by Paul Theroux
“That scares the hell out of me, man,” Vidia said.
But soon there were no more roadblocks and we were on the open road, in sunshine, heading southwest in a swampy area near a stream called the Katonga, which drained into Lake Victoria a few miles south. The Katonga was famous for the density of its reeds— masses of papyrus, a lovely pale green plant with a feathery crown on its stalk that always reminded me of Uganda’s connection to the Nile. Papyrus was Egyptian in its beauty; its image had been carved into ancient tombs along with hieroglyphics; it had been prized for its many uses—not just to make paper and cloth, but its pith was eaten and its root used for fuel. Yet in Uganda it was just another plant that choked the waterways and was good for nothing.
“Do you find those African girls frightfully beautiful?” Vidia asked. “The ones at that bar?”
“Some of them, yes. Very beautiful. A few remind me of Yomo.”
“What do you hear from her?”
“She had an abortion and is planning to go back to college.” I had recently had a sorrowful note from her and a letter from her brother. “The father of the child wouldn’t marry her.”
“Oh, God.”
I could not say anything more. I missed her badly and my life had been empty since she left. We traveled ten miles before I spoke again.
“Do you find them beautiful?”
He thought awhile, “No,” he said. Then “No” again. And “No” after another pause. “But Derek Walcott is married to a woman of mixed race who is very beautiful.” He considered this. “I could just imagine myself with her. Do you know Walcott’s poetry?” He recited:
This island is heaven—away from the dustblown blood of cities;
See the curve of bay, watch the straggling flower, pretty is
The wing’d sound of trees, the sparse-powdered sky, when lit is
The night. For beauty has surrounded
Its black children, and freed them from homeless ditties.
“That word ‘ditties’ sounds precious, but it is right somehow,” he said. And then he made his disgusted face and said, “The narrator of my novel goes to prostitutes.”
He had a way of letting his narrator stand for him, and so I knew what he was driving at and we discussed the narrator.
“Frequents prostitutes,” he said, trying out the literary phrase. His expression was still sour. “Afterwards, you hate yourself for being a man.”
That shocked me. Making love to a woman did not have that effect on me at all. Afterwards I was calm, happy, tired, at rest, the opposite of disgusted. I felt rewarded and fulfilled. Sex was magic, mind-expanding, enacted in energetic postures that I recalled later, seeing myself kneeling, standing, knotted, on all fours. It was knowledge, too—not blind lust, though wild monkey-lust was part of it, helping to illuminate the act, which was for me a source of serenity.
I enjoyed every aspect of it, from its first intimation, which was the woman’s returned glance, to the quiver of anticipation, sensing my scalp tighten at the prospect, the warmth on my skin and my fingers becoming tremulous, the sense of blood beginning to pound behind my eyes and my breath coming in gasps, my chest tightening, my mouth dry, as though I were on a narrow path, working my way slowly into a jungle, following a bird with brilliant plumage and a flicking tail.
To touch a woman who wanted to be touched was for me the height of pleasure; to kiss her and be kissed with the same desire, to feel the great excitement of being touched by her, the pressure in every fingertip a wordless promise. I changed by degrees from a reflective smiling soul sifting through my dreams to an engine of desire, and my whole body burned. However casual the act may have seemed—for I had a tendency to mask my desire when I mentioned it—it was passionate and serious. It was the slap of bodies, the crack of bone on bone, and it left me breathless. There were groans of pleasure, but it was a profound raking of the nerves and a wrenching of muscles: no laughter, no jokes. In this descent into the deepest part of my body, I felt an inarticulate animal fury, like a worker bee in pursuit of the queen, frantic to mate. It exhausted me and helped me understand the single-mindedness of desire, the urgent monomania of the libido.
I said this in a simple form to Vidia, not wishing to reveal too much: that I loved being with a woman; that I was alone the rest of the time because there was no one in my life; that I hoped to meet someone and fall in love.
“But prostitutes can be so depressing,” he said.
“Maybe in Europe, but not here. This is Masaka, by the way.”
Mid-morning in Masaka, which was a stretch of Indian shops on either side of the road: fruit vendors and hawkers crouched near verandahs, the open-air businesses of bicycle mending and cobbling shoes, the bright clothing of the rural African women. Vidia fingered his camera but took no pictures.
“In Britain, I suppose they hate their customers,” I said. “They’re famous for hating men, aren’t they? Here the women are eager, they’re hungry. They take pleasure in it. Half of them are looking for husbands. They’re not prostitutes in the classic sense. A lot of times they don’t mention money. They just want to go dancing afterwards.”
“I was a big prostitute man at one time,” Vidia said. “I was with a prostitute in London one day. It was in the afternoon. When we got to her room she said, ‘I saw you on the telly last night.’ It was one of those panel games.” He laughed at the incongruity of it, then murmured the woman’s words again.
“Then what happened?”
“We talked about the television program!”
That I could understand. The African bar girls were full of opinions, about other tribes, about politics, about neighboring countries, about Indians. The women were sometimes religious and always superstitious. Many had children, some had husbands, but they were on their own. I knew that Vidia saw a vast cultural difference, and of course there was, but living in Uganda there was also common ground and like-mindedness. I saw aspects of my own temperament in them.
“I have often gone to Amsterdam and made myself sick, eating and drinking,” Vidia said. “And then getting a woman, one of those Dutch prostitutes.” He made his disgusted face, frowning miserably, looking poisoned. “You hate yourself.”
“I’ve never felt that, actually.”
“It’s so dreadful,” he said. He was still talking and watching the road ahead but probably seeing the red-light district of Amsterdam or a whore’s tiny room with its meretricious decor, the clock and the calendar and the horrible little dog.
“I’ve never been to Amsterdam.”
“You’re a man and you’re sick with it,” Vidia was saying.
“I hate it when they say ‘Hurry up.’ But that’s not an African thing.”
“Or ‘Are you done yet?’”
“That’s more your clock-watching Western hooker.”
Vidia laughed and said, “Graham Greene goes to prostitutes all the time. He’s absolutely addicted, so I’m told. Greene will be walking down a street at night. He will see one, catch her eye, then move on. Ten minutes later, still thinking about her, he will go back. You see, he becomes obsessed.”
“That has happened to me—a lot.”
Vidia had made it sound like a distraction, but it was deeper than that. When my work was done and I was alone, I looked for a woman and always hoped to find one who was looking for me.
“You’re young. And I’ve seen your poems, Paul. All that libido!”
“Lord Rochester, that’s me,” I said. “But I sometimes get jealous if I see a bar girl I know with another man. Odd, isn’t it?”
“Paul, Paul,” he said in an uncle-like way.
We jogged along the dusty road past thorn trees.
“I’d like to find a woman to marry,” I said.
“I met Patsy at Oxford. We got married in 1954. The ceremony was a small affair. She has always worked. That’s good, you know. And it’s rather grand being the history mistress at an English girls’ school. She earns a few pence.”
“It would be great to be married to a woman with money.”
“I don’t know,” Vidia said. “But I was at university with a chap who was studying Malory. He had no money. His fiancée was very well off, though—had a sort of stipend. I used to say, ‘It will work beautifully. You have your Malory and she has her salary.’”
Smiling beneath his sunglasses, he said he loved the expression “lots of money.” Someone saying “I have lots of money” tickled him. As we drove along he tried out the words, saying them in different ways: “Lots of money ... Lots of money...”
The road was dustier now, and in this rural district where passing cars were rare, Africans walked in the middle of the road, always barefoot, sometimes with their cattle. The women carried heavy-looking burdens on their heads, baskets of fruit or stacks of firewood.
We were traveling along the dry savannah to Mbarara and could see gazelles and antelopes and African buffalo and herd boys tending goats. I refueled at a new Agip station in Mbarara. We bought some fruit and ate it. Vidia would not eat anything he could not peel—a healthy rule in Africa. There would be no more fuel or food until Kabale, several hours down a winding road that climbed through the hills. The road slowed our progress, but there was hardly any traffic except the enormous trailer trucks that came at us down the center of the road from Rwanda and the Congo.
Vidia was alert the whole time, and talkative. At one point, speaking of discipline, he quoted a calypso song with approval.
“I thought you hated music,” I said.
“I do. But the calypso is something else.”
“Harry Belafonte.”
“A complete fraud.”
I sang, “Ma-til-da, she take me money—”
“No, no.”
Vidia cleared his throat with the sudden scouring and hoicking of an asthmatic cleaning his pipes, and after a moment a reedy sound vibrated in his throat—his voice, of course, but the words were fragile, rustling scraps of dusty tissue paper being slowly torn. I recognized at once the rattly sound of a wind-up phonograph, the needle on a revolving black disk, a quavering dirgelike song coming out of a huge scallop-edged horn: “It was loooove, love alone, cause King Edward to leave his throne.”
“That sounds like an old record,” I said.
“I heard it on an old record.”
It was also the title of a story in Miguel Street, a book in which ten calypsos were quoted. So what was all this business about hating music? I didn’t ask.
He had perfectly imitated the sound, as when my parrot, Hamid, mimicked the agony of the hinges of my door squeaking. I thought, Now I’ve heard everything.
On the subject of the calypso singers of Trinidad he was both knowledgeable and enthusiastic. The culture they sang about was tough, breezy, unsentimental. Vidia had written, in The Middle Passage, “It is only in the calypso that the Trinidadian touches reality. The calypso is a purely local form.” It was important and peculiar, dealing with local life in the local language. Tell your sister to come down, boy. I have something here for she. That was Mighty Sparrow, whom Vidia called Sparrow. Lord Invader, another calypso singer, he called, familiarly, Invader.
One of Lord Invader’s songs was “That Old-Time Cat-o-Nine,” which Vidia sang in his scratchy needle-on-record voice:
The only thing to stop these hooligans from causing panic in the island;
Well, I go by the government,
Say they need another kind of punishment,
I say one thing to cool on this crime
Is bring back that old-time cat-o-nine—
He took a breath and, in the same tone-deaf voice that oddly affected me, sang the chorus:
That old-time cat-o-nine
Bring it back!
That old-time cat-o-nine
Hit them harder!
Send them to Carrera where it licks like fire
And they bound to surrender!
“Words to live by,” I said.
“Where are we?”
We had left the Kingdom of Ankole, ruled by the now emasculated and chastened Omugabe, and filled with wild game—antelopes (specifically, the Uganda kob) and elephants and zebras. We were approaching the Kigezi district, in the southwest corner of the country, where Uganda, Rwanda, and the Congo met. But the borders were obscure because they lay at a high altitude, among the volcanic Virunga Mountains, which were forested and thick with browsing gorilla families. The people here were called the Bachiga, who were sneered at for their diminutive size and their unusual customs. In addition to the urine ceremony, there was something called the fire dance, which encouraged sexual precocity in young boys. And, unlike the cow-tending, beef-eating Banyankole, the Bachiga ate monkeys.
Vidia wanted to know this. He wanted to know much more. He was the most wide-awake person I had ever traveled with. He needed to know the name of that river, that large tree, that flower, that mountain range, and when he saw a peak on the horizon, he had to know what it was called. It was called Mount Muhavura, 13,500 feet and beautifully shaped, like all these mountains, which were symmetrical cones, the very emblem of vulcanism, some of them still smoking.
He asked about my name. What was my reaction when people spelled it wrong?
“Everyone spells it wrong.”
“That’s an insult,” Vidia said. He said he had once received a letter from Penguin Books addressed to “V.S. Naipull.” It was from a man named Anthony Mott. Vidia replied, typing on the envelope, “To A Mutt,” and began his letter, “Dear Mr. Mutt...”
It was a long journey. We talked about everything. After circling through the terraced gardens and stepped fields of the Virunga foothills, we came to Kabale, which lay in a steep green gorge. I stopped at the White Horse Inn, which was known for its hospitality. It was mid-afternoon, and we had hardly stopped since leaving Kampala in the early morning.
“I’m hungry,” I said.
Vidia did not move. “You go ahead.” He smiled. “I’ll wait here.”
“Aren’t you hungry?”
He yanked his bush hat lower on his head and said, “Please go on. Don’t worry about me.”
“Vidia,” I said. “This might be a good place to stop for the night.”
“Oh, no. Not that. Not that.”
I could not understand his reluctance. I said, “The only places between here and Kigali are two really tiny towns, Kisoro and Ruhengeri. The border might be closed by the time we get there.”
“We’ll stop at Kisoro then, at the Traveler’s Rest.”
“What’s wrong with this hotel?”
At first he hesitated. Then he said, “I couldn’t possibly stay here. I’ve quarreled with the manager.”
“You were here before?”
“With Patsy.”
This was news to me.
“Quite a while ago. You were in the north. We stopped for lunch. I was quite taken with the place. It’s Oldie Worldie, isn’t it? But”—he made his disgusted face, his sour mouth—“it was a mistake. I said I wanted to talk to the manager. When he came to our table, I said, ‘You have very strange rules here.’
“‘Strange rules? What do you mean?’
“‘Rules governing the condition of your staff uniforms,’ I said.
“‘We have no such rules. Only that they wear them.’
“‘Don’t you have a rule saying that all staff uniforms must be dirty?’
“‘No,’ he said.
“‘Oh,’ I said, “I thought that, because they were all dirty, your staff must be obeying a rule.
“The manager glared at me. But I was not through. ‘The other rule I noticed was the one about serving. Whenever a plate or bowl is brought to the table, the waiter has his thumb stuck in the food. That’s surely a rule, because they all do it.’
“The manager fumed and said that if we did not like it, we could leave. I said, ‘With pleasure.’ But you see, he wanted to have a row. I’m afraid I obliged him. So it’s better that I stay here. Take your time. Enjoy your lunch.”
But lunch had ended, so an African waiter told me. The manager confirmed this. He was a thin, irritable-looking man in a crumpled white shirt and club tie and black trousers.
“I’ll have tea, then.”
“You’ll have to take it in the lounge. We require a jacket and tie in the dining room.”
Over two hundred miles from Kampala, in the Virunga forest of wild Kigezi, among the pissing, monkey-eating Bachiga, where gorillas were commonplace and bird squawks filled the air, where everyone went barefoot and many women bare breasted, I could not enter the dining room of the White Horse Inn without a tie knotted around my neck.
Sniffing defiantly at me, the manager shuffled papers and was gone. I had tea in the lounge: cookies, sandwiches with the crusts cut off, and fruitcake. An elderly African hovered next to me, pouring tea through a silver strainer, adding hot water to the teapot, smoothing the napkins.
“Did you see him?” Vidia said when we were under way again.
“Yes. He was rude to me. He said I needed a necktie to eat in the dining room. He stuck me in the lounge.”
“Infy.”
Before Kisoro, misreading a sign, I took a wrong turn. We traveled down a narrowing road that seemed to be going nowhere except into deeper forest, one that had only thickened and risen and never been cut, where there were no huts, no straying chickens. Such a place, like the Ituri and the woods near Lake Edward and some others, was distinctive for its darkness, the green-black shadows of dense ferns under a tall canopy of foliage.
After twenty minutes in that dark forest we came to a border post with a wooden shed, a barrier, and a few men wearing colorful shirts. They were drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. I saw the pack in one man’s shirt pocket with the name Belga. It was Primus beer. Congolese brands. We were on the wrong road.