My Secret History

by Paul Theroux

  His name was Mr. Wangoosa. He was a member of one of those churches who believe you are either saved or damned. He was saved; I was damned—he had made that plain enough to me the first time we had met, so I felt no need to be polite to him. He had already consigned my soul to Hell.

  He asked me for the list of new students.

  I said I didn’t have the list, and thought: What new students?

  “I reckon you have masses in the pipeline,” he said.

  That was the current expression for being busy. I said, yes, though I did not have anything at all in the pipeline.

  I went home for lunch after that, walking slowly in the sunshine and cutting through the heat. Jackson had fried some bananas and made a curry.

  He said in Swahili, “I told the cook upstairs about your safari in Europe and what you said about West Africa—that it is no good. He was very excited to hear it.”

  “Good,” I said. I was eating, and he was hovering over me. “Do you know there are cockroaches in the kitchen?” I didn’t know the word for roaches—I used the all-purpose word for insects, doodoos.

  “I will kill them completely,” he said, making a murderous swipe with his very large hand. “What food do you want to eat for dinner?”

  “No dinner tonight, Jackson.”

  “Please give me some money,” he said. “Twenty shillings.”

  He had broken teeth and bloodshot eyes and a torn shirt and long skinny arms. He crushed the twenty shilling note in his hands and touched it to his forehead.

  “That woman Miss Rashida came looking for you,” he said. “I told her you were on safari in Europe. She will come back.”

  He left and I lay on the sofa, thinking about Rashida, and how complete this life was: a job, a house, a salary, and friends—even a girlfriend. When I was away I had forgotten it all; and if I had stayed away I might never have remembered that I had a real life here.

  There was an Extra Mural class in the afternoon, one that had nothing to do with the Adult Studies Institute. This class had been organized by my predecessor, another acting director. It was called English for Diplomats. The students were all embassy personnel in Kampala—a Greek, a Rwandan, an Egyptian, two Chinese, and the Italian ambassador. It was regarded as a coup to have an ambassador in the class, and as long as he attended we kept it going.

  The Chinese were from the People’s Republic, Mr. Chen and Mr. Sung. They wore Mao suits and they hardly spoke a word of English. Mr. Solferini the Italian was a dapper and very courtly man who had lived in Somalia for twenty years. His English was poor but he was rich in gestures. He urged me to go to Somalia. It was a good place for hunting. Mogadishu, he said, and kissed his fingertips. Leopards, wild pigs, rabbits, birds. The rest of the class listened and watched. They were very shy.

  Usually we practiced speaking lines of a dialogue that I wrote on the blackboard. Today it was about borrowing money.

  “I waant to bowrow zum mooney frem yo, plis,” Mr. Solferini said.

  “Da iss da seko tie dis wik you ha as-kid me dat,” Mr. Chen said.

  “I nid eet forr an aimairgency,” Mr. Solferini said.

  “Emergency,” I said.

  “Hay-mergency,” he said.

  The rest of the diplomats listened with apprehension, fearful that I would ask them to speak. But everyone took a turn: that was the routine. They did so, stammering, trying to keep their dignity.

  After the class Mr. Chen and Mr. Sung lingered and presented me a copy of Volume One of The Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung and a recent issue of China Reconstructs, with a portrait of Mao on the cover.

  “Maybe you can teach me to speak Chinese,” I said.

  They laughed nervously at this.

  “I would like to go to China,” I said.

  “China, yes!” They had no idea what I was saying.

  When I spoke again they looked panicky, and bowed, and hurried away.

  It seemed I was always talking to people who hardly knew English. But I did not mind, and I was often glad of it, because I was able to preserve the monologue in my mind, and remember it. In London, speaking English all the time had tired me and made me lose track of time. It was another world. I had not been real there; and I had just passed through Ghana, and listened in Lagos.

  I was happier here. Even the most exotic sights here—the bats, the herons, the Nubians with their teeth knocked out, the Dinkas’ foreheads, which were bumpy with ornamental scars, or the muslim women in their black silk shrouds—were so familiar to me I found them restful. The Ugandan soldiers, always red-eyed and drunk, seemed to me odder and more dangerous. But they kept to their camps and their roadblocks in the bush.

  The phone rang. It was the librarian, asking whether I had initialed the acquisition file. I said I was dealing with it. I liked being able to say that meaningless sentence and for the librarian not to care. He was an English homosexual who lived in an apartment block that adjoined mine. He called his African lover his house boy. Like me he was real when he was home.

  All day I had been thinking about my articles—one about England, one about Ghana, one about Nigeria. If I had a good thought I could simply embroider upon it. I felt the excitement of having an idea that I had not set down—it was still fluid and provisional, ink that had not yet dried, like my life. I liked living in this temporary way.

  When the office was empty and Veronica had gone home I started my England article on her typewriter, and filled a page. Then I put it away. Night had fallen, the bats had flown. Africa smelled differently at night—it was less dusty, and had the damp fragrance of flowers. But it was noisier at night—the screech of insects, the car horns, the shouts. Rafeekee, someone cried, calling his friend.

  Rashida was waiting for me at my apartment, sitting on the steps, with her elbows on her knees.

  She said, “Your cook said you had come back.”

  She spoke in Swahili. She was shy because I had been away, and she always spoke Swahili when she was nervous.

  I said, “You look very pretty, habibi.”

  She was about seventeen and small, with a funny malicious face and skinny legs. Her lipstick made her look like a tough woman but when it wore off at the end of an evening she looked like a child. Today she was wearing a red dress and high heels and a yellow shawl. Her cheap jewelry jangled and she looked lovely to me. She had large brown eyes and long lashes. She was proud of her Hamitic nose and thin face.

  “Are you hungry?”

  “I ate some bananas.”

  “What about a drink?”

  We were still speaking Swahili, but she replied in English, “No beer. I don’t want,” as though to impress Allah with her indignation.

  We went inside and Hamid began to squawk, imitating the squeaky door. Rashida called to him—kasuku, parrot.

  “How long were you waiting for me?”

  She shrugged—didn’t know, didn’t care.

  “I want to go dancing,” she said, and then coyly, “No jig-jig.”

  “First jig-jig, then dancing.”

  She just laughed and twisted her shawl tighter.

  I poured her a glass of orange squash, and opened a bottle of beer for myself. Rashida drank in silence, and I distractedly examined the label of the beer bottle, the script of Indian Pale Ale and the emblem of a bell, from the brewery on Lake Victoria. I drank that one and another, glad that I had taken the last of my penicillin at breakfast.

  Rashida was playing with the parrot, saying Kasuku, kasuku.

  “Come here,” I said, and switched off the light.

  She got up shyly and sat beside me on the sofa. The curtains were open and the glimmer from outside was enough light. I hugged Rashida and ran my hands over her and kissed her. She primly kept her hands in her lap, and her knees together, and when I made a move to lift her dress she resisted. I laughed and kissed her again, and was aroused. It was the first time since Ghana that I had had any desire.

  “Let’s jig-jig, then we’ll go to a nightclub,�
�� I said, and slipped my hand under her dress.

  “You are a monkey,” she said.

  “Yes. I am a monkey.”

  “Tell me you love me.”

  “I love you,” I said, and I thought: I am not real—this is playing, this is fun.

  “I love you, habibi.” She kissed me, and then licked my face. She stood up and giggled and took her dress off, and folded it carefully on the sofa so that it wouldn’t wrinkle. She was wearing a red slip, edged with lace that I had given her, and a pair of red shoes that were scuffed from all her walking. She yawned, twisting her slender body inside the flimsy slip, and I reached out for her. She dodged my hands and hurried into the bedroom on her clacking shoes.

  Not then but later as she was leaving the bedroom to go to the toilet, she opened the door and paused and looked back at me. In the light from the hall she looked lovely—delicate and black, like a kitten, on her tiptoes. She said in English, “I am coming just now”—to reassure me that she wasn’t running away—and I felt my desire for her returning in me, and thought: I am happy.

  We made love again, and she was like a cat, biting my neck, clawing my back, and thrashing, weeping in her orgasm, until finally she shuddered and lay still.

  “I am not finished,” I said.

  “What do you want?” she said calmly.

  I told her.

  “Do you love me?”

  “I love you, habibi.”

  She smiled and pushed me down tenderly.

  After that, we went dancing at the Gardenia, until I was too tired to move. I dropped her at her house—just a hut near the Indian beauty parlor where she worked.

  “I have no money,” she whispered.

  I gave her some, pretending to be drunker than I was. And this isn’t real either, I thought.

  The days passed. I went to my office and dictated letters to Veronica. I wrote my articles. She typed them. Mr. Wangoosa asked me about students and plans. “Everything’s in the pipeline,” I said. Nothing was in the pipeline, but each day had its events.

  The parrot woke me with its squawks when Jackson uncovered its cage. Then I had breakfast—tea and papaya, and now and then Jackson fried me an egg. I read the Uganda Argus in my office, and at eleven went to the Senior Common Room for a coffee with the other faculty members. Back to my office, to sit and look at the herons, until lunchtime, usually at The Hindoo Lodge, with Neogy and Desai. If we had a curry we always went to the panwallah afterwards, and I walked home with a wedge of pan in my mouth, and spitting betel juice along Kampala Road. After a nap I went to the office again and answered the phone. “I’m dealing with it.” “I’m studying the file.” “It’s in the pipeline.” And then teatime flowed into sundowner time at the Staff Club, and I drank beer—often with Rashida—until I was drunk. I love you, habibi, we said.

  Saturdays were simpler. I shopped at Yung Hok’s, and then had a curry in town and drank all afternoon, until Rashida finished work. Then we danced and made love and slept until noon on Sunday, when the London papers went on sale at Shah’s. One Sunday I read about the demonstrations in London and saw pictures of the angry students. I understood their anger, but I hated the unanimity of the mob. Rashida was fascinated by their heavy coats and hats, their beards and scarves. That Sunday, like all the rest, we spent the afternoon in the Botanical Gardens, and we finished the day in bed.

  The bush-baby returned. It scratched on the screen and seemed to plead for food. I gave it fruit—soft melons and drooping bananas—and it was always eager for more. It clung to the window. I went on feeding it, but I never let it in. What would it do inside my room?

  Rashida had no name for it except nyama, which meant meat or animal and was interchangeable. She was nyama, and so was I.

  I kept my office hours; clocked in, clocked out, and drank, and made love to Rashida. I wrote my Yung Hok novel in my office, because there was no other work to do until the students came back. I could not imagine being happier. Kampala was a lovely place, of yellow-plaster shops under leafy trees; a small town scattered across seven rounded hills.

  I read Robinson Crusoe, and felt it was like my life. I read Tarzan and felt the same. I read Victory and The Secret Sharer. I was the hero of every book I read.

  I did not envy anyone, or want anyone else’s life. I had everything I wanted. I could only imagine someone envying me. But I felt I was unlike anyone else on earth—not better, but different—and that, having just realized that, I had just begun to live. So my whole life was ahead of me. I was twenty-six years old.

  Rashida laughed when I asked her about her plans for next week: the future hardly existed for her. Her laughter was genuine. It was absurd to contemplate the future. Her fatalism absolved me, and it took away all her questions.

  But she was particular about her appearance—very conscious of her shoes and her dress. Her hair was always done—the other girls at work experimented on her. She mocked me for wearing sneakers with a suit, or a T-shirt with a sports jacket.

  “You dress like an African in the bush,” she would say, looking scornful.

  Only appearances mattered. It was so easy to forget how much people cared about fashions in Uganda. If you wore the wrong clothes you were conspicuous. But this also made life simple. I had to remind myself that I was no more than a white man to anyone here—most of all to the other whites. So I kept all my secrets. I had a disguise that no one in Africa could crack: a white face.

  One of those nights when Rashida laughed at my mismatched clothes we went to see Thunderball, a James Bond movie, at the Majestic. Rashida loved James Bond, and was thrilled by the fires and explosions and speeding cars in the movie. Afterwards we drifted to the Gardenia, and danced among the prostitutes and drunken men. Later, walking down Kampala Road I heard an inhuman shriek—like a monkey that had caught fire. It was an Indian boy being cornered by an angry African, Rashida said—“Muhindi.” But she herself must have been part Indian—one of those in-between people in East Africa to whom no rules applied except the code of Islam. For a woman this meant obedience and prayers and no alcohol, though I never saw her pray.

  The Indian’s shrieks seemed to excite her. She hurried me to my apartment and took off her dress. She kissed me, and struggled, encouraging me. She had an eager way of touching me all over with her fingertips, and when she was most passionate I could feel the frantic bones beneath her flesh.

  “Do you love me?”

  “Yes. I love you.”

  And then she gasped, and devoured me.

  “I do not want to go home,” she said, afterwards. She was breathing hard, her eyes were bright.

  There were two single beds, pushed together. We lay in the one nearer the window, where I always saw the bush-baby.

  “I want to sleep here.”

  With that, she began to snore softly. She smelled of her hut, its dirt floor and its dog; of perfume and sweat and hair-spray.

  I woke to pandemonium—screams and alarms, car alarms, burglar alarms, a riot of bells and beeps. At first I felt I had caused it all, but I could not get out of bed to find out. The room seemed to twist in the darkness, the walls were brightly streaked from the lights flashing outside—what strange emergency was this, or was it a nightmare? I thought the room was going to fall on me. The gray ceiling whitened and seemed to ripple and bend towards me.

  It was not a dream. It was an earth tremor, and it set off every alarm in the city. I lay there after the minute or so of the earth’s movement and my room’s twistings. I sweated and listened to the sirens. It had all passed, but I was afraid when I thought of it and how we might have died like that. I stayed awake, scarcely able to breathe. Rashida did not stir. It was Sunday. She slept until noon.

  6.

  There was no word in Swahili for it, or if there was no one knew it. We all spoke it badly there—it wasn’t anyone’s native language, and it was hardly a language at all, more like three hundred everyday words. “Earthquake” was not one of them.

  But
it did not need a name: everyone had felt it. The next day everyone was talking about it. One of the minarets of the Ismaili mosque had fallen down, and cracks had appeared in the parliament building, and on the stone porch of the Aga Khan School. The lights had short-circuited on the antenna at Wireless Hill. The statue of George V had been jogged off its plinth, and at the National and Grindlay’s Bank a large mirror had shattered.

  It was otherwise pretty harmless. Kampala was not a fragile town. So it was a thrill, and our pleasure of having lived through an extraordinary event resulted in a whole friendly day of perfect strangers talking to one another. “I thought it was thieves.” “I thought I was drunk.” “Did you see the mosque?”

  Rashida had slept through it. She laughed at my attempts to describe it, because there was no word for it. I said the earth shook, and I tried to show her how it felt.

  She said, “You are dancing,” and laughed.

  Her laughter annoyed me. It was not just the silliness of it, nor my feeling like a buffoon for doing a charade of an earthquake because I didn’t know the word for it, nor my irritation that she had slept through it all. The fact was that she didn’t care. Even if I had been able to make her understand she would not have cared and would probably have laughed. Her fatalism would have turned it into one of those things she always accepted.

  For me it had been a nightmare. If I laughed I did so out of blind paralytic fear—my giggle like a death rattle. I might have died in that narrow bed with this snoring teenager beside me. It was not how I wanted to go—crushed and buried by the cinderblocks of Semakokiro House, the staff quarters, at the age of twenty-six. The memory of it frightened me. I had not known that cement walls could bend without breaking. I kept imagining bricks falling on my face.

  Rashida said, “It was the wind.”

  For a moment I wanted to hit her for being so stupid. And then I saw how foolish it would be to hit her. An instant later I lost all interest in her. She was still laughing at me. I took her home to her hut.

  I needed someone to share my fear with. But that evening there was no one on the streets. They were afraid of another quake. Most of the Africans felt it was a judgment—felt this not because they were ignorant savages from the bush but because they were Christians of a fairly forbidding type. The white expatriates did not have a better explanation.