Paul Theroux - The Lower River

In his sickbed, he felt a clarity of mind and a sense of resolve. He’d made a mistake. As soon as he was feeling better he’d find a way of escaping from Malabo.

Zizi brought him the tea and bananas he asked for, but it was an effort for him to eat. He kept on with his medicine. It consoled him to see her and the dwarf right outside, their heads silhouetted at the window.

At last he was able to stand, to eat a little porridge.

“I’m going,” he said, and was not sure whether he was speaking in Sena or English. He called to Zizi: “Get the chief.”

Manyenga was soon striding across the brightness of the clearing, mopping his head, seeming relieved that Hock had recovered. Hock was standing in the shade of the veranda, swaying slightly, still unsteady on his feet. Behind Manyenga, her short legs working fast, a girl carried a pail of small greenish oranges and some dried fish wrapped in the torn pages of a South African illustrated magazine.

“Eat, father,” Manyenga said.

“I need to drink more. Bring me a kettle of hot water for tea.”

Manyenga, suddenly fierce-faced, ordered the small girl to fetch the kettle. And then he relaxed and stood closer and inclined his head toward Zizi and said, “She likes you, father.”

“Really?”

“Too much.”

“Zizi should be in school.”

“But the school fees,” Manyenga said. “That is the badness.”

Hock was too faint to reply and had to sit on the straight-backed chair on the veranda, where he slumped, breathing hard.

“You must rest, father.”

Then Hock remembered. In a croaky voice, he said, “I heard noise when I was sick. What was the noise?”

“ Kufafaniza imfa. A man died. His goods were taken. His house destroyed.”

“You erased his death.”

“You are so clever, father. You are knowing so much about our customs, eh-eh.”

Hock said, “I have to leave. I’m going home.”

“This is your home, father,” Manyenga said.

Hock shivered as he had in the worst of his fever. He hugged his body, to warm himself, and moved to get his blood up, and that was when he saw the plastic crates. He recognized them as the containers of school supplies he’d asked the American consulate to send.

“When did that come?”

“The Americans fetched it here in their vehicle.”

“Did you tell them I was here?”

“You were so sick. We did not want to trouble you.”

“What did you tell them?”

“ Ujeni, ” Manyenga said — whatsit. “This and that.”

Hock guessed that he had said nothing of his presence, nothing of Hock’s lying in the hut with a high fever.

He went cold again, and he could not tell whether it was the recurrence of his fever or the faint brush of terror at feeling abandoned. Nothing that Manyenga had said was menacing, yet Hock was so weak, so feeble in response, he felt he was no match for Manyenga.

“I have a very big question to ask you.”

“Go ahead,” Hock said, “ask me.”

“Not now. At the proper time. We will have a ten-drum ngoma tomorrow. Then—” He smiled and gestured with his hands, spreading his arms, meaning, it seemed, that all would become clear.

After he had gone, Zizi peeled some of the oranges and put them in a tin bowl and served him. He gave some to the dwarf, who ate messily, chewing as he always did with his mouth open and grunting, his face and fingers smeared with the juice.

Zizi ate with dainty grace, separating the orange segments, chewing, her eyes cast down.

Refreshed by the fruit, having eased his stomach pain, Hock was suffused with a feeling of well-being, sitting in the shade, the sun whitening the earth, heating the motionless dusty leaves of the bushes next to the hut, curling the dead leaves on the ground. A strange conceit occurred to Hock as he straightened himself on his chair — that he was a chief, as they said, with his retainers, the serving girl and his fool, at his feet.

“It’s time for me to go,” he said in English. “I have no business here.”

The dwarf grunted. Perhaps he was muttering “Fee-dee-dom.” Pincering with the broken nails of two skinny fingers, Zizi covertly picked her nose, and Hock sat, finding a scrap of contentment in the absurdity.

Remembering that his stash of money had been raided, he went back to the school the next day — the hot interior, the heaps of dead leaves — and poked around for another snake. He had let the twig snake go. He found a small puff adder and brought it back to his hut. He eased it into a basket and put his envelopes of money inside with it, saying “ Mphiri, ” making sure that Zizi and the dwarf saw what he was doing.

Sleep and more fruit, and some bread with the dried fish, restored him. It only remained for him to get his strength back. Living there was a daily intimation of death, and these days he felt like a corpse. The fever had subsided, leaving him gaunt. I might have died, he thought, and reflected on Malabo as a terrible place to die — alone, in this heat, among strangers.

THE TEN-DRUM NGOMA that Manyenga promised was announced by boys wagging torches of oil-soaked rags flaming on poles, and the boys, Hock saw, were two of the orphans who’d abandoned the work at the school. They’d scuttled away then; they were marching in a stately procession now. They beckoned, then turned to lead him, and with the torches held high, preceded him across the field to Manyenga’s, Zizi and the dwarf following.

“Welcome, father,” Manyenga said, showing him to a chair and offering him a glass of nipa. The rest, all men and boys, were seated on the ground, a few cross-legged on woven mats. A piece of meat, an angular blackened leg, was dripping on a spit, and Manyenga’s elder wife was stirring a sludge of sodden, dark green leaves in a large tin pot. Several of the men were very old, staring into the fire, their eyes wild with the glow of the cooking fire, sputtering under the meat.

“Goat,” Hock said. “Mutton.”

“It is an impala for you,” Manyenga said.

“You poached it.”

“God provided this bush meat to us because we are hungry.”

Manyenga introduced the men as chiefs from nearby villages, and Hock recognized them as some of the men he had met on his first day at Nyachikadza’s hut, when they had decided to cremate the small dead crocodile with the poisonous liver. He remembered his excitement at arriving at the Lower River; he was ashamed at the memory of his innocence.

“And those boys,” Manyenga said.

As he was waited on by women and small boys, the conceit he’d had the previous day of being like a chief returned to him. He sat contented, picking at the shreds of meat on his plate, hearing Manyenga praise him.

“Now, father”—and Manyenga called one of the boys over. “This young chap is needing something to go to South Africa for work.”

“ Salani bwino, ” Hock said, as a formal farewell.

“But he is needing ndalama, ” Manyenga said. He used a Sena word as a euphemism, because “money” was too blunt.

The boy stood straight, bug-eyed with fear in the firelight, a scarecrow in his too big shirt and torn trousers, his bony wrists pressed against his sides. A yellow pencil stub stuck into his dense hair, the pink eraser protruding, was like a badge of scholarly seriousness.

“What’s his name?”

“Name of Simon.”

“How will he go? Bus from Blantyre?”

Manyenga rocked a little on his heels and grunted at the idea of such a straightforward way of traveling. The others shook their heads and clucked.

“Down the river, father. From Magwero. Through the Dinde Marsh to Morrumbala. To Mozambique. Zambezi River. Then Beira side, if he is finding a lorry. Then catching a bus — and what, and what — to Maputo. Then—” Manyenga shrugged, hinting at much more. “A jinny, father. A challenge.”