by Paul Theroux
Her village—if it was a village—was near the airport. It was part of the continuous ruin by the roadside. The planes roared low overhead, landing, taking off, leaving a smell of diesel fuel in the hot air. Gray soap bubbles and gobs of toothpaste ran in a trickle of wastewater through a furrow in the dirt and gurgled into a ditch—a lovely sound that made me look at the nauseating thing. Femi’s hut was made of paper and planks and flattened oil cans. But she was a beauty.
We didn’t kiss—we shook hands: her mother was there. Her mother did not speak English, and so she was especially attentive. She was also dressed in a lovely gown, with a shawl and a drooping headdress. She watched us closely while we were standing in the dusty hut, but as soon as we sat down on opposite sides of the room she seemed to lose interest and she drifted away.
“So, where are you coming from? George said London. I said hah!”
“I was in London for Christmas.”
“Sometimes even Nigerians go to London for Christmas,” Femi said. She had heavy lidded eyes that became absolutely unseeing when she was scornful. “I think it is a bloody waste of time.”
“Where would you go.”
She looked up, becoming interested again. “Maybe to Ikeja.”
She was from Ikeja.
“Or maybe to Uganda.”
I had hoped she wouldn’t say that.
“Everyone misses you,” I said.
“The people are very primitive, but it is a pretty place,” she said. “I remember the bush. The people are so backward there. That is why they are friendly. Bush people—”
A plane went overhead, perhaps taking off, perhaps landing. It drowned the rest of her words. She finished her sentence with a shrug.
“You like it better here?”
“Cities are better,” she said. “I don’t like it here. But this is my mother’s house. I came here after the surgery and just stayed.”
I almost asked What surgery? until it struck me what the euphemism stood for.
She stared at me. She was theatrically dressed, as for an opera or a pageant of some sort, something unreal; but the things she said were factual. They cut deep and made me remember.
“How is your life?” she asked.
“Moving right along,” I said. “And yours?”
“Not so bad. I’m still weak,” she said. “I thought I would never stop bleeding. They said to me that sometimes people die of it. That’s, what they told me afterwards.”
Her lids grew heavier and made her haughty again and more pharaonic as she raised her head.
Her mother reappeared. She had a skull-like simian face, the color of shoe leather and just as dry and full of creases. She entered laughing softly and set a bottle of orange soda onto a plate. She produced two glass tumblers from a cloth, and wiped them with the cloth, and poured the orange soda into them, taking her time and laughing, not hearing anything but watching with wet reddened eyes.
“Why didn’t they tell me before? That people die of it?” Femi said.
The mother had distracted me from what Femi had been saying, and so I asked a simple question and then regretted it as soon as Femi answered.
“Because they can’t stop the bleeding,” Femi said. “And I lost so much blood I was fainting all the time. I took iron tablets. I am still anemic.”
“God, those planes are noisy,” I said, as another roared past, making the flimsy walls of the hut vibrate.
“And my family was ashamed of me,” Femi was saying.
“But that’s over now. You can finish your studies.”
Femi looked away. She wasn’t listening to me. She said, “When I left this place to be with you in Uganda they were so happy. It was such an adventure. They were proud of me. George was boasting about me.” She frowned and said, “And me, I was happy as well.”
I said quickly, “It wasn’t my fault.”
“And when I came back so soon they were just sulking like hell.” She touched her turban, steadying it with a long red fingernail and said, “I did not think I would come back. It is horrible to go back when you don’t want to.”
“I didn’t want it, Femi.”
“It was very hard,” she said. “And then it was worse. I mean, then I had to go to the village.”
“Which village?”
“Where they do these things. Where they cut you. Where the old woman was living. She was big and fat. She cut me. That is why I was bleeding.”
As she said bleeding another plane went over. It became a drone and a dog barked crazily, choking on its barks. The air in Femi’s hut smelled of dampness and heat and of the ditchwater with the toothpaste and soap scum that stood bubbling beside the hut.
“You didn’t have to go to the village,” I said.
“But I wanted to finish my studies.”
“Did you start in September?”
She half closed her eyes. It meant no. “I was still bleeding then.”
I hated this conversation. It was like visiting—not a hospital but a leprosarium or a village of sick people. There was a pathetic stink of neglect in the air.
But what else could she say? This incident was all that linked us now. She had visited me in Uganda, and after a month with me she said she was pregnant—two months pregnant, the doctor said. At first I had said, That’s impossible. But I was wrong. She had another life, and so she had returned to it, and I had tried to forget about her.
I had visited her out of friendship, but I did not want to hear this.
“And the boy didn’t give me enough money, so my father paid for it.”
“I would have given you the money.”
“Why should you? It was not your problem.”
That was true.
“It was the other boy.”
She was twenty-one, but we were all boys to her. It had made me feel like a boy but it had turned me into a man—and it had turned her into a woman. Yet she wasn’t bitter. Her manner was still dismissive and haughty.
“The other boy was getting married. He was from Onitsha, an Ibo. And these days he is fearing about the fighting. There is trouble in the eastern region. It is all shit. I want to go away. Are you angry?”
I shook my head: no.
“White people look angry much of the time,” she said.
“I’m not angry, honey.”
“But I made you sad,” she said. As she changed position on the chair her gown shifted and the purple and gold tumbled over her knees. “I was sad. And I was sick, too.”
There were dogs and children bawling outside, as though competing or quarreling, the mutts and the kids, and with this racket was a jangling of tin plates.
“Maybe you can come to Uganda sometime for a visit,” I said.
She smiled, but it was a sad smile, and she made a noise that sounded like no.
“I think you will be happy in the future time,” she said. Her face twisted like a little girl’s, frowning, and she looked funny and glum, not wanting to be pitied.
When she made that face I was reminded of how I had loved her, how she had seemed solid and patient and tender; and how I had hated to see her go. The worst of it was that she had blamed herself for it all, and that she had been brokenhearted, facing her family.
“You’ll be happy, too,” I said.
“I never will be,” she said. “But I can try.”
Her mother put her head through the ragged curtains and chattered at us, urging us to drink the orange soda.
“She thinks I am stupid. When you go she will criticize me.”
“Then I won’t go,” I said.
“You must go,” she said flatly. “I don’t care about this old woman, my mother. She wants me to be someone’s wife and have children and get beaten by my husband.”
And then I began to ache, and to wish that I could take her back with me. But it was too late. We had had our chance and had made a mess of it.
“They all say, ‘Where is your beautiful Nubian?’ ”
“Those stupid people,” Femi said, and
she laughed. She was pleased. “What is a Nubian?”
“It is a tall black woman with a lovely long neck, from the Sudan.”
“The bush!” she said, and made a dismissive click with her bright teeth.
“Have you got a girl now?”
“No,” I said. “No one.”
“You can find one,” she said. “If you have trouble I will find one for you.” And she laughed again at the absurdity of it. “A nice village girl who will cook your meals and be very quiet. One that is a bit primitive and obedient.”
“Like you?”
“Oh, no!” And she laughed again. “I am a modern girl. I like the fast life—music and dancing. I like reading books, too. I listen to the wireless. I use lipstick.”
“I want one like you.”
“That is nice,” she said, nodding her head and then elevating it in pride, becoming a Nubian. “That is a nice thing to say.” She smiled at me. “I am glad you said that, because when you leave I am going to be sad again.”
“Don’t you have a friend?”
She closed her eyes briefly: no. “That stupid boy got married in Enugu, and he is afraid to come here because there is going to be a war.” She sighed and said, “I would like to go away in a plane”—one had just gone overhead—“but I think I never will. I can forget the other thing, because it is in the past. But I get afraid when I don’t know what is coming.”
I was glad when her mother returned and pressed me to eat, because the rest was ritual. I ate—steamed yams and stew, while the mother and daughter served me, saying nothing. They brought me a basin of water; I washed my hands; I said I had to go—I had an appointment at the Ministry of Information, for my article, that didn’t include any of this.
Femi walked with me to the road. Dressed in her robes, she seemed especially tall and stately, with her fine turban and the bangles on her wrists, and her haughty eyes. The wrecked huts were all around us, and the mangy dogs and dirty children, and the tin shacks and the planes overhead screeching so loudly that when at last we kissed she exclaimed and her words were lost. I could not hear her, but she was laughing, and I wished I knew why.
5.
At dusk in Kampala, in the district of Wandegeya where I lived, all the bats—thousands of the mouselike things—flew squealing from the tall trees by the swamp and darkened the sky. That was how night fell every day in bat valley.
From my taxi I saw them rising like shreds of soot, little fluttering smuts. I had just arrived back from Lagos, after that long Christmas trip. I looked up and saw the bats, and stared at them. The sight was not threatening. It was something that occurred every day in Wandegeya. So I knew where I was. It wasn’t horrible—I was home.
My apartment smelled of my parrot, Hamid, the plastery odor of his droppings. The bird made a bubbly growl when he saw me, and I let him out of his cage and smoothed his gray feathers and stroked his beak. He flapped around the room for a while, and then settled down, gnawing the spines of my books. There was plenty of food in his bowl, and his cage was clean, so I knew that Jackson had been feeding him.
I was restless, and yet I had no desire. I was still infected, still taking penicillin. I saw there were cockroaches in the pantry—dozens of them, from the food that Jackson had left. A moldy loaf of bread and an open bag of flour were covered with roaches. I wondered whether I should fire him. He had a habit when he was in a hurry of sweeping garbage into a kitchen drawer and forgetting about it. That drawer was the origin of our roaches.
I walked down to the Young Hok Grocery and the Chinese owner sold me some roach spray. After a satisfying hour of killing cockroaches and sweeping them up I unpacked my bag, made a stack of dirty laundry and looked over the books I had bought in London, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Conrad’s The Secret Sharer, and an old copy of Tarzan of the Apes.
Reading Tarzan and drinking gin I dozed on the sofa and then dragged myself to bed. It was not until I woke the next morning that I reflected on what had happened to me over the previous three weeks: staying with Prasad, my affair with Rosamond, catching the clap from Francesca, and seeing Femi again. I lay in bed turning it over in my mind, wincing when I remembered mentioning marriage to Rosamond, angry at the thought of Francesca introducing me to her venereal Ghanaian, and depressed at the thought of Femi wearing her finery in her dusty hut, and I am still bleeding. A week here, a few days there, an afternoon, a long night: it had all been hectic, but I could not help thinking that it had been a failure. It was as though I had been to a party—a great whirl; and I had come home alone.
I stayed in bed, enjoying my loneliness, pitying myself in my solitude, and savoring the thought that I was in debt and would have to work hard to write three articles to pay for the trip. It was a week’s work: it didn’t worry me. My anxiety lay in all I was hiding—concealing Francesca and the gonorrhea behind an essay on Ghanaian politics, and never letting on that in between my visits to Nigerian ministries I had seen Femi looking stately in her slum. And I would write something about England without mentioning Rosamond or S. Prasad. I hated conniving at what was unreal, and yet the concealment also fascinated me. I was not sure whether these different women and the odd and inconvenient events of their lives were more important and truer to the world than any of the stuff I wrote. Anyway, I suppressed it and kept it as my secret, and so it was like a parallel history in private. I sometimes suspected that it was vastly more important than anything that I had made public, but that it accumulated far too fast for me to make sense of it. Much better for the moment to write these articles and to continue my novel about Yung Hok, the Chinese grocer, another solitary man.
I was happiest in this divided mood when I was speaking another language. Jackson came in and said, “Habari gani, bwana?”
And I replied in Swahili. That other unreal self was let loose to be a bwana and jabber about his trip. I crouched inside him and looked around at the world.
I went to my office at nine. Veronica, the Muchiga secretary, brought me a cup of coffee and asked me if I would please dictate a letter to her.
“I want to take the examination, Mr. Anderea. I must improve my speed.”
I dictated a letter to the prime minister of Uganda, objecting to the practice of female circumcision in the eastern region.
“You are very rude, Mr. Anderea,” Veronica said, as she scribbled the shorthand notations. She then typed it on the letterhead where I was named, Andrew Parent, B.A., Acting Director, Adult Studies Institute.
“We Bachiga have no female circumcision,” Veronica said, watching me make corrections in her typing.
“No, but you have your delightful Urine Ceremony.”
She gave me an earthy smile. It was she who had described the ceremony to me—the new bride putting her naked bottom on the hands of all her husband’s brothers and pissing, to seal the bond.
“I think you also have funny customs,” she said.
“Really, Veronica?”
“Europeans like to have toilets inside their houses,” she said. “I think it is very unclean.”
“I agree.”
She went away, giggling at her audacity, and I swiveled my chair around, so that I could look out the window.
In the big splintered tree on the lawn outside my office there were gray herons nesting—I saw the mother heron shoving food down the open beaks of her fledglings. Beneath the tree the gardener was whacking clumps of weed with a sickle. He wore incredible rags that had once been trousers, and an overcoat from the King’s African Rifles, and a torn hat. He was perspiring and wiping his face with a brown rag. His bare feet were as big and as cracked as a pair of shoes.
Sitting in the shade of the hedge were the students who had stayed for the holidays—classes had not yet begun. I recognized Francis Omolo, a purplish man from West Nile, who had all his bottom teeth knocked out, according to the custom of his tribe; Mr. Kato, the schoolteacher from Trans-Nzoia, on the Kenya border; Chango Muwenga, who wore a Mao button; and
an undersized man named Mgubi who lived on the other side of the Mountains of the Moon, among the pygmies of Bundibugyo. They stayed here, because it was too far to go home. They had books, but they sat on them. The grass was damp.
At the edge of the lawn were bamboos and weaver birds madly shrieking in their nests. I could hear the bicycle bells and car horns and the buses changing gear beyond the hedge; and I could just see the white minarets of the Ismaili mosque on a distant hill. Looking out this window I tried to call up the sight of the cold gleaming streets of London, but it wouldn’t come. I could only see Rosamond, her fur hat and long coat, and I felt vaguely disatisfied that we had parted so coldly. Yet I could not imagine her here—or Francesca either. I could not imagine this place, or myself, any different. Africa was what it was—permanently unformed. It was clay that never hardened. It was much better for someone far away to think about it and picture it than for that person to come here and be disappointed by the broken streets and the noise and its incompleteness. And what would they make of the bats? The name was enough. I envied people who had never seen Africa.
I scribbled a memo, Books set in Africa by writers who had never been there. Tarzan, Henderson the Rain King, The Unbearable Bassington and … Veronica interrupted me with another cup of coffee, and I briefly felt happy, understanding that I was having difficulty writing my novel about the Africa of the Chinese grocer because it was an Africa that had never been described before. How could I make that unexpected man believable? How could I make this real—the sunlight flooding my office and fading my books and yellowing the stack of curled-up letters on my shelves? “Acting Director” was right. I was just a caretaker, helping this place along, keeping it dusted. No one expected very much, because this was Africa. None of us was under any pressure at all. We could never succeed, nor could we fail. I had a job here, though I didn’t belong. I felt like Yung Hok, the Chinese grocer.
As I stirred my coffee, the bursar rang. He said, “Have you been away?”
I said no, just to see whether he would challenge me—after all, I had been away almost a month. He laughed—three quacks.