Paul Theroux - Mr. Bones - Twenty Stories

Murray Cutler shifted his hands, clasping them, looking satisfied, perhaps imagining the desolation of this African village.

“Over the patter of rain on my tin roof — a sound I loved so much for its mournful tap-tap that it sometimes put me to sleep — over that peaceful repetition, I heard a plane circling the grass landing strip. Usually a plane brought mail and medicine, but today it brought a big smiling man named Charlie Saurin. This was a surprise. His first words were ‘ Jambo, bwana — habari gani? ’ He seemed to want to make a point, speaking Swahili to me. Swahili was the lingua franca in this nowhere place. I said I was fine, but that I wasn’t expecting him. ‘I was sent from Kampala. Mr. Bgoya’s orders. I’m here to help.’

“Bgoya was a government minister. What to do with Charlie Saurin? He was older than me, about forty-five, but with a full head of prematurely gray hair, combed back and upswept in a way that made him seem conceited. I’m wary of men who are vain about their hair. They behave as though they’re wearing a special hat. To keep him away from my bungalow and the clinic I gave him the small house the pilot used when heavy rain kept him from taking off. That pilot, Bevan, once told me, ‘You don’t really know anyone until you’ve seen him drunk.’”

I repeated this to Murray Cutler to see whether he’d been listening. He nodded and smiled, but this approval in such a sick man seemed like self-mockery.

“I invited Charlie Saurin to my bungalow for drinks — locally brewed beer served from a plastic basin. ‘ Nakupenda pombe, ’ he said, ‘I like beer,’ sipping it from the tin dipper, and though he lapsed into Swahili from time to time — he was conceited about his fluency, too — he became gentler, more polite, more solicitous, speaking to me slowly and deferentially. ‘Are you sure there isn’t some way I can pay for this?’ But he didn’t repeat that in Swahili.”

Becoming restless and impatient again, Murray Cutler shifted in his bed. He sighed and said, “And the point is?”

“Whenever he spoke from the heart he said it in Swahili. Just before he staggered home, he paused and hung on the doorknob and laughed, saying, ‘The history of mankind in four words: Mimi nyama, wewe kisu. ’”

“Whaaa?” Murray Cutler said, throwing his head back.

“He started to teach classes, using his house as the school — there had never been a school in the village. You’d think this was a good thing, but it disrupted the rhythm of the village. The children weren’t available to hoe the gardens or bring water from the stream. But the children didn’t mind — being in school freed them from the hard labor and menial chores.

“The parents began complaining about this to me. One of the aggrieved men brought his son, Junius. Junius said, ‘The bwana Mr. Charlie is taking me to America.’ Junius’s father said it was a tatizo kubwa —a big problem, and that Charlie Saurin’s being there was a shauri —an issue.

“So I invited him over to my bungalow again, but this time we didn’t drink. I told him I had run out of pombe. We ate chicken and roasted cassava and a stew of greens. And I saw how he ate, English style, a fork in his left hand, a knife in his right, two deft hands at work, spearing the meat and cutting a small piece, then slicing a bit of cassava and adding that to the fork, and lastly plastering some limp greens to it and lifting the whole business to his mouth. He worked his implements with affected skill, raising his elbows, making a whole operation of it, squinting at the fork of food before he made it a mouthful, and then champing on it. That told me more than his drunkenness had, and I remembered what he’d said.”

“What did he say?” Murray Cutler murmured, raising his head.

“I’m the meat, you’re the knife.”

His head fell back on the pillow, and he worked his lips as though tasting what I’d just told him.

“The boy Junius told the other children that he was going to America. I heard them repeating it at the clinic. I was too busy to pay much attention to the school — and Charlie Saurin had only been there a month. I sometimes saw him walking with the children past the gardens to the edge of the bush, sometimes singly, sometimes in groups.”

I fixed my eye on Murray Cutler.

“I knew he was trifling with the students, either with promises or actual deeds. I was strict with them. I never mentioned the world beyond our clearing. But he apparently talked about it all the time, America especially, and by doing so he made himself bigger than me. There was nothing I could do. The students felt familiar toward him, they hung around his house, and they were so convinced of his affection for them that they began to take liberties with his house, his food, some of his possessions. It was the casual, entitled way of rural Africa — after all, he had a great deal, and they had nothing. And there were his rash promises.”

Murray Cutler closed his eyes, and I stopped speaking. He opened them again and seemed disappointed that I was still sitting by his bed.

“When he discovered they were stealing his things, he was enraged. How dare they take advantage of him! He stopped teaching. He told them that no one was going to America with him, least of all Junius, who had stolen his alarm clock. The next time the mail plane came to our clearing in the bush, he got on board, and as we all watched him take off, he turned his face away from us. He said we had destroyed him. But of course it was we who were destroyed, or at least corrupted, which comes to the same thing. No one was the same after the visit of Charlie Saurin. The villagers began to resent me, and now spoke of wanting to leave the clearing, but there was no easy way out.”

I fell silent, Murray Cutler squinting at me. He snatched at the cord that hung beside his bed, to call the nurse, and yanked on it.

“This one man ruined everything by his meddling intrusion,” I said, staring at him in defiance. I got up from the chair and left the room before the nurse arrived. His last look was one of uncertainty, perhaps fear. I was relieved to breathe the sweet air outside the hospice.

But then, driving away, I remembered a better detail, how Junius’s father had gotten to Charlie Saurin. Mistaking this man for someone important, he had encouraged Junius to go with him, and had entrusted the boy to the intruder, and that was why Charlie Saurin had so much access to the boy.

Mother said, “Is there something wrong?” when I saw her that evening, alone in her house. Rose had left her to meet with the rest of the family, to see to the arrangements for the funeral at St. Ray’s. She had urged me to keep Mother company at this critical time, and so I slept these days in my old bedroom at the top of the stairs.

“I’m fine. I’m glad I’m here.”

Mother seemed doubtful, and this uncertainty looked like anxiety. The way she sat, hands clasped, knees together, slightly hunched, was like that of a peasant on a hillside weathering a storm.

“This is where I was born,” I said. “That’s an amazing fact to me. I’ve been everywhere, and yet this is the only place on earth where I truly belong.”

“Oh?” And she looked up hopefully.

“It’s kind of humbling to realize that.” Mother didn’t seem to hear me. I said, “Did you ever hear the expression ‘forgiveness is final’?”

“What does that mean?”

“This is what it means. A guy I know who’s also a writer found out that a man who’d hurt him was suffering a terminal illness. The writer was down on his luck, not much happening in his life — vulnerable to any slight. He had always resented the man who’d hurt him, but when he visited the man, he said, ‘I forgive you.’”