Paul Theroux - The Lower River

Such reading was futile, frivolous, self-deceiving. You didn’t need to devise a rocket journey to another galaxy to find alien life forms, for while the science-fiction writers were squinting into space, imagining insectile creatures and sentient sticks of matter and crystal cities and greenish almond-eyed mutants in boots — all of this fantasy — there were people in Malabo who were more remote, more cut off, less accessible than Martians or moon creatures.

Scientists had dreamed or imagined outer space into being and made a reality of space travel. But no one else on earth ever thought of the Lower River. Malabo was more distant than Mars. It was perhaps not all that remote in miles, but it was unknown, so it was at the limit of the world. Because of its isolation it was absurd, fantastic, unreal, a place of the naked and the misshapen. Alone in Malabo, Hock concluded that the villagers were unlike anyone he knew — they were different, too, from the people he’d lived among here years ago. They had changed, regressed drastically in their small subterranean hole in the world through which a river ran as dark as any in classical myth. The villagers on this riverbank did not look like other people, they did not think about the wider world, they did not talk like anyone else — and when they did speak, they didn’t make sense. They didn’t walk like other people, or eat or drink like anyone he’d ever known. And so from the beginning he saw that they were different, and what was more disturbing, they saw that he was different — utterly unlike themselves, a visitor from a distant place that was unknown but whispered about, impossibly far, unreachable from here, where they lay buried in their belowground river world.

At night, looking up, he was dazzled by the masses of stars and the winking planets and the streaking long-tailed comets, the big moon that at times looked as though it was made of bleached coral; and it seemed that those bright stars and that crusted moon were nearer than Medford.

Time, too, was retarded — or else crazed, circular, inverted, as it might be in deep space, one of those black holes into which the science-fiction writers tucked their voyagers. Hock could not remember when he’d arrived. He could not count the days that had passed, even the names of days had lost their significance, since they were indistinguishable. Market day was no longer observed, because there was nothing to sell. Sunday didn’t exist in a place where no one went to church, and the church itself had fallen into ruins. He remembered the progression of his first day — his nap, the meal, the sound sleep. He remembered his first glimpse of Zizi, of the dwarf, of Manyenga’s initial demand for money. After that it was sunrise, heat, sunset, the night sky, the stars, the suggestion that he was on another planet — that he was lost.

Some days he’d forgotten why he’d come, and Manyenga would show up for money, and only then would he think, I must get away.

Manyenga said after breakfast one day, following Hock so that no one would hear, “What are you looking at, father?”

“Nothing,” Hock said, bewildered by the ambiguous question.

“In the night, father. Looking with your eyes.”

How had they spotted him at midnight in the grove behind his hut, his arms crossed, his face upraised? Hock was reminded that he was happier in Malabo at night. He’d never used a flashlight, because any other light would have dimmed the stars. Standing in the darkness, he had not moved, only gaped at the sky. Yet they knew — they knew everything. Someone had seen, and here “someone” meant everyone.

“ Mphanda, ” Hock said. “I like to look at it.”

Instead of placating Manyenga, the answer seemed to disturb him. Hock had given the Sena name for the Southern Cross, their word for the ridgepole of a house, which is how it looked to them. He realized, too late, that he should have said, “Not looking at anything special.” But he had been specific in identifying the stars, and he knew such a reply was suspect, witch-like, as though the murmur of an element in a spell that might relate to a person’s house.

“Some people think the stars can control us,” Manyenga said.

“Which people?”

“Many people. Even those people at the Agency where I worked. One mzungu lady with much schooling, she herself said so.”

“Do you think so?”

“I am a simple man,” Manyenga said, and saying this, he had never sounded more complicated or crafty. “Myself I don’t know these things. But you, father, you are the expert.”

He said exputt, which could have been “expat” or “expert.”

“I was just thinking how far away we are,” Hock said.

Manyenga laughed, whinnying Eh-eh-eh in his throat, genuinely amused.

“Far away from what, father? We are here, right here in the middle of the world on our great river. We are having — what? We have food, we have water, we have ujeni, the river. I have my big wife and my little wife and my children.” Manyenga stamped his foot in the dust and said again, “We are here!”

“At the center of the universe,” Hock said.

“Yes. In the middle. We are having everything.”

With a thin querying smile, Hock said, “You have everything?”

“We have much,” Manyenga said, and he was returning that thin smile. “And you have much.”

Hock didn’t reply to this. He knew what Manyenga was saying: You belong to us.

Manyenga was hesitating. Finally he said, “You tell me you are observing the ridgepole. So what are the stars saying to you?” And he laughed. “That is what the people are asking. Not me. I know you are just taking refreshment in the cool air. But they are asking, ‘What are the stars saying to the father?’”

Hock couldn’t say “nothing.” No one would believe him. Nothing was a concept no one understood. Every act, every word, every event had a something to it, a direct cause. The fall of a branch was motivated by someone; a dead animal was always an omen; a person’s illness or bad luck was caused by someone who not only had a grudge but had the power to bring illness down upon that victim, or sour the person’s luck.

Someone staring at the night sky was studying the heavens, monitoring the approach of events, conspiring with the stars to bring misfortune upon an enemy, wishing to visit destruction on someone.

“They are fearing,” Manyenga said.

Hock said, “Fearing what?”

“The mzungu. The father.”

Hock said, “Sometimes I can’t sleep.”

“And they are saying that, too. The mzungu is awake when we are sleeping. He is like the fisi. ”

Hock laughed at the word. “They think I’m a hyena?”

“The fisi is awake at night. They are fearing for that reason, too. A sorcerer can be any animal. And they presume you are looking for a lightning bolt in the sky.”

“Why would I look for a lightning bolt?”

“Because you are a friend of the snakes, and the lightning is a snake from the sky, as the rainbow is a snake from the earth. A sorcerer can be able to join them, heaven and earth. You think we are stupid?”

It was impossible for Hock to tell whether Manyenga was teasing. Hock had heard of the rainbow as a snake, rising from the river or a pool, but the lightning as a snake from the sky? Was that something new, or a resurrected belief of a people who felt they had been bypassed? He was from another world, and knew he needed to be careful: he was ignorant here. The remote village had strict rules and fixed beliefs and many suspicions. In the forty years that had passed since he’d last been here the villagers had drifted farther off, they were more distant, the shadows deeper. Or was it all, he sometimes wondered, a shakedown?