Paul Theroux - The Lower River

“Norman,” Mario said, making an impatient Italian gesture with cupped hands.

“Jumping Jimmy Jesus, he wants me to thrash him again,” Fogwill said, and then to Hock, “Go to the lake. It’s beautiful there, like it always was.” But he’d kept his head down as he was speaking, studying the board, and did not look up, just grunted, when Hock said goodbye and left.

At first Hock was sorry he’d spent the morning with this man. It had meant that leaving today was out of the question, that he’d have to leave in the morning. But he softened. It was a good thing that Fogwill knew he was going to the Lower River — someone else to say farewell to, someone else to have him in mind, like Gilroy at the consulate.

And that night, hearing the music from the Starlight, the drumbeats thumping at the walls of his room, he thought how, long ago, he had toyed with the notion of courting Gala in Malabo, wooing her away from the man she’d been promised. She was lovely. They would have children. They would live on the Lower River and Hock would go on teaching — running the school, turning out brilliant students. But no — and he smiled at this: in the course of time, Gala would leave him, the children too, and he would be skinny, toothless, reminiscing in a coffee shop, killing time. Fogwill was the man he’d have become if he had stayed.

SUMMONED AT SIX from the parking lot to the travel desk in the lobby, the hotel driver laughed when Hock said that he wanted to be dropped at Nsanje. The driver wore a blue baseball cap and sunglasses, and the top buttons of his shirt were undone, a gold neck chain showing; his shoes were narrow and stylish, with thin soles. He was a city man, who would never have heard of Malabo village.

“ Muli bwanji, bambo? ” Hock asked. “ Dzina lanu ndani? ”

The man said in English, “My name is Chuma.”

The sunglasses over his smooth jut-jawed face gave him a cricket’s profile. He smiled greedily at Hock’s watch. Hock knew that lingering gaze of admiration was like a request, but Chuma had a watch of his own.

“Let’s leave at seven.”

“Eight will be best. African time. No worry, be happy.”

“Seven,” Hock said without a smile, and the man turned deferential — respectful, with a slight jerkiness in his face of fear. All that happened quickly. Hock could see that the time Chuma had spent with other foreigners as a driver had made him overconfident. Something showy about his clothes, his ease, his laugh, his knowingness; but the correction had reduced him, moving him from familiarity to subservience. It happened again on the road: “This is the best way,” he said leaving the city, to “Anything you say,” when Hock told him he wanted to pass through Chikwawa. Chikwawa was a place he’d remembered well, and he wanted to see how it had changed.

Chuma lit a cigarette.

“Don’t smoke,” Hock said.

Squeezing the lighted tip with his bare fingers, Chuma took a deep resentful breath.

The road south out of Blantyre was paved, but it was so broken, the potholes so numerous, it did not seem modern at all, but rather like another old set of obstacles; and the holes, deep enough to trap a wheel, required Chuma to make detours through the grass and mud at the edge of the road.

The farther they got from town, the flimsier and more temporary the houses, from the solid terraces of shops fronting onto storm drains, to the tile-roofed bungalows, to the tin-roofed shacks, to the mud huts thatched with straw and the skeletal sticks of the frame showing through the crumbled mud plastering. And then the road grew worse, in some places just a strip of broken paving in a gully between two slopes, and on the slopes the stumps of trees that had been cut down, the forests stripped by people foraging for fuel.

Far ahead, toward the escarpment, the whitewashed houses of Chikwawa looked like sugar cubes, filling the valley in neat rows. But up close those same houses were stained shacks, made of painted wood and patched with plastic sheeting.

“Don’t stop,” Hock said.

Chuma said, “This must look different from before. How many years?”

“ Za kale, ” Hock said, because “long ago” in English didn’t adequately describe the length of time.

None of what he saw from the car was lovely: the Africa of people, not of animals. And that was its oddity, because it looked chewed, bitten, burned, deforested, and dug up. A herd of elephants could eat an acre of trees in a day, leaving behind a mass of trampled and splintered limbs, yet that acre stayed green and grew back. But this human settlement was befouled, the greenery slashed and burned, or dragged away until only dirt and stones remained — a blight, a permanent disfigurement.

At the end of the badly paved road the car shuddered, slid on the loose rocks, and bumped in the deep ruts. At the margin, the tall thickened blades of elephant grass blocked the view. When they came to a bridge over a stream, or a roadside village, or a cluster of shops, Chuma said, “So many changes.”

Hock said “Yes,” because the man was young and proud. But the answer was no, and he was glad.

Out here the bush was still a semi-ruin, a landscape coarsening, losing its softness. He would have been happier to find that nothing had changed, because it was a place he had loved for its being itself, in spite of the aid workers and the charities and the missionaries. Now they were beyond Chiromo, in the southern province, nearing the Lower River. He recognized the flattened landscape at once, a kind of disorder even in the trees and the tall grass, and an odor of dust and smoke. It had been different from anything he’d known, not beautiful, too flat and featureless to photograph, but powerful, his first experience of the world, ancient in its simplicities.

“You like,” the driver said, seeing that Hock had begun to smile.

It all came back to him again. As a volunteer teacher, in this district of small huts and half-naked people and unpaved roads — a world made out of mud — he had been content. The Lower River became the measure of his happiness; he was happiest most of all because he’d been cut off. No telephone, only the weekly mail delivery, and sometimes an out-of-date newspaper, already yellow from age, the news irrelevant, overtaken by newer, greater trivia. There was nothing to fear. No one had money. He’d hated to leave; he’d longed to return. And here he was, back again — amazing.

“Mwabvi Game Park,” Chuma said. “You want to stop?”

Hock saw the entrance, the turnoff — just a barrier, an iron pipe resting across two steel oil drums, and a shed farther on.

“ Njobvu, ” Hock said. “ Chipembere. ”

“None of those, eh. But just monkeys,” Chuma said.

“I said, don’t stop,” Hock said.

The car was slowing down and seemed to be sliding sideways on the heavy gravel at the edge of the road, Chuma yanking on the steering wheel as if trying to avoid a skid. Hock sat forward, bracing himself against the dashboard with outstretched hands, and as he did, the car came to a stop on the slant of the roadside.

“Puncture,” Chuma said.

From his tilted seat, Hock said, “Fix it. You have a spare tire, right?”

Chuma did not reply. He pushed his door open in a sulky gesture and went to the back of the car to open the trunk lid. Hock watched him lifting out his big duffel bag and flipping up the carpet to get at the spare.

“ Tsoka, ” Chuma said.

Hock said, “What do you mean ‘bad luck’? You have a spare tire.”

“ Palibe ujeni, ” Chuma said.

“What ujeni ?” The word meant whatsit.