Paul Theroux - The Lower River

Keeping his hand on the flap of his bag, Hock said, “But I can’t give you any more money.”

“I don’t want your money.”

“I must have some food,” Hock said.

What was missing in this boy was any sympathy, none in his two companions, none in the children, in the entire village. Simple pity was something he had taken for granted in Malabo: the recognition that he was alone, stranded, far from home, in need of help. These children were feral and had no use for him, and that was worse than being exploited in Malabo. They were mind-blind and reckless.

In a low pitiless voice, without turning, the boy said to him, “Give your knife.”

“I don’t have a knife.”

“The knife from last night.”

Before his meal, in a feeble attempt to tidy himself, he’d sat cross-legged and clipped his fingernails, then carved the dirt from beneath what remained. He had no idea that anyone had seen him engaged in this sad little ritual of grooming with a chrome fingernail clipper.

Careful to remove it from his bag without showing any of the contents, he slid out the clipper and handed it over.

“The food,” Hock said.

“They will bring.”

Later, at the hut he had been assigned, the girl who brought him the tin plate of roasted cassava and the few bananas was one he recognized as being part of the jeering mob at the riverbank. That she was subdued, almost deferential, kneeling as she served the dish, made her seem more defiant and untrustworthy.

“Chai,” Hock said.

She sniffed to show she understood, rocked to her feet, and was away for a few minutes, returning with an enamel mug of hot water into which some tea leaves had been scattered. That it was hot satisfied Hock, who feared the foul water of the Lower River.

After he finished his meal he sat in the open doorway of the hut, and when darkness fell he listened to the sounds of the children playing discontentedly, or mildly quarreling, screeching now and then, the shouts of boys, the protests of girls. And later, in the silence of the night, afraid to sleep in the doorless hut, he sat, grieving for himself. He remembered slights that had been inflicted on him — not here or in Malabo, but in his marriage, in Medford, in his business, as he had the previous night.

Instead of brooding about Malabo, his sudden escape, the theft of his radio by Simon, or about the treachery of the boy paddlers who had delivered him here to the village of teasing children and hostile bug-eyed boys, and the heat, the dirt, his hunger and thirst — instead of this, he thought only of the injustices he had suffered in his life.

The trickery of his wife, who had foisted that expensive phone on him and used it to pry into his privacies. And then, after more than thirty years, she had demanded the family house, his father’s house in the Lawrence Estates, forcing him into a condo in the old high school. And her repeated messages on his answering machine: “You shit.” Chicky demanding that he hand over her inheritance: “I want my cut now.” When he gave her the check he said, “I doubt that I’ll be seeing much of you from now on.”

As those bad memories coursed through his mind, keeping him awake, grinding his teeth, slighter ones intruded — hurts, insults, snubs. “Four eyes,” “Fairy,” “You suck,” at school. The guidance counselor saying, “Maybe your father will give you a job, because if not, you’re not going anywhere.” A woman in college English tittering because he’d mispronounced the word “posthumous.” One of his customers saying, “You’re rounder now,” meaning that he’d put on weight — and the man who said it was fat. The new salesman who’d gotten a salary advance (“My rent’s due”) saying, “You can take it out of my first paycheck,” but he never showed up to work again. Not villains, but deadbeats, mockers, smirkers. “You’re still working for a living?” Teachers in grade school who’d singled him out—“See me after school”—and all the women who’d rejected him, batting his hands away. The lies he’d been told now came back to him, little twisted evasions that remained unresolved and niggling at him. Like his father, he’d been a trusting soul. He believed “I’ll definitely come tomorrow” and “I’ll fix it” and “That’s the best price I can offer you.” The pretty clerk who blocked the employee toilet with her sanitary pad, then denied it. The shoddy batch of socks from China, the repeated telephone message on the answering machine of the men who owed him money, or a delivery, until he called and got “This number has been disconnected and is no longer in use.”

And there was his incriminating phone, the one he’d thrown into the Mystic River because it was full of compromising emails. The thought of those emails shamed him, those whispers, those confidences, flirting and foolish. He had betrayed himself with people he’d trusted with his inner thoughts, people to whom he had confided his love of Africa. “The best years of my life,” he’d said, and they’d responded, “Cannibals and communists” or “Human life means nothing there,” in an echo of doom-doom-doom, and he’d lectured them on their peculiar folkways and pieties. “I was in Malabo, on the Lower River…”

All of this, and more, all night.

HE WAS CLINGING to a steep black mountainside that resembled Morrumbala. Gripping the seams of crumbling rock with his fingertips, his arms extended in an attitude of crucifixion, he had hoisted himself up the cliff face to a narrow ledge, no more than a toehold, hugging a plastic bag that bulged with a yellowish drinkable liquid, and the fat-bellied bag swelled so tight it might burst at any second. He wore boots and a harness. He pushed open a steel door in the granite wall but saw that the space was not wide enough for him and the bag to fit through. Someone was with him, a hovering figure who looked like Roy Junkins, but he was dressed in a three-piece suit and seemed doubtful, canted sideways in an ironic posture on the ledge.

“Won’t work,” Hock said to the skeptical man standing beside him.

“The bud.” That word woke him. The sun burned against his aching eyes, the light that had colored his desperate dream.

“The bud.”

No sooner had he heard the word than he saw on the hot branch behind the boy’s big shadowy head the budded protrusions, some like dark spear points and some plump swollen ones, seeming on the verge of bursting.

“What are you saying?”

“ Ndege. ”

“Bird,” Hock said.

“Bard,” the boy said.

“What about it?”

“Is coming.”

In Hock’s sleepy blur of confusion the words made no sense to him. He rolled over and the mat crunched with a chewing sound. He had been more content in his dark mountainside dream than here in the corrosive sunlight and damp earth of this hut in the village of children. He yearned to sleep again, to return to his dream.

“ Mzungu, ” the boy said.

“Don’t call me mzungu! ” His own shriek startled him and made him angrier. In his rage he was also objecting to the hut, which stank of mice and sour fermented straw and spilled beer suds.

The boy stepped back, shocked by Hock’s loud shout of protest. He was not the biggest boy, but one of the three leaders, who usually sulked behind his sunglasses.

“ Ndiri ndi njala! ” Hock shouted, louder than the first time, encouraged by the boy’s apparent fear. Hock pounded his stomach and made an animal noise of complaint.

“And me myself I am hungry,” the boy said in a low voice.

“Bring me food,” Hock said.

“The ndeg e will bring food.”

Hock smiled at the word. He said, “ Mbalame, ” because that was the proper Sena word for bird, and ndege was — what? — Swahili?