by Paul Theroux
I chose them at random.
"Is a dock."
"It's a dog," I said. "You."
"Is a dock."
"But this is a duck."
"Thees a dock."
"A duck," I said. "You."
"A dock."
"A dog," I said.
"A dock."
While they repeated these words, saying them with little comprehension, I could hear the clank of pots, the murmur of voices, the whack of wood being chopped, the timid complaining of chickens and dogs.
"It's a dog."
"Is a dock."
The cooking fires were all alight; each hut had its own fire in front, filling the clearing with a stink of burning and a low crackle. The heavy wood smoke rose so slowly that it became tangled in the jutting bunches of thatch, and hung there, disentangling itself, and seeping upward into the somnolent air in blue rags of smoke. This atmosphere was everlasting; such villages had always sounded and smelled this way. It was not a sleepy village—it was the opposite, a place of continuous activity, but the idea of all that toil had a fatiguing effect on me. Its simplicity overwhelmed me and made me tired.
"That's all for today," I said.
"It is not yet six o'clock," Johnson said in a challenging tone, rising to his feet at the back of the room.
I smiled defiantly at him.
"A class last for one hour. I am knowing that from English lessons. I have been schooling in my district."
The way he stood, in a domineering posture, his hands on his hips, taking up more space than he needed, seemed to indicate that he was speaking on behalf of the others, or at least trying to. I was already sick of him. I would have preferred a roomful of Africans who spoke no English at all, beginning with a blank slate and bringing them along.
"This is American English," I said. "The class lasts forty-five minutes. We will meet again on Friday."
Just saying that, anticipating the day, wearied me even more. The class was silent, attentive in the failing light. They were not looking at me but rather at the side of the shed where one of the nuns stood, her white robes luminous in the dusk.
"This man is in the wrong place," she said.
It was Birdie, in a nun's habit, wearing the starched bonnet that doubled as a sun hat.
"His family is looking all over for him."
She extended her hand to the silent man in the front row, and helping him up seemed to frighten him. He allowed himself to be tugged along, and went with her, with a stiffness that looked like resistance. He was obedient but his eyes were filled with terror.
I dismissed the class and joined Birdie and the man, and said, "I hadn't realized you were a nun."
"I'm not," she said. "It's just that I get more respect dressed this way." She smiled. She was friendlier than when I had first met her in the dispensary. "And this stuff's cooler."
Just her face was visible, framed by the bonnet that looked as though it were made out of brilliant white cardboard, a prettier face than the one from the other day.
"I mean, I'm naked underneath," she said.
Without knowing why—perhaps it was my confusion—I looked at the African, his glassy eyes, his fists at his side, his rigid way of walking. Birdie laughed at me and steered the clumsy African towards his hut.
For a long time afterwards I could not think of anything else. I was dizzy with the words I'm naked underneath. Her saying that stunned me, had a physical effect on me, made me slightly deaf and nearsighted and stupid. She must have known that, from the way she laughed. Over cards that night, and in the darkness of my room, and in the dusty heat the next day and especially during meals, while I was swallowing something, I thought of what she had said, and went stupid again.
On Friday there was another class, this time a dozen Africans, big and small, sick and well. The simpleton was not there, and some of the others had not come back. But Johnson was in his same seat, and Amina and her blind granny were there. Two other young women were also there, and from the undercurrent of whispers and the gestures of the men, I could see a sort of courtship going on as the class progressed. At the end, the two women paired up with two of the men and sneaked off into the bush.
I was almost fearful that Birdie might show up as she had on Wednesday, but she was nowhere to be seen. It was one of the characteristics of the leprosarium that people kept to themselves, each person to his portion of the place, the priests in their house, the nuns in the convent, the lepers in their village. I realized that one of my reasons for missing mass on Sunday was the thought that I might run into Birdie. Her laughter had excited and disturbed me. I needed to be calm, and so I avoided her. It was not difficult. In fact, the whole of Moyo seemed to contain separate kinds of solitude.
The Monday class was a smaller group than Friday's. Amina and her granny were missing, and of the others, the same two young women were there, but fewer men. They giggled among themselves. They were inattentive. I was sure the class was now simply a pretext for a liaison in the bush later on. Aware that no one was listening to me, I became tired and hoarse.
I wondered why Amina had dropped out. When she did not show up at the next class, I took it as a rejection of me, taught for half an hour, and then disgustedly sent them all home.
4
The leper village was active, it had an air of being industrious, and yet none of this work seemed to change it. Was there something African in the way all this energy and motion left no trace behind? It reminded me of a riverbed I had seen in the southern region—flooded, brimming, bearing whole trees and logs and huts in its torrent one day; dry as a bone the next, just dusty gullies. The fury came and went, and there was no visible memory of it.
Moyo was like that. Women carried firewood, big girls carried small children or else buckets of water, boys played or hoed the rows of corn, men squatted in groups, muttering and smoking pipes. Some were lepers, others relatives of lepers. Food was grown and cooked and eaten. Firewood was burned. The buckets of water were emptied. So the people were sustained. The achievement of the work was that life continued. It was the meaning of subsistence, an active way of marking time. The reason for all this effort was to hang on to life and to remain the same.
At midday a stillness settled over the place, and only then was it apparent that something had been happening—this sudden stillness was the proof that work had been going on, but it was noticeable only when it stopped, like a hum that goes dead or a clock that stops ticking, and the silence is shattering. At noon on Saturdays the silence was more pronounced. It was a large hole in the day and nothing followed it. The shop closed, the dispensary was locked, gardening ceased, the market emptied, and the women who sold bananas and peanuts and boiled potatoes and the black bony smoked fish that looked like shingles in stacks—these market women drifted away. Then the leprosarium, the village of pale mud huts, lay silently baking in the sun, and the only sounds were barks or cockcrows, no voices. Behind it all, like vibrant wires, the howl of locusts. Saturday was like a day of mourning.
I sat on the verandah of the priests' house. Nearer the rail, Father Touchette read his breviary, turning the pages with clean white fingers. Brother Piet dozed, his hands clasped over his stomach. His snoring was like an obvious form of boasting. Father DeVoss had gone to the lake shore on his motorcycle to say a Saturday mass at a village church where he went once a month.
I unbuckled the straps of my leather satchel and slipped out a cheap Chinese-made notebook, its spine covered in red cloth. I wrote, 11 Oct., 1964, Moyo Leprosarium, Ntakataka, Central Province, and then I looked up, beyond the tin roofs to the thatched roofs, to the treetops, smoke mingling with dusty sunlight, and the Africans looking as upright as exclamation marks. I thought that, but I did not write it into my notebook. Writing seemed irrelevant.
My poems, about a dozen of them, I had copied carefully into the back. I turned to them and read some lines, and then I began to skip. They were lifeless, they seemed trivial, I hated and was bored by the re
petition of the word "black." My eye fell on the words "pulpous," and "gorgeous," and "taut." I disliked them too, and I shut the notebook, because I was tempted to tear them out.
There was no point in a letter home. I seldom wrote anyway, and my family might be alarmed by this one. They might misunderstand and pity me. I had no way to describe this place. The danger in writing about it was in making it seem worse than it was. Yet leprosy was accepted, snakebite was normal, work changed nothing. Everyone except the foreigners was either a leper or else a relative of a leper. I did not know how to write about this without embellishing it, and I knew that it would be a mistake. It was as far from my notion of literature as it could be. I was reminded of the cassava and how it looked when it was dug out of the ground, just a rough hairy root covered with reddish dirt. You would never think that it was edible. And yet we ate them every day, peeled and boiled. They were a little stringy, but after you had been eating them for a year you noticed that their taste was almost delicate.
Moyo—the leper colony, the mission, all the people and their simple buildings—was a little world of illness. Yet it was more real to me than the colonial town I had left behind in the south, with its main street and its look of feeble mimicry. I had had no trouble writing poems about Blantyre, because it had once seemed real. The trip to Moyo showed me that I had been mistaken.
The reality here was that no one was sentimental. They came here ill; they declined; they died. No one advanced or prospered. It was a small world in which no one had the illusion of making choices. And no one minded that. I did not know why this was so, though I suspected that it was because the people here were always in the presence of death.
My poems were pointless and trivial. The very word "poems" irritated me, because they were made of artifice and self-consciousness. "Look at me," all poems said. They called attention to themselves rather than their subject. I wanted to throw them away, but paper was such a luxury here that someone was bound to retrieve them from the barrel and I would be ashamed. So I hid them and vowed to destroy them in my own secret way.
I turned to the Kafka Diaries, and read some pages and found them gloomy and tormented and filled with morbid self-pity. The worst of it was Kafka's hypochondria. Reading it in sight of the leper village, I almost laughed at Kafka's repeated expressions of anxiety and the minutiae of his exaggerated ill health. Sleeping badly, he wrote. Shortness of breath and a tightness in my chest, he wrote. And then my eye fell on the word "leper" in one entry. Sometimes I feel like a leper. But he had no idea how a leper felt, or what it meant to be a leper. I could not read any more.
I thought; You could stay here and learn to hate all written words, and despise literature most of all. I decided to find a shovel and dig a hole and bury my notebook of poems and my Kafka book.
Father Touchette did not stir when I got out of my creaking chair to creep off the verandah. Though he looked as if he were meditating on his breviary in a posture of great piety, he was asleep. He was not ecstatic, merely napping.
I got up and walked along the path to the edge of the village where I had seen a beehive of smoking bricks and some shovels. They made bricks the old way here, digging a hole in clayey earth and dumping in water and straw and then tramping in it until it was mixed. Then they crammed the mixture into a mold and stacked the bricks and baked them.
I wanted to dig a hole here. It would give this day a meaning—but more than that, anything buried here would (to use a word from one of my poems) become friable, crumble to dust, and one day, wetted and molded and baked, be turned into bricks for a latrine, a fitting end for these paltry poems.
The earth was dry. It seemed hard at first, but it cracked and gave and came apart, and soon, digging with a rusty shovel, I had a deep enough hole to bury the Kafka and my notebooks. I flung them in casually, raising dust, liking the way they plopped into their pauper's grave, and then I covered them with dirt.
"Great," I said.
In that same moment I heard a startled yelp and looked up. A little distance off I saw a woman running away and a man hitching his shorts up and dusting off his knees, slapping at them. He coughed loudly, glanced in the direction the woman had gone, and then hunkered down, elbows on his knees, and stared at me.
"Are you looking at me, Father?" he said in Chinyanja.
He was as dark as the shadow of the mango tree in which he crouched.
"These bricks"—I was mounding the dirt over the corpses of my papers—"are they yours?"
Now I saw his sweating face and bandaged feet, smeared with dust.
"They belong to the hospital," he said, using the word chipatala. The sick ones called it a hospital, the healthy ones referred to it as a village or a mission.
I walked nearer to him. He was wrinkled and black. Like many other Africans I had seen, he looked as though he had been worn down by the weather. His skin was roughened by wind and sun, like a tree stump or a fence post.
"They are for the kitchen," he said.
I could see a partly made wall; the mortar had hardened as it oozed out from between the bricks. This was perhaps the foundation, the outline of fireplaces that were like a row of barbecue pits. It was to be a communal kitchen.
"Is it your kitchen?"
"It is anyone's kitchen."
He seemed bored, but it was the way most of the lepers talked to mzungus—offhand, faintly jeering, because this was a world the lepers could not leave. And why should they care when they had the mzungus to worry about them?
"Are you working on it?"
In the same bored tone, now sounding haughty and indignant, he said, "No, I am sick."
He held up his bandaged hands.
"I thought maybe your woman was helping you."
"Not to work, but to play." He laughed in a rumbling way, and coughed and then spat, and all of that too was like a pronouncement.
"I just buried some rubbish," I said, realizing that he might have seen me. In Chinyanja the word for rubbish suggested something that was contaminated and unclean. I did not want him to become curious and dig it up, as a scavenging African might.
"If I work on the kitchen, will you help me?" I asked.
"How much will you pay me?"
"Nothing."
"Then I will not work."
It was a leper's response and it verged on insolence. He was frank, he was not afraid, he was blunt. In Blantyre, an African would have humored me and still not done any work.
"Why should I?" the man said, because I had not replied to him.
I thought of Franz Kafka in Prague confiding to his diary, I feel like a leper. The book belonged in the ground with my bad poems. Kafka was not a leper. He was a middle-class insurance clerk with a batlike face, pathologically timid and paranoid and guilt-ridden, developing various personal myths as he wrote long, fussy letters to lonely women desperate for the chance to love him.
This was a leper: guiltless, maimed, seeping into his bandages. He had just copulated under a tree with a leper woman, and he was now staring me down. In many ways he was healthy—certainly healthier than Franz Kafka. Reading meant nothing to him; a book was a mute object. He was patient and contemptuous because he was powerless, and he knew it. Perhaps he knew that nothing would change for him, nor would he change anything. He had no illusions, and so he was fully alive every waking moment, looking for food or water, looking for shade, looking for a woman.
"What is your name?"
"Wilson. And yours?"
"Paul."
"From England?"
"America."
"Americans have so much money."
"I don't have any."
He laughed at me and hobbled away before I could say anything else. One of his feet was bandaged, the other was big and yellow and cracked, with twisted toes. He wore a ragged shirt and tattered shorts. His hands were bandaged like mittens.
That night I remembered his confident mocking laugh and I was ashamed of what I had told him. Did the disease make lepers frank
because it made them clear-sighted? Of all the people I had met in my life, they had the least to lose.
One morning I went to mass. I had not been to mass for six or seven years, and I entered the church wincing and a little apprehensive, the way I had come home as a teenager after a long absence without a good excuse. And yet I need not have worried. The church was large and sunny and forgiving. One pew was taken up by lepers, about six men, and there were several pews of women, some with crying babies, the others suckling infants. There were nuns in the front pew, and Linda—Birdie—wearing a white dress. Standing at the back of the church was the pretty young girl, Amina, and her blind granny.
I felt friendly towards these people, and as mass began and progressed I thought of how my feelings of pity and my sentimentality had influenced so many of my friendships. And I knew self-pity, too, and the busy, domineering feelings that came from pity, saving myself by pretending to save other people. Here, in the place most likely to arouse such feelings, I was detached—not indifferent—and free to examine how I felt. Not pitying any of them, I felt lost and a little disoriented, but freer than ever.
Kneeling at the consecration, I found myself staring at Amina. She was not kneeling—because she was a Muslim, obviously—but she was steadying her granny, who was murmuring and motioning, making the sign of the cross; and I admired the young girl for doing this, being dutiful.
The mass was hot and solemn, all mumbled, with the cocks crowing just outside.
That night, during a lull in the game of whist, I said to Father DeVoss, "I'm giving up the English class."
"That is a good idea."
They had been his exact words when I told him I was planning to start the class.
"I think I'll work on the bricks at the outdoor kitchen instead."
"If you like, yes," he said. He smiled, but he might have been smiling at his hand of cards. "That is a good idea."
"Maybe Father Touchette will help me."
Father Touchette fumbled with his breviary, looking startled.
"I am busy with baptisms," he said. "So many of them these days."