Paul Theroux - The Lower River

“What was this Agency, the charity you worked for?” Hock asked.

He was merely trying to change the subject, but Manyenga was silenced by the question; he stared at Hock as if this question was somehow related to his inquiries about the stars, the suspicions that Manyenga had voiced.

“They were from Europe,” Manyenga said. “And some people from America.”

“The Agency was the name of their charity?”

“Why are you wanting to know?”

“I have friends who give money to these people. I can tell them their money is useful.”

“The money is rubbish,” Manyenga said. “They don’t give it the right way. They were cheating me.”

“I’m just asking what the organization was called.”

“And they were false witnesses,” Manyenga said.

“Did they come here to Malabo?”

“That was the badness. They promised to deliver us. But they were telling blue lies.”

Manyenga had grown angry, and looked sullen as he spoke. Hock was reminded again of how this simple conversation about the stars had veered off course.

“Never mind,” Hock said, and began to walk away.

Following him, toeing the dusty path with aggrieved steps, Manyenga said, “And they were causing trouble.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“And bringing deadly diseases,” Manyenga said, still treading angrily. “They were false friends.” He tugged the loose sleeve of the khaki shirt that Hock wore as protection from the sun and the insects. “But you yourself are not like that, father. No, indeed, you are being a true friend.”

In spite of trying to keep a straight face, Hock found himself smiling, with a slight heave of laughter in his throat, because he knew what was coming next.

“And those people who were whispering when they saw you at night observing the stars of the mphanda in the dark sky — no!” Manyenga, overdoing it as usual when he pretended to be indignant, worked himself into a fury, popeyed, clawing the air with his fingers. “I told them, eh! He is our father and our friend. He will never make magic against you. Don’t! I am telling them”—he made a chopping gesture with his big square hand as a froth of spittle flecked the corners of his mouth—“don’t be fearing.”

“Thanks, Festus,” Hock said, but no more than that.

“Please, father. Do not thank me for saying the truth. How can I lie? It is not natural for me.”

“People here used to know me,” Hock said. “No one knows me now.”

“I am knowing you, father.” Manyenga whipped his hand, snapping his fingers for emphasis. “I am knowing you too much.”

“But if the people I’d known before, long ago, were still alive, you wouldn’t have to tell people about me.”

“Some are alive.”

“Who?”

“Elders.” He named a few families, mentioned people whom Hock didn’t know. He listed the men in the riverside villages of Marka and Magwero, whom Hock had met that first day — children, grandchildren of men he’d known.

“And the teacher, that old woman.”

Hock shook his head and squinted for more.

“Gala Mphiri.”

Hock regretted his show of surprise, the “What?” that escaped him as a grunt. But he couldn’t help it — the name was an echo of the name in his mind.

Manyenga didn’t smile. He held the smile back, kept it in his mouth. He knew he had made his point. And it was then that he asked for money.

AS A YOUNG TEACHER in Malabo, stricken with a love hunger he had never known before, he had desired Gala, had to have her or he would be ill. She was aware of his hot gaze, often turning her head to look aside and smile at him, sensing his eyes on her. It was also a measure of his happiness in Malabo that he wanted her. She was slender and strong, she was aloof, striding alone from her hut to the school — white blouse, long dark skirt, red sandals. What would I give up to have her? he sometimes thought, answering himself, Everything. He would stay there, become a Malawi citizen, live in the bush, raise children, never return home. Some people did that, Fogwill for one, which was why it had been such a shock to see toothless Fogwill in Blantyre: the man he might have been.

But Norman Fogwill had married a village girl who wanted brighter lights, and Mrs. Fogwill, a Yao villager from the lakeshore, had left the country to live in England. Gala was a different sort. Hock guessed that she would never leave, but it surprised him to know that she was still alive.

She was not more than twenty at the time of independence. She had the flattish, vaguely Asian face that some Sena people had, the high cheekbones, the slanted hooded eyes. Her shaven head revealed its sculptural symmetries, her neck was slender and fragile-seeming. She was very thin, with tight muscles in her arms and legs that gave her a loose springy walk, her small high buttocks beating against her swinging skirt or her wraparound, the red chitenje she sometimes wore.

Hock had hesitated, but he had been confident that he would persuade her to marry him. He hoped she would sleep with him first, but so what? He could offer her everything. It was only a matter of time. How could she refuse? He knew the power a mzungu had in the Lower River — something magical, almost godlike. He didn’t want to think how he’d overwhelm her with his aura of being a white man in a remote place that had seen so few of them — always armed, in Land Rovers, wearing boots and shouting, sturdy, pink, and indifferent among the naked skinny Sena people. Some of them, the toughest, were Portuguese planters who had wandered over the border at Villa Nova, or crossed the river looking for animals to shoot. None had been teachers, like Hock. They had never seen anyone like him.

“We need to discuss the syllabus,” he’d said.

“I am ready.”

“Come to my house.”

“Yes, I will pop in.”

The day she dropped by his house, he sent his cook to the market. The cook was so surprised that in the midst of his sweeping he left his broom in the bucket. Hock made tea, he talked, he offered her cookies, he procrastinated, he knew night was falling but did not light his lamp. He tuned his shortwave radio and got music from Rhodesia Radio.

“Beatriss,” Gala said.

The word was unpronounceable on the Lower River. The Beatles had just reached southern Africa. Hock poured the only alcohol he had, two glasses of warm vermouth from a dusty sticky bottle.

“What is this?” She sipped and made a face.

Behind her head, out the window, across the clearing, the sky was alight in the thickened flames of sunset, and a lamp was glowing on the veranda of a hut, the orange flare in a glass chimney. Night thickened around it. Hock wanted darkness, his face hidden, his jittery fingers unseen.

In the darkness of his own house, so far from home, among people he liked and trusted, he was surprised at his eagerness, even more surprised by how he seemed — single-minded, slightly breathless, all his attention fixed on Gala. She sat on the creaking rattan sofa opposite, her small rounded head framed by the window and the glow from the distant lantern, her face in shadow. He knew she was smiling by the way she asked about the vermouth, sipping it, the smile an indication of her uncertainty, the sweetish medicinal taste.

“It is wine?”

“A kind of wine.”

“From Portuguese East?”

All the wine they knew there came as contraband from Mozambique, and the empty bottles were coveted as containers, used as lamps or as water bottles in canoes.

“From Italy. You like it?”

She shuddered, she laughed — a new taste in a culture where all tastes were age-old.

“It is alcoholic, like kachasu. ” It was the polite word for nipa.