My Secret History

by Paul Theroux

  “So you were going to meet him, were you?”

  She laughed and said, “Don’t listen to me. I didn’t have any other plans. I went to the dentist today and had a tooth pulled. To tell you the truth I didn’t think I was going to make it to the library. But I’m glad I did.” She took another sip of her drink. “I feel better already.”

  “I was glad to see you.”

  “You mean that, don’t you?” She touched my hand, but casually, as though in a reflex, like touching wood for luck.

  She inhaled the fragrance of the flowers around us and said how happy she was to be here.

  “In this bar?”

  “In Africa.”

  “Why is it that people in Africa are always talking about being in Africa?” I said. She did not reply, so I went on, “It might be nice to live somewhere else, in order to talk about something else.”

  “I came here to teach,” she said. It sounded like a reproach, but it was the strength of her conviction that made it seem so. “I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.”

  I knew exactly how she felt: it was the way I had felt in Nyasaland, my first year.

  She loved being in Africa. Very well, so did I. And so I chattered and boasted, trying to impress her, because I wanted to see her again. I was the acting director of the Institute, I said. I ran the place, I had eighty students and five part-time lecturers. I didn’t tell her that everyone else had quit and gone home, that I was the only person left to do the job and as soon as a qualified African applied I would be replaced. I told her that we had regional centers all over Uganda and that I would shortly be setting off to visit them.

  “I’d love that kind of job,” she said. “One that involved traveling up-country.”

  “You’re welcome to come along.”

  “You don’t need my help,” she said.

  She was very firm—I admired her for it. But I was also wondering how it was possible to tempt her.

  I could see that she had a definite objective—being in Africa, teaching in the bush, being independent. She was a free spirit, and she knew what she wanted. I could not be part of her plans. My job was here, in Kampala. And I had no other plans.

  I was careful in my questions. I did not want to be disappointed by any of her replies. She said she was a Londoner; she had gone to Oxford; she liked Wordsworth and D. H. Lawrence; she was a socialist, her father worked for the Water Board, she had acted in various plays—Rosalind in As You Like It in a student production. This was just chat; I did not want to go any deeper and discover that she had a lover.

  “Please let me pay my share,” she said, when the waiter brought us the bill.

  She meant it—it was another example of her insistence on being independent. I was impressed but a little uneasy—I wasn’t used to women paying their way.

  I said, “Do you want to see the best view in Kampala?”

  She seemed puzzled but said yes, and I drove her to Wireless Hill. We parked on the edge of the summit and looked out at all the lights. This hill was a place for furtive lovers who had cars—there were two other cars parked nearby, and people embracing on the front seats of them. The lights were scattered in the bowl of the town, and behind the mosque and the cathedral and the illuminated mansions and monuments was the impenetrable blackness of the Ugandan forest on one side, and Lake Victoria in the distance, under a warm and pockmarked moon.

  I kissed her, and we embraced innocently for a while, just holding on, as though consoling each other. I wanted more but I didn’t know what to say.

  Finally I said, “I really like you.”

  “You hardly know me.”

  “I know enough.”

  Then she relented. “I’m glad you like me,” she said. “I like you too.”

  As she said it I saw that the car parked next to mine was Graham Godby’s old Austin. Inside, Alma Godby’s head was jammed against the rear window. An African with her, smiling with effort, his eyes popping, I saw very clearly was Festus Okello. They looked as though they were beating time to music with their wagging heads. But I knew better, and just as Alma’s head seemed to flatten against the glass and slip down, I turned away.

  It was embarrassing because it was predictable, the Kampala custom of getting laid on Wireless Hill. It was always adulterous expatriates, and I saw there was something selfish and routine about it. I had parked there many times in just that way—because this was where you took the person you couldn’t take home; it was more secret than a borrowed apartment or the little hotel in Bombo that we called the knocking-shop. This was where an adulterer took someone to be safe from his mistress. It was one of the darker and more desperate places. I had once found that thrilling, but when I saw Alma and Festus in that trembling car I became flustered. It seemed to me a bad beginning for us.

  I said, “I like you so much that”—thinking fast—“I don’t want to sleep with you.”

  She was silent. Then she snorted. “What a strange thing to say. God, you’re funny!”

  “I mean, I’m happy being with you,” I said, hurriedly. “I mean, for now. I mean, don’t get me wrong. I’m very interested in sex.”

  She was looking out of the front window and smiling at the lights.

  “That’s very reassuring.”

  She had an English person’s devastating knack for balancing a statement between irony and sincerity.

  “Sometime we must try it,” she said. “But it might help if you knew my name.”

  Her name was Jennifer—Jenny; though she didn’t tell me until the next day. It was her way of teasing me and also of making me wait. This time I waited for her, at the swimming pool. She said she swam most days.

  “Don’t you?”

  “I can’t do it here,” I said. “It gives me the creeps to stand around in my bathing suit while Africans hang on the fence watching. Look at them.”

  There were five ragged Africans clinging to the chainlink fence that surrounded the pool, and others lay on the grass, looking in. They were there all day, watching the expatriates in the swimming pool, wearing small tight bathing suits, splashing or sunning themselves. The nakedness fascinated the Africans, and the idea of people lying in the sun was such a novelty that the Africans simply gaped, wondering why they didn’t move. Whites in the sun had the torsion and muscularity of snakes, and like snakes the most they did was blink.

  I avoided the place usually, though this voyeurism seemed an appropriate African response to whites in Uganda who stared at bare-breasted tribeswomen or Karamojong warriors who never bothered to conceal their thick floppy cocks.

  “I give African kids swimming lessons,” Jenny said. “I’ve taught some of the students to swim.”

  “I wouldn’t swim here. I’d hate Africans staring at me.”

  “That’s just silly. That’s snobbery.”

  It was our first disagreement. She was intelligent, logical, and articulate; but I also felt she was wrong.

  “You probably dislike swimming.”

  “I used to be a lifeguard.”

  That night I took her to the Hindoo Lodge. Jenny liked the place—vegetarian food served at communal tables. The waiters were Brahmins, though they wore grubby pajamas. I saw my friends Neogy and Desai and I introduced Jenny. They smiled from a nearby table and watched her eat. It was the only orthodox restaurant in town—water in brass jars, a washroom in back, no knives or forks. Jenny made no fuss, though she had a little difficulty managing the rice with her fingers.

  “Those men are staring at me,” she said.

  “Because you’re eating with your left hand.”

  “So what?”

  “You’re suppose to eat with your right hand, and make love with your left.”

  “Tell them I’m ambidextrous,” she said.

  After that we often ate out—at the Sikh’s, at the Grand Hotel and the Greek’s, at Fatty’s and the Chez Joseph. I introduced her to spending Sunday afternoons strolling at the Botanical Gardens among milling Indians, and usual
ly we had tea afterwards at the Lake Victoria Hotel. I was very happy, except when Jenny said how much she was looking forward to finishing her diploma course and her posting up-country. She spoke enthusiastically of the isolation of teaching school in the bush, in places like Gulu or Arua, or even more distant towns like Pakwach and Kitgum and Moroto, haunts of naked cattle rustlers with flopping dongs.

  I did not want her to go, but I never said so. I said that I might visit her. In the meantime we could spend our time together, if she happened to be free.

  “I happen to be free,” she said.

  “I have to visit some listening groups,” I said. “Would you like to come along?”

  “What’s a listening group?”

  “We used to have tutors all over the country, but the government cut our budget. So I organized groups in outlying villages and gave each group a radio. We broadcast lessons to them over Radio Uganda—English, political science, African history, whatever. Every few months I visit the groups to see whether any problems have arisen.”

  “Where do you go?”

  “Everywhere.”

  The morning Jenny and I left Kampala was one of the happiest in my life. It was sunny, and we raced under a blue sky, going west towards Kabale, past the rivers and the swamps that were choked with feathery papyrus, and the smoky villages that lay under scarred baobab trees, and the plains of Ankole where there were giraffes and gazelles. We stopped in Mbarara for lunch at the little hotel. As we ate, a Land-Rover drew up—some tourists and guides in safari clothes, hacking jackets and broad-brimmed hats and big boots; they were hunters, and very excited to be in this apparent wilderness. After lunch we sped off again towards Kigezi District, where the road twisted around the low hills and volcanoes.

  I had never traveled these roads with another person. I had always gone alone. It was wonderful to be with this woman. We talked about books we liked. We took turns quoting poetry we had memorized. She recited Wordsworth and T. S. Eliot; I did Baudelaire and Robert Frost. We chanted “Ozymandias.” We sang folk songs, and when it grew dark in the winding roads of Kisoro, we sang Christmas carols.

  It came upon the midnight clear

  That glorious song of old …

  We arrived at the government rest house at ten o’clock after a twelve-hour drive, and took turns in the bathroom. The dining room was empty. The African waiter brought us steamed bananas and stew, and bottles of Primus Beer smuggled from the Congo—the border was nearer than Kampala. The insects were loud. We sat on the veranda, where it was cool enough to wear a sweater. I could see the lamplights in the huts through the trees and could smell the smoke of the cooking fires.

  “God, I love this place.”

  “I’m glad to hear you say that,” Jenny said.

  I loved the smell of woodsmoke, the clayey odor of the dirt road, the racket of insects, the sound of a jangling bike and its feeble bell, the fragrance of the jacaranda after rain, and the way the giraffes loped when they hurried, the great hot distances of the day and even the simpler evocative smells of the rest house, the varnish and floor wax and cooking bananas.

  “Maybe we should turn in,” I said. “We have to drive again tomorrow.”

  In our room there were two single beds. Jenny had thrown some clothes on one, and I had done the same with the other—so we had each staked a claim.

  But after I turned the light out I said, “Can I get into bed with you?”

  She was silent. Was she asleep so soon?

  “I promise to behave myself,” I said. “I just want to snuggle next to you.”

  “Okay,” she said. I could tell from the way she said it that she was smiling.

  Her skin felt damp and warm in her cotton nightgown. She was perspiring slightly. She went to sleep and began to breathe softly in a dreamy way. I could not sleep. My heart was pounding. I was awake, with wide-open eyes.

  I touched her, and this woke her. She drew away.

  She said, “You promised not to.”

  As I kissed her and lifted her legs and parted them she said “No,” but the sound she made when I entered her was a sigh like a yes.

  * * *

  I saw my class, and then we set off. It seemed an empty land. There were few people in between the towns—no villages, only animals. We drove in the darkness of the high forest and then broke through to the plains. In one place there was a herd of elephants. We tried to count them, but got to sixty and lost count, distracted by the crested cranes and the wildebeest nearer the road. We said nothing about last night.

  “Did you know a wildebeest is a gnu?” Jenny said.

  She also knew Grant’s gazelle from Thomson’s gazelle, and the names of the various thorn trees. She told me that elephants grieved when one in a herd died—they actually mourned and trumpeted and sometimes tried to bury the carcass.

  We continued north to my listening group at Katwe, where there was a salt lake, and to Lake Edward, which was full of hippos, some up to their nostrils in water and others grazing and snorting and shitting—whirring the lumps with their tails, like shit hitting a fan. We went past the copper mine and the deserted railway station at Kilembe, and we entered the region of tea estates—still there were no people, only the lovely dense tea bushes. It was sundown when we reached Fort Portal. We stayed at The Mountains of the Moon Hotel and made love again.

  We crossed the mountains on a narrow road through the Ituri Forest. It was shadowy and damp in the forest and we were pestered by pygmies when we stopped to rest. These people were smaller than the ferns and they hid and threw stones at the car when we refused to take their picture. When I blew the car horn they vanished, thinking I was going to drive into them. I was glad to have Jenny with me, in this forest. I realized that I could carry on for a long time—as long as we were together I had no reason to go back. We slept in each other’s arms in a narrow bed at Bundibugyo, and a few days later we drove north to Gulu, where she had asked to go. The road turned from mud to sand, zebras watched us change a tire, and we were stopped at a roadblock by toothless Acholi soldiers with shiny faces and wicked-looking rifles. They asked for bribes; I paid up—and Jenny was chastened by the casual menace of those men. Gulu was hot, and its only sound was that of locusts howling. The thin trees were penetrated by the sun, so there was no shade. Hawks hovered over grass fires, occasionally dropping on mice and snakes that were put to flight by the flames.

  It was only ten days of travel, but at the end of it we knew each other well—so well that when we arrived back in Kampala I kissed her and said, “I love you.”

  I had always felt that love was a word that had been worn smooth by overuse, and yet she seemed slightly shocked when I said it.

  8.

  She did not say that she loved me. Instead she used fond and oblique expressions that tantalized me. If she had been American I would have known what she meant—if she had been African it would have been much plainer to me. But she was English, and the language could be as maddening and ungraspable as smoke. I meant a lot to her, she said. She was as happy as she had ever been with anyone, she said. The trip had been tremendous fun, she said. She had been desolated by having to come back to town, she said. She would miss me enormously …

  I wanted more. There was no more. She was going away. Within a few weeks she passed her exams and had her diploma. She delightedly told me that she had been posted to a bush school in the highlands of Kenya. Wasn’t it absolutely super?

  I said yes, because she seemed so pleased. But I was sick at the thought of it.

  “How could the Ugandan Ministry of Education send you to Kenya?”

  “I was sent by the British Ministry of Overseas Development,” she said. “It’s a three-year scheme.”

  It was the first I had heard of it. She was part of a high-powered economic aid program; but she had never mentioned it. It was partly that she never boasted and seldom talked about herself; and also that I had done most of the talking.

  “I know the white highlands,”
I said, and she winced. But that was how they were known even with Jomo Kenyatta as president. “It could have been worse, I guess. They might have sent you to Zanzibar.”

  “I’d love to go to Zanzibar,” she said.

  I found her enthusiasm very discouraging and wanted to say What about me?

  “What if you got married?” I asked. “What would the ministry say?”

  “It’s just for single people—couples aren’t as flexible. Anyway, I have no plans.”

  Before she left we spent four days at Lake Nabugabo, where there was no bilharzia, and so we could swim. We lived like castaways in a cozy hut, cooking our meals on a wood fire and drawing water from a well. I paddled her in a dugout canoe to the leper colony on the island—we had brought them sheets to be made into bandages. We gathered wild flowers and pressed them into Jenny’s book. We made love. And driving back to Kampala she said it had all been tremendous fun.

  She cried when she left for Nairobi. She took the overnight train. On the platform there were Indians, Africans, British, refugees, Greeks from the Congo, Belgians from Rwanda, people going only as far as Tororo or Jinja, or nine miles down the line; other people leaving for good, with everything they owned, and their servants watching them like orphans. Everyone was saying goodbye differently.

  “Don’t be sad, honey.”

  “I’m not sad,” she said. “I’m so excited to be starting I can’t control myself.”

  “I’ll miss you.”

  “I’ll miss you, too”—but would she have said that if I hadn’t prodded her?

  “I’ll write to you.”

  She said, “I’m terrible about answering letters.”

  I hated that.

  “Can I visit you?”

  “It’s so far!” she said, but in a surprised way, as though the thought had not occurred to her that I might want to visit her.

  The whistle blew. A bell was rung on the platform. It was a steam train—noisy, drawing attention to itself, and it gathered speed slowly. No other vehicle on earth seemed to depart so reluctantly or with such self-importance.