Paul Theroux - The Stranger at the Palazzo D'Oro

Half of this Prinsloo lost in his first divorce; half of what remained he lost in the second, the sudden split from a woman he hardly knew. What appalled him was that he had been looking at people just like her his whole life and believed he knew them, and how could Nolo be any different? Some of them, Africans like her, had appeared in many of his stories. He wrote about the intimacies of their lives, he approximated the way they spoke, he described their heartaches and tribulations.

He knew nothing, this proved it: he was a man of sixty-one, rendered imbecilic by his rashness. “I'm stupid,” he said to people, startling old friends and perfect strangers, shoeshine boys and parking lot attendants and the men in skullcaps who pumped gas for him. “I'm stupid. Look at me. I’m not joking — I'm an idiot.”

Like a man making a mockery of himself after losing a large wager, seeing his money swept off the table, and laughing horribly, a fool who seems dangerous because he has nothing more to lose.

“Stupid!” And, saying so, cranking his finger at his ear to mean “out of my mind.”

He had lost the dairy, the game ranch, the cattle, the sheep, the orchards, the farm, the ridge of ore, even the workers' settlement. The lovely farmhouse, roomy and white-plastered, from which he had sent his first wife, was now Nolo's. He kept the chicken operation and hired a colored man, Petrus, as a farm manager, and he moved away.

The day he left, giving his last instructions to Petrus, he caught a glimpse of Petrus's wife, Myra, who looked patient and winsome, with a small child, and thought: Why didn’t I marry her or someone like her? I would still be here, in my study, at my desk, writing my story, a good story, about the farmer who marries a submissive black woman with one arm.

He did not say, “They're all the same.” He said, “I made the worst possible choice, not an informed decision but a reckless throw of the dice, and I lost.”

You would have done, he thought whenever he saw an attractive woman, white or black, usually black, and he reproached himself for having been such a fool. I’m stupid!

He did not mind that he was a laughingstock — he deserved to be hooted at. He minded that he had no life — that he had forfeited all his effort, his inherited property, the work he had done. He kept a few things, the clock, his grandfather’s saddle, the photographs, his manuscripts, a rotting collection of assegais and knobkerries, baskets, neck rests, spears.

The fact of the child Zulu — he could not bear to think of him as Nelson — was the worst of all. The mixed-race child he loved belonged to a devious black woman he now hated. But was devious the word? He told himself yes, but in his heart he knew the choice to leave his wife and marry her was his alone. He could have said no, even as Nolo made noises about her Christian vows.

I wanted to write, I had no subject, I was stuck, I thought this would help, I loved her.

He could barely recall the sequence of events that had led to his being almost homeless. He winced, remembering sex with Nolo, how she had pretended to be his slave, how her being his slave had made him stupid.

Writing this African story might redeem him. The story might be perfect, but even if it was not, it was true, and the truth was always prophetic. He imagined all being well if he wrote his story unembellished, a narrative of a white farmer and his submissive black lover, keeping all the details: the sjambok, the slave chapel, the barred windows, and the fields of lucerne glowing in the moonlight. The story was about sexual desire — how it was mute and ignorant magic that cast a spell, making the lovers dumb.

But he did not write it. He missed his son and he devised ways of seeing him.

Nolo seemed to welcome his visits. She encouraged his taking the boy out, but she could be unsentimental and rigid — her schoolteacher’s severity adding to her enigma — and one day Prinsloo showed up without warning, aching to see his son, and she called the police, who arrested him for trespassing. His own house! Black police.

Prinsloo appeared in court, sitting in a dock that was a steel cage, packed with farm invaders, all of them Venda, who badgered him for cigarettes.

The country was upside down, the government black now, though the judge was white. Prinsloo got off with a warning and a fine, just like the farm invaders. And the day after he paid the fine Nolo sent him a letter through her lawyers saying she wanted more money.

The harsh syllable ach gargled at his back teeth and made his jaw sore with incredulity. Ach! The woman he saw as simple and submissive had become his tormentor — ingenious, wicked, venal. She allowed him to see the child but at the same time demanded more money. When he delayed paying she found ways of obstructing his access to the boy, and so he paid up, hating the unfair tax on him for seeing his own child. He told himself that a woman of his own race would never have subjected him to this humiliation.

He drove to the house in the morning, early. The child was already in the road, the servant holding him by the hand. Prinsloo drove the child to school — not the school where Nolo had taught but a private preschool outside the dorp. Prinsloo waited, killing time in the dorp, then fetched him in the afternoon, hoping the boy would be hungry, so that he would have the pleasure of feeding him.

He loved him, it was agony, he sorrowed for the child and himself, saw his own frailty in the small frail figure walking away from him later on, up the path toward the house — the old white-plastered Prinsloo farmhouse, the model for so many of the farmhouses in Prinsloo’s stories. What pathos in that little head and those narrow shoulders, the skinny legs and small trotting feet.

The child was like a little old man, like Prinsloo himself, and Prinsloo feared for them both and hated the one-armed woman who was the cause of this whole horrible affair. But how could Prinsloo blame her when he himself was the cause, first as an intruder, then a terror, finally a weakling. Nolo was looking old, too — as old as he felt. She had aged quickly, as African women do, losing their looks in their thirties, in their forties becoming crones.

Once, he saw Marianne. She did not recognize him. Had he grown so ugly and so different? She was first startled by him and then, recovering, hardened against him. She spoke of emigrating to Australia with Hansie. Wimpie was in Cape Town.

He forgave Marianne for her coldness. Nolo was crueler than she was, and with what reason? Was she demented? Was she simply ambitious and material-minded? He reflected that a woman who had married so late had to have something wrong with her. The missing arm did not explain much. She seemed to take pleasure in his suffering. She bled him. Her money demands were like whippings. Was she a sadist? Africans could be cruel, and some were jubilant in their cruelty, finding power in violence and feeling joy. Used to pain, their most merciful judgment was Let him die, not because they lacked a common bond of humanity but because they felt it and despised it. Revenge made them happy. He was amazed to see that they were just like everyone else on earth.

Prinsloo heard she had a lover, but could not prove it. Anyway, what if she did? She had no sentiment. The lover would be swindled — good riddance; or she would — ditto.

What tipped him off was her saying, “I want to work.”

What work could a one-armed woman do, apart from the teaching she had done before? What need was there? She was wealthy. She owned a farm bigger than a township, and a settlement of black workers within the farm, humans and animals and all their food, too. So what she was saying in wishing to work was that she wanted to circulate, have some freedom, be social.