Paul Theroux - The Lower River

I’ll find a way of giving her money, he thought. I’ll take care of her. She’ll be my project. Perhaps she was justification enough for his trip back to Malabo. Finding that the place was uninhabitable for him, he’d encountered someone worthy, to whom he could be a benefactor.

Like the crooked shadow of a bat in flight, a dark thought fluttered through his mind that he could ask more from her. But reminding himself that she was barely sixteen — that his daughter was thirty-two — he only smiled, and the next time he passed the mirror in his hut, he peered into it and laughed at the pink sweaty face, the damp hair, and the bright exhausted eyes.

That day Zizi stayed close to the hut, and when the sun was high at noon and the dwarf was dozing under the maize basket of the granary, Hock said, “Let’s go.”

She knew immediately what he meant. Alert and attentive, she anticipated his movements, and she set off ahead of him, crossing behind the hut and through the maize patch in the somnolence of the hot noontime when nothing in Malabo stirred and the parched leaves of the mopane trees hung like rags.

The bush at the edge of the village was low and thin, offering no shade. Between the spindly shrubs and stunted trees, the narrow path was littered with corn shucks and twists of trampled fruit peels that monkeys had gnawed. Hock knew from the noon heat, the packed earth, and the withered layers of leaf trash that it was a snakey neighborhood. When Zizi hesitated, muttering “ Njoka, ” he was not surprised.

He stepped around her, broke a branch from an overhanging tree, and prodded the snake, which glided away beneath the dry litter.

“Mamba,” she said.

“Not a mamba.” He hadn’t had a good look, but he wanted to seem knowledgeable to this young girl — wanted to impress her! He laughed and said, “Wolf snake.”

She put her fingers to her mouth and giggled in fear. “You go first!”

The path was distinct enough, but he could not see ahead. The bush obscured the distance in a twiggy web, and the land was so flat he had no idea where he was going. But it had always been like this — the same bush, the same snakes, the same heat, the biting tsetse flies leaving itchy sores all over his ankles. Away from the river and the marsh the soil was crumbly, dry, and stony. Dust coated the leaves, and the sun knifed through the scrubby trees. Hock stopped to get his breath, to lift his shirt against his sweaty face.

“Not far,” Zizi said.

He was looking at her bare feet, her skinny legs, her flimsy chitenje cloth wrapped around her body. Apart from the dew on her upper lip and a kind of frost-textured sweat streaking her neck, she did not seem in the least fatigued or overheated. And there he stood in heavy shoes, khaki shorts, a drenched shirt, and his red baseball cap. They were alone, and the veiled bush made it seem that there might not be anyone for miles. And the bush itself, the solitude, roused him. Even the way Zizi stood, twisting her fingers and breathing, excited him. The heat most of all, the glare, the baking in sensuality — and the glimpse of the snake that had sped his pulse made her more watchful, keeping close to him.

His hand trembled as he touched her bare shoulder. She said nothing. He draped his arm so that his hand was slung over her breast. His dangling fingers grazed her cloth, the nipple poking beneath it. There was no softness; her shoulder was a polished knob, her small breast like a compact muscle.

With a feline expression, Zizi turned away, half smiling, half fearful, listening, her head slightly raised, as if to protect him from being seen holding her. And then, almost overcome with desire, Hock released her, and she sighed.

“How far?” he asked.

“Near. I can hear.”

What she heard — what he saw, forty yards down the track at the opening of the clearing, another village — was a woman pounding maize, the slow thud thud thud of a heavy pestle pole clouting maize in a wooden mortar.

The working woman was not old. She was bare-breasted, shapeless in her cloth, which was flapping loosely from the effort of lifting and dropping the thick pole into the mouth of the mortar. She was facing away from them, toward a large cottage-like hut — a tin roof, a veranda, curtained windows, a number painted in white on the smooth mud wall, the pale twig framework showing through a fallen-away patch of plastered earth, like bones revealed in a starved carcass.

Before Hock could call out, Zizi cried “ Odi! ” as an announcement.

Deafened by the butting thud of her own pounding, the woman did not react, but a shadowy figure on the veranda greeted them and stood, clapping her dry hands in welcome.

The woman standing over the mortar caught the four-foot-high pestle pole in the angle of her bent arm and wiped her brow with the back of her hand. Seeing Zizi, she smiled, and Zizi in return jerked her body in a low genuflection.

“My auntie,” Zizi said, and as she was saying “My granny,” there was a barking sound from above, laughter like the clack of wood.

An enormous swirl of cloth rose from the veranda, a woman inside it, heaving herself from an armchair, and she swung around to face Hock. She wore a shallow green turban, and her dress fluttered over her bulky body, but even so, Hock could see her great stretched breasts flopping beneath the folds. She was dressed in the old style, the hem of her smock-like dress reaching to her ankles. Her face was puffy and dull, like scuffed shoe leather, the skin around her eyes purplish from age, her bare arms blotchy, and when she opened her mouth wide — laughing in satisfaction — Hock could see that several lower teeth and at least one upper tooth were missing.

Gala, grown old, was monumental but battered, heavy-breasted, plodding toward him on the boards of the veranda on thick fat feet, showing him her yellow palms in greeting.

She shook his hand in both of hers and kept laughing, saying, “Ellis, Ellis,” the name that sounded like Alice.

“Remember me?”

“Yes, I do indeed!”

From that big, coarse, and aged body, from the cracked lips, a voice of refinement — astonishing, correct English.

“Come sit here,” she said, indicating a plank bench on the veranda, and she ordered Zizi and the other woman to bring drinks. “What will you have? Water? Tea? We have orange squash as well.”

“Tea,” Hock said, fearing the water.

Gala dropped herself heavily into the armchair and took up a fly whisk. She batted a brush of horsehair around her head and smiled at Hock and peered with watery eyes. Her eye shape had not changed, still hooded and Asiatic, but apart from her eyes he could not find anything else of Gala in this fleshy old woman.

“Now tell me about your journey,” she said, lapsing into the local approximation, jinny.

“You’re surprised to see me?”

“To see you, yes,” Gala said carefully. “But I heard you were at Malabo.”

“You knew I was there?”

“You arrived on the fifteenth, not so?”

Hock had lost track of time, yet she was precise.

“I didn’t know you would come here to pay a call and reacquaint yourself.”

He was baffled by the sensible and fluent voice in that big battered body. Pay a call sounded so formal, involving doorbells and visiting cards and teacups and overstuffed chairs with doilies, and here they were on the rough plank porch of a mud hut.

Gala looked like a market mammy, someone he might find behind a table heaped with bananas and mangoes, or eggs in a basket, fanning herself with a palm leaf, feet wide apart, her cloth wrap drooping.

Yet she said, “It is rare that we get visitors here, except the tax collector, or the boys from the ruling party soliciting donations.” Then she laughed, with a slight choking sound, kek-kek-kek. “You look fit.”