Paul Theroux - The Stranger at the Palazzo D'Oro

No man in South Africa ever found it difficult to locate a like-minded woman, a willing partner. Prinsloo knew by the look alone whether a woman was willing. Farmers’ wives, farmers’ daughters, Rhodesians, Mozambicans; but commonest of all were the women known as “coloreds”—ambiguous mixed-race beauties who were welcome nowhere and everywhere, looking for security. The slightest hint that he was interested animated them, and he loved watching them and seeing how clever they could be in devising ways to meet him covertly, in a nearby dorp or in remote parts of his own land, for his farm was so extensive an estate as to have hidden corners and places for assignations.

With sex he was rejuvenated. He was granted new ideas, new confidence. He did not distinguish between his literary notions and the ingenuity in these sexual affairs.

Sex was a disease, sex was also a cure. He would feel the desire to make love to a particular woman — like a rooster spotting a hen. The seduction preoccupied him, made him impatient, drove his imagination, helped his writing. At last, when the day of assignation came, the act might be clumsy the first time, better the second time, a great deal smoother the third time, but after a while, gaining skill, it lost passion. Sex was the cure for sex, like medicine three times the first day, two the second, dwindling in dosage as the condition improved, until no more was needed; and then he looked for a new woman. His wife knew nothing, for — such was his sexual charge — he did not neglect her.

At the outset he believed that with Nolo the repetition would rid him of his desire — odd, too, for she was the first full-blooded African he had ever slept with, one of the plainest, and — since she was missing one arm — incomplete.

It was her strangest feature, something like an asset, for in the dark she seemed to possess not one arm but three. His whole body was gripped. She used her mouth. She clamped him between her agile legs and wrapped herself around him and, snakelike, squeezed him until he gasped for air. This small creature in the dark became an immense boomslang, and he the soft yielding thing being devoured.

He felt small, even vulnerable, caressed and embraced by this woman who had seemed like a child. He felt young when he was with her — the first time youthful, the subsequent times like a child, with a child's physical vitality and optimism, as though at the beginning of a long life. That he had only fleetingly felt with other women. Now it was a condition of being with Nolo: he was not an older man but a youth.

Everything contributed to this feeling — the time of day, the secrecy of the place, the passion of the act, the mysteriousness of the woman. It was all new to him. Being new, it took the place of his most original writing. He had not written anything since the day, weeks before, when he first saw Nolo in her blue blazer and pleated skirt in the shop. But sex with her much resembled his best days at his desk, writing brilliantly — was in some respects superior to those days — the desire he felt like the joyous drug that lay behind his most enigmatic fiction.

Here was the woman at first glance: dependable, serious-seeming, soberly dressed as only an African schoolteacher would be, rather tense with the self-conscious piety of the educated African — and a bit defensive, too: incomplete — that missing arm. She hardly smiled.

In the bedroom, in his bakkie (pickup truck, he explained to me), she was a cat — wild, reckless, full of surprises — and seemed to know what was in his mind at every moment.

Just like a cat, facing away, she crouched and raised her buttocks and said, “Do it to me”—she had no word for the act, did not want to know the word, only wanted the struggle and satisfaction.

That different woman in the dark helped him discover a different man in himself; and over the course of a month he discovered much else — all revealed to him when he was with Nolo, much as in the writing of a paragraph or a page he discovered with pleasure the thought or incident that lurked there, that proved he was uncovering something new.

So instead of burning itself out, the flame grew fiercer, hotter, and brighter.

He loved the idea that only he knew that she was two people, and neither of them was African in any sense he had known or seen before. And he a man, a baas, who had been born in the country!

He was enough of a man of the world, had lived long enough, to understand the lover's illusion of the beloved as someone unique — and, more than that, someone known only to the lover. The lover's conceit that no one else may intrude, no one else has the capacity to see or understand. Desire was this special way of seeing the lover as irreplaceable. Smitten meant hit on the head, he knew that, and he still felt that he was in sole possession of the truth.

Desire, need, urgency, made him reckless. He could hardly believe how much. Loving a black was breaking the law. What he felt was the nearest thing to love he had ever known — yet to call it that was unnatural and illegal, and while it was normal for him to feel affection and even desire, love was absurd.

Nevertheless, she gave him something powerful without speaking a word — bewitched him. She made him whole, made him strong, restored youth to him, gave him power. She inspired him. Seeing him the first time, she had seemed to understand him and silently to respond with promises. In their lovemaking she kept her promises. So she was true.

Without telling his wife why, he found a house for her, asked her to live in it, and said that he needed to be alone, to think.

She knew what was wrong. Many times in the past, working on one of his long stories, he had absented himself, vanished somewhere on his vast estate, so that he could understand the story better.

Nolo was like a character in one of his strangest stories. So was he. Exactly. The sense of living inside one of his own stories roused and compelled him to look deeper. The feeling did not pass away, nor even diminish. He wanted more of it.

Distracted, almost demented by this fever of passion and attachment, feeling unwell, he had no doubt that there was only one cure for his ailment, ridiculous as it might seem to the whites he knew — a sickening desire for the half-educated schoolteacher with one arm, just a kaffir and, outside the bedroom, a deeply moralistic munt. All he wanted, now that he was separated from his wife, was for the African to move into his house with him, something any African woman would have been eager to do, to share his life, to be waited on by servants, to know a degree of luxury that was way beyond the imagining of most of them, like winning the lottery.

She said no.

Prinsloo almost laughed. This was a ruse, surely. He demanded to know why.

“Because we are not married,” she said.

He stared at her.

“In the eyes of God,” she added.

“In the eyes of God we are!”

“Not married,” she said stubbornly, frowning, defying him.

This from a woman whose people hardly used the word, who stuck a spear upright, twangling in the ground, before the door of a rondavel, which meant, I am a man. I am here. This is my woman.

Prinsloo still smiled. He said, “We have done nothing but sneak around and make love for almost a month.”

“I regret that.”

He reminded her of certain acts she had performed, words she had said, noises she had made.

“I should not have,” she said, looking demure, pressing her prim lips together. “Because of my Christian vows.”

Prinsloo wanted to hit her. He had spanked his children, and one drunken night he had smacked his wife; he had never struck an African, though such beatings were common enough in his stories — thrashings with sjamboks that cut flesh and drew blood. Having rehearsed them in his work, he was able to imagine snatching a whip and slashing her with it and belaboring her on the floor until she agreed with everything he said, until she submitted.