Paul Theroux - The Lower River

“Been away,” the man said, and looked sheepish, because it seemed there was no more to say. And there was a gentle laugh he had, of self-deprecation.

“You feeling all right?”

“I’m Kool Moe Dee,” Roy said, one of his formulas. “I am back in the world. Heh.”

A note in his voice, of relief, suggested that a story of struggle lay behind his sudden good humor.

“You been far?”

“Very far, Ellis.” That laugh again. “Concord.”

Hock smiled at the absurdity of it — Concord wasn’t far. And then it hit him: Concord Prison.

“Why didn’t you get in touch?”

“I needed time to think about how I ended up there,” Roy said. “Not a thing you coulda done to help me. My sister visited. But the headline about being inside is, you are on your own.”

And then, in a matter-of-fact way, Roy told Hock the details, how from the first he had been picked on in prison, his dinner plate snatched from in front of him, and he’d had to fight to defend himself. He’d been hit in the face by a man (“white dude”) swinging a sock with a lump of metal inside, a steel padlock perhaps. “And that’s how I lost my grille”—his teeth missing. He’d been intermittently bullied after that, but in time had found a degree of protection with a black faction in the prison. “Imagine — me!”—because Roy had always taken pride in distancing himself from any cause, rejoicing in being a loner. “But the brothers helped me,” he said, shaking his head at the memory of it. “They were good.”

His stories were of confinement, insecurity, threat, and intimidation. He’d been hurt, he’d been robbed, his cell ransacked. Younger, weaker, fearful inmates were raped.

“You couldn’t tell the guards or — what? — the warden?”

“Guards don’t run prisons,” he said in his growly comic voice. “Prisoners run prisons. They make the rules. And they got some hard rules. If you snitch, you die. And you learn a few other things.”

“Like what?”

“Learn to say ‘sir.’ Heh.”

“How long were you inside?”

“Almost a year.” Then, rubbing his hands and moving sideways to a display case, he said, in a subject-changing tone, “Show me some shirts, man. Something fine.”

He never told Hock what the conviction was for: a year — probably drugs, a small amount. But the details stayed with Hock, the stories of being bullied, the extortion, the threats, his being alone, confined, under siege.

Malabo was a prison now, and the only strength that Hock had was bluff. Why did he not feel self-pity? He grieved for the vanished village, as Gala had done, and he thought of Chicky, but not as the selfish young woman who had demanded her share of his settlement, on the granting of his divorce, saying, “If I don’t get it now, I’ll never see it.”

Chicky at her smallest and sweetest was the face he saw: at her most unsuspecting, the way she laughed, her chattering in a big chair, her bluish lighted face in front of the TV set, laughing at something silly. And to please him once — because he’d begun to smile — she lip-synched to a reggae song, hunched her shoulders and mouthed the words to “Dem Get Me Mad,” and told him the singer was someone called Yellow Man. One day, missing her, he’d leafed through her school notebook and found, in her scrawl, I want to be cool, and had to fight back tears. Another time, he watched her through a crack in the door to her room, putting on lipstick — she couldn’t have been more than eight or nine. The little neat bundle of bus tickets, held by a rubber band — what urgency in her heart had made her save them? On a walk in the Fells, she was probably twelve, she saw a robin and said, “ Turdus migratorius, ” and blinked and pressed her lips in a kind of mild pedantry. On the same walk, pleased with herself, she took his hand and said, “When I grow up I want to live in a little cottage.”

She hadn’t been a lonely child. She’d been confident enough. But he’d seen her in the purity and blindness of her innocence. She did not know what was coming, the blight, the cynicism, the disappointment, and then her marriage, which was for him a sorry giveaway; and at last as a young woman she demanded money from him, and that poisoned everything. He needed to remember that she had once been blameless. He grieved for that child.

There was no consolation for him in the thought “Everything happens for the best,” because that was general and his misery was particular. Hock did not dare to consider his own plight. The thing was to become strong again. Oppressed by the heat, the bad food, and his futile escape attempt, he was dazed, sensing that he might be dehydrated. He knew the symptoms, and he had them — headaches, lassitude, muscle aches, and sometimes he could barely speak.

Zizi was unchanged. She was like Gala, whom he had known all those years ago: uneducated, but just as strong, like the original women of the Sena. She gave him hope. In his weakened condition, Zizi acted for him, brought him the hot kettle for tea, and filled the basin so he could wash. Since arriving back from his weeklong escape, he’d stopped eating at Manyenga’s, or even visiting, as an act of rebellion. Zizi brought him food. Though he offered to share it, she refused. She squatted with the dwarf, watching him eat, waiting for another order. She saw to the washing and ironing of his clothes, and the ironing was something he insisted on, because of the eggs of the putzi flies. He’d been through that before. Zizi was patient, obedient, observing him with large dark eyes, her knees drawn up, her chin resting on them, and wrapped in her purple chitenje cloth. While he’d been away, thinking he’d gone for good, she had mourned him in the traditional way, by letting her hair grow — only a week, but it showed. On his return, she shaved her head and held it proudly erect.

A few days after he returned, Hock woke at first light to hear a familiar thumping outside his hut, the thud-thud of a pestle dropped into a wooden mortar. He saw that Zizi was crushing maize into flour, standing under the tree, the air heavy with the static heat of morning stillness. She hugged the heavy pestle, lifted it, and let it drop, and as it did, her head jerked from the effort, her whole body falling back. Her face and head gleamed; she was never blacker than when she was sweating. She lifted her shoulders and, taking a deep breath, saw Hock at the window and smiled, then shyly covered her mouth.

Later that day, he saw that Zizi had spread a large mat on the ground in the sunniest part of the courtyard and scattered the newly pounded flour on it, to bleach in the bright light. In Malabo there was an informal competition among the women to make the whitest flour. From the veranda, he saw Zizi on her hands and knees sweeping the flour, turning it on the mat with a paddle, and his heart ached.

He could have said, he knew, “Go into the hut. Take your chitenje off. Get into the bed and wait for me.” She had obeyed him without a word the morning of his escape, crawling into the bed. He could have summoned her into the hut at any hour of the day or night.

But because of this power and of her obedience, because he could demand and receive anything from her, whatever he wanted, he didn’t ask. He only watched: Zizi’s bones, her skinny legs, her big feet, her full lips and shining eyes, the glimpses of her small breasts, the way she stood at times like a heron, on one leg. His wish was to see her crossing the stream to bathe, as he’d done on his first day, the way she danced, stepping deeper and deeper into the water, lifting her cloth higher against her legs. He wanted to stand behind the mango tree at the embankment and watch her strip naked, soaping herself, her black skin gleaming with creamy bubbles. But someone would see him.