by Paul Theroux
“I see you’ve made a meal of it”
Silvano brushed at his suit with muddied hands. The wisp of web had worked itself to the top of Silvano’s thick cap of hair where it fluttered like a shredded pennant.
“Pardon?” Silvano’s eyes were glazed from the wind that had drawn the scattered cloud mass together, behind which the sun showed like a pale wafer.
“You should have worn your wellingtons," said Munday.
“I don’t have any," said Silvano, shaking his head, as if asking for charity.
“No?” Munday gave him a squint of caution. “Never come to the English countryside without a good stout pair of wellies.”
“I understand,” said Silvano. “But my feet are wet.”
“Bad luck,” Munday sang, “however, there’s no sense turning back now.” And jabbing his stick ahead of him he ascended the steep rocky path, climbing into the wind. The clouds moved fast, darkening the wooded slopes, then coming apart as the sun broke through and warmed him. The sun on the dead leaves gave him a whiff of spring. He unbuttoned the sheepskin coat and took a delight in being able to recognize the trees by their bark, by the scattered husks of their nuts, beech and oak, and knobbed stumps with sea-white shells of fungus on their rotted sides. The path became level and on this hillside shelf was a grotto of low firs, contained by their own shade. The recent storms had knocked many over; some showed white flesh where they had broken off and others had taken a whole round platform of roots and earth with them—feathery branches sprouted vertically from those newly-fallen. Munday was reassured by the familiar foliage, the freshness of the moss, the cedar smells. He had not forgotten any names: he saw and remembered the light puffballs.
At the highest and most densely wooded part of the hill was a rock with an elevation marker bolted to it, and a sign-post, paragraphs of small print headed Bye-Laws. That was England, whose remotest corners bore reminding traces of others; it was her mystery, these vanished people and their lingering tracks, even here in the Dorset hills. He was no stranger to these woods—the stranger was behind him, somewhere below, kicking at the path.
Silvano was nowhere in sight. .Munday found a grassy hummock by a tree and he leaned back and closed his eyes, feeling his face go warm and cold from the sun winking past the sailing cloud mass, the glare of the sun burning on his eyes through the blood-red light of his lids. When he opened his eyes to be dazzled Silvano was standing near him, looking a sorry sight, with his mud-caked shoes and cuffs, and his hair and suit speckled with bits of brown leaf, bruises of earth on his knees, and the knot of his necktie yanked small. But it was not only that his clothes were disheveled, looking as if they hadn’t stood up to the ordeal; there was also his color, and the way he was panting—he was maroon with exertion.
He was obviously relieved to have finally caught up with Munday, and he wore a smile of exhaustion and gratitude.
Munday said, “You look worn out.”
Silvano said, “I am!” He dropped beside him and slapped at the stains on his suit. “You were always a champion hiker,” he said. “This mountain climbing is too much for me.”
“This isn’t mountain climbing,” said Munday. “Just working up an appetite for Sunday lunch. Good English habit—Emma’s doing a joint.” Silvano with his fellow Ugandans in their Earl’s Court flat (Munday could see the disorder, hear the radio, smell the stews) knew nothing of that. He didn’t know why they had been hiking or where they had been. It had only confused him. He had allowed Munday to bully him into a walk: he had followed the native through an inhospitable landscape and he had been reminded of his difference, the shallow lungs of the lowland African. And when he got back to London or Africa he would try to tell what he had seen, but description would elude him and he would be left with chance impressions of discomfort—cold, briars, spider webs, wet feet; stinging nettles he would report as ants (the dock leaf a miraculous cure), the pasture mud as swamp, the woods and windbreaks as forest, and how he had spoiled his new shoes. Munday wanted to say, “How do you like it?” But he said, “You can see four counties from here,” and he stood and named them, indicating them with his walking stick, and pausing when he saw Pilsdon Pen and trying to make out the road to Birdsmoor Gate. He said, “I saw a badger down there one night.”
“But we have lions,” said Silvano.
“There are no lions in Bwamba!”
“I mean in Africa.”
“Shall we move on?” said Munday. “I want to try a
new path. It’ll take us down there, through those pines and that farm, and eventually to Stoke Abbot.”
“I don’t think I can manage,” said Silvano.
“I thought we might have a drink in Stoke Abbot,” said Munday. “There’s a pub there, The New Inn. Lovely place—very good billiard table.” Silvano shook his head. “Maybe we should go home.”
“You’ll miss the village,” said Munday. “Eleveiith-century church. Charming cottages. Thatch. Natives. You wanted to see it.”
“I don’t mind.”
“Have it your way.” Munday was pleased; he had avoided the inquiring eyes of the villagers, the crowded Sunday morning at the pub when all the local residents drank together, sorted throughout the room according to their class, conversing formally about the weather or the road-work or a fire in a chimney. He had saved himself from that confrontation—the silence upon Silvano’s entering, the pause in the skittle game, the awkward stares, the strained resumption of convivial chatter. He led Silvano down the hill, to the road and the Black House.
After lunch, which a power cut delayed (the miner’s strike was in full swing), Silvano looked at his watch and said, “What time does the train leave?”
“But I thought you said you were staying till tomorrow,” said Emma.
“Classes,” said Silvano. “They keep us busy.”
“Pressure of work, Emma,” said Munday, jumping up. “I’ll ring the station.” And later, driving Silvano to catch the 5:25 from Crewkerne, he said, “It’s been awfully good to see you, Silvano.”
“And it was awfully good to see you,” said Silvano, the mimicry of Munday’s phrase intending politeness but sounding like deliberate sarcasm. “You are just the same as ever, Doctor.”
“We muddle along, Emma and I,” said Munday.
Silvano stammered, then said, “But she does look different.”
“Emma? In what way?”
“Thinner, I think,” said Silvano.
“She might have lost a few pounds,” said Munday. “Change of climate—it’s to be expected.”
“Not only that,” said Silvano. “Also the face is tired and the hands are shaking.”
“What you’re saying is that you think she’s sick.”
“I think,” said Silvano uncertainly.
“Don’t be a fool,” said Munday, and he drove faster in annoyance. “She’s never felt better in her life. She’s home. It’s meant a lot to her—to us both— coming back to England. Our life is here. I admit I had some reservations about coming back—it’s not easy after so long. But now I see it was what we had to do. I was wrong about Africa, I was wrong about England.” He rambled on, as if talking to himself. “You can’t stay overseas, miles and miles away in some godforsaken place, and go on denying you have a country and always trying to accommodate yourself, pretending you have a life and friends. Yes, it’s depressing. I lost ten years that way. I was a young man when I went out to Africa—I’m not young any more.” He gunned the engine and smiled. “But we’re back now, and we’re jolly glad of it. You can’t blame us for that, can you?”
“No,” said Silvano.
“And you’ll go home, of course?”
“I like London.”
“You like London,” said Munday. “You have money and a flat—you’re luckier than most English people. But what happens when your scholarship runs out and they raise your rent? Have you thought of that?”
“I can teach,” said Silvano.
“Rubbish!�
�� said Munday. "I can’t even get a university job just now, so what chance is there for you?”
“Even bus conductors earn high salaries in England,” said Silvano.
“High? What does that mean? Higher than what? Herdboys in Bwamba, coffee-pickers in Toro, Uganda poets? You tell me—you’re an economist,” said Munday. He grumbled, “Bus conductors don’t live in Earl’s Court.”
“I would like to stay,” said Silvano in an obstinate whisper.
“Go home,” said Munday.
“It’s primitive. People starve. You know that.”
“No one starves in Bwamba,” said Munday. “You put your women to work in the fields. Your wife, Silvano, remember? The system works—inherited land, a little magic, and a bunch of bananas a day.”
“I never liked it.”
“It’s all you have,” said Munday. “Read my book.”
“I will read it,” said Silvano. “Where can I buy it?” Munday didn’t reply. He changed gears on a hill and then said, “You have no business here.”
“I have friends here,” said Silvano, insulted but controlling his anger. “You had friends in Africa.”
“I had subjects,” said Munday. “Friendship is only possible between equals.” Silvano turned to the side window. He was slumped in the seat, clutching his knees, looking at the fields whipping by. Munday was irritated anew by his hair, its absurd shape parodying mourning, and by his clothes, which Munday saw as pure folly.
Munday parked at the station. He jerked the hand brake. He said, “Don’t you dare hurt that girl.” When Silvano boarded the train, the small frivolously dressed black man, pulling his cardboard suitcase through the high metal door of the carriage, Munday felt a pang of sorrow for him, he looked so sad. Munday regretted the conversation in the car—not his ferocity, but his candor. Silvano was behind the window, alone in the compartment, wagging his yellow palm at Munday. Munday waved back, and the train hooted and pulled away. He had said too much— worse, he had simplified. How could he explain that his England was a black house whose rooms and shadows he understood, and a woman—ghostlier than any African—who had bewitched him with passion? He had returned to a house and a woman. But he knew that, as with Alec—that last glimpse of him disappearing into a crowd of London shoppers— Silvano would sink, and nothing that Munday might say could matter, neither consolation nor blame. The truth was simple: he never wanted to see him again.
16
He had watched Silvano go, and it was as if he had rid himself of the continent. He drove home from the station under a sky lighted as subtly as skin, a swell of mild light with a tincture of blood, and raw gold sinews breaking from a sun pulped by clouds. This evening light was too complicated for him to see any drama in it—like the African sunset which altered too fast for him to assign it any metaphor but murder —but the light itself at this hour was his triumph. It was nearly six o’clock, and yet the light continued, thickening and changing, becoming more physical as it dimmed.
He had seen his death in the early darkness of winter, the pale daylight had been for him like a brief waking from sickness. But the seasonal illness was passing; he measured his mood by these lengthening days with a pleasure he had not known in the unvarying equatorial light. The fear had left him: he had overcome it by enduring it, like his heart, which had not pained hifti for weeks. So he had got well, and he imagined the thick scar on his heart narrowed to a harmless lip of tissue. His health allowed him to ignore his body, the intrusive wrapping of muscle he had felt failing him so keenly, weighing him with a kind of stupidity. Now he fed his mind on sleep, restored himself in the darkened room under the disc of Caroline’s face, a fixed image of sensation which, hovering in the room, amounted to a presence almost flesh. He felt her pressure so strongly on him in the Black House he didn’t need to ask where she lived, and at times in the living room with Emma, the air before the fire bore his lover’s odor so obviously it embarrassed him. It was a haunting that confronted his mind and aroused his body, but it inhibited his conversation with Emma, as Flack’s voice had, his mewing mutter against the wall, on their first day at The Yew Tree.
Munday had thought, recovering, that Emma had also recovered. She was, after all, his wife. It had not occurred to him that Emma could be ill if his heart improved, and it was only after Silvano commented on it that he had gone back to the house and seen her unwell. She looked tired, perhaps she was coming down with something; she had that lustreless inattention that precedes real sickness—not sick yet but, abstracted and falling silent, in decline. He was sorry; he was also cross, for what Silvano had said was disrespectful, not necessarily in English terms, but in Bwamba culture which forbade such intimate observations except within a family. Silvano was not part of the family. Munday didn’t like his presuming; he objected to an African tribesman telling him his wife had lost weight. He didn’t need a stranger to call attention to the hysteria that came over her when he was unresponsive. But he was ashamed that he had been too preoccupied to notice it earlier. He had his own diagnosis: she was taking refuge in illness—refuge from her dread. He laughed at the bitter irony: they had come to the country (she had chosen the place!) for his health, and now it was hers that was shaky.
He was not sure how to deal with it. He was circumspect, then bullying, and finally hearty, offering encouragement, usually at mealtimes, for he was in his study the rest of the time, while she moped, watching Mrs. Branch dust, or sat before the garden window with a sketch pad in her lap.
One evening he said, “Emma, you're not eating.”
“I don't have any appetite.”
“A good walk would set you up.”
“I hate your walks,” she said. “You make them such an occasion.”
“Why don’t you invite Margaret down here one weekend?”
“It's a bother. And there's her job—she’s probably not free,” said Emma.
“But you never see anyone!”
“I see you,” she said. “Why do you talk to me as if I’m an invalid?”
“You haven't been looking well lately.”
“I'm perfectly all right,” she said. But her denial only confirmed that she was sick in a more critical way than if she had agreed with him. She didn’t know she was sick—that was worse. She went on, “But I do wish you'd finish your book. Then we could leave this place.”
“And go where?” said Munday. “Emma, this is England!”
“It’s not ” she said, and he thought she was going to cry. “It’s a miserable house, not like any house I've ever known. Even Silvano said it.”
“What did he say?”
“ ‘Your house frightens me,' ” she said. “Those were his exact words.”
“Africans scare easily.”
“I know what he meant.”
“Africans in England seem so pitiful and comic,” he said. “Like country cousins.”
“You were offhand with him,” said Emma. “I’ve never seen you treat an African that way.”
“I couldn’t help it. He said he wants to settle in England and become a bus conductor. It’s a joke! He likes England, he says, but I took him for a walk around back and he was knocked for six—couldn’t take it. Wants to live in London.”
“I don’t blame him,” said Emma. “So do I. I admit it, Alfred, I’m not suited to the country.” He snapped, “That’s what you used to say about Africa.”
“I can’t creep into a comer and thrive.”
“Who can?”
“You,” she said. “It’s in your nature.”
“Don’t be cryptic, Emma.”
“I’m not being cryptic,” she said. “I admire it in you. But I still get awfully scared sometimes in this house. We can’t all be so self-sufficient.”
“You don’t know me,” he said. “I can’t survive alone, and I’m not self-sufficient. Emma, I’m as weak as you!”
“You’re not weak at all.”
“But I am,” he said. “This move was a great strain for me
. You seem to forget I have a heart condition.”
“I haven’t forgotten.”
“Why are you looking at me that way?”
“I was thinking of Silvano. You used to be so fond of him in Africa. I can remember you talking to him for hours on end.”
“They weren’t social occasions,” he said. “I made notes on those conversations. And don’t worry, he’ll get his acknowledgment in the book.”
“That weekend opened my eyes. I saw you avoiding him and I thought how much you’d changed.” Emma sighed. “He left early, you know.- He distinctly said he was going to stay over until Monday. But he wasn’t happy here.”
“He’ll get over it.”
“You didn’t go out of your way for him.”
“Who went out of his way for me in Africa?” said Munday angrily. “Ten years, Emma, ten years!”
“You’re not sorry you left Africa, are you?”
“I was at first. It was a blow—well, you know. You were in the room when Dowle told me.”
“You cried.”
“That was exhaustion,” he said. “Not grief, not grief at all. But it seems so foolish now.”
“Why foolish?”
“Because we should have come home sooner. Ten years in Africa and I thought I’d be at the top of my profession. But these poaching students who flew out from England on their vacations to do research have already published their books. They have all the jobs, and I’m ten years behind the times.”
“You’re glad you came home, though?”
“It was the only thing to do.”
Emma said slowly, with mingled relief and fatigue, “I was wondering if you’d ever admit that.”
“And if my heart holds out I’ll finish the book properly.”
“Your heart will hold out,” she said.
“You seem so sure!”
“I am sure. There’s not a thing wrong with your heart.”
“Emma, you were there when Dowle told me I’d have to leave.”
“That dear, dear man,” she said.