Paul Theroux - The Stranger at the Palazzo D'Oro

After we left the darkness of the woods, there was one last thing, and it was I who raised it. I said, “What about confession?”

Chicky said, “Was that a sin?”

“We were helping Walter,” I said.

“Maybe it’s a sin if you’re helping a Protestant,” Chicky said.

“Not a mortal sin,” I said.

“What’s the difference?” Walter asked.

“If it’s a mortal sin, you go to Hell.”

We detoured past St. Ray’s to go to confession, Walter watching our guns in the shadows beside the church, near the statue of Saint Raphael with his wings and his halo. I confessed seeing the pictures of the naked women, and fighting, and having impure thoughts: venial sins.

The next day, Easter, we performed our Easter duty, sitting at Mass, Walter the unbeliever between us in the pew, not knowing when to kneel or pray — skinny, blotchy-faced with embarrassment when he stood up, surveying the priests in their starched white lace-trimmed smocks, and whispering, “Where’s Scaly?”

Scaly was not on the altar. The pastor’s sermon that day was about the meaning of Easter, Christ slipping out of his tomb, being reborn, pure souls. That was true for me; the holy day reflected exactly how I felt, and made me happy. The smell of the church was the smell of new clothes. When the singing started I shared the Sing to the Lord hymnbook with Walter, who mumbled while I sang loudly,

Christ is risen from the dead,

Alleluia, alleluia!

Risen as he truly said,

Alleluia, alleluia!

Father Staley had vanished. All the pastor said was “Reverend Staley has been transferred to a new parish.” People said they missed him. At Scouts, Arthur Mutch talked about Father Staley’s contribution to the troop. His hard work. “He was a vet.” But Mutch wasn’t happy. The blue Studebaker we destroyed was his: Scaly had borrowed it. The thing was a writeoff.

“Banana man,” Chicky said. That night he said he was quitting the Scouts.

No one knew what happened to Father Staley, and we never found out who the boy was — maybe a Protestant, like Walter; a secret sin. That was also the mystery of the woods. We had discovered that, going there as Scouts. The woods might be dangerous but the woods were free, the trees had hidden us, and had changed me, turned us into Indians, made us friends, so we couldn’t be Scouts anymore, because of Walter. When I quit the Scouts, my mother said, “You’ll have to get a part-time job, then,” and I thought: Great, now I’ll be able to buy a better gun.

We had made Staley disappear. We had made ourselves disappear. No one knew us, what we had done, what we could do, how close we had come to killing a man. I was glad — it meant I was alone, I was safe, now no one would ever know me.

AN UNSPOKEN RULE stipulates that a writer does not appropriate another writer’s talk. The one who says, “An odd thing happened to me,” and tells you the oddity, is sharing a confidence that must not be betrayed, because he will eventually use it. Telling you is a way of trying it out, and the better he tells it, the more he possesses it, making it untouchable. There is no question of your borrowing it: any use of it is theft.

Lourens Prinsloo told me what happened to him at the age of sixty in similar words, stilted because his mother tongue was Afrikaans: “Quite a curious thing befell me.” But now he is dead, killed as a consequence of the events he described to me, so the story is mine to relate. No one else knows.

I could tell this story by inventing a fictional name for Prinsloo, but he is so well known, his work so widely read, that there is no point. And I have been around too long to hide myself in fiction.

I say “well known” and “widely read,” but that is in South Africa, of course. Prinsloo does not exist in the United States — untranslated, unpublished, not spoken of. I would never have been aware of him were it not for Etienne Leroux, my near namesake, author of many novels in Afrikaans, some of them translated into English, such as Seven Days at the Silbersteins and The Third Eye. Leroux, a farmer in Koffiefontein, in the Orange Free State, was introduced to me by Graham Greene. Greene put some aspects of Leroux’s farm life into The Human Factor, on the basis of several visits.

When Leroux came to London in the 1970s he urged me to visit him in South Africa. I did so, many years later, when I was traveling from Johannesburg to Cape Town after South Africa’s political transformation. Lourens Prinsloo was Leroux’s houseguest.

“I am homeless at the moment,” Prinsloo said, “but I am an optimist.”

Leroux called him Louwtjie, pronounced “low-key,” a name that suited him, for he had the most placid disposition. Prinsloo spent the day licking his thumb and turning over the typescript pages of his short story collection in the English translation, preparing it for publication. This typescript he shared with me — lucky for me. Because of a legal dispute that arose after his death, his family squabbling over the copyright and the royalties, there was no publication in English.

The best introduction to Prinsloo is the collection of stories I was privileged to read. Too long for magazine publication, too short for individual books, the stories — novellas, really — appeared two or three at a time in slim volumes, published in Afrikaans in Cape Town. They were admired by Afrikaners, but not enough of them to allow Prinsloo to write full-time. So, like Leroux, Prinsloo remained a farmer — lucerne and cattle and seed maize — supporting fifty black families.

The farmer-writers of South Africa were like the literary men of old Russia, running country estates and writing at night by lamplight of the rural life they led, servants’ quarrels, local gossip, scandals, superstitions, the low comedy of country life with its adulteries and pettiness, its vendettas and pieties. Blacks in South Africa were like the serfs in old Russia — owned, beaten, barefoot hut dwellers, worked to death. The setting was not a country but a twilit world of loneliness and squabbles, with darkness all around it.

Prinsloo’s stories were strange. Very long, very detailed, vividly depicted, they were like tales from another age. They had all the elements of Russian stories, but when animals and trees were mentioned they were freakish — two-headed calves, night-blooming bat roosts; and racial oddity abounded — albinos, freckled Bushmen, white men with one Zulu on a remote branch of the family tree. The stories tended to be forty to fifty pages long — what magazine would publish them? But published two or three together in a book, they looked impressive, well printed, on good paper, with tight bindings, old-fashioned handiwork of self-sufficient South Africans. I could not read them but I did have this translation, the pages thickened, physically dented, by the typewritten letters. That in itself reminded me how old typescripts showed the force of the prose, how words were punched into the page, underlinings were slashes and some exclamation marks punctured the paper, and altogether the typewriter gave the pages the raised texture of Braille.

Etienne Leroux, known familiarly as Stephen, didn’t mind that I was absorbed in Prinsloo’s manuscript rather than one of his. Typically generous, he said, “If you read these stories you will understand this place.” I supposed “this place” to mean Africa, though maybe he meant Koffiefontein, OFS.

The stories were the more terrifying for being rural comedies. The element of the grotesque that I associate with farming was in the grain of all of them, for a raw acceptance penetrates the barnyard. The nearer we live to animals, the more naked life is. Yet while varieties of animals and humans can seem ridiculous and conspiratorial on a big aromatic farm, they are partners deep down, for farm life makes everyone fatalistic. Faulkner at his broadest is a good example of that. Not much is hidden, modernity does not exist though faith is everywhere, life unfolds outdoors, and people's lives come to resemble those of their animals. Existence is a browsing and a fattening, and then comes the harvest and the slaughter.