My Secret History

by Paul Theroux

  Mr. Graves wore a thick suit and heavy shoes, and his wife an apron—she was just doing the roast potatoes, she said. There was Rosamond’s younger sister, who was also pretty; her name was Janey and she had a ringing laugh that made Mr. Fry, who sat next to her, squint in an exaggerated way. Dave and Jill shared a big chair—she sat on the arm. Dave was a red-faced man in a yellowish suit, and Jill a plump woman who, under the pretense of restraining her husband, actually encouraged him.

  “So this is the Yank we’ve been hearing about,” Dave said.

  “Don’t be beastly,” Jill said, and laughed as she pushed his head.

  This made Dave smile. “They say everything in America is bigger than over here. Cheers, James”—Mr. Graves had refilled the tiny glass of sherry—“Happy Christmas. God bless.” He took a sip. “That right?”

  His eyes were on me in an aggressive stare. Did he want me to answer him?

  “Oh, Dave, don’t start,” Jill said, and laughed affectionately.

  Mr. Fry said, “I’ve got a cousin who went out there. Canada. Toronto, I think. They usually send a Christmas card.”

  “A big Christmas card,” Dave said. “Bigger than ours.”

  “I don’t come from Canada.”

  Rosamond said, “Andrew’s from Boston.”

  “They’re more English than the English,” Mr. Graves said.

  Now they were all staring at me, waiting for me to speak again.

  “How are you getting on here?” Mr. Fry asked.

  Before I could answer, Rosamond’s mother spoke up. She was twisting her apron in her hands. “People criticize us, but this is ever such a small place, and we’re not as wealthy as we used to be.”

  I did not know whether this woman was talking about herself or England, but it hardly seemed to matter. Still she clutched her apron.

  “Oh, do leave Andrew alone,” Rosamond said. “You’re just putting him off.”

  I loved the way she chewed the word orf.

  “If I don’t see to the roast potatoes,” her mother said, and she left the hot room without finishing her sentence.

  “Because of the blacks,” Dave said with force in his voice, his cheeks tightening. “That’s why they criticize us. Your friend knows a bit about that, I reckon, Ros.” He created a silence in the room with his confidence. He said again, “Blacks.”

  I could not hear the word without seeing dark dumb blunt things, like stumps in a burned forest.

  Mr. Graves cleared his throat and began to speak. I was relieved to think that he would lighten the atmosphere. He smiled, but I realized that his smile was only to give an edge to his sarcasm when he said, “But do we get a word of thanks? Not a bit of it. I tell you, my heart goes out to those Rhodesians.”

  “Andrew works in Uganda,” Rosamond said, as a sort of protest.

  “He would, wouldn’t he?” Dave said, which made Jill laugh.

  Janey was looking at me eagerly and smiling, the fascinated younger sister, with her lovely eyes and her large young lips.

  Mr. Graves said, “That’s just what I mean, Ros. Now the Americans are going to Africa and saying what a bad job we did of it. Well”—and he glanced at me—“see how they like it.”

  “I’m sorry to have to say this,” Mr. Fry said, not sounding sorry at all, “but the Americans are welcome to them. They can have every damn one of them.”

  “And not only in Africa,” Dave said. “There’s a few round our way I’d like to send over.”

  “My mother used to say, ‘American men cry a great deal, and they never take their hats off when they go inside,” Mr. Fry said. “She often went to the pictures, my mum.” And he smiled.

  The conversation turned and turned, like a merry-go-round that I was trying to get on, but each time I made an attempt it speeded up. I saw that I would fall if I just leaped aboard, and so I did nothing and felt foolish.

  Dave was telling a confused story. It took awhile for me to realize that it was a joke, about a black man at a bus stop who was asked how long he had been here. He said, “Five years.” The Englishman replied, “That’s a long time to wait, even for a Number Eleven bus.” Dave compounded the malice of the joke by swearing it was true.

  Mr. Graves said, “Drink up, everyone. I can hear Dickie calling us.”

  Rosamond’s mother was called Dickie?

  “That’s the spirit,” Mr. Fry said, seeing me smiling, “don’t take this mob seriously.”

  I nodded and smiled again realizing that the name Dickie had made me smile, and then I wondered whether Mr. Fry was being sarcastic.

  “I’ve always wanted to visit America,” Jill said, as we filed into the dining room. “See the Statue of Liberty. See Niagara Falls. Do they really have cowboys out there?”

  “That’s the question my African students always ask,” I said.

  She did not hear me. She was handing me a Christmas cracker and yanking at the same time. There were a series of pops and shouts. Then the reading of the mottoes, and everyone put on a paper hat.

  “Poor Andy,” Rosamond said. “I’ll pull your cracker.”

  “I’ll bet you will,” Dave said, and Jill shrieked.

  And then I put on my paper dunce cap.

  We sat close together around a small sunlit table of steaming vegetables. Mr. Graves straightened his paper hat and talked about Rhodesia. “Those are our own people,” he said. Mr. Fry was next to me, not eating but mashing food onto the tines of his fork and making a lump of it like an African daubing a wall. On my other side, Rosamond sulked in embarrassed silence, hearing her father use the expression “our kith and kin in Rhodesia.” Her mother—what was your name if people called you Dickie?—looked tired and tearful. Perhaps she was drunk. She said we mustn’t miss the Queen’s Christmas message on television.

  “That went down very well,” Mr. Fry said, arranging his knife and fork parallel on his empty plate.

  “Talkative, isn’t he?” Dave said to Rosamond, and when I looked up I saw everyone staring at me again and laughing loudly—much too loudly, when I said nothing.

  The Christmas pudding was doused with brandy and lighted. A blue flame flickered around it for a few seconds. I was given a crumbling wedge. I ate a forkful of it, and tried another, but when I bit down I cracked a tooth and began to choke. Then I took a small smeared coin out of my mouth.

  “Andrew’s got the sixpence,” Rosamond’s mother said.

  “That’s lucky,” Mr. Fry said.

  “I guess I’ll need it to pay my dentist,” I said.

  No one laughed.

  We went into the parlor again to have coffee and to watch the Queen on television. The Queen looked very white and nervous, and she was sitting in a room just like this parlor, rather cluttered and fussily arranged, with framed family pictures, doilies, porcelain knickknacks, footstools, and frilly lampshades.

  Mr. Graves awkwardly proposed a toast and then everyone except Dave and Jill went for a walk to the river, which was as still as a pond and black, with black leafless trees on both banks. Before we had finished our walk, a wreath of fog gathered on the water, and then night fell—the early darkness of an English winter.

  “Will Andrew stay for tea?” Rosamond’s mother asked her, although I was standing next to her.

  I hated the way the question was put, and so I pretended to be deaf. Rosamond made an excuse and said we’d have to go back to London right away.

  On the train she said, “I’m really sorry,” and nothing more. Now I was grateful for her silence. She took my hand. I felt miserable. There seemed something final in the pressure of her hand on mine.

  “I was expecting you somewhat later than this,” Prasad said, when I returned to his house, and then he looked closely at me. “Oh, God, what happened?”

  I told him of my Christmas visit.

  “Pay no attention to them,” he said. “They’re inferior people. Did they have one of these depressing houses, and a monkey wagon in the driveway? You should have nothing to
do with them. Just walk away. Don’t be sad, don’t be angry. These people are only dangerous to themselves.”

  He was making stabbing gestures with his pipestem. He wore his pajamas, his bathrobe, his slippers—and the socks I had given him for Christmas.

  “And the girl—you must leave her, Andy,” he said. “Forget her. Forget the family. They’re nightmare people. The house. The opinions. Do you want that? Do you want that nonsense and a little monkey wagon?”

  “I don’t know what to do,” I finally said.

  Sarah was looking sadly at me and thinking Poor Andy.

  “Just”—and then Prasad raised his hands, like a priest at the consecration, giving his words weight—“leave her.”

  “I don’t want to hurt her.”

  “She’ll be very relieved.”

  After Sarah had gone to bed, Prasad took me into his study and opened a filing cabinet. He showed me some of his notebooks, his novels written in longhand. He was a man of great assurance and decisiveness, and so I was surprised—even shocked—to see his handwriting, the hesitations, the blotches and balloons and crossings out. Whole pages were disfigured, and many were recopied three or four times. And then I realized I hardly knew him.

  “You want to be a writer, Andy. But you see?” He opened another notebook—words blacked out, scribbles, his fine handwriting deteriorating into a scrawl. “It’s terrible, man. But if you’re serious you have a lot of work ahead of you.”

  He was gone when I woke up the next day. Sarah said he was lunching in Kensington. I watched for him, and I was standing at the window when his taxi drew up. There was someone else inside.

  “Cyril Connolly,” he said. “We shared a taxi. You know him?”

  “The Unquiet Grave is a masterpiece,” I said.

  Prasad winced, as he always did when he didn’t agree with something I said.

  “He saw you at the window. He asked who you were.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “ ‘That’s Andre Parent. An American writer,’ Prasad said. “ ‘He’s going to the Gold Coast.’ ”

  “What did he say?”

  “That he knew your work,” Prasad said, a smile rising on his lips.

  “What work?”

  “Exactly. You haven’t a moment to lose.”

  3.

  The main street of Accra was scattered with squashed branches and trash, and some of its potholes were large enough to hold three children, just their dark heads showing above the street as they played in the yellow mud of the hole. I felt sick to my stomach, queasy in this humidity and heat after the cold air of London. Africa now seemed to represent ill-health and failure.

  Francesca was driving. She steered around a pothole that would almost have swallowed her little Fiat. “They always say they are going to fix them, but they never do. It’s always lies.”

  She drove badly, making me sicker. We were shopping. We tried to buy beer for New Year’s Eve—tomorrow. There was none to be had in the entire city. But why were we buying it today? Why hadn’t she thought of this before? She had known a month ago that I was coming.

  “They are always out of it! You can’t buy coffee! You can’t buy lipstick! Did you get the makeup I asked you to buy at Boots?”

  “It’s in my bag.”

  “And they always smile stupidly and say ‘Don’t worry.’ ” The cynic habitually says always and never, but after only three months in the country had she any right to be cynical?

  Francesca was tough. That was surprising first of all because she was tiny and looked helpless. But she was solitary and self-reliant, and she had the melancholy of the Italian woman who faced life alone—no husband, no children, no church. They left Italy and made their lives elsewhere. In her independence and her anger she seemed to me extraordinary. But I was uncomfortable with her—because she was older than me, she wouldn’t say how much older; and because her melancholy could turn from thoughtful pessimism to bleak sadness. I knew when: sadness gave her bad posture.

  She had gone first to London, where she had learned English, and then she visited Boston, where we had bumped into each other on a bus to Amherst. We had exhausted each other one weekend, making love, and then she was gone. We stayed in touch by letter. She was in Paris, then back in Sicily, among people she hated. My being in Africa gave her an idea. After a while she turned up in Ghana, teaching at the university, English, of all things. But it was not very demanding work. It was a place much like my own—middle-aged students doing high school work.

  “These are the laziest students I have ever taught. They never do any studying. It’s always, T forget to read the book!’ ”

  When a person with an accent imitates the accent of another person, the satire usually collapses into self-parody. And I had found that most people who tried to imitate the way Africans talked were racists. It took me a little while to realize that when Francesca criticized Ghana or the Africans she did not regard it as racism. She felt it was the opposite—proof that she was truly broadminded. Perhaps she was. She certainly seemed confident. It took confidence to laugh and mimic and lose your temper in Africa, but it was tiring for me to watch and listen.

  “Africans are really hopeless,” she said.

  “I need to meet some Ghanaians,” I said. “That’s why I came here.”

  “I thought you came to see me.”

  “Right. But I have to pay my way. I’m writing an article.”

  “What is it about?”

  “Ghana after Nkrumah,” I said—and she still had a questioning smirk on her face, so I continued, “What now?—Who’s in charge?—What next?—Are we at a crossroads? On the one hand this, on the other hand that. It’s a thumbsucker.”

  She laughed—she liked hearing new expressions in English. And laughter turned her into a new person—she made a loud approving noise and her small body became supple. She had short black hair and golden skin. She loved the color green—dresses, scarves, even underwear—and because she was short she always wore interesting shoes—high heels and basketwork things with built-up soles.

  “I can introduce you to some Africans,” she said, and drove on.

  She lived in a hot little apartment in a building that was faced with plaster that had turned from yellow to gray in the damp heat. So many of the buildings in Accra looked brittle and moldy, like stale bread, and the streets too were crumbled like old cake. The sky was heavy with the dull gleam of stifling clouds, and even at night the air was clammy and unbreathable.

  That first night, when we couldn’t buy any beer, we sat surrounded by packing crates and tea chests—she said that she hadn’t had time to unpack properly and anyway found them convenient for storing her things. They were like cupboards, she said. They gave the room the cluttered and stacked-up look of an attic or a storeroom. Her ceiling fan was no more than a whirring distraction. It made the calendar rattle against the wall, but it did not cool me.

  Francesca wore a Ghanaian cloth wraparound, which slipped loose as she leaned over and spooned some sinister-looking stew into my plate. I looked down and saw lurid vegetables in greasy gravy. There was bread but it was hard and dusty, and the butter tasted of soap.

  “This food is disgusting,” Francesca said. “My cook is good for nothing.”

  I said nothing. It was obvious the food was bad. In any case I had no appetite. The coastal heat affected me like a sickness.

  When I said I wasn’t hungry, Francesca squawked for the cook. He entered in a stiff and almost ceremonial way to remove the plates.

  Francesca plopped her spoon into her plate, as the cook made a little bow.

  “You want pooding, muddum?”

  “No, no, no, no, no.” And she waved him away.

  Silently the table was cleared, and I saw that it was not a table, but another packing crate.

  “Why don’t you cook, if he’s so bad?”

  “I hate cooking,” she said.

  Then it was clear to me why she treated him so rudely. It w
as one bad cook blaming another.

  “I just like eating,” she said.

  The cook was padding back and forth, one room away. We sat restlessly, and her sentence still hung in the air. The ceiling fan went ark-ark. Someone else’s radio penetrated our wall, and there were children’s shouts from the street, and laboring cars and choking dogs. The kitchen door clattered: the cook was gone.

  “I’m still hungry,” Francesca said.

  “I’m not surprised.”

  But she was smiling.

  “Now I’m going to eat you.”

  She switched the light off, but the yellow light from the street brightened the room and gave the packing cases crooked shadows. Francesca was standing before me.

  “I like these Ghanaian dresses,” she said. “So easy to take off.”

  She unknotted it and it slipped to the floor. She was naked. Her body was lighted by the streetlamps and stripes lay across her curves like contours—the shadows of the window bars showing on her skin. She dropped to her knees. I looked up at the ceiling. Ark-ark—the fan had a froggy voice; and later with the bed creaking it was like a jungle racket.

  I woke up the next morning feeling ill. The humid heat was a weight that squeezed my eyes. It was a sense of oppression, like a memory of suffocation, and I sweated as though running a temperature. Francesca said it was a normal day in Accra. A normal day was like a fever.

  I foresaw a week of this fever and this food.

  “Why don’t we take a trip?” I said. “We could drive somewhere up-country in your car.”

  I had a feeling that if we went north it would be cooler, and I hated this broken-down city.

  Francesca was frowning—her way of showing me she was thinking.

  “We don’t have any plans for New Year’s. There’s hardly any food in the cupboard. And there’s nothing to drink.”

  “You are criticizing me,” she said peevishly.

  I denied it and said I was sorry, but so feebly she knew I was lying.

  “And it might be fun to take a trip.”

  Now I regretted leaving London so suddenly, and I missed Prasad and Rosamond and the black gleaming streets.