Paul Theroux - The Lower River

“I’m day-to-day,” Aubrey said.

No one spoke English well in Malabo. Manyenga’s was generally correct and idiomatic, but his accent made it hard for Hock to understand him at times. This fellow Aubrey spoke English in a way that made him hard to fathom. He was a little too well spoken, evasive, quick to deflect, so fluent as to sound glib.

“Maybe I’ll see a bit more of you.”

Aubrey said, “Whatever.”

“Community relations sounds important.”

“Not really. Mzungus get afraid in the villages. I run interference,” Aubrey said. “Sometimes damage control.”

Hock nodded, at first impressed by the deft replies, then put on guard by the casual jargon that had worried him with Manyenga.

“The Agency is mostly Europeans. They think we are dirty and dangerous.” Aubrey laughed. “Some of the villages are dirty, but they’re not dangerous. They love the food drops.”

“What’s a food drop?”

“Chopper flies into a prearranged site and unloads.”

“On the Lower River?” Hock asked, pretending ignorance.

“All over.”

“I’d like to see it sometime.”

“It’s usually a zoo.”

“Why is that?”

“Free food. Hungry people. Do the math.” Now Hock began to hate him, but before he could say anything more, Aubrey looked at his watch, which hung loosely, like a roomy bracelet, on his thin wrist, and said, “I gotta go. Maybe catch you later.”

THE DAYS BURNED BY, and on some smoldering late afternoons of suffocating aimlessness he felt that if he had a gun, he’d march Festus Manyenga to the creek and, in front of the whole gaping village, riddle him with bullets, then kick his bleeding corpse into the water. He sat on his slanting veranda, imagining this horror, sometimes smiling. Even in the times when they were talking — friendly enough, “We are liking you, father,” “I’m glad I came back,” all that — he wanted to twist a viper around the man’s neck and watch the hammer stroke of the fanged mouth against his terrified face.

Hock had, as well, an image of himself holding a cloth bag, like one of the food bags from the Agency that bulged with rice or flour, saying, “Money, take it,” and watching Manyenga reach into the bag that held — money, yes, but also a knot of venomous snakes. See how their wrist scars of snake medicine worked then.

He was ashamed of his smile and tried to stifle these thoughts — they were desperate, unworthy of him. But not having the strength to attempt another escape made him feel feeble. And though he tried to consider the villagers indulgently, he didn’t trust them. None had helped him; they knew he was helpless, and they were especially cruel to the weak.

Yet Aubrey, fresh from Blantyre, connected to the Agency, was someone from the outer world, moving easily in his new shoes from that world to the village and back; someone who might help him. Manyenga could be enigmatic in his demands — he was superstitious, irrational, excitable, oblique, a villager — but Aubrey, with his smart-guy English and his worldly sarcasm, was different. He was greedy, he was knowable.

“The boy who came yesterday,” Hock said to Zizi the next afternoon as she raked the flour into soft, salt-white heaps on the mat.

“With the shoes, with the watch, with the red eyes”—she had seen him clearly.

“Tell him I want to talk to him.”

Zizi flashed a twitch of understanding with her eyebrows. Adult and conspiratorial, this time she would not go to the chief first. She was Hock’s ally.

“But whisper.”

It was another of the English words she knew. “I weespa.”

Hock thought, I am going to miss you.

“Tomorrow,” she said.

“Better tonight.”

“He is not staying at Malabo.”

“Yes?”

“But at Lutwe. Pafoopi. ”

“How near?”

Zizi twisted her lips in vexation, implying not near, an inexact immeasurable distance.

“Is this a problem?”

“Night,” she said.

Hock stared at her with the suggestion of a smile.

“Night is a problem,” she said, using another word for problem, mabvuto, serious trouble.

Now Hock was frankly smiling, challenging her.

“Night is dangerous,” and she used a more severe word, kufa, which meant death.

“Because of”—Hock tried to think of the word for monsters; all he could remember was large beasts. “ Zirombo, ” he said. “ Zirombo zambiri ”—lots of beasts.

Zizi frowned, suspecting she was being teased, but she didn’t relent, because she was certain.

“Man,” she said, another English word she knew. She made a face and clutched her body. “And boy.”

“Beasts with two legs,” Hock said in Sena, to lighten the mood. She seemed so glum, and was probably tired, too, from raking and piling the new flour.

“Men,” she said, “wanting women.”

“You could take a torch with you. My big torch.”

“That is worse,” she said in her own language. “With a torch I would be seen.”

He was fascinated by her disclosing her fears, she who never hesitated to help him. He was touched by her seriousness, standing before him, shaven-headed, in her flimsy cloth and bare feet. She was actually resisting him for the first time, trying to explain something to him that mattered to her. The instinctive reluctance of Sena people to go out at night was something he’d always known. Animals prowled at night: crocs crept out of the shallows onto the embankments and into the nearby bush, looking for the carcasses of abandoned kills; hippos browsed in the tall grass after dark; hyenas loped along in packs and grunted and dug in the garbage piles at the edge of Malabo, fighting over bones. Some people spoke of snakes at night, though Hock knew that snakes seldom lurked in the dark, never hunted at that time, even the boomslangs remained in tree branches, never dropping at night.

“Hippos. Hyenas.”

Zizi clicked her tongue against her teeth, emphatically no.

“ Mfiti. ” Spirits.

Zizi wrinkled her nose in annoyance.

“Just men?”

“Man.” She said the word without any lightness, and showed her teeth, as though she was naming a species of vicious animal.

“What do they want?” he asked.

She stared at him, impatient, as though thinking, Why these ignorant questions?

“They want,” she said, “what all men want.”

But he said, “You can ask the boy in the day. Tell him I want to see him at night.”

So it was another day before Zizi set out for Lutwe, going a roundabout way so she would not be seen, to find Aubrey, to whisper to him that the mzungu wanted to see him in the dark.

Aubrey returned after nightfall the day that Zizi delivered the message. He arrived suddenly, stepping into Hock’s compound with another boy — younger, who didn’t appear to speak any English, who knelt before Hock’s hut near the dwarf, looking nervous, the dwarf grinning at him, mouthing in spittle his mutter, “Fee-dee-dom.”

Aubrey stood aside, just out of the lantern light, scarcely visible.

Two things disturbed Hock about this second visit. One was the way Aubrey sauntered across the clearing, his hands in his pants pockets. He did not observe the customary greeting, calling out, “ Odi, odi, ” and clapping his hands as an announcement, asking permission to enter the compound. This was rude, and uncommon — Manyenga himself usually said “ Odi, ” though often in a satirical tone. Hock was keenly aware of the niceties, wary when they were flouted, like the boys in the village of children who had called him mzungu to his face. “Hey, white man” was pure insolence.