Paul Theroux - The Lower River

“I’m okay.”

“My granddaughter is looking after you.”

“You know that too?”

“Her mother has passed on from the scourge of eddsi”—AIDS was a word that no one could pronounce. “The Lower River has suffered. Even Malabo has suffered.”

But Hock saw a different connection — a revelation. He said, “So it’s not a coincidence. They knew about you and me?”

“We are part of the local legend,” Gala said, laughing again, kek-kek. “It was a source of pain for my late husband. I was a marked woman because of my friendship with the mzungu. ”

“And that’s why they chose Zizi?”

“Some people might think so,” Gala said, and screwed up one eye against the sun.

So it was a setup. He should have known. They had assessed his weakness, his sentimentality, and he reflected on how shrewd they were, how predictable he was: just minutes ago he had embraced Zizi with hot hands on the bush track.

With exaggerated dignity he said, “I might not be staying much longer in Malabo.”

Gala flicked at her head with the fly whisk, then said, “So— hah! — what do you think of your village?”

“It’s changed,” he said.

“Maybe it hasn’t changed,” Gala said. “Maybe it was always like this.”

“Forty years ago it seemed like home to me.”

“That was a special period,” she said. “Maybe you could call it an era. People were hopeful in a way they hadn’t been before. After some few years the hope was gone. You had left by then, back to your people.”

“I thought of the Sena as my people,” Hock said. “What happened?”

“Nothing happened. That was the badness. People expected a miracle, and when the miracle didn’t come they were angry. You see these young people in Malabo — all over the Lower River. They are so angry. What do you think?”

Hock, staring at her, was thinking that he was about her age, and yet, for all her fluency, she was a physical wreck, decrepit in spite of her wisdom. What he could see of her eyes was clouded, not blind but dim-sighted and milky from her hard life in this sunlight.

“Zizi isn’t angry,” he said.

“I raised Zizi,” Gala said. “My children were not angry. I sent them away for their own good. My firstborn is in the UK, a pharmacist. Another is married, in South Africa.”

“How many children do you have.”

“I have borne a total of eight, but two died in infancy. One more from dysentery, another succumbed to malaria. I myself am troubled by malaria. I hope you are taking precautions.”

“I take a pill every day.”

“The headman, Festus Manyenga, he was with the Agency in a malaria eradication program. Also some food delivery.”

Her mention of the man gave him an opportunity to ask, “What do you think of him?”

Laughing, she said, “Festus was so puffed up when he worked for the Agency. He was the driver — not a very elevated position, you might say. But he had a smart uniform. He took advantage. His vehicle was so big and expensive. He treated it as his own. He pinched from them. Have some tea.”

Zizi held a tin tray, a cup trembling on it, as her aunt poured tea for Hock.

“I think we have some biscuits,” Gala said. She was making queenly gestures from her armchair. At last, with a frown and a dismissing hand she indicated that Zizi and the aunt should leave. In a low serious voice she said to Hock, “I hope you are being careful in Malabo.”

“Doing my best,” Hock said.

“Please take care.”

“You sound worried.”

“I know those people.” She leaned forward. “They are different from any people here that you knew before. We were quite cheerful. Independence was a joyful occasion for us. The school was new and it was something wonderful.”

“When did it fall apart?”

“Some few years after you left.”

“I used to think how happy I’d be living here,” he said in a soft speculating voice that implied, With you.

“You made the right decision by going home. You have a family?”

“A wife, a child,” he said. “An ex-wife. An angry child.”

“Angry or not, your child is forever your child.”

He could not explain why he felt differently, and that when he had left home he had said goodbye to his friend Roy and not to his ex-wife or his daughter. He said, “Are you warning me about the people in Malabo?”

“You are wiser than me,” she said. “But this is my home. These people know you only by name and reputation. They know you don’t fear snakes. Apart from that, you are a stranger here.”

She seemed so ominous, saying it in her deep voice, he laughed to lighten the moment. But she kept her head lowered in that confiding posture.

“They will eat your money,” she said. “When your money is gone, they will eat you.”

He flinched at this, and was sorry he showed his surprise. It was a far cry from the homecoming he’d expected, and a shock coming from this articulate old woman, who clearly had suffered. She was ill and overweight and short of breath, and having gasped that warning, she’d exhausted herself and was panting.

“So I can’t trust anyone?”

“You can trust me,” she said. “You can trust Zizi.”

“She’s, what, sixteen?”

“More than that. Soon to be seventeen, but still a girl, still mtsikana. ” It was a village distinction, a girl who had not been initiated — a virgin.

“No chinamwali for her?”

“I didn’t agree to the initiation. Festus was so angry!”

Hock glanced at the girl. “Pretty young.”

“I was not much older when I met you. Eighteen.”

“I had no idea. You were a teacher.”

“Anyone could be a teacher in those days,” Gala said. “But as you found out, I was promised to Mr. Kalonda. Zizi is not promised.”

Hearing her name, Zizi became watchful and solemn. She knelt with her auntie at the edge of the veranda, as though awaiting instructions. Zizi seemed anxious, hopeful, her dark, white-rimmed eyes lighting her smooth face. Her shaven head gave her a distinct nobility as well as an air of ambiguity, an apparent androgyny, the slender boy-girl with breasts and big feet. Hock was glad that Gala had praised her, and even seemed to encourage him, because he had already come to depend on Zizi with mingled helplessness and desire, feeling more like a lost boy than a man, as he sometimes said, on the shady side of middle age.

“My friend,” Gala said, “I am so glad to see you. But I will also be glad when I hear you are safely far away from the Lower River…”

She hadn’t finished. She had lifted her arm to make a point — to give him another warning, perhaps. He could see it in the way she took a deep breath to sustain her through a serious utterance. She had begun to say, “Do not believe…”

Then the bap-bap-bap and the shimmy of a loose muffler of a motorbike rattled into the stillness, waking a terrified dog and throwing up gouts of white dust, Manyenga skidding to a halt in front of Gala’s hut.

“I was getting worried,” Manyenga said, wrestling with the handlebars and killing the engine. “But here you are, seeing your friend.”

Lifting herself from her posture of warning, Gala relaxed and clapped her hands to welcome him. She spoke all the formulas of ritual greeting, the repetitions, too, in a mild submissive voice, calling him Festus, ending by offering him a cup of tea.

“I can’t stay. I must help this big man,” Manyenga said. Then with his teeth clamped together he hissed at Zizi in Sena. Without a word, she slipped off the veranda and turned to head down the path. She lifted her knees when she walked, seeming to march.

Manyenga climbed onto his motorbike and kicked the starting lever. His voice rose as the engine revved, but still it was inaudible. Hock had begun to follow Zizi, but Manyenga gestured for him to ride behind him.