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

“Is your business always this bad?” Vidia asked the Belgian proprietress of the Miramar, in his challenging way.

The big woman shrugged and matched his directness, saying, “Business is good whenever there is a revolution in the Congo.”

The next day we drove across to Goma and had lunch at a café on Lake Kivu. Cheese sandwiches again: Africa was an unrewarding place for a vegetarian.

“I will meet you at ‘the coffee,’ they say in France and Italy and Spain. Even quite educated people make that simple mistake.” He saw that I was only half listening. He said, “You are thinking about your writing.”

“No,” I said. But I had been — the simple problem. How did I get from where I was to where he was?

“Are you sure you want to be a writer?” he asked. “It’s a terrible profession. Yes, you have your freedom. But it can kill you if you’re not up to it.”

I said I was up to it.

“Come to London. I will introduce you to some people.”

I said I would try to visit, perhaps at Christmas.

“These people are infies. They know nothing. Their leaders — Ian Smith, for example—”

Ian Smith had recently issued a unilateral declaration of independence in Rhodesia, and a minority of whites were governing the country.

“—Ian Smith is an infy. He is qualified to mend bicycles in Surrey. Nothing more than that.”

Vidia had been looking into the distance as he had been talking. After we finished lunch, he suggested we walk down the adjacent road. When we were on it I realized he had been looking at a sign that said R.J. Patel , and that evangelism was on his mind.

“Hello,” the Indian shopkeeper said, smiling at the Indian in the bush hat who had just entered his shop. “You are not Congo people. I am knowing.”

“We’re from Uganda,” I said.

Vidia got to the point. “How is business?”

“So-so. Not bad. People are needing. I am exclusive stockist for a large variety of goods.”

“Do you have a family?”

“That is my daughter,” Mr. Patel said, gesturing at a young woman near the shelves whose back was turned. Mr. Patel was standing before a large basin heaped with salt. “She is running shop. I am attending to so many other businesses.”

“What sort of businesses?”

“Too many to tell you,” Mr. Patel said. He opened his mouth wide and the approximation of a laugh came out of it. “This is just a simple shop. My other businesses occupy my time. Properties also.”

“But the money here is worthless,” Vidia said. “How do you manage?”

“I am managing. I have many ways.”

“So you’re not worried?”

“Ha! I am doing very well.” Wery vell was what he said.

He began filling a paper bag with scoopfuls of salt, murmuring with each scoop.

“What will you do when the crunch comes? The crunch is coming, you know.”

“I have my ways,” Mr. Patel said. He had grown solemn under Vidia’s questioning. He was still scooping, murmuring, crinkling the brown paper bag. “I will be okay.”

“And your daughter?”

“She will be all right.” He then went silent. He said, “Excuse me,” and turned his back on Vidia.

“So what do you think?” I asked.

We were out of the shop, swinging along the empty Goma road, Vidia marching like a soldier.

“He’s lying.”

He had not believed a single word the man had said.

“He can’t move his pence. The Africans will take his shop and all his goods. He’s lying about those other businesses. And look what he’s doing to his daughter, forcing her to work there.”

Lake Kivu was dull silver under a gray equatorial sky that sagged with humidity. The grayness gave the trees along the lakeshore a dark, impenetrable look. People on the street stared at us, though the soldiers in their faded uniforms did not glance our way but walked heavily past, stirring up the dust in big clomping boots. Their boots and their rifles were old-fashioned and indestructible-looking. Music played, the Congolese songs that sounded Brazilian, with marimbas and blaring trumpets. Soldiers, waifs, dogs, chickens, and broken signs in this distant corner of the Congo.

“He’s a dead man,” Vidia said of R. J. Patel. “They’re all dead men.”

I had heard him say that before, in Kampala and Nairobi. But I had believed Patel when he said he would be all right. And I had been excited at being in the heart of Africa. It seemed to me that if you put your finger on the middle of a map of the continent it would be on this place, Goma, this muddy lakeshore. I tried to see it with Vidia’s eyes, but I could not. I had neither lived his life nor written his books. He made up his mind quickly: observation for him was about drawing conclusions. I knew that whatever I wrote would be different from his view. It was probably a good thing that he did not ask me what I thought.

“I’m glad I saw this,” he said. “Now I think it’s time to go.”

Another night at the Miramar, among the squabbling Belgians and the food-strewn dining table and the overbright lamps, and then we were off to Ruhengeri again and the Uganda border. We stopped only to snap pictures at a dramatic curve, dangerous for its being unprotected, over an abyss called the Karnaba Gap. I was wearing my tweed jacket and my horn-rimmed glasses that gave me a scowling expression.

“I think you will do well,” Vidia said. He was upbeat, cheerier now that we were heading home.

I had turned twenty-five in April. I had not published anything outside Africa. I ached to have a publisher for my novel. In a halting way, I told him so.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “The most important thing is to avoid making an enormous amount of money before you’re forty. Promise me you won’t do that.”

I made this promise, that I would not make my fortune in the next fifteen years.

“Concentrate on your writing. After you’re forty, fine — make all the money you like.”

Vidia was well under forty, yet he seemed older than my father.

We drove on, up and down the Kigezi hills, squeezing the car around corners, into the savannah again, past the big game and the long-legged herons and the marsh of papyrus, under the vast African sky. It was all familiar now.

Back in Kampala, at my house, where he was still a guest, I was full of his talk and of ideas I wanted to write down. Even before I had a bath or washed off the dust of the safari, I hurried to my study and sat and began to write.

Passing the room, Vidia looked in and exclaimed, “Yes!” He was delighted. “I used to do that. Sometimes at night, after we got home from a party I would go to my room and write, just like that, without even taking my coat off.”

He stepped into the room and glanced at the pages. He was looking at them upside down. I was about to turn them so that he could see, but he said, “No, I’m not reading. I’m looking at your handwriting.”

He looked closely.

“Yes. Yes. Yes.” He nodded. “It’s not American. It’s distinct. Hasty. Intelligent. It’s you.” This was more of his approval.

For weeks he had been speaking eagerly of leaving Uganda, of going back to London. Before he left, he gave me a necktie he had brought from England. “I knew I would meet someone to give this to. I want you to have it.” It was new and very narrow — that was the style — and orange. It was still in its shallow box. I never wore ties, but I was grateful for the gift. He gave me another gift the day he left. He told me in detail a dream he had had, which concerned his brother and a murder he had committed. I listened closely, and when he was gone I wrote the dream down in my notebook.

I was sorry to see him go. I was losing my teacher, and he had also become my friend. It mattered to me that he took me seriously, that he treated me like a fellow writer. No one else did, but that did not matter, because I had him.