Paul Theroux - The Lower River

“You drink kachasu ?”

“Myself I never take.”

She wasn’t drinking, only sipping. Hock thought, If she drinks a glass or two, she might get woozy enough to listen. But the vermouth was warm, syrupy even to him. She was politely pretending not to dislike it, to accommodate him. For months she had been a friend, a fellow teacher, but this was the first time he’d been alone with her in the dark.

“If only we had ice,” he said.

“Ha! Ice in Malabo, a miracle,” she said. “Even the word we are not having.”

“Next time, I’ll get some ice from Blantyre,” he said, standing up, delivering the statement like a piece of news, using it as an occasion to take three steps to the sofa, to sit next to her.

The crackling of the brittle rattan seat under him, the shiver of the frame as she moved aside, stirred him, as he draped his arm across her shoulder, stroking the white blouse.

“Put the light, please,” she said.

“I like it like this.”

She held herself and said, “I always imagine snakes coming in the dark.”

“The snakes are afraid of me,” he said.

“But not of me.” And she sniffed for emphasis. She was quick like that; no one else in Malabo would have had that answer.

“I’ll protect you.” He hitched nearer and settled his arm on her. She shrank, even under his light touch.

In that moment he became aware that she was humming the music that was playing on the radio, the song a throbbing murmur in her throat: She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah. She didn’t know any of the verses but she had the rhythm perfectly, and now it was rising in her throat, ringing softly in her head.

He touched one of her breasts, shaping its softness through the cloth of her blouse. Breasts had no magic in Malabo — most of the women went bare-breasted. Gala didn’t object. She patted his hand as though in chaste friendship.

“I like you so much,” Hock said.

“Alice,” she said, her version of Ellis, but nothing more. She held her face away, as if anticipating that he’d kiss her. But though her body was turned to the opposite wall, she held his thigh, seeming to steady herself. And she was canted against him, in his arms, as he stroked her breast. It fitted his hand and the underside had a softness. Her breast was as firm as fruit under her modest buttoned blouse.

He moved to touch her between her legs, but she resisted with such sudden force it was as though he’d pinched her.

When he had soothed her, she resumed crooning, a new song now, the Beatles again, he didn’t know the name. As she sang in her throat and her nose, groaning, moving just perceptibly to the music, she steadied herself, slipped her hand between his legs and pressed, and he almost fainted with pleasure. He let go of her breast, put his mouth on her neck, and was glad for the darkness.

The Sena had a peculiar way of eating, not just gathering the lump of steamed dough and splashing it into the stew, as other Malawians did. Instead — perhaps to prolong the anticipation of eating, they were always so hungry, and food was so scarce — they broke off a corner of the hot dough, held it in their fingers, and kneaded it like a pellet, using the heel of the hand, smoothing it, making it into a small ball, then flattening it again, working it more with the fingers and palm, savoring it, sharpening their appetite in the delay, bringing it to perfection, breaking it down. The act, like mastication, was done without hurry, using only that one clean hand, continually pressing and squeezing, massaging the lump.

He had seen Gala eat this way. And this was what Gala was doing now, working her skinny fingers and her hard palm on him. What would have seemed gross and obvious in daylight was, in darkness, a bewitchment. He let her continue, saying nothing, then held his breath, and when the quickening pain of the release was too great, he caught her hand and held it and sighed.

She was listening, looking away, her head erect, alert. She had stopped humming, though the music still played.

“What is that?” Her fingers were inquiring on his lap.

He didn’t want to say, and his deeper silence seemed to animate her. She laughed softly. She tapped and traced the way she did with her fingers on food.

“Wet,” she said. “Is wet.”

He clapped his knees together like a startled girl, and placing his damp hand on her much cooler one, he lifted it away.

“I want to see,” she said, turning to him. She was whispering. “What is it?”

“You know.”

“I have never.”

In the darkness she was not the bright schoolteacher with copybooks under her arm, but an African of wondering bluntness: What ees eet? And Ees wait and I hev nayvah.

She searched in her carrying basket, and the next thing Hock knew she was laughing, softly waving the beam of her old chrome flashlight around the room and into his eyes and onto his pants. She let out a sound that was not a scream but much worse, a low agonic moan, as if expelling her last breath: a terror of dying where she sat.

The yellow light had fallen across the room in the crease between the wall and the floor where a puff adder lay like a strange misshapen hose, tensed and swelling, its blunt flat head lifted from the gritty floor, its eyes glinting at them.

“Don’t move,” Hock whispered. “Keep the flashlight on him.”

The wide froth-flecked mouth of the snake was slightly parted, spittle coating its narrow lips. Its shadow gave it extra coils, so it seemed a great knotted thing fattening against the far wall.

“He can’t see us behind the light.”

But Gala’s shoulders were narrowed in fear, and her hand shook so violently that Hock was afraid she’d drop the flashlight. The flickering beam seemed to disturb the snake. The wedge of its head lifted to sample the air with its darting tongue.

Taking the pillow from behind Gala on the sofa, Hock hitched forward, and when the rattan squeaked, the snake tensed again. Hock tossed the pillow in front of it, and the snake sprang at it, leaping full length from the last coil of its tail, and striking it, imprinting a clean parenthesis in spittle of its mouth shape on the cloth.

Gala yelped in terror as Hock snatched the flashlight from her. He kicked the lengthened snake across the room, where it gathered itself again and made for the open door, thrashing back and forth, its mouth still gaping for air.

“It’s okay,” Hock said. “It wasn’t a big one. And not poisonous, though they bite.”

“All snakes are poisonous,” Gala said.

“It’s a puff adder, not deadly. And it’s gone.”

“I should never have come to this house.” Gala fretted breathlessly, reproaching herself.

Hock walked her back to her hut, which she shared with another teacher, since it was, like his, a hut provided by the school. Her home was in an adjacent village, nearer the river, where her father had a fishing canoe in a small compound on high ground in the marsh.

Too upset to speak, she turned away from him at her hut and uttered a formula of words in Sena, which could have been a curse or a prayer.

Yet it had all excited him. After that, Hock could not think of her visit, and her embrace, without thinking of the snake — the desperate bright-eyed thing coiled in the room all the while they’d spent body-to-body, her hand moving on him.

He did not mention any of it again. She was oblique with him, but still friendly, more familiar, as though strengthened by the episode. Hock guessed that she was so sure she’d made a mistake, she was confident she’d never do it again, and her resolve made her franker with him.

One day he said, “I need some help with the report cards.”

“But I am busy.” She laughed. She would never have said that before.