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

He was staring at the stream. “All that water, rushing. It simply gathers here. There are good-sized fish in it.”

I said, “I feel dreadful. I shouldn’t have come.”

“No,” Vidia said. “You have something on your mind. Very well, leave her.”

“He was relieved,” Vidia used to say after he had given someone advice like this: “Don’t ever write again,” or “Go away from Uganda,” or “Leave her.” He wanted me to say I was relieved. What had at first seemed a depressing possibility had, with his encouragement, become an act of liberation.

“You will gain perspective,” Vidia said.

I thought,

Sometimes you hear, fifth hand,

As epitaph:

He chucked up everything

And just cleared off ,

And always the voice will sound

Certain you approve

This audacious, purifying,

Elemental move.

We were walking along a path beside the dark, greasy-looking stream. I wondered whether my presence had provoked his quarrel with Pat, for Pat felt weak and needed witnesses. Perhaps she felt overpowered when she was alone with him.

Vidia walked ahead. I had the sense I would never see him again, never see Pat, would never come back. The English had been right to keep me at arm’s length. I was unreliable, uncommitted, hideously skeptical, a mocker. And now I was bolting.

On the riverbank I remembered walking with him in Africa in places like this — sodden, untidy grass flopped over and flattened; twisted trees and a brimming river gurgling past — like the highlands of Kenya and those walks on the Rwanda trip and in fields outside Kampala, up the Bombo road. We had grown older and closer in age, the way middle age converges, and now never talked about writing. He hated hearing about writers and books, and I did too.

Out of the blue I said, “I have never had a worse problem than this.”

Vidia said, “Problems are good. You’re a writer. You’ll do something with them.”

“I’d rather not have them,” I said. Something in me was protesting.

“Problems are good,” he said again, and kept walking through the damp grass.

I took this to mean he did not want to hear about it. I did not blame him. It was not that he had refused to offer a solution. There was no solution, except for me to go.

“Leave her,” he said. “You know my rule.”

His rule was: Never give anyone a second chance. It had been explained by his narrator Ralph Singh, in The Mimic Men . It stated that if someone let you down — failed you, offended you, broke a promise — you sent the person away. It was over. And if the person who let you down had been a dear friend or lover or a great employee, there was even more reason to end the relationship, because there had been so much more at stake. Friends were the last people who should fail you and so were the last people to whom you should give another chance.

Vidia seemed preoccupied, or perhaps he was being cautious. I was uncertain of his mood and somewhat wary. We were now, twenty-five years later, still strangers to each other in some respects — still had secrets. That kept us watchful and a little remote when we were alone with each other.

I said, “I like the way your trees are filling in. It’s beautiful.”

“That was my plan. To hide the house with some shrubs and trees and that high hedge.”

Hiding was what all of us did, so that we could work. I had lived here once, not far away, in Dorset. That was the past. I had visited him with the sense of something beginning for me, and on this last visit my life here was ending.

Cake had been cut for us at the house, apportioned on plates, with tea and a tray. Pat poured and apologized, a white-faced old lady now, whom I had once desired in the garden of the Kaptagat Arms, long ago in Africa.

Vidia showed me some slides he had taken on the Rwanda trip. I had never seen them before. One showed me in my horn-rimmed glasses and tweed jacket, when I had scorned travelers in Africa who wore desert boots and safari khakis. I was twenty-something, among the Virunga volcanoes.

Vidia said, “It is an amazing image, not only for the background, but also because you have changed so little.”

That proved one of his theories, that I was truthful and still had all my marbles. If I had gotten fat or changed physically in any other way, it would have showed I was morally weak.

“Don’t be sad,” Vidia said when I left, wheeling my bike to the gate. “You’ll be all right.”

But as I went down the country lane at dusk, I thought: Problems are not good. I don’t need them. I don’t want them. I have had enough problems.

There was something so melancholy on this dark afternoon. It was me, a big man on his bicycle, trying to lull myself with the faint click inside the axle as I pedaled alongside the battered briars and hedgerows and black trees, under a sky like cat fur. At the same curve in the road a pair of pheasants flew up, and this time they frightened me. I uttered a cry, and a pain creased my heart. But just after that I saw the birds flying. I felt better and a little hopeful.

I SEEMED TO EVAPORATE. I died. I disappeared. I left London, left my home and family. As the ghost of the man I had been, I traveled across half the world looking for a simpler place and sunshine and no memories. Two years I spent wandering the Pacific. I went back to Africa to look at where my writing life had begun — but before Vidia, before Yomo even — no specific memories, only the reminder of big dusty African plains and dusty feces and mud huts. A slim, quiet girl I had taught in Malawi was now enormous and jolly in a wide loose dress, three of her seven children goggling at me from the door of her hut. I could not find Yomo. In the north of Malawi I saw elephants, a family herd, devouring the bush, chewing on trees. I went to Mexico and Ecuador. I did no writing. I asked myself, Are problems good?

The Pacific drew me back. I paddled a kayak among whales and slipped into the sea to hear them singing. Dawn over the volcano cone on Haleakala; a Trobriand Islander whispering “Meesta Boll"; the fragrance of gardenias, the total eclipse of the sun, the taste of honey from my own bees, the heat in my bones from sleeping at noon on the sand at Waimea Bay; birdsong, blue skies. I saw the connections in all this and thought, God is a fish. And so I came back from the dead.

But everything else had ended, not just my other life but — was it my age? — friends and relations began to die. In the past, people fell ill and recovered, but now they got sick, they declined, and the next thing I knew they were dead. Five women from breast cancer, one from leukemia, and my best friend in Hawaii, ailing but saying “I’ll be fine,” and dropping dead. After long illnesses two uncles and two aunts; several neighbors — heart attacks, cancer, and AIDS.

None of these were drownings or road accidents or plane crashes or blunders in the home. They were not preventable. In each case the body failed: it was death as doom, the limit of mortality. I never went to so many funerals. And still I was not prepared for what was to come.

One morning my mother called me in Hawaii to say that my father, who had been frail for some years, had been taken to the hospital on Cape Cod. I had gotten out of bed to answer the phone. She would keep me posted, she said. I lay down again and the piercing fragrance of a gardenia in a dish near my bed sweetened a reverie of my father. It was a real reverie, a dreamlike sequence of images: my father’s face, the aroma like a sunburst of pollen, the perfumed flower (a bouquet of which my mother had held, next to my father, in their wedding portrait), the whiteness of the petals, the fullness of the blossom, the dark green leaves, the sweetness of the dish near me — following the whole sequence of associations from my father to the cut stem.