My Secret History

by Paul Theroux

  But this African so-called savage was enlightened. He didn’t make moral judgments. I had picked up a germ and he had killed it—a simple matter. I was glad to be dealing with Africans. I was so reassured by his attitude I thought I might never go home.

  The cure left me feeling as I had some years before, when I had gone to confession: purer, cleaner, in a state of grace. I was healthy again. Today was Saturday but I had no plans to go to the Beautiful Bamboo.

  “I came here to help you.”

  “Put this on,” Mr. Nunka said, and gave me an orderly’s green smock. It was stiff with starch.

  I imagined assisting at operations, handing him a scalpel, holding a tray of instruments. He would pass me a newborn baby and I would lay the infant in a cradle and whisper to the mother It’s a boy.

  Mr. Nunka led me down a dirty corridor that smelled of disinfectant and we entered a crowded ward.

  “The volunteers don’t come here anymore,” he said. “We used to have plenty of Europeans who worked as hospital visitors.”

  “Why don’t they come?”

  “They left the country,” he said. “They were frightened of what would happen at Independence.”

  “But nothing has happened.”

  “We are not independent yet,” Mr. Nunka said.

  Did that mean anything?

  Most of the whites had gone, though. That was why The Nyasaland Trading Company was so empty and the reason the Blantyre Sports Club was closing. The tea was not being picked, the ministries were closed.

  “They used to wash the patients,” Mr. Nunka said.

  There were forty-seven males, old and young, in the ward, but only thirty beds. The ones without beds slept on the floor. I mentioned this to Mr. Nunka. He said, “They are used to it.”

  “They look sick,” I said.

  “They need baths,” Mr. Nunka said.

  He brought me a big enamel basin and a bar of yellow soap. He explained that it would take two of us to do this—one to prop the patient up, the other to scrub. We took off their pajamas and went at it, sloshing their heads first, then their arms, their torso, and lower, the disgusting rest. The first few made me retch, but then someone turned on the radio, and it played The Drifters’ song “Saturday Night at the Movies,” and I thought of Abby at the Rainbow Cinema. We washed a few more men, and after a while it was like scrubbing furniture.

  The old African men simply lay there and groaned while we soaped them. Several of them were full of tubes and catheters and it required a certain amount of care to wash them. One of the sickest, and hardest to wash, was a man called Goodall. While we were doing him I thought: Maybe Abby gave me the clap? But then the radio played a new song, Elvis’s “Return to Sender,” and I forgot about Abby. We couldn’t scrub Goodall. We dabbed him carefully, cleaning him like an antique. He stank, and his skin was like a lizard’s, rather cold and slippery, with white flakes and scales. But I had the impression that he was enjoying his bath—he smiled faintly as he felt the warm water on him—and his pleasure took away my nausea.

  “All these tubes,” I said.

  “Strictures have formed in his urethra,” Mr. Nunka said, and he whispered, “He has been a martyr to gonorrhea for sixty years.”

  When we came to the last bed and washed the old man in it and the one underneath I had a view of the Outpatient Clinic. I was scrubbing a foot—I had the battered thing under my arm—and I saw a familiar figure walking up the gravel path—Gloria, heading for Emergency. She wore her red dress and a red turban, very stylish for the hospital; but she looked rather gray and gloomy.

  I simply watched her as I did the foot. I knew she would have a long wait—there was the usual crowd of desperate people waiting to be seen.

  “What about a cup of tea?” Mr. Nunka said, when we had finished.

  I did not have the tea habit, and this tea was the color of the bathwater in the basin, a resemblance that turned my stomach. But the Staff Room was adjacent to the clinic, and I sat there and read an old issue of The Central African Examiner so that I could watch Gloria. She was on a bench near the wall of health posters. Perhaps she was reading Toby Toothbrush says, “Use me every day!” or In Case of Burns—first aid in pictures.

  “Busy day.”

  “Every day is busy,” Mr. Nunka said.

  “Goodall seems a nice guy.”

  “That old man is an institution. He is a chief of the Sena people, on the Lower River.”

  “He seems to be in terrible pain.”

  “He is used to it.”

  Mr. Nunka pushed out his lips like a fish and sucked his tea noisily. How could he, in a such a smelly place? But it seemed he did not notice.

  He said, “I want a packet of biscuits, and then I must do some bandages. I will find you here.”

  I waited until I saw Gloria stand up, hearing her name being called. She was treated by someone I could not see, behind a curtain. After she had gone, clutching her bottle of tablets, I discovered why she had come. It said so on the medical record that was flung into the tray for filing. Her name was given as Lundazi Gloria. She had gonorrhea.

  This aroused me—not the disease, but the fact that she was being cured. So was I! As far as I knew, we were the only two people in the country who were being treated for the clap. It made me amorous. In a week we would be completely cured; we would be safe. For the first time in a week I tasted desire, and with it came a renewed feeling of mingled optimism and secrecy. But I did not follow her. There was always time.

  Mr. Nunka returned and we washed more patients; bandaged some burns and emptied Goodall’s bottles. It was cold in the men’s ward, which dulled the smell somewhat but caused the men to bury themselves in their ragged blankets. A light rain spattered the windows.

  At the end of the day, Mr. Nunka said, “It was very good of you to help us here. I hope we will not see you again.”

  He meant I think—they often confused the English words when there was only one word in Chinyanja.

  “Why not?”

  “We don’t have money to pay you.”

  That did it. I said, “I’ll be back tomorrow.”

  The next day I worked alone, washing the old men again. I realized that I would have to wash them a few more times before they were completely clean. But I was making a visible difference. They were so dirty that one or two baths were not enough to get the grime off.

  Goodall said, “Be careful, father. Don’t hurt me.”

  I kept at it and when I finished the old chief was clean, perhaps for the first time in years. His skin was shining. He smiled. But the bath had tired him; he lay back on his raised pillows and went to sleep.

  The men were so silent and inert and uncomplaining it really was like washing furniture. There were stitched-up legs and snakebites and thick plaster casts and wounds being drained. I took care to wash around the obstructions. I had spent the day alone here, and when the rain started at five, and I switched on the feeble orange lights—three bulbs in the ceiling—I slopped an old African’s skinny arm in my basin. A big fly was buzzing and bonking against a window, trying to get out. It stank of sickness here, and now the daylight was gone. It was damp and cold. I was happy.

  During the week at Chamba Hill Secondary School, I was fully alert and got more done than I ever had. I had never felt so rested. I had had nothing to drink, I hadn’t brought any girls home over the weekend; I had spoken only to Captain. He told me he believed there were monsters in the Shire River. One he described resembled a whale-sized snake that could wrap itself around the ferry and sink it. Instead of setting him straight, I encouraged him, and he described more monsters. I listened and felt virtuous, which was also a sense of physical well-being. I was cured of the clap and living one life. Still, I thought of Gloria, taking her penicillin.

  The following Saturday after lunch I went back to the hospital.

  Mr. Nunka said, “You are on your own again today, father. The other orderly has returned to his village for the week
end.”

  I didn’t mind. I filled the basin and put on my green smock and went to the men’s ward. It was harder and slower alone, because I had to prop them on pillows before I could scrub them. But I managed.

  When I came to Goodall’s bed I saw that he was not in it. Instead, there was a sullen man who had been on the floor. He was very ugly, which had the effect of making him look strong.

  “Where is the old man?”

  “They took him away.”

  He did not sound sorry: he was glad now to have a bed. But he saw I did not understand.

  He said very plainly, “He died yesterday.”

  I stood holding the dripping rag.

  “Wash me,” the African said, and sat up.

  “Wash yourself.”

  “I am sick,” he said in a harsh complaining voice.

  “Sorry, father.” I was ashamed of myself for ever having felt virtuous. I handed the man my wet rag.

  I did not go home immediately. I stayed and washed the patients, but I did it badly—I could not see the point of doing it well or being thorough. They didn’t notice, nor did Mr. Nunka. I had wet the men, that was all. And then I saw in my reaction to Goodall’s death that I had been doing this for myself, not for them. And a bath didn’t save anyone from death.

  That night I went to the Beautiful Bamboo. I drank beer and waited, watching Gloria dance.

  “Come home with me,” I said at midnight.

  She did not say anything about having had the clap. Mr. Nunka had told me to use a rubber. “African girls,” he had said. But a rubber was superfluous. I was certain that we were both cured.

  Gloria said, “I love you,” in English.

  It did not mean anything. They were just the words to a song. Yet I felt very tender towards her, and held her closely, feeling like a survivor, still too terrified by the close call to feel relieved about being alive.

  7.

  Out of superstition, and because I had been ill and disappointed, I only saw Gloria now.

  She said, “I can be your wife.”

  It didn’t mean much: your wife, your woman. It was the same word, like month and moon, or man and husband, and even the words for marry and copulate were close—kwata and kwatana—because both meant joining.

  “Kapena,” I said. Maybe.

  Like the other girls she lived behind the Beautiful Bamboo; all the disgraced girls, the rebels and runaways, in one hut. She sometimes stopped by my house in Kanjedza, but not before sending a small child ahead.

  “The woman in the red dress wants to visit you.”

  I always said yes, though during the week this was inconvenient. I had my teaching to do, my copybooks to mark, and lessons to prepare. I had my headmaster’s paperwork—junior staff salaries, supplies and allowances, letters to parents, memos to teachers. I had files to read and the attendance book to keep. One day, when the country had a government and an Education Ministry a school inspector might visit Chamba Hill.

  Miss Natwick saw me dealing with the papers. She said, “Bumf!”

  I had never heard the word before. She saw I was bewildered.

  “Bum fodder,” she explained, in her Rhodesian snarl.

  She took delight in seeing how I had to stay late at the school. I was always in my office, even after sundown, working through the files by the light of the sizzling Tilly lamp.

  I was not the only person there, however. Rockwell was often straddling the chimbuzi and laboring, as I cycled back to Kanjedza. These days he would not let anyone near it, not even to use it. We reopened the trench near the blue gums. He had taken over the entire construction of the chim.

  “Do it yourself,” he said. “That’s the only way to get something done right.”

  “I thought you were almost done.”

  “I had seepage in my urinals,” he said. “I’ve got to lick these urinals.”

  Late one afternoon, when the whole school had emptied, I found him climbing the scaffold to resume the work his teaching had interrupted.

  I walked over to watch him. He ignored me at first, and then he accused me of trying to undermine him by giving him an extra math class.

  “It was Form Four—full of wise guys. I thought they’d be helping you make bricks.”

  “Hah! Your big mistake! Thought you could punish them by forcing them to make bricks. You thought you’d get a good latrine.”

  He smiled at me, and I thought how seldom it was in life that a smile was a sign of pleasure. Rockwell’s was always something else.

  “But because it was punishment they made bad bricks. Anyone could have told you that. What did I do with them?”

  He was now sitting on the half-made roof. At his most obnoxious he always asked questions, and waited until I was exasperated, and then answered them.

  “I threw every single darn one of them away.”

  Even his laugh was not a laugh.

  I said, “Where did all these bricks come from then?”

  “Punishment’s no good,” he said, taking his time. “You’ve got to motivate people properly and do things right. Then they take a pride in their work.”

  “How are you motivating people, Rockwell?”

  “There’s only one motivation—”

  He started to smile, but he abandoned it when I shouted.

  “You’re paying them!”

  “It’s not much,” he said, enjoying my anger. “But look at the result.” He patted the top of the Alamo wall. “Now, see, there’s a good-quality brick.”

  I was against paying anything to anybody. One of the satisfactions I took in the country was that money did not matter. The African girls never asked for it. Mr. Nunka had cured me for nothing. There were no school fees. And what was I earning? Fifty dollars a month.

  “No more paying.”

  “You’re so arrogant.” He pronounced it eeragant and it didn’t sound so bad.

  “I’m the headmaster here, Ward. I can get you transferred. I’ll call Ed Wently. You’ll be back in Sierra Leone, watching people go to the bathroom in the street.”

  He was silent: the prospect clearly worried him.

  “Doing wee-wee and poo-poo on the sidewalk.”

  “Cut it out, Parent!”

  “Anyway, where are you getting the money?”

  “It’s charity. My church sent it.” He had nails in his mouth. As he talked he removed a nail and pounded it into a roof shingle. “The Tenth Street Tabernacle in Rosemead.”

  It was the first time he had mentioned his church; but I should have known.

  “They’ve got a Faith Fund—Pageant for People Overseas. They collect money from a variety night—Show for Souls. They dole it out, so that we can spread the word of the Lord Jesus, and”—and drew out a nail and slammed it into a shingle—“have Bible study in distant lands.”

  “This isn’t Bible study.”

  He stared down at me.

  “It’s a latrine,” I said.

  “Still, it’s in a distant land,” he said, and blinked furiously.

  “What if your church knew you were hiring Africans to build a shithouse?”

  “All the Africans are doing is making the bricks,” he said, and then in a lordly way. “I’m building the structure itself.”

  “Playing God with your chimbuzi. You should tell them.”

  “I think they’d be glad the money was going to a good cause.”

  “Shall I tell them?”

  He saw that I was angry. He said he wouldn’t pay out any more money from the Faith Fund. But I knew he was nearly done with the thing and probably didn’t need any more bricks.

  “I’m done for the day,” he said.

  He made his way down the ladder, and I saw that his chin had an odd pinkness, as of a burn—it looked bald and scalded.

  “Did you hurt yourself? Your chin looks red.”

  “Nah. Just an experiment.” He put his hand on his chin. “Leave me alone. I’m sick. I’ve got mucus in my stool.”

  I work
ed late every day and then bicycled two miles downhill through the dripping pine forest, to Kanjedza. The little boy was usually there.

  “The woman in the red dress wants to visit you.”

  She had immense patience. It was African patience. It had something to do with having plenty of time. It was not indifference, but it was close—the mood of someone who lived in a country where not much ever happened. It was also a kind of watchfulness, like the poise of a bird on a branch. She could sit in a roosting way all day, waiting, doing nothing. Miss Natwick said they behaved that way because Africans were bloody lazy. The Peace Corps told us that Africans had parasites and as a result were very sleepy—the germs, worms, ticks, and amoebas all slowed them down.

  But in Gloria’s case it might have been something else. She said she was in love with me.

  One night she said, “I am visiting my father. He is sick.”

  “Where is your village?”

  “Will you let me show you?”

  I could not say no. In that way she got me to agree to go with her.

  We took the bus from Zimba to Blantyre and left from there on an old black steam train. It was slow-moving and it stopped at every station. On some hills the engine gasped and went silent, and the whole train rolled backwards, unable to make it to the top. Then the fireman shoveled and stoked until he had built up enough steam for the train to go up and over.

  At noon we arrived at the hot flat town of Balaka. There were baobab trees, fat and gray, like misshapen elephants. There was no shade. The rest of the country was cold and drizzly, but this low-lying town was stricken with sun. The main street was a narrow track of pale dust.

  “Where are you going, Mister Undie?”

  She had started calling me that.

  “Back to the station for a timetable.”

  It was an old habit. I never arrived in a place without thinking that very soon, perhaps sooner than I thought, I would want to leave. I always needed an escape route, no matter how contented I was. The timetable was chalked on the station wall. I copied it into my notebook.

  We found a bar and sat in its shadows eating chicken and rice out of tin bowls. People stared at us—the white man, the African girl. I wore my rumpled suit, and Gloria her red dress and high heels.