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

To touch a woman who wanted to be touched was for me the height of pleasure; to kiss her and be kissed with the same desire, to feel the great excitement of being touched by her, the pressure in every fingertip a wordless promise. I changed by degrees from a reflective smiling soul sifting through my dreams to an engine of desire, and my whole body burned. However casual the act may have seemed — for I had a tendency to mask my desire when I mentioned it — it was passionate and serious. It was the slap of bodies, the crack of bone on bone, and it left me breathless. There were groans of pleasure, but it was a profound raking of the nerves and a wrenching of muscles: no laughter, no jokes. In this descent into the deepest part of my body, I felt an inarticulate animal fury, like a worker bee in pursuit of the queen, frantic to mate. It exhausted me and helped me understand the single-mindedness of desire, the urgent monomania of the libido.

I said this in a simple form to Vidia, not wishing to reveal too much: that I loved being with a woman; that I was alone the rest of the time because there was no one in my life; that I hoped to meet someone and fall in love.

“But prostitutes can be so depressing,” he said.

“Maybe in Europe, but not here. This is Masaka, by the way.”

Mid-morning in Masaka, which was a stretch of Indian shops on either side of the road: fruit vendors and hawkers crouched near verandahs, the open-air businesses of bicycle mending and cobbling shoes, the bright clothing of the rural African women. Vidia fingered his camera but took no pictures.

“In Britain, I suppose they hate their customers,” I said. “They’re famous for hating men, aren’t they? Here the women are eager, they’re hungry. They take pleasure in it. Half of them are looking for husbands. They’re not prostitutes in the classic sense. A lot of times they don’t mention money. They just want to go dancing afterwards.”

“I was a big prostitute man at one time,” Vidia said. “I was with a prostitute in London one day. It was in the afternoon. When we got to her room she said, ‘I saw you on the telly last night.’ It was one of those panel games.” He laughed at the incongruity of it, then murmured the woman’s words again.

“Then what happened?”

“We talked about the television program!”

That I could understand. The African bar girls were full of opinions, about other tribes, about politics, about neighboring countries, about Indians. The women were sometimes religious and always superstitious. Many had children, some had husbands, but they were on their own. I knew that Vidia saw a vast cultural difference, and of course there was, but living in Uganda there was also common ground and like-mindedness. I saw aspects of my own temperament in them.

“I have often gone to Amsterdam and made myself sick, eating and drinking,” Vidia said. “And then getting a woman, one of those Dutch prostitutes.” He made his disgusted face, frowning miserably, looking poisoned. “You hate yourself.”

“I’ve never felt that, actually.”

“It’s so dreadful,” he said. He was still talking and watching the road ahead but probably seeing the red-light district of Amsterdam or a whore’s tiny room with its meretricious decor, the clock and the calendar and the horrible little dog.

“I’ve never been to Amsterdam.”

“You’re a man and you’re sick with it,” Vidia was saying.

“I hate it when they say ‘Hurry up.’ But that’s not an African thing.”

“Or ‘Are you done yet?’”

“That’s more your clock-watching Western hooker.”

Vidia laughed and said, “Graham Greene goes to prostitutes all the time. He’s absolutely addicted, so I’m told. Greene will be walking down a street at night. He will see one, catch her eye, then move on. Ten minutes later, still thinking about her, he will go back. You see, he becomes obsessed.”

“That has happened to me — a lot.”

Vidia had made it sound like a distraction, but it was deeper than that. When my work was done and I was alone, I looked for a woman and always hoped to find one who was looking for me.

“You’re young. And I’ve seen your poems, Paul. All that libido!”

“Lord Rochester, that’s me,” I said. “But I sometimes get jealous if I see a bar girl I know with another man. Odd, isn’t it?”

“Paul, Paul,” he said in an uncle-like way.

We jogged along the dusty road past thorn trees.

“I’d like to find a woman to marry,” I said.

“I met Patsy at Oxford. We got married in 1954. The ceremony was a small affair. She has always worked. That’s good, you know. And it’s rather grand being the history mistress at an English girls’ school. She earns a few pence.”

“It would be great to be married to a woman with money.”

“I don’t know,” Vidia said. “But I was at university with a chap who was studying Malory. He had no money. His fiancée was very well off, though — had a sort of stipend. I used to say, ‘It will work beautifully. You have your Malory and she has her salary.’”

Smiling beneath his sunglasses, he said he loved the expression “lots of money.” Someone saying “I have lots of money” tickled him. As we drove along he tried out the words, saying them in different ways: “Lots of money… Lots of money…”

The road was dustier now, and in this rural district where passing cars were rare, Africans walked in the middle of the road, always barefoot, sometimes with their cattle. The women carried heavy-looking burdens on their heads, baskets of fruit or stacks of firewood.

We were traveling along the dry savannah to Mbarara and could see gazelles and antelopes and African buffalo and herd boys tending goats. I refueled at a new Agip station in Mbarara. We bought some fruit and ate it. Vidia would not eat anything he could not peel — a healthy rule in Africa. There would be no more fuel or food until Kabale, several hours down a winding road that climbed through the hills. The road slowed our progress, but there was hardly any traffic except the enormous trailer trucks that came at us down the center of the road from Rwanda and the Congo.

Vidia was alert the whole time, and talkative. At one point, speaking of discipline, he quoted a calypso song with approval.

“I thought you hated music,” I said.

“I do. But the calypso is something else.”

“Harry Belafonte.”

“A complete fraud.”

I sang, “Ma-til-da, she take me money—”

“No, no.”

Vidia cleared his throat with the sudden scouring and hoicking of an asthmatic cleaning his pipes, and after a moment a reedy sound vibrated in his throat — his voice, of course, but the words were fragile, rustling scraps of dusty tissue paper being slowly torn. I recognized at once the rattly sound of a wind-up phonograph, the needle on a revolving black disk, a quavering dirgelike song coming out of a huge scallop-edged horn: “It was loooove, love alone, cause King Edward to leave his throne.”

“That sounds like an old record,” I said.

“I heard it on an old record.”

It was also the title of a story in Miguel Street , a book in which ten calypsos were quoted. So what was all this business about hating music? I didn’t ask.

He had perfectly imitated the sound, as when my parrot, Hamid, mimicked the agony of the hinges of my door squeaking. I thought, Now I’ve heard everything.

On the subject of the calypso singers of Trinidad he was both knowledgeable and enthusiastic. The culture they sang about was tough, breezy, unsentimental. Vidia had written, in The Middle Passage , “It is only in the calypso that the Trinidadian touches reality. The calypso is a purely local form.” It was important and peculiar, dealing with local life in the local language. Tell your sister to come down, boy. I have something here for she . That was Mighty Sparrow, whom Vidia called Sparrow. Lord Invader, another calypso singer, he called, familiarly, Invader.