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

Pat said, “Amin asked, ‘What work does the bwana do in his room all day?’ I told him that your work is like praying. So he has to be very quiet.”

“‘The bwana is praying,’” Vidia said. “Yes. It’s true. I’m glad you put it that way.”

He had started the novel in a hotel in the southeast London district of Blackheath, having deliberately checked in to find atmosphere and enter the mood of his narrator, who was a temporary hotel resident writing a novel-memoir. It was appropriate that he was finishing the book in another hotel. He said many times, “My narrator likes hotels. I like hotels.” He enjoyed the attention he received, the tidy rooms, the staff toiling away, the illusion that this was a manor and he was the lord. And such conditions were perfect for the writing of a book.

“This is an important book,” he said of his novel. “These things have never been said.”

It’s just a book, I thought. It amazed me that he could talk about his work so admiringly and with such fondness. But I also thought: I want to feel that respect about something I have written. I want to value it. I want to have that confidence. I want to invest all my intellect and my effort in it. I want to be rewarded.

“Patsy objects to something I wrote,” Vidia said over dinner one night. “Patsy doesn’t want me to say ‘wise old coon.’”

“Oh, Vidia,” Pat said, and her eyes became moist.

“Patsy wants me to say ‘wise old negro.’”

They both seemed awful to me, but I could tell from Pat’s anger and the argument that ensued — more tears at the dinner table — that she would prevail.

He worked on an Olivetti portable, one of those lightweight flat machines that seemed modern to me and that went chick-chick-chick . I used an old black Remington that clacked loudly when I typed, going fika-fika-fika .

“I love to sit in the garden and hear you both typing,” Pat said.

In the bar one night Vidia said, “How do you spell ‘areola’?”

I thought he was saying “aureole” and began to spell it, but he said no. He asked the Major for a dictionary and found the word.

“Isn’t it a nipple?” asked the Major.

“It’s the portion that surrounds the nipple,” answered Vidia.

While they talked, I looked up the word “pathic,” but it was not in the Major’s small student dictionary, which must have belonged to one of the Kikuyu staff.

“Is that for your book?” the Major was asking Vidia.

“My narrator mentions it, yes.”

“I must read this book.”

Pat smiled at this but said nothing. She had a smooth pale face, a slightly jutting jaw, and a pendulous lower lip that made her seem thoughtful, on the point of speaking. She was shy, she spoke sweetly, she was modest and always polite. I was careful never to swear in her presence. I had seen how the word “fuck” upset her when spoken by a man in the Kaptagat bar. I did not want to ask myself why her reaction stirred me.

In the garden, beyond the hedge of purplish bougainvillea, she read, she wrote in her diary, always looking lonely and somewhat embarrassed, as though she were obviously waiting, keeping an ap pointment with someone who would never show up. She was small and demure and shapely. I give her a chaste kiss at night .

“Keep Pat company,” Vidia would say. He was wholly occupied with his book.

I wondered what his words meant and wanted them to be less ambiguous, or for her to take the initiative. I was twenty-four and still missed Yomo badly, although in Kampala I sometimes took women home from the Gardenia bar.

Pat and I drove to nearby villages or to Eldoret, where there was a post office. We went for walks. It was not unusual to stumble across an African couple rutting, or a boy chasing a girl through a field, or to hear, as we did one day, shrieks of pleasure from a corn field. This sort of thing roused me. Pat appeared not to notice, as a well-bred woman will avert her eyes from two dogs copulating in the road. She was friendly and receptive but always polite. Was her politeness her way of keeping her distance?

Wooing was unknown to me. I did not know anything about the rituals of English courtship. I had so far, in the four years I had lived in Africa, made love only to African women. That sex had liberated me and given me a habit of straightforwardness. Once I asked an American woman in Kampala if she was interested in having sex. She said, “You’ll have to be a little subtler than that,” and when I attempted subtlety — though I knew it was too late — she confessed that she was a virgin. I was so shocked at her innocence I lectured her, warning her to be more careful. We were all dogs here, I said.

“Come home with me. I want to make love to you,” I would say, but the statement was even blunter and without euphemism in Chichewa or Swahili. It was as unambiguous as describing the insertion of a cork in a bottle, but wasn’t that better?

“ Mimi nyama, wewe kisu ” usually worked when I said it with a smile. I am the meat, you are the knife.

“No,” one woman laughed. “ You are the knife, I am the meat.”

“ Sisi nyama mbili ,” I said. We’re both meat.

Sometimes no words were necessary. Just being alone with a woman in Africa meant that you had complete freedom. She might not say “Let’s do it,” she might make no sound at all. Her silence or her smile meant yes. I had lived what I felt was a repressed life in the United States. It was a relief that no negotiation was necessary. If I met a woman I liked, I soon mentioned sex. It seemed to me, and nearly always to the woman, that what was being proposed was no more serious, or lengthy, than a game of cards.

“I have given up sex,” Vidia had said to me. The statement strangely teased me. I regarded Pat in light of that disclosure and saw both timidity and hunger and a hint of frail susceptibility that only made her more desirable.

We went for walks and were often together, yet I could not find the words to broach this subject. I had no technique and I knew straightforwardness would not work. She was simply too polite and circumspect for me to speak bluntly to her. I wished that she would help me, either by frankly putting me off or encouraging me. Her politeness was like the reaction of a coquette, and perversely that attracted me as much as her delicate face and pale damp eyes and lovely hair — only thirty-three, and yet her hair was silver-gray, another provocation.

She caught me staring at her one day and she became self-conscious. “My clothes have shrunk so,” she explained, and tugged with her tiny fingers. Tight slacks, tight blouse, and her pretty lips. This never went further than my lingering gaze, but my feelings of desire for his wife made me guiltily hearty towards Vidia whenever Pat and I returned to the hotel from a walk or a ride. I would not know until much later that in the novel he was writing, Vidia’s Indian narrator-hero’s English wife, who somewhat resembled Pat (a whole page was devoted to the pleasures of her breasts), has an affair with a young American. The narrator looks on; the American who cuckolds him is “slightly too hearty towards me, who felt nothing but paternally towards him.”

Eldoret had a noisy bar on a back street called the Highlands. In spite of the music there were not many people inside, and most of them were women from that area, very dark, from the lakeshore town of Kisumu. I went to the Highlands one night after dropping Pat at the hotel. I took a seat at a table and saw an African woman nearby smiling at me. Her face gleamed like iron in the badly lighted bar.

“ Mumpa cigara .”

I gave her one and asked in Swahili, “Do you want a drink?”