Fresh Air Fiend

by Paul Theroux

  Christmas was coming. Good! He was where he wanted to be, on the other side of the earth, in central Africa, beneath the tamarinds and winterthorns of the Zimbaba banks. Gilstrap knew that, had he been anywhere else, he would be yearning to be back here on the Zimbaba.

  Sometimes, trekking alone in the heat along the riverbank, he was able in his stupor of satisfaction to recover his dislike of Mudford. There was first of all Elveera Howie, supporting herself by giving music lessons in the parlor of her house near Craddock Bridge, adjacent to the interstate; and the interstate itself, looming over the town, illuminating Mudford with its glaring lights at night; and with that traffic, drowning the music of Elveera's strings, Mudford was never silent, nor ever dark.

  The pillars of the interstate attracted graffiti, and beneath the arches were strange encampments of drifters and drunks. Then there were Gilstrap's hatreds: the litter, the filthy back seat of a Mudford taxi, and the meaningless smile of the driver. Someone at a soda fountain slurping a drink or loudly chewing ice. Circus animals, baseball hats worn backward, the exultant insincerity of The Mudford Messenger. Dirty hands, cold eyes, billboards, bad breath, most flags. The person who rested a damp drinking glass on a book cover, and bus fumes, and the idiot laughter of someone watching TV. Mayor Mazzola; Dr. Enid Hugo, the dentist; Hump, his neighbor's Lab, just one of Brimble's slobbering dogs; Elveera's cat, Morris; most children; and, in this season, everything to do with Christmas, from the Christmas carols monotonously repeated in elevators, to the overstuffed Santa ambushing him from every Mudford street corner, to the topheavy Christmas trees on their wobbly stands.

  Gilstrap craved new sights, and in Africa he was thrilled when he reflected, I have never been here before, and better, Nor seen anything like this before.

  Even better, Nor has anyone else.

  He was altogether a satisfied man. He was over fifty, but he could pedal that many miles on his bike in half a day, and not only could he do that number of push-ups as well, but often did. On any quest, he said, the principal thing was never to look back.

  His bearers saw him down the Zimbaba from Chambo in dugouts—the river was down, the heavy rains were not due until mid-December—and just above Kawaba he paid them off, sent them back, and struck out on his own, the low scrub smacking his puttees.

  While Gilstrap marched, he heard a child's bratty voice call out, "Go away!"

  "On the contrary."

  He spoke pompously, to make his point, yet was somewhat self-conscious at finding himself replying to a bird in a tree. It was of course a go-away bird.

  "I am staying."

  Because, Gilstrap reflected, it was a land without Christmas trees, nor any suggestion of home. In a word, it was not Mudford. He had spoken indignantly, and it seemed significant that there had been no answer, so the bird had quite seen his point.

  One afternoon he pitched his tent and, squatting to tidy the tent pegs, could not rise from his heels. He toppled forward, used the last of his strength to zip the flapping door, and there he lay, under canvas, twitching like a monkey. He was very cold. He shivered. He grew warm. His brain ached, his skin was scorched, he panted, he slept, he saw doggy demons with chewed fur and red eyes. He saw cranky birds on black trees with beaks like scissors; then he saw nothing, for he felt that his eyes were being boiled in their sockets.

  When the fever finally passed, Gilstrap crept from his tent, weak and thirsty, and knelt at the riverbank. He saw a troop of baboons all tangled in the tamarinds. The baboons joined him, scoop-splashing the water to their mouths as Gilstrap did—the Zimbaba was clean enough to drink.

  Ranged on the bank, the baboons regarded him with dripping faces, but what struck Gilstrap most of all was the way the baboons separated into little families, mother and child and frowning father, just the way Mudford families picnicked at Hickey Park or rested by the banks of the Mystic River, near Craddock Bridge on summer days. Now he remembered that fragment of Mudford and sighed.

  Resuming his hike, he saw a crocodile on a sandbank with its mouth wide open, and a white-feathered egret approached it, and Gilstrap was put in mind of Dr. Enid Hugo the dentist and her long legs and white smock. The egret did a most dentist like thing, tilted her head and drilled expertly between the crocodile's teeth, foraging as she cleaned them. He remembered the garrulity of Dr. Hugo, though perhaps her questions were no worse than the squawks of this insistent egret.

  He saw several roly-poly hippos not far away. One raised itself before Gilstrap and seemed to smile, and Gilstrap recalled a well-padded Santa shaking with laughter on a Mudford street corner. But the Santa was the more harmless of these buffoons. Even trotting busily along the banks, the hippos looked like shoppers, and they munched in the herbage like mothers at lunch.

  "Go away!" he heard, and it was repeated.

  He knew it was another go-away bird, yet now the command made him pensive.

  Gilstrap pushed on, picking the odd guava and watching the slow-footed progress of his dusty boots, to the doubtful encouragement of the monotonous lark and the screech of the racquet-tailed roller in their tumbling acrobatics.

  Toward nightfall, camped by a kopje, he felt a pair of eyes on him, a warthog receding—indeed, backing directly into his hole. Yet Gilstrap did not see the tusks and the hairy nostrils, nor the bristly face and the oversized head, but the sweeter and sillier face of Hump the Lab, settling into his dog bed with the same tentative inquiry of his hindquarters. Not twenty feet away another warthog was also reversing, this one with a snout that looked like a hood ornament on an old Chevy, specifically that of Ed Brimble, Gilstrap's Mudford neighbor, as he fastidiously backed into his garage.

  Gilstrap woke and crawled from his tent to see Aunt Tom at breakfast, nodding at her spinster sisters, Grace and Trudy. But no: though they had many Gilstrap features—solemn and long-faced and leggy—it was a trio of marabou storks at work on the remnants of food Gilstrap had unwisely left out last night. They had just about finished his provisions and had punished the horde of guavas he had gathered.

  Put distinctly in mind of Mudford at that juncture, he saw something Wagnerian in the Cape buffalo, which looked like an entire cast of Parsifal at the Mudford Opera. Reminiscing in this way, Gilstrap hardly noticed the eland beneath their horns, so lyrelike you half expected the phantom hand of a lovely woman—Elveera's, perhaps—to reach out and pluck them and fill the air with the plangency of this chord.

  Yet there was no music here. There was all of Africa, and not the chirping of birds but their sudden utterances, the go-away bird with its command, and even more orders from the mourning dove, which repeated, "Work harder, work harder!" and at noon, "No farther, no farther!" and at nightfall, "Drink lager, drink lager!"

  In his already crapulous state Gilstrap heard and obeyed, and listening for more, he heard the laughing dove laughing and a spotted hyena yakking like a boasting child. Stumbling in the darkness, he shone his flashlight and saw a porcupine like a pot scrubber, a night ape lurking like Mayor Mazzola, and a large ripe artichoke. The artichoke made him hungry—and a bit homesick, too, for the last artichoke he had eaten was at Elveera's in Mudford—but before he could feast on this one, he saw it revealed as a pangolin.

  Onward in the morning on more reluctant feet, he saw a squirrel and was back in Hickey Park, but it was just a bush squirrel, not as glossy or as well fed as the Mudford squirrels. He saw more families of Mudford picnickers, but they were troops of chacma baboons. Nor was that creature Morris the cat but instead a frolicking clawless otter, drying itself on a rock; that coiled coach whip an Egyptian cobra; that coat rack on the pretty patterned carpet a Goliath heron standing in a backwater in a small sea of hyacinths.

  "Go away," cried the go-away bird.

  He glanced up and saw a fish eagle and for an instant was in the Mudford post office, standing under the American eagle getting his mail, which at this season would have been a stack of Christmas cards.

  Yet the hooded vulture was a hooded vul
ture, the tsetse flies were tsetse flies, the crocs crocs, the bats bats, the sunlight's shattering flash like the swipe of a golden sword. Gilstrap knew he ought to have been nearer to the object of his quest, yet he seemed no nearer.

  In desperation he turned inland, away from the riverbank, and what he saw made him pine for Mudford: as far as he could see were Christmas trees.

  Pine trees here? Yes, the trees were gorgeous, their green boughs beautifully decorated with bright trinkets. Gilstrap wept at their symmetry and their color, even at the way they so explicitly wobbled on their stands.

  Through his tears of homesickness, how was Gilstrap to know that these were the Two-Toed Tumbo people in their ceremonial cloaks, which were contrived from the feathers of the green-backed heron and the green sandpiper, the emerald cuckoo and the olive bee-eater, and hung with ornaments.

  "Go away," cried the go-away bird.

  This time Gilstrap obliged, leaving his tins and his camp stool and his puttees and his tent. He fled upriver to Chambo and caught the night bus, the first of many journeys that brought him back to Mudford and his love.

  The Return of Bingo Humpage

  THE MORNING ROOM of Thorncombe Manor was thick with artifacts—ancient skull racks, canoe prows, tortoise paddles, dogtooth necklaces, nose cones. His islanders would swap almost anything they possessed for the fruit lozenges Humpage brought them in tins—anything except the crocodiles they venerated.

  This made Humpage livid.

  "There's money in wallets," he said, winking horribly, "and even more in handbags."

  The skull rack served for hats, of course. Near it, a framed photograph showed a fashionably obese islander and a small boy.

  "Who is that, Bingo?" Wetherup squinted.

  Humpage was "Bingo" to those who thought they knew him.

  "One of my chiefs," Humpage said.

  The obstinate chief lived near Humpage's bungalow by the muddy lagoon. Obstinate because he would not hear of crocodile handbags or wallets.

  "And who's that next to him?" Wetherup indicated the child.

  "That's his lunch."

  Back on the island, hilarious on grog, Humpage repeated this offensive exchange to the chief himself.

  The chief gnawed a betel nut and then spat. Islanders could be impassive. This encouraged Humpage, and he shouted the story throughout the archipelago all that year, showing his teeth.

  In return for lozenges, the islanders crafted wicker visors and gathered loofahs that Humpage sold in Burlington Arcade.

  Humpage trusted them without liking them much, nor could he contemplate their passion for dog meat without thinking of his own Monty. Crocs were more numerous—there were now twice as many crocs and half as many islanders since his first visit. Why not eat those accumulating beasts instead, and use their hides for handbags?

  The islanders muttered that they had reasons.

  At night, while Humpage sat with Monty chucking dollops of chunky marmalade to the crocs he longed to skin, the islanders crouched in their windowless huts. For them the night was alive with creatures. For an islander, there was no finality in death, but only rebirth, new lives, new forms, not always human.

  Humpage jeered at their savagery and twitted the chief with his monotonous humor ("I said, 'That's his lunch'!") and brought their artifacts back to England on the December mail boat in time to be sold as stocking fillers.

  Now all that was the past, for this year on his return to the islands Humpage was informed of the death of the chief.

  Humpage missed him in the resentful way a bully misses his victim. Nevertheless, he drank, and red-faced with grog he cursed the chief and spoke with renewed hope of handbags.

  The night was too black to reveal any listener.

  Humpage flipped marmalade into the lagoon, and he awaited the mail boat and Christmas at Thorncombe.

  One day soon after, the lagoon was heaving with crocodiles. These were the estuarine variety, thriving in salt water, and as sturdy and sleek as the islanders who venerated them.

  In previous years the creatures had seemed grateful for a spot of jam, and so it was odd when one fat beast made straight for Humpage.

  Monty went rigid.

  In a single gulp the reptile bolted the Lord of Thorncombe Manor and then sank beneath the muddy lagoon. All that night there were bubbles and the agreeable sounds of digestion.

  The mail boat was a day late, though not late enough to explain the crocodile, impassive and upright on the jetty. Nor was Monty anywhere in sight.

  Without a word, the crocodile boarded the mail boat, occupying Humpage's usual cabin. It was this same creature—green and enigmatic, but with a tremulous dignity—that stepped off the 11:37 from Waterloo in the snow at Thorncombe Halt, causing talk and twitching curtains in the village.

  On Christmas Eve, the crocodile joined in the trimming of the tree, hooking on an ornament peculiar to the island, and standing just ahead of the Wetherups and the Pratts, and Sasha, and little Algy, as Bingo had done in years past.

  Bibliography

  "Being a Stranger" is based on a lecture I gave at Michigan State University in March 1999. "Memory and Creation: The View from Fifty" I wrote off my own bat, to console myself; a shorter version was printed in The Massachusetts Review, 1991.

  "The Object of Desire" first appeared in Vogue. "At the Sharp End: Being in the Peace Corps" appeared in a Peace Corps book entitled Making a Difference (1986) and also in the New York Times.

  "Five Travel Epiphanies" was written for the fifth-anniversary issue of Forbes FYI.

  "Travel Writing: The Point of It" I wrote after the Tiananmen Square massacre, in June 1989, when I reflected on the waspish reviews my book Riding the Iron Rooster had been given. The reviewers' line was that I had been beastly to the Chinese authorities. After the massacre, my book was seen as prescient; in fact, I had just written truthfully of what I had seen over the course of a year in China, and writing the truth can sometimes seem like prophecy.

  An earlier version of "Fresh Air Fiend" appeared in Worth. "The Awkward Question" formed the introduction to Alone, by Gerard d'Aboville. Soon after "The Moving Target" appeared, as an op-ed piece in the New York Times, a woman jogger was beaten and raped by a gang of boys in Central Park—a notorious example of the sort of thing I discussed in the piece. "Dead Reckoning to Nantucket" appeared first in Condé Nast Traveler; "Paddling to Plymouth" in the New York Times.

  "Fever Chart: Parasites I Have Known" appeared under a different title in Condé Nast Traveler and formed the introduction to Dr. Richard Dawood's book Travelers' Health (1994).

  "Diaries of Two Cities": I am not a diarist. In general, a diary is a waste of a writer's time. I kept one-week diaries in London and Amsterdam at the suggestion of different editors, one at the Guardian in 1993, the other at Handelsblad in 1990.

  "Farewell to Britain: Look Thy Last on All Things Lovely" I wrote for Islands. "Gravy Train: A Private Railway Car" was published in Gourmet. "The Maine Woods: Camping in the Snow" appeared in the German edition of Geo; "Trespassing in Florida" in Travel & Leisure; "Down the Zambezi" in National Geographic; "The True Size of Cape Cod" in Outside; and "German Humor" in the New York Times.

  "Down the Yangtze" was first written as a short piece for The Observer in 1981. I then expanded it to include the whole trip. Under the title Sailing Through China, I published this at my own expense, in a limited edition, with illustrations by Patrick Procktor. This little book appeared in a commercial edition, and after it went out of print, it resurfaced as a Penguin book under the present title. As it is no longer in print—perhaps it was too small to survive—I have included it here.

  "Chinese Miracles" is the account of an extensive trip I took in 1994 through newly prosperous south China for Harper's Magazine. "Ghost Stories: A Letter from Hong Kong on the Eve of the Hand-over" was published, in somewhat different form, in The New Yorker.

  "The Other Oahu" first appeared in Travel Holiday; "On Molokai" in the German edition
of Geo; "Connected in Palau" in Condé Nast Traveler; "Tasting the Pacific" in Vogue. Outside published both "Palawan: Up and Down the Creek" and "Christmas Island: Bombs and Birds."

  "The Edge of the Great Rift" was the introduction to the Penguin edition of my three novels with an African background: Fong and the Indians, Girls at Play, and Jungle Lovers. "The Black House" appeared in The Independent. "The Great Railway Bazaar," "The Old Patagonian Express," and "Kowloon Tong" appeared in new editions of those books. "The Making of The Mosquito Coast" appeared first in Vanity Fair.

  "Robinson Crusoe" is the introduction to the Signet paperback edition of the novel; "Thoreau's Cape Cod" is the preface to the Penguin edition; "A Dangerous Londoner" is the introduction to the Everyman edition of The Secret Agent; "The Worst Journey in the World" is the introduction to the Picador edition of that book. "Racers to the Pole" is adapted from my introduction to The Last Place on Earth, by Roland Huntford. "PrairyErth" and "Looking for a Ship" first appeared as critical pieces in the New York Times.

  "Chatwin Revisited" was the introduction to the book Now here Is a Place, and when it appeared, it greatly angered some of Bruce's friends, who felt it was too breezy and disrespectful. After biographies of Bruce began to appear, my portrait was seen to be accurate. "Greeneland" is a gathering of four separate pieces published in various places. "V. S. Pritchett: The Foreigner as Traveler" I wrote for the New York Times on Pritchett's death. "William Simpson: Artist and Traveler" was the introduction to the English edition of a book by Muriel Archer about this little known painter. "Rajat Neogy: An Indian in Uganda" was published in a newly revived series of the magazine Transition. "The Exile Moritz Thomsen" is my introduction to Thomsen's travel book, The Saddest Pleasure — a title he found in my novel Picture Palace, but it was actually a line spoken to me by Graham Greene.

  "Unspeakable Rituals and Outlandish Beliefs" appeared in Granta; "Gilstrap, the Homesick Explorer" in The Independent; "The Return of Bingo Humpage" in the New York Times. These last three pieces I wrote while traveling, to amuse myself. I think of them, as I often think of my travels, as fugues.