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

By contrast, the Africans here were tall, dark, skinny, whispering, and whipped-looking. I mentioned to Vidia that I thought they were Watutsi.

“Toot-toot-Tutsi, goodbye,” he said. “But you wonder how they stand these Belgians.”

He had hardly touched his food. He had eaten the fish. He disliked salad. “What kind of a vegetarian hates salad?” the Major had muttered to me. The Belgian food was heavy and meaty.

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

We left the dining room early, before dessert was served.

“I don’t think I could stand watching these Belgians having their pudding.”

It was his first experience of the true bush settler in Africa. I had seen such people in Malawi and Zambia and Kenya, but these Belgians were the apotheosis of the type. You knew their days were numbered. They were farmers and mechanics and operators of heavy equipment — tractors and road graders. They were clever at fixing cars. They mended machines with the simplest tools. They drove the largest trucks. They had maintained the colony but, newly independent, the black republic would find them too expensive and ornery and would send them away. Without these simple capable folk keeping it maintained, the country would begin to fall apart. Although I always doubted it, I often heard that there was idealism in colonizing; but really, whenever the word “colony” was mentioned, especially in Africa, I thought of these simple-minded mechanics. And I suspected that when Africans talked about whites, it was the mechanics and their attitudes they were usually denouncing.

“Let’s get out of here.”

We went for a walk in the darkness, keeping to a path near the lakeshore. At the far end of the road, the Congolese town of Goma was visible. Goma was better lighted than Kisenyi.

“This deteriorating road. These crummy houses,” Vidia said.

I told him my thoughts about colonials as mechanics.

“My narrator mentions how a society needs to be maintained,” he said.

“Your novel,” I said, “is it based on a sort of political memoir?”

“Not exactly. I had to find a form for it. It was terribly difficult.”

We had walked through the center of town, past a bandstand, an abandoned fun fair, and some banners and lights strung across the main street. We came to a part of the road that was severely potholed and with villas that were shuttered and rundown.

“I suffered over it,” he said. “I wasn’t sure how to tell the story. One day it came to me, the structure. I was so pleased. I called Patsy at her school. I said, ‘I’ve got it.’”

It was easy to imagine Vidia doing this, but I could not see myself on the phone, calling my wife and telling her about my unwritten book. Anyway, I had a book, but where was my wife? The whole business seemed enviable, someone caring that much about my writing. I had been working in the dark, just groping, until I had met Vidia.

“When I started out, I found it so hard to write I got sick,” he said. “I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t perform the physical labor of it. It exhausted me.”

I knew better than to tell him that I did not find the process of writing difficult. I sat, I wrote, the words came. I did not suffer. But he distrusted writing that was so fluent. “When it comes easily, throw it away. It can’t be any good,” he said. There had to be an element of struggle in all writing, which reflected a struggle in life. It was also why he hated hitchhikers.

Writing was a relief to me. Everything else was a struggle. I knew that I was nowhere — just a teacher living alone in the middle of Africa. It had been my luck to meet Vidia, but now he spoke all the time about leaving. He made it sound as though he were going to the center of things, back to his house, his friends, parties, his publisher, his wife, his life. I did not envy him his fame, or the glamour, but I admired the life he had made for himself.

“This is already starting to go back to bush,” he said. “Look, the jungle.”

As in Kigali, the sidewalks were erupting. The glass-spiked walls around the lakeside villas were cracking. Some walls had been vandalized, others had been painted with slogans or had political posters stuck to them. It was tropical Belgium, suburban Brussels gone jungly, penetrated by rubber trees and fungoid growths. Colonial decrepitude depressed Vidia, but it fascinated me — the crumbling houses, the chipped cornices, the remnants of the dead past, the Africans squatting against the nigh walls that were scorched and blackened by their cooking fires.

I told him this.

“Horror interest,” he said.

We walked on.

“I am going to see André when I go back,” he said.

André Deutsch was his publisher. He was still thinking about his novel, thoughts I had provoked with my questions about writing.

“I am going to say, André, I want a thousand pounds for this book.’”

It seemed a great deal of money to me, yet it was less than I earned in a year on my Uganda government contract.

“I think he’ll understand,” Vidia said. “I think he’ll give it to me.”

We were still walking in the empty rubbly road, the fallen leaves and blown papers unswept, in the middle of Kisenyi, among the darkened villas, hearing the lap of lake water where the night was blackest.

The dogs did not warn us — perhaps they were watching, waiting for us to walk closer. At first there was no barking at all. But it was soon clear that we had gone too far into the residential part of the town, for we were at once beset by a pack of dogs, panting in fear and effort, and only when we were surrounded did they begin to bark. They barked horribly, all their teeth bared, their neck fur bristling. They made odd choking noises. They slavered near my ankles and sounded crazy, as though they were going to kill us and eat us — that hunger and cruelty and strength were in their barking.

“They’ve been trained to attack Africans,” Vidia said.

He was calmer than I expected. I retained a childhood fear of aggressive dogs. “They know you’re afraid,” people had said. “That’s why they’re barking.” That was crap. Most dogs were wolfish and reactive and pack-minded, which is why they barked. Their owners were the alpha males, encouraging this behavior in the dog, their weapon, their slave.

“ Kwenda! Kwenda! ” I yelled — Go away! — believing they might know Swahili. This only maddened them more.

Vidia was careful not to turn his back to the dogs, which were perhaps both guard dogs and strays. He lunged at them and made as if to punt them.

“What they need is a kick.”

The dogs scattered, moving back but still barking fiercely.

“If they felt this veldshoen on their hide, they’d know it.”

He was wearing his heavy shoes and swinging his walking stick. His bush hat was crammed on his head. Seeing the dogs react, he went after them again, driving them further back. I was impressed by this small man in the dark street of a remote African town, taking on the dogs.

They did not stop barking. In fact they barked louder, protesting, after Vidia intimidated them. But now we were able to move along. I was grateful to him. He had not been fazed in this showdown. He was frowning.

“Another one-whore town,” he said.

The Belgian family were still quarreling when we got back to the Miramar. They were in the lounge, drinking coffee and shouting amid the glaring table lamps. There were armchairs and doilies and footstools and little porcelain shepherdesses on shelves and framed lithographs of Liège and Ghent and Antwerp. An African servant stood in the hallway, doing sentry duty, holding a tin tray, waiting to be summoned.

“It’s all so crummy.”

Yes, I saw that, but I also felt it was a glimpse of the colonial past, a curious antique that was now worn out and broken. I did not really think that the jungle was moving in, as Vidia had said. I felt that this Belgian culture would be displaced by Rwandan culture and that we had no way of anticipating what it might be.