by Paul Theroux
I risked the question. "Whatever happened to that part you offered me?"
"The Writer? Oh, Peter got someone really good. He was considering you, though, for a while. Do you think you would have done it?"
For a moment then, all life left my body and I was rigid, wooden, holding the phone in my hollow hand, and then, as though I had sneezed out my soul and been blessed, my spirit reentered me and I felt ashamed and tricked.
"No," I said.
"I've got a story for you."
"Yes?"
"The other night, Dickie Bellford's underwear party," Ariel said. "It was the usual thing, people had to come in their underwear or they weren't admitted. We all knew what was going on, so we were prepared. But some people tried to crash it, and that's where it got interesting. First were these hotshots from out of town. They stopped laughing as soon as they reached the door. Two huge black bouncers with wire coat hangers grabbed them. Take your clothes off or get out.' They got out. Then a really rich Italian executive came with his date—the girl was already in her underwear. The Italian didn't think the rule applied to men. The two black guys came up to him with the wire hangers. Take your clothes off.' You should have seen him in his boxer shorts, and his hairy chest and skinny legs, looking like some guy that was totally lost. What do you think?"
"It's good."
"You think it's stupid."
It was unusual and diverting, but did it bear any relation to anything I wrote? It seemed to me unusable, like the other stories—of the Dutch couple, and the gift victim. Perhaps the reason I was so ready to listen to them was because they convinced me of the reality of my writing. I was always greedy for more, as though the stories had an accidental significance, and I would see their meaning afterwards, like parables I had to live through to understand.
TEN
Traveler's Tale
THE WAY that people, interviewers especially, sit down is usually a good indicator of how long they are planning to stay. Miss Erril Jinkins—the name was apparently correct—lowered herself slowly into the leather armchair in the sitting room of my suite at the Regent of Sydney, going silent as she sank. She was tall and symmetrical, and she shifted her weight and crossed her legs as though locking her body onto the cushion and sealing herself there. The chair itself responded to her—flexed and hesitated and seemed to steady itself with an abrupt chairlike grunt of acceptance.
Miss Jinkins had seemed primly and rather prettily dressed, but when she sat down her prim clothes sort of winked and surprised me with teasing illusion. Her dark blouse was translucent and created a shadow play of the curves beneath it; and her skirt was split to her hip, showing me the entire shapely length of her slender leg.
There was something about her name, about so many of these Australian names, that made me think of a criminal or a convict. She was an elegant woman, but "Erril Jinkins" had an old, crude misspelled strength and suggested to me a hint of wickedness.
"I've interrupted you," she said. "Writing home?"
Her alertness alarmed me. So she had seen the letter I had begun, which lay on the desk across the room with the stamped envelope.
"Yes, I've been away too long."
"Didn't I read somewhere that you're divorced?"
"You may have read it, but it's not true. "I am very happily married," I said. As soon as the words were out of my mouth I regretted them for their self-congratulation. Superstitiously I thought: Who heard that?
Erril Jinkins took out her tape recorder. She held it like a small sandwich, then set it on the table between us. She smiled, she peered forward without seeing much, she batted her eyelashes. I was appalled by her slowness and her patience.
Her smile made me uneasy, too. She seemed to be warning me of an awkward question.
"Mind if I use your facilities?"
I hated that—hated her asking, hated the phrase—and why hadn't she asked me before she so ceremoniously sat down in the chair?
"Just through there," I said as she slowly rose to her feet. The curtains of her skirt closed on her thigh as she stood and started away. What is it about the click of a woman's heels on a polished floor that is so arousing?
I went to the far window, where a telescope on a tripod was trained on the opera house. I shortened the focus, from the opera house to the harbor to the bustle at Circular Quay, and watched the people buying tickets, boarding ferries, relaxing. A man sat on a bench in the sunshine, a sandwich in one hand, a paperback in the other. He munched and he read. I was thinking, I want to be that contented solitary man, and I wondered what I was in for with this woman.
***
Now and then an interviewer, while asking something predictable and dull, lets drop a fact that stops me cold.
The journalist in San Diego whose husband got her a big blond surfer for the night as a present for her fortieth birthday. The tiny and rather plain spinster who profiled me in Denver and who said she had taken every drug I could name. "And I still drop acid now and then." The thirtyish woman reporter in Houston who told me how, early in her marriage, their coke parties frequently turned into orgies, and how she had often ended up with two men in her bed, one of them her husband. "But nowadays life is pretty quiet. I mean, we have kids and a mortgage." The broadcaster who was leaving his wife and three children to live in Tucson with another man. The Chicagoan who divorced her lawyer husband after he decided to become a plumber. The radio journalist in Baltimore who had abandoned her husband and three children to follow a fat Indian herbalist-guru to Canada. The smirking girl in Kansas City who told me how her brother, nicknamed "Butter," had made love to a mother and daughter at the same time, and when I frowned, wondering how, she added, "Tag team."
"But this interview is supposed to be about you," they say, and they laugh and change the subject. I comply, because the sooner I answer their questions, the sooner it is over and I am free to sit on a bench in the sunshine and eat a sandwich and read a book.
"I'm sure you've been asked all these questions before," the interviewer says at some point, and I always protest: No, no—I find yours interesting! It hardly matters. I am on autopilot, answering the same questions I have been asked for the past twenty years. Why did I go to Africa? What is so special about trains? Do I use a word processor? Which is my favorite of my own books? Who are my favorite writers? If I could go anywhere in the world, which country would I choose? Have I ever, in traveling, been in fear of losing my life? Was the hero of this book or that based on anyone in particular? What do I think of the nasty piece about my book in last Sunday's book review?
One interviewer is eighteen and a bit giggly, just out of school and still living with her folks, and really wants to tell me about her baby sister. Another is elderly and nervous, quite unlike the young interviewer who just left the room wearing an Elvis button. Many are unremarkable-looking women who startle me by mentioning drugs or multiple divorces or the sudden throwaway, "Well, I happen to know that because I was sexually abused myself as a child."
These interviewers squint at me and then rush away and describe me in their newspapers as relaxed ... ivy-league ... horn-rims ... candid ... evasive ... polite but distant ... friendly but formal ... younger than I expected ... taller than I expected ... shorter than I expected ... middle-aged ... very fit ... somewhat pale ... ill at ease ... bumbling ... transatlantic.
I am not dismayed. I learned long ago that a newspaper page is not a mirror and seldom a window.
But I often think: I should do a profile of them. I would be better at it, and they too would feel self-conscious when I mentioned how they clawed their hair and dropped their notes and spilled their drink and got my titles wrong: Riding the Red Rooster, Riding the Iron Monster, The Great Train Bazaar, My Secret Life. That simple little fellow in Christchurch, New Zealand, who praised me for writing Walden. There is always a tape recorder that won't record, and always the same comment: "I was always afraid that this would happen." There is often an interviewer who arrives late and apologet
ic because she has a serious problem at home (sick child, ailing parent, damaged pet). Their bitten fingernails, their touching admiration, their ill-concealed malice or envy, their sadness, their mention of deadlines. All that and "How long does it take to write a book?" and "Do you respect your characters?" and "Which is harder to write, fiction or nonfiction?"
But what remains with me is the sorry way they walk, and their plastic briefcases and their fatigue, and their shoes—especially their shoes, so trampled and misshapen they have come to resemble a battered pair of human feet—and I decide to do nothing, not to write about them, because every one of them is overworked and underpaid.
***
Only then did I hear a toilet flushing, like the sound of a failed explosion, and a door slammed, and I looked up and saw Erril Jinkins. She had been gone all that time. She made her way back to the sitting room, and she thanked me and motioned with her hands—I guessed they were somehow still damp—and she got back into the chair in the same serious way.
I wanted to say: The actor Dirk Bogarde was being interviewed by a woman from the BBC. This was in Switzerland, and she had a so-called tummy upset. Bogarde said, "Sorry, I never let anyone use my lavatory," and banished the poor woman a mile and a half down the mountain, into the village, back to her hotel, so that he could preserve the sanctity of his own cherished toilet.
Meanwhile, Erril Jinkins said, "Nice place."
It was the Presidential Suite, and I almost told her so, but I was getting it at a greatly reduced rate so that hacks could come in and scribble, as she was doing now, Sumptuous suite ... deep arm- chairs ... patterned wallpaper ... signed prints by well-known aboriginal artists ... flowers ... Oriental carpets ... view of harbor ... brass telescope...
"I didn't choose it," I said, despising myself for bothering to explain. "It was assigned to me."
"I've been here before," Jinkins said.
I looked sharply at her. Surely a lie?
"John le Carré," she said.
She squinted and smiled and glanced around the room.
"What is it about hotel rooms? They make me feel sexy."
She was still looking hungrily around the room.
"He had me in stitches," she said. "He insisted I call him David."
I tried to imagine his insisting, and when she glanced up at me I think she realized that I didn't believe her.
"That's his real name, of course," she said.
How easy it was to be with an author who was wary of throwing his weight around out of a fear of being called arrogant or pompous. The idea was to put your best foot forward, to treat all questions as though they were well intentioned and all interviewers as intelligent and serious. Play the game and they will be gone soon, was my usual tactic.
"It's impossible to open a paper without seeing your face," Jinkins said. "All those articles about you! All those book reviews!"
I found myself being apologetic once again, but she interrupted me before I could get very far.
"How long were you in China?" she asked.
"About a year, on and off. But the funny thing is—"
"I was there for two years," she said, cutting me off. "First in Shandong, in Dongfang—the oil fields—and then in Ha-mi. You didn't mention Ha-mi."
"I passed through it on the train to Turfan," I said.
"You should have stopped. It's on the Silk Route, very Muslim, the food's beaut. I got to know the people there pretty well. They can be super-friendly. They've got all sorts of grievances with the Han Chinese, of course."
"I mentioned that," I said quickly, but before I could say where, she was off.
"Such as marriage laws, family size, freedom of religion, permission to travel to Mecca to make the haj—all sorts of stuff. But I found that if you learned the language you could get to know them really well."
"So you learned Mandarin?"
"I meant Uighur," she said confidently, pronouncing it Weegah. "Yeah, I learned Mandarin, but most of the Uighur are suspicious of you if you speak it to them."
"Uighur is supposed to be very difficult."
She shrugged and dismissed this. She said, "The script's a bugger, though."
"You can write it, too?" I was astonished that she had learned this maddening script of curlicues and doodles.
She nodded, and I wondered whether she was lying. She said, "That train connects to Korla—in the desert."
"Korla is closed to foreigners," I said.
She smiled again, and now I knew that this smile was a show of defiance and contempt. She said, "I spent a month there. I lived in a village with a Uighur family. We lived on mutton and goat's milk and that fabulous bread they call nang. They treated me like one of the family—showed me a forbidden oasis, taught me how to ride a camel, took me hunting. Wolves," she said, before I could ask. "We killed three huge ones. They made a pelt into a waistcoat for me. When I left, I gave them my Walkman and a compass, so they'd always know which way to face when they prayed. In return they gave me a samovar. Antique. Russian. Worth loads, I reckon."
Her interruption exasperated me, yet I envied her—not only the trip to Korla, but living with the family, speaking the language, even the samovar. I had seen these bright brass urns in some Uighur houses in Xinjiang, but no one had presented me with one. I suppose it would have helped if I had been a beautiful, sturdy Australian woman with all the time in the world. I envied her those weeks or months she had spent without the necessity of having to meet a deadline. I loved the casualness of it, the wallowing in all that exoticism, her independence and anonymity. It was real travel: hardship and pleasure in the great naked undeveloped landscape of Xinjiang.
There was something so artificial about a travel book: taking notes, and then lugging your notes back and making them into a book, as though in justification of all that self-indulgence. Yet what was more self-indulgent than writing such a book? As a writer who traveled, I felt somehow that I was forever having to account for my movements, and in so doing having to make them seem as though they mattered.
"So you've done a lot of traveling?" I asked.
"Travel is in your head—people are in your head." She smiled once more. "The best fun I've ever had was driving slowly through the African bush, wearing my Walkman and listening to the soundtrack of Diva while looking at elephants, fifteen or twenty at a time, foraging and walking—opera and elephants and dust."
I could see it just as she described it, and I set the scene in the dusty bush of Malawi where I had seen elephants.
"In China," she went on, "it was 'Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do' while looking at three thousand people cycling through Tiananmen Square—that was amazing. It was ... doesn't James Joyce call it an epiphany? It is impossible to put the feeling into words."
She was right—a travel book was such a feeble duplication of the real thing, and some of the greatest travelers never wrote a word; their names are not known. They are the people, like Erril Jinkins, whom one spots in the bazaars of distant places. You look again, in order to catch their eye, and they are gone. Their stories are never told.
"I've traveled in Europe and Asia. I was on the hippie trail in the early seventies." Here she looked closely at me and smiled, searching my face for a reaction. "But mostly it's been South America. Down the rivers."
"I've always wanted to do that," I said.
"It takes ages but it's worth it," she said. "It's impossible unless the Indians help you. I flew to Colombia—Bogotá. Then Chaviva. Have you been there?"
"I've heard of it," I said, and wondered whether I really had.
"Then down the Río Meta, to Puerto Carreño, in a canoe. That's on the Venezuelan border. Then down the Orinoco, about four hundred miles or so. Very nice."
Erril Jinkins no longer seemed like an anonymous woman in glamorous clothes, but rather a genuine person with a name and a past. Her strength and courage were far more attractive to me than her beauty, but they made that beauty itself something powerful.
&nbs
p; She said, "I discovered then that there are places in the world where no one has ever been. Not just mountains that no one has yet climbed, but valleys never seen, rivers no person has ever paddled in. Real wilderness, virgin territory. What Sir Richard Burton called 'nature in the nude.' That ought to be the whole purpose of travel, don't you think? To find those places and then to keep them a secret."
She recrossed her legs and smiled again. What lovely teeth she had.
She said, "Let's talk about your book."
While she had been talking about the wilderness, I had revised my opinion of her. Of course there were always these interviewers who needed to tell their stories—they sought out a writer not to listen but to talk. They were competitive, they were aggressive, they could be very boring. She was none of these. Perhaps she had set out to impress me; if so, she had succeeded. I had to admit that even if half of what she was saying were true, she was special. I didn't mind her monopolizing the allotted hour—which was, by the way, nearly over.
She asked, "Do you ever invent in your travel writing—I mean, make things up?"
"No. I put it down the way I—"
And just like that in the middle of my sentence she interrupted again, as though I had not been speaking at all.
"Ever try to lie, make your trips sound better or worse than they are, in order to amuse your readers?"
"I was about to say—"
But I got no further.
"Because there's this theory going around that travel writing is a kind of fiction, that invention and imagination are part of the process of the writing. Maybe it happened, maybe it didn't, what does it matter, you know?"
"That's not my theory," I said, wondering whether she was going to interrupt. "I try to describe things as they are, as they happened. I pride myself on telling the truth, because the truth is always more interesting than anything you can invent."
She reached over and snatched up her tape recorder and switched it off. "That's a good ending. Thanks for the interview."
I almost said, What interview? I certainly had not told her much. She had not seemed to notice that. She took her time putting her notes away and zippering her tape recorder into her handbag. By now her hour was gone—she had run over, not that it mattered.