Sir Vidia's Shadow

by Paul Theroux

  “I think we’ve done this,” Naipaul said, tapping the cigarette pack.

  After I took them home, I told Yomo about the Naipauls’ argument. She said, “Did he smack her?”

  “No. Just talked, very coldly.”

  Yomo laughed. “Just talked!” She was not shocked in the least. She shrugged, pulled me to the sofa, and said, “I want to give you a bath.”

  The next afternoon, in the blazing sun, Naipaul and I were on the sports field again, being watched by urchins from the mud huts in the grove of trees beyond the field’s perimeter. They jeered at the perspiring runners—it was so odd for them to see white people run or sweat or suffer. They mimicked the movements of the cricketers. I ran around the track while Naipaul flung cricket balls at a batsman. Naipaul seemed to know what he was doing. He knew cricket lore. He had told me it was a fair game—that it was more than a game, it was a whole way of thinking. “There is no sadder sound of collapse than hearing a wicket fall,” he said. “The best aspect of cricket is that no one really wins.”

  He did not say anything about the argument with his wife until we were on our way into town afterwards for tea and cakes. He lit a cigarette and faced away from me, looking out the window—the same posture as the day before, the same time of day, the sun at the same angle, him smoking, me driving.

  “I hate rowing in public,” he said, and nothing more.

  At the teashop I had chocolate cake, he had cucumber sandwiches.

  “These are cooling, but you need your cake. The body knows.”

  He clutched the empty teacup.

  “They warm the cups at the Lake Victoria in Entebbe. That’s nice. But not here.” He poured the milk, he poured the tea, he added sugar, he stirred, he sipped. “We’re moving into our house tomorrow. Do you know those houses?”

  “Behind the Art Department, yes.”

  “They’re pretty crummy.”

  He was more restless than usual. When he had gone without sleep his eyes became hooded and Asiatic. He looked that way today. He began talking about the Kabaka again, asking questions. People in Uganda, even expatriates, seldom mentioned him. He was an institution, a fixture, a symbol. No one ever saw him.

  I said, “He is fairly invisible, but people say that he knows what’s going on. He has his own prime minister, the Katikiro, and even his own parliament, the Lukiko. He takes an interest in things.”

  “He has taken no interest in me,” Naipaul said.

  I smiled to show my incomprehension. Why should the Kabaka, the king of Buganda, even be aware of Naipaul’s existence? The Kabaka was forty-two, handsome, androgynous, aloof, a drinker, the ruler of almost two million people. He had been a thorn in the flesh of the British. He was a thorn in Obote’s flesh. The Kingdom of Buganda belonged to him.

  “I sent a little note to the palace. I had a letter of introduction. He hasn’t replied. Not a word.”

  What a good thing it was that we were alone. Any local person overhearing him go on about not receiving an invitation from this king would have found the complaint absurd. And a more delicate aspect was that the Kabaka was never discussed in public; his name was not spoken. It was bad form to do so if you happened to be in the presence of one of his subjects, and politically unwise if you were in the presence of one of his enemies.

  “He has other things on his mind,” I said.

  Naipaul chewed his cucumber sandwich and faced me, as though challenging me to give him one good reason why the Kabaka could not reply to the note informing him that V.S. Naipaul had arrived in Kampala.

  “They want to kill him,” I said, lowering my voice in this crowded Kampala teashop. “Obote wants to overthrow him.”

  This was news to Naipaul, who I felt had mistakenly lumped the king together with the clapped-out maharajahs and sultans he had come across in India—men down on their luck, feeling wronged and dispossessed, grateful for a sympathetic hearing. The Kabaka was strange but he was vital, and he had a palace guard and a whole armory of weapons.

  “It’s not a good idea to talk about him,” I said.

  “Excellent. I have no intention of doing so. I have lost all interest in him.”

  Leaving the teashop, we bumped into Pippa Broadhurst, a lecturer in history, who had been at Hallsmith’s party. A feminist, hating the prison of marriage, the jailer husband, the life sentence, clucking “I am a human being too,” Pippa had found in the smoky bowl of the Ngorongoro crater in Tanzania a hospitable manyatta (village) and had had a brief affair with a spear-carrying moran (warrior) of the Masai people—another blood drinker, like Dudney’s Karamojong missus. The upshot was Flora, a brown long-legged daughter, with whom Pippa went everywhere. The warrior was still in his thornbush kraal in Masailand.

  “Hello, Vidia,” said Pippa. “And congratulations. I understand Mr. Bwogo’s found you a house.”

  “The house is pretty crummy.”

  “Everyone gets those houses,” Pippa said, snatching at Flora.

  “I’m not everyone,” Vidia said.

  The house, one of a dozen just like it, was newly built and raw-looking, set on a hot, rubbly slope of baked earth above a brick warren of ruinous servants’ quarters. The afternoon sun struck the house and heated it and made it stink of risen dust. The small brick buildings down the slope, too close together, were jammed with squatters and relatives, and I could hear music and chatter coming from the area of woodsmoke. Cooking fires and laughter: it was life lived outdoors, people eating and cooking and washing themselves. The clank of buckets and basins and the plop of slopping water reached me as I tapped on the front door.

  “Come in,” Naipaul called in an irritated voice.

  I could see what he disliked about the house. It was new and ugly, it smelled of fresh concrete and dust, it had no curtains.

  “Paul,” he said in an imploring way, “do sit down.”

  Pat said, “Go on, Vidia, please.”

  “Listen to the bitches!”

  “Vidia,” she said, trying to soothing him.

  He continued to do what he had been doing when I entered, which was to read aloud from closely typed pages a scene about a farewell Christmas party in London, a meal at which presents were being given and toasts proposed. It was something from his novel, I supposed, the one he had brought to Uganda to finish. He went on reading, speaking of the tearful meal and the emotion, of people weeping.

  Pat pressed her lips together when he finished, pausing before she spoke. The last time I had seen her was in the back seat of my car, when she had been sobbing openly and trying to speak (“Stop chuntering, Patsy”), her face contorted, her hair a mess, her cheeks and lips wet, her large breasts tremulous with her grief.

  But today she was cool and very calm. In the most schoolmistressy way she said, “Too many tears.”

  I was seated by a small table on which there lay a carefully corrected paragraph of small type, which I glanced at. The first words, in boldface, read Naipaul, Vidiadhar Surajprasad. It was his Who’s Who entry, with meticulous proofreader’s marks in the margin in black ink, Vidia’s precise handwriting, deleting a semicolon, adding a literary prize and a recent date.

  He had only briefly interrupted the reading of his novel when I entered. I felt he wanted me to hear it, to mystify and impress me. I was impressed. He was admitting me to this ritual of reading; he trusted me.

  He turned to me and said, “Do you hear those bitches and their bongos?”

  No bongos, but I knew what he meant.

  “Do you suppose we could flog them?” He knew it was an outrageous suggestion, but he wanted to gauge my reaction. He took a harmless pleasure in seeing people wince.

  We went to the window and looked downhill at the roofs of corrugated asbestos, moldy from the damp, at the woodsmoke and the banana trees, at barking dogs, crying children, all the elements of urban poverty in Uganda.

  “That’s what they need, a good flogging.”

  “Vidia, that’s quite enough of that,” Pat said, stron
g again, no sign of the tears and sobs of the other day.

  His reading from the typescript and his unembarrassed candor in allowing me to hear it encouraged me to ask him again about writers he liked. So far, all I knew was that he disliked Orwell and that for pleasure he read the Bible and Martial. I had Nabokov’s Pale Fire with me and told him how much I liked it.

  “I read Pnin. It was silly. There was nothing in it. What do people see in him?”

  “Style, maybe?”

  “What is his style? It’s bogus, calling attention to itself. Americans do that. All those beautiful sentences. What are they for?”

  His interest, his passion, was located solely in his own writing. He saw it as new. Nothing like it had ever been written before. It was an error to look for any influences, for there were none; it was wrong to compare it with any other work; nothing came close to resembling it. It took me a little while to understand his utter faith in this conceit, but the day I did, and acknowledged that his writing was unique, and that he was a new man, was the day our friendship began.

  Some people mistook the apparent spareness of his sentences for a faltering imagination, or a lack of stylistic ambition, or sheer monotony. But he said he was deliberate in everything he wrote, calculating each effect, and the simplicity was contrived. In his view, he was like someone making a model of an entire city out of the simplest material, a Rome made of matchsticks, say, a Rome whose bridges a full-sized human could stand on and run carts over. He detested falsity in style, he loathed manner in writing. He said he never prettified anything he saw or felt, and “prettified,” a new word to me, like “chuntering,” was added to my vocabulary.

  “The truth is messy. It is not pretty. Writing must reflect that. Art must tell the truth.”

  But early on, I had kept after him for the names of writers he admired. He shrugged. “Shakey, of course,” he said. “Jimmy Joyce. Tommy Mann.”

  What books, I wondered, and why?

  “Forget Nabokov. Read Death in Venice. Pay close attention to the accumulation of thought. Notice how each sentence builds and adds.”

  What about American writers? Surely there was someone he liked.

  “Do you know the first sentence of the short story ‘The Blue Hotel’ by Stephen Crane? About the color blue?” he asked. “I like that.”

  His own work served as a better example of how complex and yet transparent prose fiction could be. It was original, freshly imagined in both form and content. Its brilliance was not obvious—he did not use the word “brilliance,” but he was wholly satisfied with the work, had no misgivings, saw nothing false or forced in it.

  “Miguel Street is deceptive,” he said. “Look at it again and you’ll see how I used my material. Look at those sentences. They seem simple. But that book nearly killed me, man.”

  Marlon Brando had read Miguel Street with pleasure, he had been told by a mutual friend, the novelist Edna O’Brien, who had also reported that Brando was attracted to women with dark nipples. It pleased Naipaul to know that Brando admired the book, and that knowledge made Naipaul feel friendly towards the actor. The Teahouse of the August Moon was a film he had liked, he said. He had not gone to many films lately, but he had seen every film that had come to Trinidad between the years 1942 and 1950, when he left for Oxford.

  “You know what Brando says about actors?”

  I said I did not know.

  “An actor is a guy who, if you ain’t talking about him, ain’t listening.” Naipaul laughed his deep appreciative laugh and repeated the sentence.

  Yomo was in bed when I got back home.

  “Bibi gonjwa,” the housegirl said in a low voice, sounding as though she had been scolded. “Your woman’s sick.”

  Yomo said in a feeble voice that she was feeling awful and wished she had some kola nuts. I made a cup of tea for her and then rooted through my bookshelf and found an anthology of American short stories, which included “The Blue Hotel.”

  This was how the story began: “The Palace Hotel at Fort Romper was painted a light blue, a shade that is on the legs of a kind of heron, causing the bird to declare its position against any background. The Palace Hotel, then, was always screaming and howling in a way that made the dazzling winter landscape of Nebraska seem only a gray swampish hush.”

  Then Yomo was at the door, wearing the bed sheet like a toga, blinking in the lights and saying, “Please read to me.”

  Naipaul complained so heartily about his house that I told him about my upstairs neighbors—newly married, a middle-aged man and a much younger woman—who giggled and chased each other around the house. They splashed in the bathtub and clattered plates and silver when they ate and called out constantly from room to room, “I can’t hear you!” But we could hear everything they said. It seemed at times they were carrying on for our benefit, using us as witnesses, proving something. They made love noisily—she was a screecher in her orgasms; it was a noise that built in volume and frequency, like someone working hard, pumping a tire, sawing a log. Their bed rocked and squeaked. At times it sounded like a muffled inquisition, the ordeal of someone whose confession was being painfully extracted.

  “Who are they?” Naipaul asked.

  “New people. From Canada.”

  “Infies,” he said. “Doesn’t it make you hate all Canadians?”

  I said no, and Pat laughed.

  “Well, it would make me hate them,” Naipaul said. “Do you speak to them?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “You should cut them.”

  “You mean not speak to them?”

  “I mean not see them. You walk past them. You cut them. They don’t exist. Nothing at all.”

  Not even the G. Ramsay Muir treatment—you just walked on.

  The point about the rocking, squeaking hobbyhorse of a bed was that when I heard it, its first murmurs and jerks and hiccups, hesitating, just foreplay, nothing rhythmic yet, I prepared myself, and soon it was swaying and calling like a corncrake, and the woman was urging this late-night plowing. Then, almost against my will, I became aroused and woke Yomo and we made love.

  One of those nights Yomo turned me away, hugged herself, and said she was really ill.

  “You might be pregnant,” I said. “You have to see the doctor.”

  “I don’t want the doctor. I don’t need him.”

  “He’s good. He’ll need to examine you.”

  “Indian doctor,” she said. “Bloody shit.”

  Dr. Barot was a Gujarati, Uganda born, trained in the Indian city of Broach, who in the past had treated me for gonorrhea and for malaria. I asked him if he would see Yomo. He said of course, that he was also an obstetrician, and that it was important that he see Yomo soon.

  Sleepy-eyed, reluctant, slightly sulky, Yomo finally agreed. She always took pains to dress up before leaving the house, but this was a greater occasion than most. She put on her brocade sash, her expensive cloak, her best turban. I loved seeing her dress up, and she became haughty and offhand when she wore her elegant clothes.

  The February heat was oppressive. In the car Yomo said, “You don’t know. Black people get hotter than white people. It’s our skin.” I wondered whether this was true.

  Dr. Barot greeted her and took her into his examining room. I heard the scraping sound of her disrobing, stiff colorful clothes sliding away, of her folding them. If she was going to have a baby, I would be happy. It was not what I had planned, but really I had no plans. There was something wrong with the very idea of a plan, and anyway I half believed that my life was prefigured—perhaps, as people said, like the lines on my palm. My random life was pleasant enough, and everything good that had happened to me had come accidentally. I just launched myself and trusted to luck. Mektoub—it is written.

  I sat waiting, thinking of nothing in particular. When the examining room door opened I smiled, having just been reminded of why I was there.

  “What’s the verdict?”

  “Four months pregnant,” Dr. Barot said
.

  Yomo looked shyly at me and slipped next to me as we watched Dr. Barot write his bill on a pad. While he wrote, he said that Yomo was healthy and that she should see him regularly from now on so he could monitor her blood pressure.

  In the car, sitting on the hot upholstery, I said, “How can you be four months pregnant? You’ve only been here three months.”

  I felt innumerate and confused and was not blaming her but rather trying to explain my bewilderment.

  Yomo said, “I had a friend in Nigeria before I came here to see you.”

  Now it became harder for me to drive. The road was full of obstacles, and it was much hotter in the car.

  “What are we going to do?” I said.

  She was silent, but I could see she was sad, and her sadness seemed worse because she was dressed so beautifully.

  “Do you think you should see your friend?” I asked.

  She said nothing. She did not cry until that night, when her clothes were neatly folded on the chair, all that stiff cloth in a deep stack. She was in bed, hiding her face, sobbing.

  I did not know what to say. I did not have the words. I loved her, but I had just discovered that I did not know her. Who was this friend, and what was this deception? It must have been obvious to her that she was at least one month pregnant soon after she arrived in Uganda.

  “I want to go home,” she said in a voice that broke my heart, and it was awful to hear the Canadians upstairs fooling around and calling out.

  “This is your home.”

  “No,” she said, and went on weeping.

  Yomo was one of only three passengers on the plane from Entebbe to Lagos a week later. Her posture was different, her sadness making her slower and giving her a halting way of walking, and she sighed as we moved towards the barrier, where I kissed her goodbye. It seemed a kind of death, because it was as though we were losing everything.

  “I liked it when you read that story to me,” she said. She began to weep again.