by Paul Theroux
I was impressed because it revealed so much. It amazed me that a dream that reflected no credit upon him, that showed him as guilty and sneaky, depicting his brother as a killer, was one he told me coldly and in detail.
Vidia was in London, and I was alone in a land that now seemed dustier and flimsier and fictitious. I had grown used to being alone in Africa: the solitude had sharpened my concentration, and this intensity served my writing. But for the first time I was lonely and felt listless with disappointment. Africa had once seemed limitless and powerful and liberating. Vidia had left me with doubts. He had belittled the politicians, ridiculed the currency, sneered at the newspapers, and Africa now seemed tiny, self-destructive, and confining. It was full of crooked opportunists and it was dangerous. It was ruinous and random. Do you notice how they make their own paths everywhere?
In the Senior Common Room and the Staff Club and the Kampala Film Society, the word “infies” rang in my ears. On Sundays I went for long bird-watching walks up the Bombo Road and in the bush. Nothing has a name here—it is always “hill,” “tree,” “river,” “bird.” They don’t differentiate. There is no drama. They don’t see.
My habits were the same: work in the morning in my office, do some teaching, eat lunch at home or at the Hindoo Lodge. After a nap, writing in the afternoon, then into town through the big iron gates under the Makerere motto, Pro Futuro Aedificamus. At the gates and in the road and in Bat Valley and in town I heard: This will go back to bush. The jungle will move in. Look, already it has started.
At the Staff Club people inquired insincerely about Vidia.
“What do you hear from your friend Naipaul?”
Their insincerity was tinged with sarcasm, because for the whole period of Vidia’s stay in Kampala I had been his shadow. He had been my friend, not theirs. They saw it as my abandonment of them—I had rejected them and become Naipaul’s friend. It was true: I had rejected them, but I thought it was my secret. In being Naipaul’s shadow I had revealed myself, revealed my literary ambitions most of all. Until then I had been seen as a village explainer, indulging myself. I knew, even then, that a writer lives in his writing. I suspected I had given myself away, perhaps had shown my ambition, certainly had exposed my wound. That was all right with the Staff Club. It was okay to be a local writer, but in befriending Naipaul it appeared that I was getting above myself, looking to London for approval. Expatriates both hated and hankered for London. I had ignored them. Naipaul had ignored them. They knew his contempt, his indifference; they knew his insulting word for them.
To most of them he was a bird of passage, the most undesirable expatriate: an enigma, a mocker, a complainer, someone who would bolt when things got bad. Some had bolted when the Kabaka fell. People flew in and said all sorts of things about Uganda, and like Vidia even mocked it. When they left, we mocked them. What did they know? This was our home, our place of work, our risk. We lived here because we liked it. It was regarded as bad form to jeer at Africans or to speak slightingly of the students. It was dangerous to laugh at the government. Vidia had broken most of the unspoken rules. No one had openly disagreed with him - indeed, in our hearts many of us agreed - but he was resented for trying to demoralize us. Africans said he was typically English. The English expatriates called him typically Trinidadian. The Indians in Kampala called him a typical Brahmin. A number of people said he was a settler type, which was the worst you could say about anyone.
Naipaul also gave the appearance of being a snob. He ridiculed our beer drinking and our bad wine and the power that our servants had over us. He had no faith in the students. The news had circulated that he had awarded only one prize, Third Prize, to Winston Wabamba, and no one found it funny. Some of his scorning observations were repeated. People said, “I feel sorry for his wife.” “Patrician” was the kindest word I heard used for him. The Staff Club was noted for its foul language, and Vidia was described in the crudest anatomical terms. The local Indians generally felt he had been browbeating them when he had talked about their days being numbered and nagged them about their exit strategy.
Dust devils, those furious little whirlwinds, were common on our roads and in the dry fields. Vidia had appeared like a dust devil, had sternly questioned every received opinion and demanded answers, and then, like a dust devil, he had whirled away—shivered into the distance, leaving a small scoured trail in the earth.
After Naipaul left I had to explain him, and, exposed as someone aspiring to be like him, I was regarded with suspicion, as unreliable, a secret mocker, like him. I would never again be a Staff Club hearty, taking turns as barman.
“I used to like you,” an expatriate woman said to me one night in the club’s bar. Her name was Maureen. She was drunk and truthful. “I don’t like you anymore. I think you’re a shit. So does Brian.”
Brian was her husband, a mathematician who taught Boolean algebra. He also did the Staff Club accounts. Hearing Maureen denounce me, he said, “Fucking Yank.”
He seemed to lose his footing as he spoke, but instead of regaining his balance he kept falling. He was drunk too, and he brought down one of the bar stools with him as he fell. Maureen had not moved; she still glared at me.
“Aren’t you going to help him?” I asked.
“He can’t fall any further,” Maureen said, and raised her glass to her lips.
It was just the three of us in the bar on this hot night, with the cicadas chattering outside. On the bar were the India Pale Ale and Tusker Beer mats, on the wall the clock that said Watney’s, the Guinness for Power sign, the stylish African couple—man in brown suit, woman in frilly dress—on the sign that said Waragi—Uganda’s National Drink!, and stacked to the side were year-old copies of Private Eye.
Maureen pressed her lips together, sloshed the waragi in her mouth, and swallowed it, blinking and smiling. It was terrible stuff, banana gin.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” she said.
The things they said to me were the things they had wanted to say to Vidia.
To console myself, I went to the Gardenia more often. I nearly always took a girl home. It was so simple, always the direct question: “Do you want to come back to my house?” And the greatest satisfaction of the question for me was that the word for house, nyumba, was the same as for mud hut. Usually the answer was yes, or else “Let’s go dancing first.”
“I’m the meat, you’re the knife.” That was my life again.
The expatriates at the Staff Club went on complaining about Vidia long after he had gone. How little they knew of him. “The mob,” Vidia had called them. He had urged me to leave, saying it was dangerous to the intellect to live in such a place. I did not have time to waste, he said. I knew he was thinking of himself.
“I am old and slow,” he had said, and talked about the past in the regretful yearning voice of an elderly man. Things had been different years ago; so much had changed for the worse.
Old-crock expressions were the ones he liked best: “latterly,” “a few pence,” and “some little time.” He called all magazines “papers,” which was perhaps not as quaint as old Duffield, who called them “shinies.” Still, Vidia lamented the age, its scruffiness, its whining low-class people, and its crooked aristocrats. “What is a title?” he would shout. It was just something to impress the Americans. It was meaningless. Literary agents were “idlers” and many publishers were “crummy.”
He was often unwell. His asthma had come back to him in Africa and gagged him. He had insomnia or else bad dreams. He was often low or depressed. Perhaps these afflictions were to be expected in someone so old. He was thirty-four.
As colonials, he had said, he and I had a great deal in common. Was I a colonial? I had never thought so. Never mind. He was my friend. Nor did I question his feeling of being elderly. Perhaps, I thought, when I am in my thirties I will feel that way too. Thirties seemed like middle age, forty was old, fifty was past it, sixty cadaverous.
I was ten years younger than Vidia, wh
ich seemed a long time, long enough for someone like me to be transformed into an old man. I had finished my novel and started another. I was confident. What mattered most was that Vidia, a brilliant writer, believed in me.
No one else I had ever known had looked into my face and seen a writer. Vidia did that and more: he said I was a writer of promise, and he marveled at how quickly I worked. I could call him my friend. He paid me the compliment of writing to me regularly after he got to London, and each letter was a lesson.
In his swift, decisive way, in an early letter he analyzed my keeping a journal and rejected the idea. I must abandon it, he said. It was just a way of anthologizing experience. A writer was not a writer because things happened around him. A writer did other things. A diary, more detailed, was worse—I should not even think about it. I ditched my journal, I abandoned my diary for good.
I should consider writing for The New Statesman, he said. I ought to avoid “little magazines": literary journals, university quarterlies, the small-circulation nonpayers.
If I wrote a story, I had to know why my story happened. I had to know why I was writing my novel. He mentioned Miss Lonelyhearts. I had urged him to read it. He disliked it and could not understand my enthusiasm for it. He did not see its point. I did not argue with any of this, though secretly I went on admiring the book for its wicked and wayward satire.
Vidia advised me, also by mail, to settle down with an agent and a publisher in England. American publishers were interested only in a single book; English publishers were interested in a writer—all the work. He would help me find an agent, and I should then look for a good publisher.
If I insisted on staying in Africa, I ought to consider, he said, writing a monthly “Letter from East Africa” for an Indian paper. He would arrange everything. I might get as much as £20 for each piece.
“Aim high,” he said. “Tell the truth.”
The worst thing a writer could say was “I am just a storyteller.” He suggested that it was a form of boasting. Vidia despised the description and disliked the very word “story.” It was a misleading and perhaps meaningless word. He had once told me that many stories did not have an ending. He used the word “narrative” instead. It was vaguer but more helpful. Structure and form were of utmost importance. The notion of style irritated him: it was showing off, a display of ego and inexperience, pretentious and pointless. He said that art was not pretty.
About two months after arriving back in London, he wrote to say that he was reviewing a life of Ian Fleming, the author of the James Bond books. The biography was not important, the review was not long, yet he said the writing was torture. In the piece that was published in The New Statesman, he mentioned in a jeering way that Milton Obote, the Ugandan prime minister, had attended a special screening of a Bond film. Obote’s Rolls-Royce had been parked outside the Rainbow Cinema with Thunderball on the marquee.
In the Staff Club some expatriates who had heard of the review said Naipaul was sneering again, and they trashed him. What was wrong with the PM’s seeing a ruddy film? Better than reading one of Naipaul’s shenzi books! But Obote had been the nemesis of the Kabaka, and he had recently overthrown him, in James Bond style, by attacking the Lubiri palace with commandos firing machine guns. The Kabaka had fired back with a machine gun before fleeing to Rwanda disguised as a woman. It was all Bond.
Vidia mentioned the Kabaka in his letters. He knew the people who were taking care of him in London—wealthy people, some aristocrats and royalists. Although he had no money, the Kabaka lived stylishly in Paddington and had opened an account at the Ritz.
London life flowed through the letters: the lunches with editors, the dinner parties, the weather, the traffic. Vidia even mentioned the objectionable sound of planes going by overhead. He informed me that the best parts of London were on the flight path to Heathrow. Buckingham Palace, for example, was constantly strafed. He complained of taxes. He was busy judging a literary prize. He reported his friends’ reactions to Africa—they took a dim view. He mentioned walking through the rain.
In Africa we never walked through the rain. We sheltered, waiting until the deluge stopped, as it always did after a few minutes.
He urged me to visit London. It would be good for me, he said.
I thought about it, and kept in touch, but I went on living my life. I had students in Kampala, I had responsibilities upcountry. My routine: work, the girls at the Gardenia, my writing.
One night a girl from the coast named Jamila slipped out of my bed to look for the bathroom. She hesitated at the doorway—the lovely scissorlike silhouette of her legs—and took a wrong turn in the hall. I heard the clatter of plopping papers and “Sorry!”
I switched on the light and found her standing naked among the mass of scattered sheets that was a typescript.
“What is it?” Jamila asked, tweaking the sheets of paper with her toes.
“Kitabu,” I said.
A book! She opened her pink mouth and howled with laughter. How could this mess of scrambled papers be a book?
Within a week I bought a ticket to London. I left Uganda just before Christmas.
From the descending plane, London was a blackness overlaid by a map of yellow lights. I had flown from the simple blind night of Africa to the yellow glow of a predawn city picked out in twinkling sulfurous streetlamps. The plane banked, tipping the map upright.
Outside it was cold. The drafty passageway at the plane’s door shocked me, the airport itself, the stinky bus. Early morning in London was still pretty dark, and with the bad big-city smell.
The telephone fooled me. To operate it I prepared my coin, placing a threepenny bit on a slot, and found button A and button B. When the call went through and I heard “Hello, hello,” there was an urgent noise in the receiver—the repeated pips, loudly and awkwardly announcing that I was struggling at a pay phone, becoming rattled. While they sounded I pressed the coin past a resisting barrier in order to complete the call. It took two tries. You had to be quick.
“Vidia?”
“Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.” It was Vidia’s habitual chant of anticipation when he was impatiently pleased. “I am so sorry I couldn’t meet your plane.”
“That’s all right.”
“We don’t have a monkey wagon, you see.”
It was his name for the cheap little cars that crowded the roads.
“I’ll take a taxi. I have some English pounds.”
He gave me directions, assuring me that a taxi driver would know how to get to his house, but if the driver drew a blank, I should mention the South Lambeth Road.
“And how are our infies?”
“I didn’t tell them I was coming.”
Because it was so extravagant, I had kept my London trip a secret from my colleagues at the Staff Club. Visiting Naipaul was also further proof that I was abandoning them. London was a destination for an expatriate on leave, not on holiday. “Going to the coast,” they usually said at Christmas. That meant Mombasa, Malindi, or Zanzibar, Tanga or Bagamoyo, where you could swim without risking bilharzia. London was for the three home-leave months every two years, not a fortnight’s holiday. Were my Christmas visit to become known, the expatriates would say I was getting above myself.
In the taxi, heading through London, I understood Vidia’s idea of order. It was this, the solid buildings and well-swept roads gleaming under the streetlamps. The shops, spiked iron railings, brick terraces, and clusters of chimney pots; the symmetrical spans of the great bridge we were taking over the Thames. London was reliable, built to last, and the whole city looked sealed in black glaze. No wonder Vidia had thought of Kampala as thrown together and ruinous and chaotic, and that it would fall down and return to bush.
But the London dampness and the London cold intimidated me. Even wearing the sheepskin coat that I had bought in Kenya, I was shivering, tired from the flight, feeling fragile in the vast glazed city that was still dark at eight o’clock on this December morning.
The taxi swung left and right and then shot up a side street. I saw some black faces and was reassured. Another corner and the taxi rattled to a halt and kept rattling.
“Number Three Stockwell Park Crescent.”
It was a small gray-brick Georgian house, set back behind a low wall, with a similar but larger house to the right, a poorer one to the left. Number 3 had a newly planted sapling in the front yard.
Vidia had heard the taxi. With a pipe in his mouth he greeted me from the doorway, and before we entered he pointed to the house on the right. “That frightfully grand house belongs to communists, of course. And that one”—the scruffy one on the left—“well, they are home all the time. They don’t work, you see. I thought, Goodness, they are all unemployed. But no, they are being ‘redeployed.’ All this time I thought they were a pack of idlers, but no—’redeployed’!”
I had almost forgotten that work, or the lack of it, could be material for a joke. In Africa there was no point to such a remark, and certainly no humor in it, because there was hardly any paid work in the usual sense; there was subsistence farming. If that work wasn’t done, you starved. It wasn’t funny or sad, it was taken for granted.
Pat kissed me as Vidia shut the door. It was warm in here. Had I not just come from East Africa, I would have said the house was too hot, but I found it perfect. Double glazing, Vidia’s remedy for his hatred of noise, kept the house silent.
While Pat protested his impulsiveness, Vidia showed me around the house, sourly gloating over the blunders the workmen had made—the badly cut corners, the poorly drilled holes, the asymmetrical beading, the slapped-on paint.
His study was off the parlor. A chaise that was a folding chair—like a beach chair—was set up in the middle of the floor. The chair grunted and squawked when he sat down on it and stuck his feet out.