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

“You Americans are so lucky,” he said at last. “You come from a big, strong country. You are looked after. If there was trouble here or in Uganda, serious trouble, your government would send a plane for you. You would be airlifted out.”

“They were promising that during the Emergency and the curfew,” I said. “But I was having a good time.”

“You’re a writer. That’s why you don’t go insane. You can define and order your vision. That is so important. If you didn’t, your life in Kampy would be insupportable.”

It vitalized me to hear him say this. What had I written? Poetry, some essays, part of a novel. What had I published? Hardly anything. Yet to V.S. Naipaul, a writer I admired, I was a writer. He had seen it as much by reading my essay as by reading my palm.

“What’s all this about being airlifted out?”

“The embassy here, man. Your embassy. We had no place to stay. They provided it. Don’t take it for granted.”

“What would have happened if we’d gone to the British embassy?”

“Nothing, man. Nothing.”

“I’m sure your country would help you if you were stuck.”

“I don’t have a country,” Vidia said.

Now I knew why he was sad.

Kigali, not anything like a capital, was pitiful even by African standards. There were few streets and no buildings of any size. It had no breadth, it had no wealth, and it was dirty. The paved road ended at the edge of town. Yet Kigali swelled with people, who had flocked to find work and food, to feel safe in a crowd. The Hutus thronging the place had the watchful covetous gaze of hungry people, and when they set their eyes on me they seemed to be looking for something they could eat, or else swap for food. They lingered near the market, along the main street, and at the church that was called a cathedral. Easily seen from the main street were slums and shantytowns on the nearby slopes.

“I think we’ve done this,” Vidia said.

He said he did not want to see the cathedral. Churches filled him with gloom. He wanted to avoid the market. Mobs, he said. The crush of people. The danger, the stink. The colonial architecture, the shop fronts, the high walls of yellow stucco with glass shards planted on the top, the tile-roofed houses, all these Belgian artifacts, he said, were already looking neglected and would soon be ruins.

He saw the roots of a banyan forcing their way into the paved sidewalk and pushing at a wall, the knees and knuckles of the roots visible in broken masonry and paving stones.

“The jungle is moving in.”

We left Kigali in the heat and traveled back the way we had come, on the winding rutted road, to the crossroads at Ruhengeri. Again the road was almost impassable because of all the pedestrians.

“This road is black with people,” Vidia said.

At the same café, Vidia sat under a beer sign and ordered another cheese sandwich. I thought, Vegetarians eat an awful lot of cheese. I ate an enamel plate of stringy chicken and rice. We were watched by kneeling Hutus as we ate. When we left, we took the road that led west, to the border town of Kisenyi, on Lake Kivu. The place was famous for its smugglers’ dens. Like most of the Congo’s border towns, it was said to have an air of intrigue because it was also the haunt of white mercenaries, who had names like Blackjack and Mad Mike and Captain Bob. There was often trouble in the Congo’s large eastern province of Kivu and in the southeastern province of Shaba. When fighting broke out, refugees fled across the border. From time to time, angry expatriates or white mercenaries would take over a Congolese town, causing a panic flight of people into Rwanda.

The people on this road could well have been refugees, for there had been fighting near Goma in the past month. But after a while there were no people at all. The empty road cut through yellow woods that gave way to greener, denser forest, and the car labored on stony inclines that were the foothills of more assertive volcanoes. On one of the bends of this road stood a man in a white shirt and dark pants, holding a basket. He waved as we approached him.

“Don’t pick him up,” Vidia said.

But I had already begun to slow the car.

“Why are you stopping?”

“Maybe he has a problem.”

The man leaned at the window. “ Pouvez-vous m’emmenez à Kavuma? J’ai raté le bus ,” he asked. Can you take me to Kavuma? I missed the bus.

“Get in,” I said, in English and then in Swahili.

Sliding into the back seat, the man apologized for not speaking English.

Vidia said, “ Mon français n’est pas particulièrement bon, mais bien sur c’est comme ça. J’ai peur que vous ne soyez contraint à supporter cet accent brisé .” My French is not particularly good, but of course that is the way it is. I am afraid you will have to endure this corrosive accent.

“ Vous parlez beaucoup mieux que moi ,” the African said. You speak much better than I do.

Vidia protested this, even a bit crossly, and then he fell silent, and so did the African. Vidia was angry. He had not wanted me to pick up the hitchhiker. He believed that Africans often took advantage of expatriates.

Ten miles down the road, the African said, “ Mon village est près d’ici .” My village is near here. Getting out, he once again complimented Vidia on his French, and he vanished into the trees.

Before Vidia could say anything, I said, “I spent two years in Africa without a car. I hitchhiked everywhere. People picked me up. That’s why I picked him up.”

Vidia said, “Let the idlers walk.”

He sniffed and made a sour face, twisting his lips. The man’s pungent earthen odor lingered in the car. I said nothing for a few miles.

“This is the bush. People depend on each other.” I could see that he was not impressed. “Anyway, it’s my car.”

What was his problem? Years later Vidia said to an interviewer, “I do not have the tenderness more secure people can have towards bush people,” and he admitted that he felt threatened by them. But who were “bush people"? Anyone — African, Indian, muzungu— seeing the dusky distinguished author V.S. Naipaul standing beside any road in East Africa would have grunted, “ Dukawallah .” Shopkeeper.

We got to Kisenyi in the late afternoon, having had to go very slowly on the hilly road. Kisenyi was a lakeside town of villas and boarding houses and several hotels. We chose one at random, the Miramar, which was run by an elderly Belgian woman. She had untidy hair and wore a stained apron, but she seemed a kindly soul. You knew what such people were like from the way they talked to their African servants. She spoke to her staff in a polite and patient way that was clearly masking her exasperation.

Belgians — just one family, but a large one — filled the dining room, and, being related, they were uninhibited: they shouted, they worked their elbows, they reached across the table for more food. We ate at the same table, family style. Vidia winced and seemed to lose his appetite as he watched the display of boisterous manners, the chewing, the squawking women, the shouting, growling men.

The Miramar was more a boarding house than a hotel, with an intimacy, a disorderly domesticity, the shared facilities meaning intrusions on privacy — the bathmat was wet most of the time, bedroom doors were usually left ajar. Vidia, intensely private, hating proximity and confidences, disliked the place from the first and found the dining table, this common board, unbearable for its quarreling, gnawing Belgians. He hated their appetites. He said the Miramar smelled. He loathed the Belgians for their being big, pale, overweight, loud, ravenous, unapologetic. “Potato eaters,” he called them.