Paul Theroux - The Lower River

That was a lesson to Hock, who did not want to be obvious either, who had always hoped he’d be able to slip back into the village, hardly noticed, to pick up where he’d left off.

So to Manyenga’s presumptuous question he replied, “Take me where?”

“To the woman — Gala.”

“No,” Hock said. “It’s not important.”

That baffled Manyenga. He had a habit of picking his nose when he was especially reflective. He scrunched his face, his thumb in one nostril, and his bafflement gave Hock time to think.

Hock was not alone. The skinny girl Zizi still brought him hot water in the black kettle for tea in the morning. She carried his laundry away, the bunched pile in her thin arms. Whether she washed the clothes herself he wasn’t sure, but it all came back to him folded, ironed as he instructed, with the clumsy hot-coal iron. It wasn’t the crease that mattered; what was important was that they had been heated. The whole of the Lower River was buzzing with blowflies. These putzi flies laid eggs on damp clothes on the line. Ironing killed the flies’ eggs and the possibility that they’d hatch from the warmth of his wearing the clothes and burrow into his skin, the maggots in his flesh that had become boils he’d suffered in his first year with unironed clothes at Malabo.

Zizi knelt and swept with the twig broom, she dusted and fussed, and she clucked when she knocked things over. But he loved to see her happy, stretching in the heat, muttering “ Pepani! ”—Sorry! — as she brushed past him. Although he did not tell her what he wanted, he trusted Zizi. Her large dark eyes and long lashes spoke of innocence, and he could see that she looked to him as a protector. When the bratty boys in the village teased her for being a virgin, she sidled nearer to Hock and the boys were silenced, abashed, because while they were suspicious of his intentions, he knew they feared him, understood that as a stranger he was strong. Zizi knew that he didn’t despise her.

And Snowdon, with his scabby face and twisted fingers and clumsy feet, he too looked to Hock for protection, since dwarfs were often murdered and their bodies used to make medicine. Snowdon could see that Hock was taken by Zizi — in a way that surprised and embarrassed Hock. He guessed it one late afternoon as Hock sat on his veranda watching Zizi crouching, sweeping the dust and leaves from the courtyard, cleaning it the way Malabo women did, claiming the shady front of the house by tidying the ground. Snowdon toiled over to her on his damaged feet and pinched her shoulder.

Zizi twisted inside her chitenje wrap, loosening it, then stopped to adjust the cloth, drawing it closer and retying it, edging away from the dwarf.

“She is beautiful,” Snowdon said in his screechy voice, glancing slyly at Hock. “She is”—and here he twisted his mouth and spoke his one English word—“fee-dee-dom.”

Another one who had had a clear glimpse of what lay in Hock’s heart.

Wide-eyed, her lips pressed together as though for balance, breathing anxiously through her nose, Zizi stood, presenting him with a tin bowl of chicken and rice. She was black and slender and emphatic, like an exclamation mark in flesh, upright before him, her wrap slightly slack at her small breasts, standing on large feet, bobbing slightly as a clumsy courtesy and a show of respect when she handed over the hot bowl of food.

Hock loved being barefoot on his wood plank veranda, drinking warm orange squash, sitting in his shorts, eating the tough chicken and sticky rice, peeling a juicy mango, treating himself to one of the last chocolates in his stash, while Zizi watched him from the edge of the veranda, the dwarf gnawed his fingers, and mourning doves moaned in the twisted thorn tree. He felt like an animal then, a happy animal, with food in his paw, his face smeared.

But he was alone. And on hot afternoons like this it was easy for him to believe he was the only foreigner on the Lower River, the last living mzungu on this hot dusty planet, with his retinue, the skinny girl, the dwarf, and his snakes. He was so content in this role as the last man, he had stopped tuning his radio and ceased to take an interest in the news. He rediscovered what he’d forgotten from before: stop listening to the news, and let two weeks go by; tune in again, and you realize you’ve missed nothing, and so you were cured of the delusion that you needed to stay current. The news didn’t matter, because nothing was news. Nothing mattered. No one was interested in Malabo — this was why the people in the village must have suspected him of having a deeper motive for visiting. He wanted something from them — why else would he come all this way to live in a hut? Altruism was unknown. Forty years of aid and charities and NGOs had taught them that. Only self-interested outsiders trifled with Africa, so Africa punished them for it.

He was much harder to read than any of the other outsiders because he was alone — there was an implicit boldness in that. He had no context, no vehicle, no way out. He was a stranger, a solitary, and the only way to his heart was to confront him with a skinny girl, like the traveler to whom they would offer a bowl of food or a drink from a green coconut, as though to test him, to see if he was really a man, and also to disarm him, to delay him, to confine him, to obligate him.

Did Zizi know she was being used? At times he stared at her with an old hunger — he could not help himself. She set the food on the wobbly table and he reached for it and snagged her fingers and held on, tugging a little. He watched her anxious eyes widening, her pressed-together lips, her nostrils opening for air, and it sometimes seemed to him that her ears moved, twitching to hear a danger signal. She stood, her feet together and overlapping slightly, one big toe clamped on the other.

Her hands were marked with her history. Her fingers, though slender and delicate-looking, were like twigs to the touch, callused and rough at the tips from handling firewood and heated pots. The backs of her hands were scaly, slick, and with her hard palms seemed almost reptilian. She was not old — sixteen? — but she’d been working since the age of six or so, carrying wood, picking maize, thumping the corn with the heavy pestle pole. Like any old woman she could carry the hottest tin container in her bare hands. The work had hardened her hands, and though they were graceful from a distance, holding her hands in his, Hock could feel only the thickened and dead skin that made him think he was holding a claw. And he knew that her fingers were so desensitized by heavy work, she could hardly feel warmth from his. Still, he held on to her hand, and knew her life better. He wanted her to know that he cared for her.

A choking sound from the doorway made him turn. Snowdon was gagging on a clot of mucus in his damaged nose, watching them with his whole ruined face.

Zizi’s wordless way of responding to the intrusion was a sudden eyebrow flash and the scratch of a quite audible sniffing.

“Send Snowdon to get some water,” Hock said, because he did not want a witness to this, not even the dwarf, who was despised by the village.

Zizi was loud, heckling the dwarf with instructions and smacking the bucket for effect and chasing him down. And after the dwarf had tottered away on his almost toeless blunted feet, Zizi returned, her arms at her sides, twisting her chitenje wrap in her fingers.

Hock said, “Tell me, do you know a woman named Gala?”

Zizi’s yes was a lifting of her eyebrows and an intake of air at her nose.

“Does she live in Malabo?”

Zizi frowned, half closed her eyes, and allowed her head to tilt once, sideways just a little, as though reacting to an odor on a rising breeze.