Sir Vidia's Shadow

by Paul Theroux

  The road from Entebbe to Kampala was known for its frequent fatal car accidents. I drove it that day feeling fearless and stupid, not caring if it was my turn to die on this road, because hadn’t everything else come to an end? I was numb, but when I got to my house I knew that I had lost my love and would have to begin again, and all that helped was my knowing that for Yomo it would be worse. So I helped myself by sorrowing for her.

  Naipaul asked me where I had been. He had not seen me in the painful week that had just passed.

  “Oh, God,” he said. “Oh, God.” His voice cracked, his face was tormented. “Are you all right? Of course you’re not. Paul, Paul, Paul.”

  He was truly upset. He was sharing the burden. That was the act of a friend.

  He took my hand and turned it over and studied it again, this time tracing it with his finger, and this time he spoke.

  “You must not worry. You’re going to be all right.”

  “Thanks, Vidia.” It was the first time I used the name.

  “That is a good hand.”

  3

  The Kaptagat Arms

  IT WAS THE MONTH of bush fires, smoky skies, black hills, fleeing animals; the season of haze and hawks.

  With all my love lost, I lay in the bedroom alone where we had slept together, staring at the long-nosed stains on the ceiling, goblins with the voices of the yelling Canadians upstairs. I was sorrowful without Yomo and her laughter. Naipaul—Vidia, as I now called him—was kind, but kindness was not enough. I needed a more intimate friend or else no one at all, just the consolation of the African landscape, which was a reminder to me that life goes on.

  It was the season when Africans set fire to the bush, believing the blaze to be helpful to next year’s crops. I set off for the north, drove almost to the Sudan, and walked among the elephant palms to the shriek and twang of the same insects the people ate there; then I drove on to Arua, in West Nile province, on the Congo border, with its scowling purplish Kakwa people, of whom the chief of staff of the Uganda Army, Idi Amin, was the stereotype.

  Hawks hovered above the grass fires and swooped down on the mice and snakes and other small creatures that were roused and panicked by the flames. There were hawks all over the smoky sky. Something about the wildfires and the hovering birds and the scuttling mice spoke to me of sex and its consequences.

  At Kitgum, in the far north, I hiked in a hot wind, sinking in sand to my ankles, kicking at dead leaves to scatter the snakes. Each night in the village where I stayed a toothless old woman squatted on the dirt floor of a hut and sang a lewd song in an ululating voice. “She is beautiful and has a neck like a swan, but she has stroked the spear of every man in the district” was the way her song was translated for me. It was coarse and upsetting, but this hidden corner of Africa was peaceful for being hot and remote. Black water tumbled over Karuma Falls. To justify my trip to my department head, I traveled southwest and slipped between the Mountains of the Moon and visited schools at Bundibugyo, where Yomo and I had planned to lose ourselves in the bush. One night after rain I went outside and found thirsty children licking raindrops off my car.

  Hawks, bush fires, heat, envious songs, and desperate children: so far, not much consolation on this safari.

  A sign reading Very Big Lion was nailed to a tree near Mityana, where I stopped on my way back to Kampala. Another sign said Good News—To See A Very Big Lion—It eats 50 lbs of Meat Daily. A coastal Swahili man with gray eyes in a grubby skullcap asked me for a shilling and then showed me the lion.

  “Simba! Simba!”

  Covered with flies, the lion lay in a pen made of corrugated iron, thrown up in a clearing near the road. The man in the skullcap made the beast growl by poking it with the skinned and bloody leg of a dead animal, a gazelle’s perhaps. The lion thrashed but could not seize the meat in its yellow stumps of teeth. I looked into the lion’s eyes and saw the sort of lonely torment that I felt.

  “Bwana. Mumpa cigara.”

  Within a week the lion had escaped and killed six villagers and was finally shot by the Mityana district game warden. All that violence for the lion’s being in a pen. I saw a link between that hunger and the animal’s captivity—that appetite, that denial. I tried to write a story about it, but there was no story, only the incident.

  “Someday you will use it,” Vidia said, though he said he disliked animal stories. He told me that when he was my age, working on his first book, a man had told him to read Hemingway’s story “Hills Like White Elephants.”

  I said, “For anyone who lives in Africa—for me, at any rate—Hemingway is unreadable.”

  “Nevertheless, I read the story immediately it was recommended to me.”

  Vidia was still helping me with my essay on cowardice, frowning over it, the tenth version. He said that it was improving but that it would be better if I cut it by half. I nodded but doubted that I would.

  He said, “I know when I make comments on it you listen and get very tired.”

  That was exactly how I felt.

  “It’s normal. But this is an important statement—how you feel about Vietnam, how you feel about your life. You must get it right.”

  The problem was language, he said. He was passionate on the subject of misapplied words and meaningless mystification. I had lived too long in a place where the wrong words were used. Africans called Kampala a city. But it was not a city. “‘University’ is a misleading word for this crummy place, and is this a government?” The teaching was not teaching, these were not real academics, the daily newspaper, the Uganda Argus, contained no news. “This is all fraudulent!” The writing by credulous well-wishers about African literature had corrupted the language. He emphasized that I must pay close attention to the words I used and evaluate how they worked. Putting his fastidious finger on the page, Vidia made me justify each word in the essay. “Why ‘fat’?” “Why ‘hapless’?” “Don’t use words for effect,” he said. “Tell the truth.”

  “I have said before that writing is like sleight of hand. You simply mention a chair and it’s shadowy. You say it’s stained with wedding saffron and suddenly the chair is there, visible.”

  This was spoken at his house, which smelled of fresh cement and red floor wax and new paint; the sun streaming through the windows that had no curtains; the house he hated, within earshot of the noise from the brick-and-thatch servants’ quarters.

  “And that is not music. Listen to the bitches!”

  Sometimes students brought him their work. He did not encourage them, but he allowed them. He saw the occasional lecturer. Sometimes he was asked a question about literature or the world.

  I was present when he told a man with a serious inquiry, “I can’t answer that. I would need written notice of that question.”

  After the man left, Vidia said, “That’s what he wanted to hear, you know. He didn’t really want me to answer his question.”

  A female student brought him an essay. She had come to his house because he refused to hold classes.

  “Your essay is hopeless,” he said. He chose a few examples to illustrate how bad it was, and then he said, “But you have lovely handwriting. Where did you learn to write like that?”

  Another student, celebrated as a rising Ugandan poet by Hallsmith, sent Vidia a poem, entitled “A New Nation Reborn,” and showed up some days later at VIdia’s house wearing his crimson student’s gown. These gowns, introduced by the same English vice-chancellors who had contrived Makerere’s Latin motto—Pro Futuro Aedificamus, We Build for the Future—mimicked those worn by Oxford students. The young poet gathered his gown like an older woman taking a seat at a doctor’s office. He said, “Have you read my poem?”

  “Yes, I’ve read it.” Vidia paused, tapped a cigarette, and said nothing for a long while. “I have been wondering about it.”

  “It is about tubbulence.”

  “Really.” Vidia found the boy’s eyes and fixed them with his weary stare. He said, “Don’t write any more poems. I really don�
��t think you should. Your gifts lie in some other direction. A story, perhaps. Now, promise me you won’t write any more poems.”

  The boy shook his head and made the promise in a halting voice. He went away baffled and dejected.

  “Did you see how relieved he was?” Vidia said. “He was glad I told him that.”

  Vidia rubbed his hands and disposed of other students in the same fashion. I was surprised when he agreed to be the judge of a university literary competition, but he carried out his duties his own way. He insisted that there be only one prize, called Third Prize, because the entries were so bad there could be no first and second prizes.

  “Make it absolutely clear that this is Third Prize,” he told the people in the English Department.

  Some of the members objected to this.

  Vidia said, “You are trying to give the African an importance he does not deserve. Your expectations are misguided. Turn away and nothing will happen. It’s the language again. Obote is just another chief. You call these politicians? They are just witch doctors.”

  When the term “Third Prize” was converted to “The Prize,” Vidia smiled and said, “Blackwash.”

  “The Africans who carry books around are the ones who scare me, man,” he said around that time.

  He was dimly aware of, but not impressed by, some of the distinguished men and women who were living in Kampala or doing research at the university. An anthropologist, Victor Turner, was then at Makerere. You would not have known that this small, soft-spoken man with the diffidence of a librarian had spent years in mud huts on the upper Zambezi and on the Mongu floodplain and written pioneering studies of the Lozi people of Barotseland. Colin Turnbull had studied the Mbuti Pygmies. In the course of illustrating his encyclopedic studies of the mammals and birds of East Africa, Jonathan Kingdon, a painter and naturalist, had discovered at least two new species of mammal and several birds that had never been described. Michael Adams, a friend and contemporary of David Hockney’s, was our Gauguin. Colin Leakey, son of Louis Leakey, was our botanist. Rajat Neogy, the editor and founder of Transition, published Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, and Nadine Gordimer.

  “What should I think about Africa?” Vidia demanded of an anthropology professor one day.

  “Mr. Naipaul, I don’t think it’s a good idea to have too many opinions about Africa,” the man said. “If you do, you miss too much that’s really important.”

  “Really.”

  Later, walking back to his house, Vidia said, “Foolish man. He refuses to see the corruption. He accepts the lies.”

  But he blamed himself, saying he should never have come, should not have accepted money from the Farfield Foundation. “Don’t ever accept money from a foundation,” he said. “It will ruin you. There are strings attached to all money you don’t earn yourself.”

  This mistake in coming to Uganda inspired him, he said, to write an essay about all the rules he had made for himself and how disastrous it had been when he had broken one.

  “Every time I’ve broken one of my own rules I have regretted it. Like this ... Maka-ray-ray. Or the weak and oppressed. They’re terrible, man. They’ve got to be kicked.” He kicked a stone. “Like that.”

  His own behavior alarmed him.

  “This is turning me into a racialist, for God’s sake. What a dreary, boring thing to be.”

  Until I met Vidia, I had never known a person who recognized no one as his equal. He’s a Brahmin, the local Indians said: all Brahmins are fussy like that. Early on, seeing me solicit directions from a villager, he stood silently by, listening to the flow of Swahili, and then said, “You talk to these people so easily.”

  I told him I had made a point of learning the language. People told the truth in their own language. They were nervous or inaccurate or more easily mendacious in a second language.

  “I don’t mean that,” he said.

  What did he mean? Perhaps that I spoke to them at all, and that I listened. His manner made him an impossible colleague but a natural bwana and employer of servants. He said I was too easy on my staff. “Your housegirl is an idler.” My cook, he said, was dirty. My gardener was a drunk.

  “Your gardener is a drunk too,” I said, unwittingly indulging in the asinine debate between bwanas: my Africans are better than your Africans.

  “Only on Sundays. A servant has a right to get drunk on Sundays. You have no right to criticize him for that, Paul.”

  One of his pleasures was in taking his houseboy, Andrew, to the market and buying him half a pound of fried locusts and watching the man devour them, the dark mafuta grease smearing his cheeks.

  “Good, eh, Andrew? Delicious, eh? Mazoori, eh?”

  “Ndio, bwana. Mzuri sana.”

  “You see, Paul. The occasional treat. The occasional reprimand. Works wonders. He’s frightfully happy now.”

  He complained that we were out of touch in Uganda. I said that we got the London newspapers on Sundays.

  “Bring me the English papers this Sunday,” he said. “We will read them and then go for a walk.”

  But he was in a foul mood when I arrived. I knew the reason: Sunday was the day when African families congregated outdoors. There was music, laughter, singing, fooling. “Bongos.” I thought the London papers might help.

  “If there’s nothing about me in those papers, I am not interested in reading them,” he said in a sharp voice.

  “Vidia,” Pat said, chastising him with his name.

  “All right, let’s go for that fucking walk.”

  His fluctuating temperament fascinated me, because it was so unusual, even self-destructive. Expatriates in Africa were generally even-tempered, and the farther into the bush you found them, the more serene they were. In Africa, nitpickers were those people by the side of the road plucking at someone’s louse-ridden head. The expression described no one else. So it was strange to find someone losing his temper, almost constantly on the boil. Such people never lasted. Vidia was especially fanatical in the matter of timekeeping.

  “Come at seven,” he said to me one day, inviting me to dinner.

  I took this to mean drinks at seven and then dinner. I showed up casually at seven-fifteen and found him at the table with Pat. Pat looked embarrassed; Vidia said nothing. He ignored me. He was eating quickly, like someone who was himself late. He was gobbling prawns.

  “We’ve finished the first course,” he finally said. His mouth was full, to put me in the wrong and make a point. “You’re late.”

  His obsession with punctuality governed his relationships. I was lucky in having merely been reprimanded for my lateness; the usual penalty was rejection: “He was late. I wouldn’t see him.” An African painter I knew ran out of gas on his way to an appointment with Vidia and, having to walk the rest of the way, arrived half an hour late. Vidia sent him away.

  “The oldest excuse in the book, man. ‘I ran out of petrol.’ All the lies!”

  He began to rant more often, which was now most of the time. He stopped working. He grew morose.

  One day, all he wrote was the word “The” on a piece of paper, nothing more. He showed it to me. It was large and very dark. “It took me seven hours to write that.” He smiled insanely at it, a grin of satisfaction, as if to say, See what they made me do! He looked crazy, but he said he was sad. The problem was his house. The noise was also an assault. “Those bitches!” He hated the smells—cooking fires, rotting vegetation, human odors. “No one washes. Is soap expensive here?”

  There had always been a note of humor in his rage, but today he was not joking. He looked older, angrier, insulted, trapped. He was miserable.

  “I had to take to my bed,” he said.

  In her gentle, trembly, imploring voice, Pat said, “We’ve heard of a hotel...”

  The hotel was outside the town of Eldoret, in the highlands—the White Highlands, as they were still known then—of western Kenya: a wooded refuge in the middle of the plateau. It was called the Kaptagat Arms and was run by a man know
n as the Major, who was noted for his rudeness. He was an Englishman, a retired army officer, Sandhurst trained, who had spent his military career in India. He was in his late sixties and very gruff. Stories about him circulated in Uganda, emphasizing that the Kaptagat Arms was a place to avoid. The most recent story, one I told Vidia, concerned a woman faculty member who had asked the Major for a Pimm’s Cup in the hotel bar. The Major had said, “We don’t serve that muck. Now get out,” and showed the woman the door. Woman-hating was a recurring theme in the Major’s rudeness.

  Vidia had told me he loathed colorful characters. He hated clowns, comedians, yakkers, virtuosos, village explainers, and hollow jokesters, vapidly Pickwickian, who spent their lives monologuing in country pubs. He felt insulted by their insincerity and foolishness. Buffoonery caused in him a deepening depression. Yet he liked my story about the Major for its rough justice. The woman in question he had singled out as an infy. Pimm’s No. 1 Cup was an infy drink.

  “One of these suburban drinks,” Vidia said.

  I was apprehensive. It seemed to me that the Major was the sort of colorful character who would either antagonize Vidia or lower his spirits. He had told me of a fistfight he’d had in a London restaurant once with just such a presumptuous person. It was hard to imagine this tiny man provoked to physical violence. But he never lied, so I believed him.

  The three of us, Vidia, Pat, and I, went to the Kaptagat together. It was a long drive. First the Jinja Road out of Kampala, with its sugar estates and clouds of butterflies that settled on the road and posed a skidding hazard at the curve near Iganga. Then Jinja itself, the cotton mills, and Owen Falls—the headwaters of the Nile—and the conical hill outside Tororo where a dangerous leopard was said to live. Near the Kenyan frontier and the customs post, we came to the end of the paved road. Eighty miles of dusty, stony road had to be traversed, and on it, outside Bungoma, which was just some Indian shops and a bicycle mender, we saw six or seven naked boys with white-powdered bodies running along the road, having just “danced,” as Africans said, meaning they were initiates in a circumcision ceremony. Their white faces were ghostlike. Farther on, seeing the sign Beware of Fallen Rocks, Vidia muttered the words to himself, liking the sign for its precise language.