and was either contemplating murder or suicide, probably both.—HIO