Paul Theroux - The Stranger at the Palazzo D'Oro

So he was absolved of any sense of guilt. Sex filled his life. These were the first weeks, the first months, of a passionate marriage. He loved her seriousness, he adored her recklessness. She was wilder than he was, she was impossible to know. His life was complete, like a finished story, but the marriage was both a satisfaction and a blurring, for now he had no idea who she was.

She had kept her promise. That was worth a lot. She belonged to him. His nonwriting life was as full as his writing life had ever been, as rich, as unexpected.

But one day, drawing her arm behind her, she hesitated before he twisted it, preparing to restrain her.

“Not too rough today. I don't want to hurt the baby.”

He backed off, raising his hands, as though she had shown him a weapon, and when he tried to resume, his efforts were enfeebled by what she had told him. He could not proceed.

The news of a baby surprised and preoccupied him in a way he had never known. He had hardly been aware of the births of his two other children. This was different. He monitored the progress of Nolo's pregnancy. He had the time. He was not writing. Anyway, this was better than writing and yet similar — something new every day, a discovery, growth, wonder, he was humbled. She was the pen, bringing forth something new. Nolo became inward, compact, budlike, concentrating on her body. She swelled, she lost her girl’s body, she became fruit-shaped; he studied her tightened flesh, he pondered the loss of her sexuality.

When the day came and she signaled that she was ready, the doctor arrived and Nolo gave birth in their own bedroom, a wonderful thing, a celebration, a boy, a gift.

The infant was gray at birth, then pink, darkening, with thick hair. He was not black or white, but maculate, pinkish patched gray, more a reflection of Prinsloo than either of his other children, intelligent, responsive, alert.

Nolo called him Nelson. Prinsloo called him Zulu, to represent his people: and “Zulu Prinsloo” had the right sound, a haughty assonance.

Children in Africa seldom cry, seldom fuss, don’t clamor for attention, don’t have to, since a cloth binds them to the mother’s back, a bundle she carries everywhere, and suckles whenever the child is hungry. Nolo kept the boy close, took him to bed with them, suckled him there, Prinsloo looking on, the child always lying between them.

Nolo was a new woman, fulfilled and fattish, beautiful in her bulk. The skinny young woman had become rounder, with pale clear skin and serene eyes and great heavy breasts.

“No,” she said when Prinsloo reached as though to weigh one in his lifting hand.

She would not allow his fingers the slightest touch, and she shrank when he approached.

The African custom stipulated that a woman could not engage in sex while she was breastfeeding. Nolo, who had never shown any curiosity for her culture, reverted to her traditional customs.

Months passed. Prinsloo played with the baby and, though rebuffed by the mother, was consoled by the child’s response — a bright child, golden-skinned, his own, more him than his others. He endured the no-sex stricture, and eight months later the child was still seeking his mother’s nipples.

Prinsloo, though indulgent and proud of the child, was eager to change places with him, to nestle between those breasts, where he had once spent whole nights.

Sometimes he took his small son to town, binding him into the baby seat in his Land Rover, the child contentedly gurgling. On such occasions, the entire day devoted to one trip to the dorp — no writing, no reading, only hours of proximity to the child — Prinsloo reflected that for over a year now he had not written a word; he had been silent. Had anyone noticed?

That day of writing would come, he was sure, though this was the longest he had gone without writing, for his creative life had been spent writing stories end to end, finishing one, starting another, linking them in his head; and this was a break, an emptiness.

What made him confident was the knowledge that this too was a story, his love affair, the marriage, the child. Not that any of this compensated for setting words down on a page, yet he was living an African story.

The most African of African stories, for he was a farmer, descended from Boers who had trekked to the Transvaal two hundred years before; he was a white man who had made a whole life and abandoned it upon falling in love at a feed store with a black woman who had one arm; he had embarked on a new life, a new family, with a mixed-race child — an amazing story, and living it was almost as satisfying as writing it.

He wanted more. The fullest expression of her fantasies was fresh in his mind, the slave business, the submission, the play with silken ropes and restraints, the leather mask, the gag.

The child was asleep in the next room one hot afternoon. Prinsloo approached Nolo from behind. They were alone in the dark humid shadows of the house, he was impatient and eager, wishing to hold her and subdue her and use her as she had allowed him a little over a year ago. Not just allowed; she had encouraged him, pleaded to be dominated, begged him to tie her to the bedposts, her eyes glistening with anticipation as he knotted the ropes, and when she was immobilized and he was sitting astride her, her sighs of satisfaction. The ritual had been central to their love affair and had been a marriage rite, too.

Prinsloo snatched her arm, held her, and before she had time to struggle or shout encouragement he gagged her with a scarf and drag-shuffled her to the bedroom. Now she fought him — that feeble pretense, wagging the stump of her arm, had always been part of the ritual — but her opposition only excited him the more. He turned her over, his hand jamming her head down, her face into the pillow, and he mounted her from behind. He took her muffled howling for the eagerness she had shown before, and he covered her with his body, one hand holding her skull, using his other hand as though thrusting hard with a dagger until he was done.

He had possessed her, she was his captive, as in the oldest days of the colony.

But when he was exhausted and lay beside her, loosening the scarves, she swiped at him with her good arm, and dragged off her gag, and accused him of abusing her. In the past she had flattened herself against him in gratitude and obedience, like a cat warming herself against her owner.

Drowsing, stuporous after sex, he was rattled by what she was saying.

“You're joking.”

“You raped me.”

“You want me to. It's a game.”

“Your game.”

“Our game. You're my wife.”

“I’m afraid of you,” she said, and she touched herself where he had held her roughly, smoothing the pinch marks on her skin.

“No,” he said, and looked closely at her, expecting her to laugh.

“I want a divorce,” she said.

Prinsloo had no reply. What she had just said knocked the wind out of him, and all he could think of was his first wife’s anguish, a suffering he understood now, how she was shattered when he said he wanted to leave her, looking at him with horrified eyes, hoping it was not true.

Nolo, never much of a talker, said there was nothing to discuss. She regarded him as an intruder — kept away from him, did not argue, watched him coldly.

“I want you to leave.”

Minutes after sex, this rejection.

Prinsloo was smiling at her schoolteacher’s tone, the shrill authority.

“This is my house,” he said.

“How can you force me to leave with a small child?”

Prinsloo’s estate had been vast, not just fruit trees and lucerne, tobacco and seed maize, but animals — sheep, cattle, poultry, an experimental ostrich farm, a game ranch with herds of eland and waterbuck, zebra and buffalo; crocs and hippos in his river. A settlement of workers, too, that amounted to an African village. Underneath it all, below a ridge that ran like a protective berm at the southern limit of his land, were seams of platinum. A mining company’s survey promised a great haul of ore, and though what was under the ground was the government’s, not Prinsloo’s, the mining company would have to lease many hectares for buildings and equipment.