Paul Theroux - The Lower River

“And myself I rescued you.”

The memory of all that was so painful that Hock cut him short, saying, “How much do you want?”

“Petrol, food, transport,” Manyenga said, beginning to itemize, his way of nagging.

“Let me go,” Hock said. “I’ll send you money.”

“You never will.”

“I promise.”

“Just words. How will we know?”

Manyenga wasn’t sentimental; he wasn’t even pretending to like Hock. He was fierce and toothy, with cold eyes, and he seemed to enjoy reminding Hock that he was a hostage by telling him he was a guest.

“How much?” Hock repeated in a lower voice.

“What is the price of one human life?” Manyenga asked.

What Agency hack had taught him that sentence? Hock had kept some money in his pocket for just such an occasion, so he wouldn’t have to rummage for it in Manyenga’s presence. He took out some folded-over bills and handed them over.

Manyenga did not close his fingers around the money. He let it rest on his open palm.

“See? We are worth nothing,” he said.

As though suspecting that Hock had the advantage, the dwarf crept over to Manyenga and clawed at his trouser leg, setting his head to the side as if he was going to bite him.

Manyenga kicked out at him, and the dwarf tumbled into the dust, honking in protest.

But already Hock was on his feet. He stepped off the veranda and stood so close to Manyenga that his chin was in the man’s face. He was at least six inches taller than Manyenga.

“Don’t you ever do that again,” Hock said, and nudged the man back, bumping him with his chest. At this the dwarf looked up and smiled, showing his broken teeth. “Say sorry.”

Manyenga faced him with reddened eyes.

“Say pepani. ”

Now Snowdon understood and looked pleased.

“ Pepani to you.”

“Now leave us alone,” Hock said.

“Not until I say one thing more, father. Remember this. When your rival stands on an anthill, never say ‘I have caught you’ until you are up there yourself.”

With that, he left, the same determination in his stride that he had on his arrival. And Hock remained among the screaming cicadas in the thin hot air and the dusty trees and the gray sun in a sagging spider web of sky, and the dwarf mewling, all of it like aspects of his futility. He was miserable, but there was grim precision to it, and he took comfort in his condition, knowing that it was true, that it was exact, that he was not being fooled in his suffering.

HE RESENTED BEING captive in this flattened vegetating place, and he had come to hate the idiot wisdom of the proverbs these ragged people subjected him to. I never want to hear another proverb, he thought, or another opinion from someone so obviously doomed. If there was anything true or lasting in the village, it was in their dancing, but like so much else, this authentic expression of the past had become flat-footed. Instead of grieving for himself, he lamented the village that had disappeared utterly, its school buildings fallen, its well gone dry, its spirit vanished; lamented the evaporated essence of a place that he knew from its bitter residue of dust, like the skid of a footprint of someone who had fled for good. Malabo had become an earlier, whittled-down version of itself, recalling a simpler, crueler time, of fetishes and snake doctors and chicken-blood rituals.

The Lower River he’d dreamed of as a happy refuge for almost forty years; the embankment of beached canoes that had been hewn from ancient fat trees; the shaded village of dried mud, of thick-walled huts with cool interiors, and of smooth swept courtyards of strutting cockerels and plump chickens; the dense foliage of low trees like parasols of green; the narrow footpaths, the half-naked women and the men in neatly patched shirts, the coherence of the tidy weeded gardens of millet and sorghum and pumpkins, and the veiled drapery of strung-up fishing nets; and most of all the welcome, the warm greeting that was without suspicion or threat; something golden in the greenery lighted by the river, the warmth that kept him hopeful for all those years — gone, gone.

What he recalled now on these days of recovery after his thwarted escape was his reluctance to leave, all those years ago, the sadness he felt, not because he was going home to be with his ailing father, but at having to uproot himself from a life he had come to love, the school flourishing, the diligent hopeful students, the self-sufficiency of the people in the village. Back in Medford, among the shelves and glass display cases of expensive clothes, he remembered how in Malabo they mended their shirts, the small picked-out stitches, the sewn-up slashes, the new knees on trousers, the thick thready darns on elbows. Nothing was thrown away, nothing wasted. He had smoked a pipe then. The flat empty tobacco cans of the Player’s Navy Cut he bought at Bhagat’s were coveted in the village and became utensils, along with his occasional cup-like cans emptied of Springbok cigarettes. He too wore patched clothes. “My grandfather was a tailor,” he told the man who worked the treadle-powered Singer sewing machine on the veranda of the Malabo grocery shop. He was proud of his patches. People stood straight, worked hard, and were grateful for the smallest kindness. They asked for nothing.

All that had vanished, and what was worse, not even a memory of it remained. The villagers hadn’t been innocent before — there’d been petty thieves in Malabo, and he’d been robbed of a knife, a pen, books, money, an alarm clock, all stolen from his hut or the school. And there had been some bad feeling over his dalliance with Gala, but nothing audible. Now the big trees had been cut down for firewood, and there was no shade in the glary place. The baobab was a stump and a snake nest. The people had seemed unusual to him before, in their gentleness, in the way they had managed the land, their obvious attachment to it. The earth is our mother, a man might say, standing in a furrow with a mattock. They weren’t corrupt now; they were changed, disillusioned, shabby, lazy, dependent, blaming, selfish; they were like most people. You didn’t have to come all this way to be maddened by them. You could meet them almost anywhere.

He could not tell how this had come about. He hardly asked, he didn’t care, and he was disappointed in himself for his indifference. Yet he did not want to care more than they themselves did. He hated their extracting the trickle of money from him, hated the lies they told him, the lies he was telling them.

And now that he’d traveled partway down the river toward Morrumbala, the humpy, steep-sided rock pile of a mountain, and seen the smaller villages and the settlements on the embankment of the wide river, the strange hideout of children, the free-for-all in the open field, the militaristic depot of the charity, L’Agence Anonyme — after this failed escape, an exposure to the hinterland around Malabo, he was more disillusioned than ever. The flourishing Lower River was gone, its very greenness faded like a plucked leaf. He was trapped in a rotting province that he had once known as promising and self-sufficient and proud. He wanted to forget it all, to leave, but they frustrated every attempt he’d made. No one had hurt him, but their sullen stares suggested to him a greater menace. He simply did not know what to do and where to go. He was broken; he was part of the chaos.

Nothing in his life had prepared him for this. Now he remembered a particular day when Roy Junkins came to the store. Roy was thinner, not pale but sallow, yellowish even, his eyes set deeper in loose ashen sockets, as though he’d been ill and was still recovering. When he smiled, Hock saw missing teeth.

Hock was straightening jackets on a display rack, shaking them to free their sleeves. “Royal — haven’t seen you for a while.”