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

“Can you come home with me?” I asked when I saw a woman I liked.

Sometimes, without my asking, a woman would say, “Take me home with you,” because it was more pleasant to be stuck in a large house than in a small hut in a turbulent township.

Boredom was the cause of all sorts of unruly behavior, and the streets were always littered with broken glass. I enjoyed the drama, the release from the routine, and found it a period of stimulating turmoil.

One day, hurrying home with a woman in my car, worrying about beating the curfew, I took a side road and a bat crashed against my windshield. It was a large fruit bat, and my thought was that it could have broken the windshield. I stopped the car, and before I knew what I was doing I began stomping on the bat, killing the injured creature. The woman in the car was screaming, “Let’s go!” The curfew was changing me, too.

Vidia was shocked by it. The curfew seemed to confirm his fears of African anarchy — casual violence and a climate of fear. From a distance it must have looked awful. He wrote from the Kaptagat Arms saying that he was just about through with his novel and that as soon as the curfew was over, and law and order was restored, he would return to Kampala.

And, “May I use your spare room?”

I was just a young man in Africa, trying to make my life. He was one of the strangest men I had ever met, and absolutely the most difficult. He was almost unlovable. He was contradictory, he quizzed me incessantly, he challenged everything I said, he demanded attention, he could be petty, he uttered heresies about Africa, he fussed, he mocked, he made his innocent wife cry, he had impossible standards, he was self-important, he was obsessive on the subject of his health. He hated children, music, and dogs. But he was also brilliant, and passionate in his convictions, and to be with him, as a friend or fellow writer, I had always to be at my best.

I said, “Of course.”

THE EVENING before we left for Rwanda, Vidia asked, “What would you normally be doing tonight?”

I said, “Going to the Gardenia.”

It was what I usually did before I left for the bush. I explained that it was a bar where strangers were welcome, and there were always women around.

He said, “I want to see it.”

To tell him the Gardenia was a brothel would have made it seem more efficient, more of a business than it was; to describe it as a pickup joint would have misrepresented it as sleazy. It was an African bar, outwardly a hangout but in its complexity and character a sorority of rebellious women. Far from having the sexual ambiguity and low self-esteem of cringing, pimp-bullied Western prostitutes, these African women were as liberated as men. They were not castrators. The Gardenia was a sisterhood of laughing adventuresses and cat-eyed princesses.

Young and old, they had left their villages, because African villages were full of restrictions on women. Fleeing bad marriages, ditching boyfriends and family quarrels, escaping blood feuds and hoeing and child rearing and agonizing circumcisions in mud huts, they had come to Kampala for its freedom. Most came from upcountry districts, but some were from the coast and from as far away as Somalia and the Congo. At the Gardenia every woman’s face was different. These women were not coquettes; there was no wooing involved — they wanted to dance — and as for sex, they were more direct than most men. If they wanted it, they said so, and if not, they did not waste your time. I went there to be happy; always I left in a good mood. If I happened to be going on safari, it was the best farewell.

I knew I was a dog, but so what? Such a lively place made me hate polite company and loathe the tedium of dinner parties — parties generally, all chitchat and ambassadorial bottom-sniffing. Most of the expatriates lived at a great remove from the real life of Kampala, and the diplomats were even more remote, and consequently paranoid. From the embassy residences on Kololo Hill this would have seemed like lowlife, yet African women fascinated me. Their common language was Swahili. Many spoke better English than my students. They lived by their wits. They fluttered like moths around the lights of these bars.

On the way to the Gardenia, Vidia said that Pat had gone to London to put their house in order and prepare for his arrival in about a month. She awaited his return. I thought fondly of her. I said I hoped that, in time, I would be married to a woman who would treat me this way.

“Marry a woman who can earn a few pence,” Vidia said. “Then you can get on with your writing.”

He smiled at the Gardenia. It was a friendly-looking place, a three-story building on a side road at the edge of town, beyond Bat Valley. It was brightly lit, with strings of light bulbs on its two verandahs and more bulbs in the mango trees next to them. Several women who stood on the upper verandah called out softly, welcoming us.

It was early, so there were many more women than men. The miniskirt, popular that year in London, had arrived in Kampala, but some of the women wore wraparounds and robes, and the Somalis were dressed in white gowns. We were the object of their attention. The women stared and smiled, but they would not sit with us until they were beckoned.

Seeing us on the upstairs verandah talking, the women were more teasing towards Vidia, because he apparently was not interested. They saw him as a challenge. Vidia debated what to drink. He disliked beer and cheap wine. He asked for sherry. There was none. He decided on a glass of waragi , banana gin — the word was a corruption of “arrack.” I drank pale ale and called to a woman I knew, Grace.

“What is your muhindi friend’s name?” Grace asked me in Swahili.

“Bwana Naipaul,” I said. “But my friend is not a muhindi . He is British.”

She laughed at the notion of this Indian’s being British. Vidia looked content. He had picked up the word rafiki , friend. And this was clearly an abode of good humor and ease. The Gardenia had private rooms where people could lounge and canoodle without disturbance, but I never used them. I usually stayed awhile in the bar, talking, and then asked a woman if she wanted to go home with me, or go dancing. She nearly always said yes. Afterwards I drove her back to the Gardenia. A present was expected, but there was no set fee, never a specific sum. Often no money was asked for, and the woman feigned surprise when I handed over some twenty-shilling notes.

“ Muhindis have lots of shillings,” Grace was saying.

“He is a writer. He has small-small shillings.”

Vidia frowned at the mention of shillings . Money was on Vidia’s mind, and therefore on mine. He constantly talked about the money he had lost in coming to Uganda.

The front door opened, a woman muttered muzungu , and I saw two burnt-nosed planters heave themselves into armchairs and yell for beer. The best-dressed drinkers were Africans, wearing suits and ties, and they mingled with Indians — the hard-drinking Sikhs, the more abstemious Gujaratis, the teetotal Muslims.

“I see perfect integration here,” Vidia said, and he laughed, repeating it in his usual way. I suspected that such a pronouncement was like a rehearsal for something he intended to repeat in another place (And I sat back in the brothel and said, “I see perfect integration…”) .

At just that detached and observing moment, as he was being so objective, I realized that, pleasant as he was, I did not want to be with him. How could I take a woman home with me? I was too self-conscious. And yet I wanted to, because we were leaving for Rwanda in the morning and I needed some sort of farewell.