by Paul Theroux
After this singular act of love we turned into two people and I knew I had to get out of her hut. It was not easy for me to leave, for as soon as I got up, the old woman mumbled, saying to Amina, "Don't go," or something like it, because she too stood up and began shambling to the door.
I could not go out alone, because the old woman would hear. The only way I could avoid detection and not rouse her suspicions was to stay very close to Amina, so that we would sound like one person.
In all the clatter of the drumming there was another snorting noise.
"Fisi," the old woman said.
"Yes. A hyena," Amina said as a big, bristling and humpbacked dog blundered out of the darkness next to the hut.
That was how I left, startling the slavering creature and covered by its noise. We were the noise, the hyena and I. The thing was alert but did not seem afraid. It was mangy and misshapen, and it snarled at me, not angry but annoyed, as though I were the intruder.
11
When that scavenging animal bared its teeth at me, I knew it was the end. I would have to leave Moyo, and I should pick up and go before I was sent away. Expulsion would have been so hard: facing Father DeVoss's melancholy eyes. I was ashamed on the path back. I skulked like the hyena. I went guiltily to my room, sneaking up the stairs, knowing that anyone could hear my feet.
Even so, when I said the next day, "I have to be getting back to my school," Father DeVoss did not protest or make an ironic remark. He nodded as he sometimes did when he was dealt a certain hand of cards.
It was settled. His silence meant that it would be soon. Perhaps he was grateful to me for sparing him the bother of banishing me from Moyo.
I had lost my right to remain there. I had at last interfered. I had used Amina and that was wrong, because it violated a strict rule. I knew the rule, but I had been curious. I had created an area of disorder. There was no way I could deny it or undo it. Father DeVoss knew everything.
And what made it hard for me was that I felt strongly that everyone else knew, too. I could not look into their faces, and when I glanced at them they seemed different—not more familiar but a great deal stranger, almost menacing. And if this was so, that everyone knew what I had done, I could never go back to Moyo. That was worse than anything.
"I am sorry to be leaving," I said to Father DeVoss.
He did not ask why. That shamed me, too.
"Because this is the real world," I said.
"Yes," he said, and smiled. "It is all here."
He was not being ironic. It was a complete world, perhaps the only real world, and I was leaving it for the feebler and less secure world of metaphors, where "leper" did not mean leper.
"Maybe you can write something," he said.
"I don't know about writing," I said, remembering how I had shoveled my books into the ground in my attempt at a great purifying act of finality. "It's so hard."
"Papier is geduldig." Father DeVoss had never spoken Dutch to me before. He smiled, as though he had revealed a secret. Then he explained. "Paper is patient."
The word "paper" brought to mind a piece of the foolscap that my school got in stacks from the ministry, the sort I had used for writing my poems. This blank sheet had a blinding whiteness that made me helpless and stupid.
At the station, at seven the next morning, Father DeVoss said, "Don't forget us."
It was perhaps just a pleasantry, but I knew I never would. Then he touched my elbow and I felt the charge of his hand traveling through my arm.
The train drew into the Ntakataka stop and it was all a confusion of shouting and boarding, the women with baskets, the men with chickens. This was near the beginning of its run, but after just four stations the aisles were littered with peanut shells and chewed sugar-cane stalks and orange peels. And the coaches seemed much more battered than they had been six weeks ago. Decrepit and uncomfortable, they looked a hundred years old.
I sat in second class again, and even before we left the station I began mentally to list what I had seen at Moyo. I wanted to write something, but I truly felt as though I would never write again, about Moyo or anything else.
Was I a writer? A writer had to get used to looking on and not interfering—being a witness. I had been passionate. Should I have kept back and been colder? I did not know whether I had made it hard on myself. I did not know that I would only see this over an enormous distance of time and space. I felt sad because I did not know how to live.
The low woods, the yellow leaves, the elephant grass, the dust, the mud huts, the unvarying bush: every landscape feature seemed to turn its back on me in my departure.
I would miss Moyo, I knew, and what made the loss of it a burden was that no one there knew what missing meant, nor wanted to be anywhere else. In that sense it was paradise.
To console myself, I looked for a young girl who might resemble Amina. I searched inside the train and looked at the people we passed in villages. No one looked like her. That thought uplifted me, but made me sad.
Moyo was unlike any of these mud hut villages by the tracks. It was static and settled, a place of monumental inertia and no drama. It was not dark, not dangerous. It went against all my notions of Africa. It was snakes and insects and curable diseases. You accepted it and left: all other ambition behind.
The lepers and priests and nuns, all of them, were happier than anyone I had ever met. They had found what they were looking for. What luck. It bothered me that I had not been able to fit in; that through my own fault I had been cast out; and that having left I would have to keep going—searching for the rest of my life for a similar place, and my mind always returning to Moyo.
I thought of what the people said at the leprosarium: there would never be a disease like this again, never a plague or a scourge, and surely nothing like it in this part of Africa, which in a clumsy way was being purified. No plague, no scourge, and even words like these would be archaic or quaint when leprosy was gone.
Yet I was uneasy, feeling naked again, certain that I was leaving this for a greater ignorance.
THREE
Poetry Lessons
1
I DID NOT UNDERSTAND a thing I read, nor did I begin to write any better, until I married and had children.
It all happened quickly. I fell in love in Africa with Alison Musgrave, an Englishwoman, and within three years we were a family of four. That short time crammed with events changed my life, and all of it—love, marriage, children, debt—seemed inevitable. I felt powerless against these urgencies. Yet I saw that I had to be strong. The ritual and romance of adulthood bred such intense emotions in me that one day I would see myself as a victim and another day as a hero. But really I was being a husband and father. I held my family in my hands and felt how fragile they were. Loving them made me love life and value it in a way I had never known before.
In that same three-year period we moved from Africa to Singapore. I was not ready to go home to the United States, and I wanted to see Southeast Asia, to be near to Vietnam, perhaps go there while the war was hot. As someone who opposed the Vietnam War, I felt obliged to be a witness. I also liked Singapore's image as a hot, sleepy backwater full of colonial relics, crumbling houses, and old habits. The time warp of travel in hot countries, under a vast sunny sky, helped my imagination. I signed a three-year contract to teach at the University of Singapore. I had plenty of time.
My small house was now noisy with my family and two inexpensive servants. I often complained about all my responsibilities. But I was howling dishonestly, because deep down I was fulfilled.
I knew how deep my pleasure was the day I agreed to drop Ringrose's key at his house on the Jurong Road.
"I can't do it," Ringrose said, his mouth drawn down like a dog's. He was either suffering or else imitating it brilliantly. "Ring Nose" we called him behind his back at the Staff Club.
He had the office next to mine. The walls were thin, I heard his telephone conversations, but everyone knew what I knew. He had just gotten di
vorced and the old Singapore law was humiliating. The grounds were adultery. His wife had had to name a corespondent; it was one of Ringrose's students. Ringrose countersued, named his wife's lover, Pratchett from the chemistry department, with the beard, and all the pens in his shirt pocket, and the flip-flops on his feet—he had entered Ringrose's house wearing them, and the story went that he had left one behind, an incriminating rubber footprint.
After this mess was settled, Ringrose's wife had gone back to England with their two children (Colum five, Kari eight). That it was winter in England—it was never winter here—made it especially awful for the angry, isolated woman and her children. Ringrose was living in an apartment in the noisiest part of Selangor Estates, pretending that he was not carrying on with the named student, a Chinese girl, Wendy Lee, whose smooth seal-pup face still looked guiltless. Ringrose too had moved out.
"I can't stand to look at that bloody house," he said. I had lived among English people long enough to know that he had a Birmingham accent.
Having agreed to drop the key through the letter slot of his house, I decided to turn the errand into a family outing. Here on Bukit Timah there was nowhere for children to play. The Chinese shops were full of ambiguous wonders, like snake wine and medicinal deer antlers and jars of crumbly pickled lizards or fragile mouse fetuses. But there were drawbacks.
"Chickens!" Anton, my older son, said one day, seeing half a dozen hens squawking on a counter. An hour later we passed the same shop and saw them dead, beheaded and plucked. "Where are the chickens, Dad?"
Jurong Road was the country, ragged uncut jungle, the defunct rubber estates, new red roads being made in the swampy ground, the old Asia of snakes and ferns and grottoes, and mossy shrines littered with blown-apart firecrackers, and small, square rubber-tappers' huts being bulldozed and buried.
Alison said, "I wish this were our house."
It was off the road, up an unpaved driveway, a lovely upraised house with verandahs running entirely around both the lower and upper stories, set among palms, in a garden that flourished with ferns and big-eared plants and flowering shrubs. It must have once been a rubber-planter's house, an estate manager's, one of those adulterous drunks who was always turning up in the expatriate stories of Somerset Maugham.
We crunched down the gravel drive, scaring the wild birds, and we all piled out of the car, as though in a park. Alison had brought a ball for the children to play with, and some sandwiches and drinks, and she joined me on the ground-floor verandah.
We looked through the windows and saw the Ringroses' chairs, their pictures, their rugs, some carved Malacca chests, their bright cushions and ashtrays and pewter mugs; a playpen, a fruit bowl with no fruit in it, vases without flowers, some scattered toys, and in a room just off the hallway a glimpse of a bedpost.
Because it was not vacant, it was one of the saddest interiors I had ever seen. It was visibly haunted. The family had gone, their artifacts and their gloom remained. Everything in the house had been chosen by the Ringroses. Each silent object had once radiated hope. You could imagine the family saying, "I love this," and "Let's get two of those," and "This is just right for the children," and "This is super."
Dead echoes in the furnished house.
It reminded me of one of those tombs—Egyptian, I suppose—where pots and pans and bracelets and books, all the paraphernalia of a person's life, are buried with the corpse. The ghosts of the Ringroses still lingered. Number 538 Jurong Road was the sarcophagus of a dead marriage, and we peered inside like the living looking into the window of a burial chamber, where a family had been turned into triumphant dust and were now represented by their chairs and vases and their stuffed toys and green garden hose and their other comforts and consolations. The way the toys were propped and the cushions prettily arranged broke my heart.
"Let's get out of here," I said. I shoved the key through the letter slot.
Alison shivered aloud and said, "I never want that to happen to us."
I kissed her with all the love in my heart so that we would both feel reassured, and seeing this intimacy, the boys, watching from farther down the verandah, began to object.
"You said we could play here!" Anton said. "That's a false promise. You broke your word!"
I took his face in my hands lovingly and said, "I'd rather chew snot than stay around this house."
He shrieked with pleasure and snatched at little Will. "Daddy said...!"
But I was rejoicing in his excitement and thinking: We have everything!
Ringrose's house represented failed hopes, an ended life, the stage set without a play, all the actors gone, never to return. This glimpse gave me a horror of divorce: the loss, the pain, the emptiness. A family split up and scattered. You could not lose more than this.
***
So, as a married man in love with my wife and adoring my children, I was a wiser reader and a better writer, but I had very little time for either reading or writing. We simply had no money. I earned 1,400 Singapore dollars a month, which was 200 American dollars.
The Singapore government had found out that I was a writer, that I had written political pieces in Africa. This was a government that feared student dissent or any opposition. A flogging—twenty or thirty strokes with the rotan, a cane the width of a man's finger—was a frequent sentence in Singapore in the sixties. The government approved of the Vietnam War and, as a supplier of food and technical assistance and one of the safer R-and-R locations, Singapore was making a fortune on the war. Under pressure from the ministry, the university tried to withdraw my contract. But I had already signed it. Unable to cancel my contract, the government put me on the lowest wage scale, hoping to starve us, so that we would go home. They did not seem to know that we were too poor to go home, or anywhere, and we were still innocent enough of the world not to regard our poverty as failure.
We decided to be very frugal, yet frugality did not help. At the end of every month we were deeper in debt. Alison went to work, teaching at Nanyang, the Chinese university, and when this still did not pay our bills she taught night school, English language and Macbeth, in the basement room of a tenement. Being poor was like a dull ache. It forced habits upon us, life lived at a slower speed. All shopping took longer because we deliberated over prices; we seldom went out—even a movie was an unthinkable expense; and for the first year, with no car, having to take buses, we were always waiting by the side of the road. These constraints did not make us quarrel, nor did they bond us. We suffered it all in silence because it was exasperating to talk about never having enough.
Except for official bashes at the embassies, especially the American embassy, no one I knew gave parties; no one was sociable. Quite the opposite. People prided themselves on being loners and bad-tempered drunks. They thrived on chaos, and when they were drinking they told stories of the last time they had been drunk and what a mess they had made. If a stranger walked into the Staff Club, the regulars were generally rude to him—or her. Being awful to someone to his face without flinching, while he was kept one humiliating beat behind, was regarded as an art, and it was better if the victim was a woman. "He's a rat bag," people said admiringly of the torturer. Hearing that in the Staff Club, I was reminded of how much I hated the place and pitied these people, and how badly I wanted to resign and go away.
But I needed my job, and so I stayed and I listened to my colleagues in the Staff Club whisper about each other and tell the same terrible jokes and complain of the heat, or the rain, depending on the time of year. People didn't give parties unless they were leaving Singapore for good. And when they left there was a sourness in the air, mingled jealousy and resentment for the ones who were getting out. Afterwards we toasted "absent friends," talked about them constantly, and it was hard to tell whether they were being ridiculed or envied. The other expatriates were older and English and had no idea how I wanted to be self-sufficient as a writer. I knew I could not afford to quit, and so I had my hands full with my teaching at the university
English department, my writing, and my family.
A year went by, then another. Now it was 1970 and I was still on the lowest salary scale, still a lecturer in English, still teaching the course called Shakespeare's Contemporaries, still working on my novel. Africa had cured me of poetry. Fiction writing seemed to offer a hope of financial self-sufficiency. That was what I told myself, but I knew my soul was possessed; I needed to turn what I saw into fiction, to give it light and shape. I had published two novels. Ripples still widened from where they sank; they had received respectful reviews.
And I had more to write—my head was full of plots and pronouncements, characters' names. I wrote each morning between seven and ten, lectured at eleven, had lunch, held tutorials in the afternoon, drank from five to seven, and then went home to my family. It was a strange and selfish existence, but it was what the other men did, the English, the Indians, the Chinese. Although we were just scraping by, we had two servants. Such was life in Singapore.
We lived, the four of us and our two amahs, Ah Chang and Ah Ho, in a hot semidetached house of mildewed plaster so near to Bukit Timah Road that the place always smelled of exhaust fumes and all day and night we could hear the gasping and plowing of the buses. Just across Bukit Timah, in a walled compound, was Serene House, a private hotel that catered exclusively to soldiers on R and R from Vietnam—enlisted men. The officers stayed several blocks away at the Shelford. Serene House was a glorified brothel which was one of Singapore's secrets—open only to the military and to prostitutes. Even the police stayed away. It was run with the connivance of the United States and the Singapore governments, a supervised whorehouse. The Shelford had a better class of prostitute and a forbidding fence. I knew the Serene House gatekeeper, a Tamil Indian named Sathyamurthy, and so I often dropped in for a drink on my way home from my lecturing at the university.