Paul Theroux - The Lower River

Go into the hut and wash, he could have said. She would have done it. She would have turned away and allowed him to see her. She was shy, but she was willing — too willing; he couldn’t ask.

Yet she always seemed to be obliquely testing him with questions, even asking, “Is there anything else you want?” or in a single word, “ Mbiri? ”—More?

Hock shook his head and wondered if perhaps he was saying no because there was more power in his resisting her, that his rebuffing her gave him greater authority. But it was simpler than that, and obvious. He was a man in his sixties, a very old man for Malabo. He wanted only to be her benefactor, but the Lower River was a district without remedies.

“She respects you, father,” Manyenga said when he wandered over one day and saw Hock seated between Zizi kneeling and the dwarf squatting in the shade.

Manyenga knew Hock was being uncooperative. As a pretext for the visit — so it seemed — he had brought an old stumbling man, whom he led by one arm. The man held his face upturned in an attitude of listening. He stroked the air with his free hand.

“He is blind,” Manyenga said. “He said he wanted to meet our guest. He has heard about Mister Ellis.”

Hock asked the man his name, but it was Manyenga who answered, “He is Wellington Mwali, from an important family. But he cannot see, so he has no big position.”

The man mumbled to Manyenga.

“He wants to shake your hand.”

Hock reached for the man’s inquiring hand, and shook it, but the man did not let go. He spoke again to Manyenga.

“He says that he knows you are a friend to the snakes. He wants to tell you a story about them.”

“I’d like to hear it.”

“He is a storyteller,” Manyenga said. “That is his position.”

The man seemed to understand what was being said. He smiled with pride and spoke again in his feeble voice.

“He is tired now. He says some other time. But he is clever”—the old man was still speaking softly in a language or a dialect that Hock could not understand—“he knows there are other people, this little man, and this lovely lady.”

“She’s just a girl,” Hock said.

“Girls are better. You can take her as a wife. You can have any woman in this village. You can have anything.”

“No lobola, ” Hock said, meaning bride price, because it was the man who paid the dowry in the Lower River.

“You have plenty.”

“I’ve given most of it to you,” Hock said. “And I don’t eat children.”

But Manyenga wasn’t rebuffed. He said, “She is old enough. She can bear you a child. She is making white flour for you!”

Zizi knew she was the subject of this talk. She raised her head, narrowed her eyes, and breathed deeply, and hearing her, the old blind man reached to touch her. She pushed his hand away, and he laughed. He kept laughing softly as Manyenga led him across the clearing.

Zizi still brought news to Hock — talk, the rumors of illness, the whisper that Manyenga’s motorbike was broken, or that a dance would be held. Hock asked about Gala. Zizi said she didn’t know anything, but later she had a story.

Gala was so sad, maybe disappointed. She had been happy to hear through a rumor that Hock had gotten away on the river, even if her heart was sore. But the news that he had been captured made her sad again. The reason was that she had warned him of dangers. And someone — maybe the laundry woman was to blame — had heard and told Festus Manyenga. They went to her house, some boys. They scolded Gala for warning him. They said they would beat her if she was cheeky again. She must not speak to Hock, ever. That was the story, much as she told it.

“I can talk to her,” Hock said. “They can’t hurt me.”

“But Gala, they can hurt her,” Zizi said. “She is very old.”

Younger than me, he thought. But he stayed away. And in her role as his protector, Zizi seemed unusually responsive; resourceful, too, revealing an intelligence and subtlety he had not seen before.

A few days after this conversation, she brought him news that a boy had returned to the village from Blantyre, where he lived, one of Manyenga’s family, a brother — but everyone was a brother.

“What is he doing in Blantyre?”

“Schooling,” Zizi said in English, and again, “Or wucking.”

“I want to see him.”

Zizi took the message to Manyenga — it would have been against protocol for her to go to the boy directly. And it was an indication of how eager Manyenga was to please Hock that the boy visited within a few hours. It seemed that he was prepared to agree with anything that Hock asked, except the only important one, his release. Let me go, he wanted to say again, but he knew what the answer would be. He would not sit and be defied, or lied to, or jeered at, so he didn’t ask. In everything else, he was obeyed. Manyenga had said, You can have any woman in this village.

His name was Aubrey, and he was not a boy — twenty or so — but had the thin careworn face of someone even older. Although it was nearing dusk when he arrived at Hock’s hut, he wore sunglasses. They were new, and there was something menacing in their stylishness. His short-sleeved shirt was new, not one from the secondhand pile at the market, the castoffs from America they called salaula, their word for rummaging. His trousers, too, looked new, and when he saw that Hock was studying them, he offered the information that they were from Europe, a present. He had the slight build and small head and short legs that Hock was used to seeing in the Sena, but he was more confident, somewhat restless, shifting on the stool that Hock offered him, the bamboo one with squeaky legs.

Aubrey had a way of holding his head down at an odd butting angle, with his mouth half open, as though anticipating combat. Just behind his lips, the inside of his mouth was pink. The parted mouth made him seem both hungry and impatient, breathing hard, and for a reason Hock could not explain, the open mouth seemed satirical, too, as if Aubrey was on the point of laughing.

“How old are you?”

“Funny question,” Aubrey said.

“Just a normal question.”

“Twenty-two,” he said, and jerked in his chair, revealing a cell phone in a holster at his belt.

“I want to make a call on your phone,” Hock said.

Now the mouth parted a bit more as Aubrey laughed. “No coverage here. This is the boonies.”

From the first he seemed to have an American accent, an affected one, something slurring and nasal in his delivery, a deliberate carelessness, a gratuitous rapidity. And boonies?

“Where’d you pick that up?”

“My English teacher was an American guy. Malawi’s full of Americans. Look at you. What are you doing here?”

“Funny question,” Hock said.

“Hey, just a normal question. But I know the answer. Americans like coming to the bush. Even big celebrities and rich people. They’re in Monkey Bay, Mzuzu, on the lake. Karonga, and up on the plateau.”

“How do you know that?”

“I see them. My job takes me around.”

“I thought you were a student.”

“I dropped out. It was a waste of time. And it’s a laugh what teachers earn here. I’m in community relations for the Agency.”

“L’Agence Anonyme, that one?”

“Yeah. The chief got me the job. He was a driver for them.”

“But he quit — or was he fired?”

“You have to ask him, bwana.”

Aubrey was quick, his English excellent, yet he seemed winded by the back-and-forth. As if from the effort of his replies, he perspired heavily, rare for a Sena man under a tree at dusk.

“How long are you going to be here in Malabo?”