Sir Vidia's Shadow

by Paul Theroux

  After we left Eldoret and its single gas station, we traveled north down narrow red clay roads, past corn fields, following wooden arrow-shaped signs saying To the Kaptagat Arms. We found the place in the early afternoon. It was utterly silent and abandoned-looking: no guests, no cars, only flitting birds and a few Kikuyu gardeners work ing in the flower beds. The hotel had one story, a converted farmhouse with an added wing of single rooms that looked out on the flower garden.

  “Hello?” I said. “Jambo.”

  No one answered. Inside in the reception area there were Indian artifacts on shelves—Benares brassware, carved ivory, wall hangings, some baskets—as well as the sort of paraphernalia found in English country pubs: horse brasses, pewter tankards, tarnished trophies, old blurred photographs of anglers struggling to hold prize fish upright, hunting horns, ribbons, and the sort of fluted glass that offered a yard of ale. There were mounted racks of gazelles and oryx and kudu. There was a shoulder mount of a zebra on one wall and a zebra skin on the floor. The most ominously impressive object was a large, dusty tiger skin nailed to one whole wall, where it sprawled disemboweled in an arrested growl.

  I rang a tinkly bell that was propped on the gold-stamped leather of the reception book and blotter, whereupon a tall craggy figure marched out from the back office. His posture was crooked and peevish. He had white hair and a deeply lined chain smoker’s face and a burning butt between his fingers. Undeniably the Major, he looked cross, with an English scowl that meant “nothing impresses me.” Staring with puzzled, just-interrupted eyes, he stuck his chin out and said, “Yes, what is it?”

  “We’ve just driven from Uganda,” Vidia said.

  “Shocking road. But we do get quite a few people from that side.”

  “We are inquiring about your hotel,” Vidia went on. “We’d like to have lunch and look around.”

  “Give me a moment to get sorted out,” the Major said. “Have a shufti at the garden. I’ll give you a shout when we’re ready to seat you. What was the name?”

  “Naipaul.”

  “Are you the writer?”

  It was an inspired response. The heavens opened. A trumpet sounded, flocks of doves soared, and all the malaikas, the choirs of black angels, in the skies of western Kenya burst into song.

  “Yes,” Vidia said, stammering with satisfaction. “Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.”

  He was home, welcomed, at ease, in his own element, in the presence of a reader, happier than I had ever seen him.

  “And what can I do for you?”

  The Major had to repeat the question. He was speaking to me. I was lurking near the tiger skin, feeling awkward, but also wondering how you managed to kill one of these enormous creatures without making a mark or leaving scars.

  “I am with them,” I said. “And I am looking for the bullet hole in this thing.”

  “You won’t find it,” the Major said. “I shot him in the eye.”

  The big glass eyes of the tiger stared like a martyr’s into the room with its ridiculous curios.

  “How did you find us?” the Major asked.

  “I had a vibration,” Vidia said.

  Over lunch in the dining room, where we were the only diners, the Major was attentive. He said that business was terrible and that he planned to sell the place. He was breezy and somewhat stoical, as though fighting a rear-guard action and about to announce his surrender. He pulled the cork from a bottle of wine. “This is an Australian hock.”

  “But this is awfully good,” Vidia said, examining the label as he worked his lips together.

  “Try some of that sherry sauce in your soup. Joshua will be right back with your entrées,” the Major said, marching away.

  Pat had begun to cry. She sobbed miserably and said she could not eat. It was the thought of the hotel’s closing, she said. All the flowers, all the order and nearness, all the hope. And they were shutting up shop.

  “Oh my, Vidia, look,” she said, and gestured towards a waiter. “His poor shoes.”

  There was something pathetic in the shoes. They were broken, without laces, the counters crushed, the tongues missing, the heels worn. They seemed to represent battered, tortured feet. The sight of the shoes reduced Pat to tears once again. Each time she saw the man wearing them, she began to sob. I did not tell her that Africans got such shoes second- and third-hand. Used to being barefoot, the Africans who owned them rarely found that they conformed to their misshapen feet; the shoes, like the torn shirts and torn shorts they wore, were often merely symbolic.

  “Don’t be sad, Patsy,” Vidia said. “He’ll be all right. He’ll go back to his village. He’ll have his bananas and his bongos. He’ll be frightfully happy.”

  Later, the Major said that after India’s independence, he had followed some other Anglo-Indians in coming to East Africa. Kenya, for its good climate, had been a choice destination. Tanzania was regarded as a rough place, difficult to farm, full of Bolshie Africans in Mao suits. Uganda was black, an agglomeration of incoherent kingdoms with bad roads. In any case, the Major had come reluctantly. He had liked India. Africa was all right, but Africans infuriated him. His Swahili was just a stern litany of orders and commands, and I saw something rather strict, even domineering about him, a coldness, and a defiant cynicism. He embodied the worst of the settler severity and the woman-hating mateship of the officers’ mess.

  Ignoring her tears, the Major took a dislike to Pat from the first, and afterwards he sometimes mimicked her to me—clumsy, overstated mimicry that betrayed a kind of rancor. To him she was the bibi, the memsahib, the whiner, but for Vidia’s sake he was polite to her. Vidia used the old-fashioned-sounding word “pathic” to describe the Major. I had never heard the word before. Vidia said English prostitutes used it, which seemed a curious attribution and an even more questionable authority. Oh, tarts said it, did they? I took it to mean that the Major was bent. Vidia’s more particular word “bugger” was never uttered here at the Kaptagat Arms.

  They talked of India: the beauty of Punjabi Muslims, the ferocity of Sikhs, the plains of Uttar Pradesh, the Englishness of hill stations, polo at the Poona Club. The Major had been posted all over. He said to Vidia, “I could tell you some smashing stories. I am sure you’d be able to use them.”

  “No, not me,” Vidia said. “You must write them yourself.”

  Over the years, I heard him give that same advice to everyone who offered him a story to write. He could not write their stories; it was for them to do. When they protested that they could not write, Vidia said, “If your story is as good as you say, you’ll write it.”

  The Major was also a reader and had admired Vidia’s book An Area of Darkness. Soon after we arrived, I saw him reading Graham Greene’s The Comedians, which had just been published in Britain.

  “What do you think of it?” I asked.

  “Characters called Smith and Jones and Brown. That’s no bloody good. What should I think of it?”

  He did not like Americans, he said. He made no secret of his contempt for me. I had a sissy way with the sherry sauce. “Yanks!” he cried, and then told long, implausible stories. Once, the Major said, while in the United States on a military errand, he had ordered a slice of ham in an officers’ club. Unbidden, an American officer at the table had spooned a dollop of marmalade on the ham and said, “That’ll make it taste a whole lot better”—spoken in one of the Major’s cruelly inaccurate accents.

  “Bloody Yanks,” the Major said. “I couldn’t eat it.”

  With minor variations, he told me the same story four times. I did not mind. I felt that this casual abuse would give Vidia a perspective on an American’s life among these English settlers in Africa.

  Vidia found a room in the hotel he liked. He negotiated a weekly rate, and soon he and Pat moved in. The idea was that Vidia would finish writing his novel there, and it was at the Kaptagat Arms that he told me its title, The Mimic Men. Pat did some writing too. She kept a diary. She also had literary ambitions—she wanted to write a
play—but she seldom discussed her plans, always deferring to Vidia. From time to time she broke into helpless blubbing, either as the result of a disagreement or simply because of some sorrowful sight—broken shoes, a snotty-nosed child, a woman bereft, a gardener laboring on his knees. Often her tears roused me. I did not know why, but her weeping made me want to hold her and fondle her breasts.

  There were no other guests at the Kaptagat Arms. The Major had several mild-mannered Labrador retrievers, which nuzzled our legs, their tongues lolling, hoping to be scratched. Some British teachers from a nearby prep school came to the bar most nights and got drunk.

  “That silly Jewess,” a male teacher shrieked one night.

  Vidia said to avoid them. “Infies.”

  He understood the Major, he said. The Major’s Indian Army nickname had been “Bunny.” The poor man was tormented by passion and frustration. Clearly, he was a very sensitive soul, Vidia said. “Look at those eyes.” (To me, the Major’s blue eyes seemed cold and depthless.) The Major had a feeling for India, which was a mark of his sensibilities. He had heart. He was a good soldier and respected his men. He understood the culture. He was intelligent. He had brought this sense of order to Africa, where, imparting skills, building an institution, he was in a way running a miniature colony of his own.

  Vidia, suspecting that the Major found him to be a puzzle, seemed to look for ways to make himself more puzzling. Yet Vidia had such simple, inflexible rules that, if they were strictly followed, he was happy. For example, Vidia’s vegetarianism caused a dilemma in the kitchen. Omelets were a frequent solution. “I have had to buy more cookery books,” the Major told me.

  I visited Vidia whenever I could, at first for weekends and then for weeks at a time. The Kaptagat routine was quite different from my life in Kampala, and I grew to like playing bar billiards and eating steamed chocolate pudding, putting sherry in my soup and walking the Major’s dogs.

  What occupied me—though I never spoke of it—was my own novel. It was understood that my writing consultations with Vidia were just about over. My cowardice essay was nearly done. “I think it’s an important statement,” Vidia said, “though you might have revealed too much of yourself.” I had moved on. I did not say what I was doing. Anyway, no one asked. I was the Sorcerer’s Apprentice.

  “My narrator has something to say about that,” Vidia would say in the middle of a conversation, and it was often as simple as a reference to the fluctuating price of land. He was close to all his characters—he quoted them, and he often quoted the narrator, who was a wise, if world-weary, forty-year-old with opinions on politics and oppression, friendship and money. Vidia was happy with his novel’s progress now that he was the resident of this comfortable hotel. All his needs were seen to. He had rusticated himself and was looked after by the Major and his Kikuyu servants, whom in Kenyan fashion he had begun to call “Cukes.”

  Pat said, “Amin asked, ‘What work does the bwana do in his room all day?’ I told him that your work is like praying. So he has to be very quiet.”

  “‘The bwana is praying,’” Vidia said. “Yes. It’s true. I’m glad you put it that way.”

  He had started the novel in a hotel in the southeast London district of Blackheath, having deliberately checked in to find atmosphere and enter the mood of his narrator, who was a temporary hotel resident writing a novel-memoir. It was appropriate that he was finishing the book in another hotel. He said many times, “My narrator likes hotels. I like hotels.” He enjoyed the attention he received, the tidy rooms, the staff toiling away, the illusion that this was a manor and he was the lord. And such conditions were perfect for the writing of a book.

  “This is an important book,” he said of his novel. “These things have never been said.”

  It’s just a book, I thought. It amazed me that he could talk about his work so admiringly and with such fondness. But I also thought: I want to feel that respect about something I have written. I want to value it. I want to have that confidence. I want to invest all my intellect and my effort in it. I want to be rewarded.

  “Patsy objects to something I wrote,” Vidia said over dinner one night. “Patsy doesn’t want me to say ‘wise old coon.’”

  “Oh, Vidia,” Pat said, and her eyes became moist.

  “Patsy wants me to say ‘wise old negro.’”

  They both seemed awful to me, but I could tell from Pat’s anger and the argument that ensued—more tears at the dinner table—that she would prevail.

  He worked on an Olivetti portable, one of those lightweight flat machines that seemed modern to me and that went chick-chick-chick. I used an old black Remington that clacked loudly when I typed, going fika-fika-fika.

  “I love to sit in the garden and hear you both typing,” Pat said.

  In the bar one night Vidia said, “How do you spell ‘areola’?”

  I thought he was saying “aureole” and began to spell it, but he said no. He asked the Major for a dictionary and found the word.

  “Isn’t it a nipple?” asked the Major.

  “It’s the portion that surrounds the nipple,” answered Vidia.

  While they talked, I looked up the word “pathic,” but it was not in the Major’s small student dictionary, which must have belonged to one of the Kikuyu staff.

  “Is that for your book?” the Major was asking Vidia.

  “My narrator mentions it, yes.”

  “I must read this book.”

  Pat smiled at this but said nothing. She had a smooth pale face, a slightly jutting jaw, and a pendulous lower lip that made her seem thoughtful, on the point of speaking. She was shy, she spoke sweetly, she was modest and always polite. I was careful never to swear in her presence. I had seen how the word “fuck” upset her when spoken by a man in the Kaptagat bar. I did not want to ask myself why her reaction stirred me.

  In the garden, beyond the hedge of purplish bougainvillea, she read, she wrote in her diary, always looking lonely and somewhat embarrassed, as though she were obviously waiting, keeping an ap pointment with someone who would never show up. She was small and demure and shapely. I give her a chaste kiss at night.

  “Keep Pat company,” Vidia would say. He was wholly occupied with his book.

  I wondered what his words meant and wanted them to be less ambiguous, or for her to take the initiative. I was twenty-four and still missed Yomo badly, although in Kampala I sometimes took women home from the Gardenia bar.

  Pat and I drove to nearby villages or to Eldoret, where there was a post office. We went for walks. It was not unusual to stumble across an African couple rutting, or a boy chasing a girl through a field, or to hear, as we did one day, shrieks of pleasure from a corn field. This sort of thing roused me. Pat appeared not to notice, as a well-bred woman will avert her eyes from two dogs copulating in the road. She was friendly and receptive but always polite. Was her politeness her way of keeping her distance?

  Wooing was unknown to me. I did not know anything about the rituals of English courtship. I had so far, in the four years I had lived in Africa, made love only to African women. That sex had liberated me and given me a habit of straightforwardness. Once I asked an American woman in Kampala if she was interested in having sex. She said, “You’ll have to be a little subtler than that,” and when I attempted subtlety—though I knew it was too late—she confessed that she was a virgin. I was so shocked at her innocence I lectured her, warning her to be more careful. We were all dogs here, I said.

  “Come home with me. I want to make love to you,” I would say, but the statement was even blunter and without euphemism in Chichewa or Swahili. It was as unambiguous as describing the insertion of a cork in a bottle, but wasn’t that better?

  “Mimi nyama, wewe kisu” usually worked when I said it with a smile. I am the meat, you are the knife.

  “No,” one woman laughed. “You are the knife, I am the meat.”

  “Sisi nyama mbili,” I said. We’re both meat.

  Sometimes no words were
necessary. Just being alone with a woman in Africa meant that you had complete freedom. She might not say “Let’s do it,” she might make no sound at all. Her silence or her smile meant yes. I had lived what I felt was a repressed life in the United States. It was a relief that no negotiation was necessary. If I met a woman I liked, I soon mentioned sex. It seemed to me, and nearly always to the woman, that what was being proposed was no more serious, or lengthy, than a game of cards.

  “I have given up sex,” Vidia had said to me. The statement strangely teased me. I regarded Pat in light of that disclosure and saw both timidity and hunger and a hint of frail susceptibility that only made her more desirable.

  We went for walks and were often together, yet I could not find the words to broach this subject. I had no technique and I knew straightforwardness would not work. She was simply too polite and circumspect for me to speak bluntly to her. I wished that she would help me, either by frankly putting me off or encouraging me. Her politeness was like the reaction of a coquette, and perversely that attracted me as much as her delicate face and pale damp eyes and lovely hair—only thirty-three, and yet her hair was silver-gray, another provocation.

  She caught me staring at her one day and she became self-conscious. “My clothes have shrunk so,” she explained, and tugged with her tiny fingers. Tight slacks, tight blouse, and her pretty lips. This never went further than my lingering gaze, but my feelings of desire for his wife made me guiltily hearty towards Vidia whenever Pat and I returned to the hotel from a walk or a ride. I would not know until much later that in the novel he was writing, Vidia’s Indian narrator-hero’s English wife, who somewhat resembled Pat (a whole page was devoted to the pleasures of her breasts), has an affair with a young American. The narrator looks on; the American who cuckolds him is “slightly too hearty towards me, who felt nothing but paternally towards him.”