Paul Theroux - The Lower River

Hock waved to Gala and was sped down the path, past the marching girl, to Malabo.

At his hut, dismounting, Hock hated that he’d been spirited away. Manyenga didn’t shut off the engine. He tossed his head as a casual acknowledgment. But before he rode away he shouted at Hock.

“What did you give her? A present, eh?” In the risen dust he’d thrown up, he pushed at his nose with the back of his hand, and it seemed a hostile gesture. “What have you got for me?”

Hock fumbled in his pocket and found a broken peanut shell and gave it to him, holding it over the man’s open palm.

“Eh!” he grunted when he saw it. “Groundnuts! You are so funny, father.”

After he’d gone, Hock waited in the shade for Zizi to return. Idle there, he replayed the visit and remembered seeing a book on the floor beneath Gala’s armchair, a book of frayed pages, fat with mildew, the cracked spine looking chewed, like a relic from another age. He wished he had looked more closely. It was probably a Bible.

When Zizi slipped from amid the tangle of bushes at the margin of the maize patch, Hock was glad. But the day had disturbed him. Now he knew the limits of his world here, how narrow they were.

HE DID NOT want to think that Africa was hopeless. Anyway, Africa didn’t exist except as a metaphor for trouble in the minds of complacent busybodies elsewhere. Only the villages existed, and he was now convinced that there was something final about Malabo. He had believed it to be static and inert. But the village, all of it, seemed to be sinking, the thirty or so huts, the low bush and splintered stumps, the withered mopane trees and their twitching leaves, the smoke smell, the smoothed and swept portions in front of the huts, the dusty tussocks of weeds. The place was flattening, soon to be a ruin, like the failed schoolhouse, the fallen church, none of the ruins or huts, even now, higher than Hock’s head. The whole of the village was like a rubble of foundations suggesting the settlement it had once been. Or maybe it wasn’t final but would just go sprawling on like a termite mound, mimicking its stick-like people.

Waves of sadness weakened him as he blinked in the heat shimmer of the small dusty village that had once been his greatest hope. It was not a mistake to have come, but it was a mistake to remain. Gala was right, he had overstayed his visit — time to go. He tore a page from his journal and wrote a message to the consulate in Blantyre, saying that he was unwell and needed to talk to the consul. He found an envelope. Stepping off the veranda of his hut with the letter in his hand, he heard a whistle.

The clean white paper, so rare in Malabo, brilliant in the sunlight, had been spotted from fifty yards away.

“ Kalata, ” Manyenga said, materializing on the path, as always trying to push him back with the force of his voice. And when he put his hand out, palm up, Hock imagined that at one time a cheeky mzungu at the Agency had done that to him. Manyenga must have been working on his motorbike — his hands were smeared with black grease. “We will post the kalata for you.”

“I can do it, Festus.”

“The big man does not post letters. His people carry out the workload. They brush the glue on the stamps. His people post the letters. Give it, my friend!”

Too feeble to protest, Hock handed it over. Finger streaks of grease imprinted the pure white envelope, which he knew would never be sent.

Hock had abandoned any idea of improving the village. The school would remain a roofless shell, a nest of snakes, the office a hideout for the orphan boys, the clinic a ruin. The side road would grow narrower from the dense encroaching elephant grass that flopped over at its edges. The villagers would subsist, the weaker ones would die. The river was invisible, and all he had seen of it was the heaviness of the marsh and the water hyacinths that piled up in a mass of leaves and flowers that filled its channels. The nearer creek was stagnant, a constant whiff in the air of decay. The boma seemed as distant as Blantyre, an unwalkable distance.

The next day at breakfast he said, “I’m going to pick some bananas,” using that as an excuse to take a stroll, to feel less trapped.

Though he had not spoken to anyone in particular, his words reached Manyenga, who confronted him, speaking as though to a child.

“The big man cannot pick bananas!” Manyenga said. “You must not do, father. The kids will fetch them.” And he called to a small boy, saying, “ Ntochi! ” He never spoke to the dwarf Snowdon.

Hock’s running an errand or going for a walk were indignities, not befitting a chief. So they waited on him, the whole village enlisted as his helpers, and they kept him captive. They were no longer afraid of him. He would rise from his chair on the veranda and as soon as he stepped into the clearing he’d hear a sharp whistle that signaled, He’s moving.

The earth, his life, his brain, had slowed in the humid heat of the Lower River. Half cooked, drowsing during the day, he was more wakeful at night. He came to understand the sharp squawks and chirps, the warbling and whickering of some birds and the bub-bubbling of the mourning doves at sundown. These noises gave way to the raw coughing of dogs, or the untuned string of a locust at dusk, until in the pitch black of his hut at midnight when he was wakeful all sounds ceased except the most disturbing one, the gabble of a human voice, five or six muttered words, the more alarming for being flat and unintelligible, always like a command. He found no reassurance in the voices of Malabo, only warning, as though they were always speaking about him.

He became accustomed to Zizi bringing him news, or sometimes warnings. Boys in ragged shirts would wander past his hut, going slowly, tilting their heads, giving him sidelong glances. Before he asked who they were, Zizi would hiss through her teeth, “Bad boys. They are wanting.” One day, hearing a commotion, Zizi squinted into the emptiness of the village, as though conjuring a vision. “They are killing a goat, but he is not dying.” She might mention that someone was brewing beer, or that visitors had come to Manyenga’s compound — the delivery of medicine, the arrival of a relative. Another day, she reported a death, but it was not the death of the man that she described; rather, she told how Manyenga’s family had gone to the dead man’s hut, at the far side of the village, and they had stripped it of all the pots and knives, taken his hoe and his ax, his mirror, his mats and baskets, then set the house on fire, something that Hock had once witnessed, the ritual raid the Sena called “erasing the death.”

“What will Festus do with the hoe and the ax?” Hock asked, to see what Zizi would say.

“They will sell them, because they are lazy.”

No government officials ever visited the village, no missionaries, no aid people, no foreigners, no health workers. Hock inquired. Zizi shook her head.

“But the Agency,” she said, “they have food for Festus.”

“What’s the Agency?” It was a recurring name. Gala had also mentioned it.

She couldn’t say; it seemed she didn’t know. She shrugged and pointed to the sky.

Sorting papers early one morning, still in his hut, disconsolate that he had stopped his diary, because every day’s entry was the same two lines, he heard Zizi calling to him, clucking through the window.

“A doctor has come.”

It seemed a blessing, it gave him hope. “Where is he?”

“At the clinic.”

Like the school, the two-room clinic was a ruin — no roof, the doors and window frames torn out and used for firewood. What remained was a set of brick walls that dated from Hock’s time as a teacher in Malabo, one of the buildings put up at independence. Every month, a doctor or a medical missionary would arrive in a Land Rover from the boma, or Chikwawa, or farther afield; word spread and within the hour a line of people formed to be treated or to ask for medicine. Hock always went to the clinic to hand over letters to be posted, or to obtain chloroquine for students who were down with malaria. He’d been treated, too, for tonsillitis, for an infected knee, and once he’d had a chigger dug from beneath the nail of his big toe, a fat leggy flea that had writhed and kicked on the blade of the doctor’s lancet. “Cheeky bugger,” the doctor had said, smiling at the flea, wiping it away.