Paul Theroux - Sir Vidia's Shadow - A Friendship Across Five Continents

I sat waiting, thinking of nothing in particular. When the examining room door opened I smiled, having just been reminded of why I was there.

“What’s the verdict?”

“Four months pregnant,” Dr. Barot said.

Yomo looked shyly at me and slipped next to me as we watched Dr. Barot write his bill on a pad. While he wrote, he said that Yomo was healthy and that she should see him regularly from now on so he could monitor her blood pressure.

In the car, sitting on the hot upholstery, I said, “How can you be four months pregnant? You’ve only been here three months.”

I felt innumerate and confused and was not blaming her but rather trying to explain my bewilderment.

Yomo said, “I had a friend in Nigeria before I came here to see you.”

Now it became harder for me to drive. The road was full of obstacles, and it was much hotter in the car.

“What are we going to do?” I said.

She was silent, but I could see she was sad, and her sadness seemed worse because she was dressed so beautifully.

“Do you think you should see your friend?” I asked.

She said nothing. She did not cry until that night, when her clothes were neatly folded on the chair, all that stiff cloth in a deep stack. She was in bed, hiding her face, sobbing.

I did not know what to say. I did not have the words. I loved her, but I had just discovered that I did not know her. Who was this friend, and what was this deception? It must have been obvious to her that she was at least one month pregnant soon after she arrived in Uganda.

“I want to go home,” she said in a voice that broke my heart, and it was awful to hear the Canadians upstairs fooling around and calling out.

“This is your home.”

“No,” she said, and went on weeping.

Yomo was one of only three passengers on the plane from Entebbe to Lagos a week later. Her posture was different, her sadness making her slower and giving her a halting way of walking, and she sighed as we moved towards the barrier, where I kissed her goodbye. It seemed a kind of death, because it was as though we were losing everything.

“I liked it when you read that story to me,” she said. She began to weep again.

The road from Entebbe to Kampala was known for its frequent fatal car accidents. I drove it that day feeling fearless and stupid, not caring if it was my turn to die on this road, because hadn’t everything else come to an end? I was numb, but when I got to my house I knew that I had lost my love and would have to begin again, and all that helped was my knowing that for Yomo it would be worse. So I helped myself by sorrowing for her.

Naipaul asked me where I had been. He had not seen me in the painful week that had just passed.

“Oh, God,” he said. “Oh, God.” His voice cracked, his face was tormented. “Are you all right? Of course you’re not. Paul, Paul, Paul.”

He was truly upset. He was sharing the burden. That was the act of a friend.

He took my hand and turned it over and studied it again, this time tracing it with his finger, and this time he spoke.

“You must not worry. You’re going to be all right.”

“Thanks, Vidia.” It was the first time I used the name.

“That is a good hand.”

IT WAS THE MONTH of bush fires, smoky skies, black hills, fleeing animals; the season of haze and hawks.

With all my love lost, I lay in the bedroom alone where we had slept together, staring at the long-nosed stains on the ceiling, goblins with the voices of the yelling Canadians upstairs. I was sorrowful without Yomo and her laughter. Naipaul — Vidia, as I now called him — was kind, but kindness was not enough. I needed a more intimate friend or else no one at all, just the consolation of the African landscape, which was a reminder to me that life goes on.

It was the season when Africans set fire to the bush, believing the blaze to be helpful to next year’s crops. I set off for the north, drove almost to the Sudan, and walked among the elephant palms to the shriek and twang of the same insects the people ate there; then I drove on to Arua, in West Nile province, on the Congo border, with its scowling purplish Kakwa people, of whom the chief of staff of the Uganda Army, Idi Amin, was the stereotype.

Hawks hovered above the grass fires and swooped down on the mice and snakes and other small creatures that were roused and panicked by the flames. There were hawks all over the smoky sky. Something about the wildfires and the hovering birds and the scuttling mice spoke to me of sex and its consequences.

At Kitgum, in the far north, I hiked in a hot wind, sinking in sand to my ankles, kicking at dead leaves to scatter the snakes. Each night in the village where I stayed a toothless old woman squatted on the dirt floor of a hut and sang a lewd song in an ululating voice. “She is beautiful and has a neck like a swan, but she has stroked the spear of every man in the district” was the way her song was translated for me. It was coarse and upsetting, but this hidden corner of Africa was peaceful for being hot and remote. Black water tumbled over Karuma Falls. To justify my trip to my department head, I traveled southwest and slipped between the Mountains of the Moon and visited schools at Bundibugyo, where Yomo and I had planned to lose ourselves in the bush. One night after rain I went outside and found thirsty children licking raindrops off my car.

Hawks, bush fires, heat, envious songs, and desperate children: so far, not much consolation on this safari.

A sign reading Very Big Lion was nailed to a tree near Mityana, where I stopped on my way back to Kampala. Another sign said Good News — To See A Very Big Lion — It eats 50 lbs of Meat Daily . A coastal Swahili man with gray eyes in a grubby skullcap asked me for a shilling and then showed me the lion.

“ Simba! Simba! ”

Covered with flies, the lion lay in a pen made of corrugated iron, thrown up in a clearing near the road. The man in the skullcap made the beast growl by poking it with the skinned and bloody leg of a dead animal, a gazelle’s perhaps. The lion thrashed but could not seize the meat in its yellow stumps of teeth. I looked into the lion’s eyes and saw the sort of lonely torment that I felt.

“ Bwana. Mumpa cigara .”

Within a week the lion had escaped and killed six villagers and was finally shot by the Mityana district game warden. All that violence for the lion’s being in a pen. I saw a link between that hunger and the animal’s captivity — that appetite, that denial. I tried to write a story about it, but there was no story, only the incident.

“Someday you will use it,” Vidia said, though he said he disliked animal stories. He told me that when he was my age, working on his first book, a man had told him to read Hemingway’s story “Hills Like White Elephants.”

I said, “For anyone who lives in Africa — for me, at any rate — Hemingway is unreadable.”

“Nevertheless, I read the story immediately it was recommended to me.”

Vidia was still helping me with my essay on cowardice, frowning over it, the tenth version. He said that it was improving but that it would be better if I cut it by half. I nodded but doubted that I would.

He said, “I know when I make comments on it you listen and get very tired.”

That was exactly how I felt.

“It’s normal. But this is an important statement — how you feel about Vietnam, how you feel about your life. You must get it right.”

The problem was language, he said. He was passionate on the subject of misapplied words and meaningless mystification. I had lived too long in a place where the wrong words were used. Africans called Kampala a city. But it was not a city. “‘University’ is a misleading word for this crummy place, and is this a government?” The teaching was not teaching, these were not real academics, the daily newspaper, the Uganda Argus , contained no news. “This is all fraudulent!” The writing by credulous well-wishers about African literature had corrupted the language. He emphasized that I must pay close attention to the words I used and evaluate how they worked. Putting his fastidious finger on the page, Vidia made me justify each word in the essay. “Why ‘fat’?” “Why ‘hapless’?” “Don’t use words for effect,” he said. “Tell the truth.”