Paul Theroux: The Lower River

Today he saw Jerry Frezza sidling between parked cars, wiping droplets from his face. Jerry had a tight smile and a jaunty upright stride; even in the rain Hock could tell that his friend had something on his mind.

Jerry saw him and said, “I’ve been trying to call you on your cell. What’s with your phone?”

“I don’t have one anymore.”

“How do you keep in touch?”

“I don’t,” Hock said. “You can call the store number, though.” He was going to tell him that in another month the store would be closing, but he resisted. He didn’t want to discuss it, he didn’t want sympathy, he hated the thought of the obvious question, What will you do now? So he smiled and said, “What’s up?”

Jerry said, “You know snakes, right? From when you were in Africa?”

On the Lower River, at Malabo, Hock had been the mzungu from America; in the Medford store, he was the man who’d lived in Africa. The sunny word “Africa,” spoken on a wet November day in Medford Square, seemed almost blasphemous and made him rueful again.

The Lower River in his time had been a nest of snakes. He was known for not fearing them; he was feared for daring to catch them. One of Hock’s long-ago names in the village was Mwamuna wa Njoka, Snake Man. So he said, “What’s the problem?”

“This crazy mama I know, Teya, over in Somerville, has a humongous snake she keeps as a pet, python or something. Get this, she actually sleeps with it.”

Hock considered the stupidity of this, and then said, “They like the warmth. How big?”

“Yay big,” Jerry said, flinging out his arms. “Almost as big as she is. What do you think?”

“I think, don’t be cute. Put it into a cage. But it should really be in an equatorial forest. Ask her if it makes any noise — like a blowing sound.”

Not long after that, nearer Thanksgiving, Jerry stopped in again and said to Hock, “You were right. It sucks in air and goofs it out.”

“If it’s vocalizing, it’s a python. Other snakes don’t make any sounds.”

“Whatever. I told her what you said, but she feels sorry for the snake. The thing’s not eating. She gave it food, but it won’t touch it.”

“Probably it would eat if it was left alone. But they can go months without eating.” Hock was folding sweaters that a man had decided not to buy. “She still sleeping with the snake?”

Jerry nodded. “Whack job, right?”

But standing at the store counter on this November day of denuded trees under a brown sky, Hock thought of Malabo, of the snakes he’d collected: green mambas, black mambas, spitting cobras, the swimming sun snake, the egg-eating wolf snake, the boomslang mbobo, the puff adder, and the nsato, the rock python, which could have been the woman’s pet snake. The villagers feared them and would kill a snake on sight. If a traveler encountered a snake at the start of a journey, he would return home. Because of these fears Hock developed an interest and made a study, to set himself apart, so he would be known as something more than a mzungu. One of the derivations of mzungu was “spirit,” but the word meant “white man.” He kept some snakes in baskets, and fed them lizards and grasshoppers and mice, and he released them in places where they’d be safe to breed.

Jerry called the store the next day. He did not offer a preamble because their only subject lately had been the woman with the pet snake. He said, “She wants to know why the snake is acting weird. It still isn’t eating. It lies beside her, flattening itself.”

“Did you say flattening itself?” Hock said. “Listen, get her on the phone. Tell her to put the snake in a cage immediately.”

“Why are you shouting?”

Only then had Hock realized that his voice had risen almost to a scream. In this same shrill pitch he said, “The snake is measuring her. It’s getting ready to eat her!”

He knew snakes. Jerry’s story of the woman made him miss Africa — not the continent, which was vast and unfinished and unfathomable, but his hut in Malabo, on the Lower River in Malawi.

After he hung up, he called Jerry back and said, “Where is she? That woman’s in trouble.”

The house was a wood-frame three-decker on a side street in Somerville, from the outside like every other house on the block, from the inside a tangle of drapes and silken gold-fringed banners, highly colored, smelling of a sickly fragrance, perhaps incense, or from the candles flickering like vigil lights, their fumes the pulpy flavor of fruit, the plush bite of spices. The place was shadowy, as though furnished for some sort of ritual, a séance or spiritual exercise. A small cluttered bulb-lit shrine was fixed to one wall — a dark idol, a dish of grapes and plums before it. The rooms were warm with the aroma of sweet cake crumbs on this raw day.

A white-faced woman opened the door, holding it ajar just a few inches, looking afraid, until she recognized Jerry, and then she smiled and let them in. Her dark hair was uncombed and looked clawed and nagged at.

“Where is it?” Hock asked.

“Is this your friend?” the woman said, peering with her flat smile.

“Teya — this is Ellis,” Jerry said.

She spelled her name and said, “American Indian. I wish I would have known you were coming.”

Hock said, “The snake — did you secure it?”

“Mind taking your shoes off?” the woman said.

She herself was wearing sandals, with silver rings on her toes, and over her shoulders a robe that Hock knew to be polyester and not silk. She was older and slightly plumper than he expected. “Spaced out” and “hippie” had made him imagine someone girlish, but the woman was perhaps fifty. Her left wrist (upright, she was clutching a hank of her hair) was tattooed with a pattern of small dots.

When Hock put his mesh box down, she said, “Like I need another pet.” But she was pleased and smiled at the small sniffing guinea pig.

Stepping inside, barefoot, his foot-sole cushioned by carpets, he could not see much in the candlelit room. Yet through the furry fruitiness of incense and hot wax he could smell the snake — a distinct tang of flaking scales, the sourness of urine and smashed eggshells, a rank odor of earth and warmth.

“I’ve been doing a ton of washing,” the woman said. “Just back from Vermont.”

“The snake’s in a cage, right?”

“Witch Camp,” the woman said. She bent down and put her face against the mesh of the box and clucked loudly at the guinea pig.

“Witch Camp. What did I tell you?” Jerry said, pleased with himself.

“Am I wasting my time?” Hock said. “Where is this bad boy?”

“I was just going to say, the Mud Ritual,” the woman said. “It was insane.”

She had turned and was shuffling in her sandals across the room, to an adjoining room, where parasols hung upside down from the ceiling, the walls draped with scarves and gilt-edged banners and more votive lights.

“In here,” she said.

He saw a glass-sided fish tank against a wall, some sawdust and wood shavings heaped against one end, and a snake inside that he immediately recognized as a rock python. A heavy board served as the lid of the tank. And because this room was not as warm as the first one, the snake lay coiled like a rope on the deck of a ship, its head tucked under its thickest coil.

“ Nsato — Python sebae, ” Hock said.

Jerry said to the woman, “What did I tell you?”

“Jerry told me about him being dangerous. I put him in here just before I went to Vermont.”

“You didn’t leave him any food?”

“He wasn’t interested.” She had taken possession of the mesh box, and now she lifted it and smiled at the guinea pig. “But this little guy looks hungry.”