Paul Theroux - The Lower River

“What is it about Blantyre you like?”

Taking a deep reflective breath, Aubrey sighed. He did not reply at once. Hock could see that he was trying to formulate an answer. They sat in the shadows thrown by the lamp, and in the silence some talk carried from across the clearing, and smoke from cooking fires filled the night air with buoyant sparks.

Finally Aubrey said, “The lights.”

He had to repeat it, he spoke so quickly. But later that night, after Aubrey and the boy had left, and Zizi had gone to her hut, and Snowdon had stowed himself away among the litter and the branches behind Zizi’s hut, Hock lay in his cot and said the words to himself, the simplicity, the truth of them, the lights.

Aubrey came before dawn, in the dim light of the thin fading moon. He knew the matter was serious, and he knew how to be covert. He had tapped softly on the screen door. Hock was reassured by Aubrey’s early arrival, by his obliqueness, and especially by his greed.

Hock had prepared his message — the photocopy of his passport page that he always kept handy, showing his picture, his details, with the message he had printed before going to bed: I am seriously compromised and possibly in danger. Please help. This man will lead you to me, and his signature under his printed name.

Folding it small, Hock handed it over with the hundred-dollar bill tucked into it. Aubrey pocketed the pieces of paper, and then he raised his face to Hock’s, looking defiant.

“This is going to cost you a little more,” he said.

Hock had been in the village long enough to expect that. He had the twenty-dollar bill handy, also folded.

As Aubrey palmed it, Hock said, “Don’t let anyone see you.”

UNTIL NOW HE had not dared to hope, because all he’d found here was failure. He’d known the Sena people before they’d become artful, and he wondered if their plotting against him now was something they’d learned from the mzungus at the Agency. Or had they always been artful, and he too beguiled to see it?

He hated to wake each morning in the heat and remember that he was trapped. Yet after all this time the idea of saving himself, being freed from the village, was a mental leap that left him saddened; the very thought made him gloomy, for its futility. In the dust of his confinement the prospect of freedom was so absurd that he seldom left his own courtyard. In the past he had wandered around the village, chatting to people, adding to his word list, looking for signs of snakes. Now he sat under his tree, inhabiting a mirage, blinking away the flies, like other old men in Malabo.

Like the children, too, who never strayed far from their huts and their mothers. In his captivity, his inability to get away from this insignificant village, Hock had become childlike. The feeling had stolen upon him, making him smaller, his avoidance of strangers amounting to a fear he hated to acknowledge. He had come here as a man, with willingness and money, assured of meeting friends and — knowing the people, speaking the language — with a confidence that amounted almost to a sense of superiority. Not racial, it was a complex sympathy, the suave generosity masked as the humility of a passerby pressing a fifty into the hand of a beggar at Christmas, knowing that it would make a difference, and pausing a moment to hear, “Bless you, sir.” He had meant well, but that conceit had made him the beggar. He had become reduced; he was a child now, sitting in the shade. And during that time, as he’d become smaller, Zizi had proven herself stronger, almost motherly, someone he trusted and needed, who looked after him, someone older, wiser. He wanted to thank her but could not find the words, and she would have been startled to hear I would be lost without you.

He stayed near his hut because lately, when he had taken a walk in the village or out to the road, small children — some skinny and potbellied, others cadaver thin, all wearing castoff T-shirts — had followed him and, laughing, had thrown small stones at him, or darting closer tried to hit him with dried maize cobs or the large blown-open fruit from the sausage tree. He tried not to be angry — anger was not a source of strength here but something that could be dangerous. He cautioned himself to take care.

After Aubrey had left, backing out of the hazy shadows of early-morning darkness, Zizi’s mood changed. She became unusually silent, which Hock took to be sullen resentment, seeing Aubrey pocketing the money. Hock approached her and put his arms around her, to comfort her.

“My friend,” he said.

She stiffened, her body like a bundle of sticks wrapped in loose cloth.

Instead of saying more, Hock let a day pass. Zizi brought him his meals as usual, with tea; she had her own cooking fire now, and no longer depended on food from Manyenga’s compound. She pounded maize, she spread the flour to bleach on the big mat, and by now she had several fat bags of flour she’d made, stored on the veranda of her small hut in the proud manner of Malabo women, visible proof of their hard work and their homemaking.

Seeing that she was unresponsive, Hock said, “That man Aubrey, do you like him?”

Zizi said nothing, but sniffed a little, which he took to mean no. She was holding a bucket of plates in soapy water, from the meal, which she intended to wash.

Assuming she had spoken the word, Hock said, “Why not?”

Zizi made her reluctant face, nibbling her lips, twisting her mouth, then said, “He is not afraid of you.”

Burdened by the heavy bucket, taking short steps, her shoulders wagging as she shuffled, she walked away, the plates knocking and gulping in the water. With the bucket bumping against her leg she seemed slow and careworn, like a little old woman — skinny body, big feet. But when she swung the bucket up and hoisted it on top of her head and she straightened, balancing it, she became tall, erect, poised, and Hock desired her again. But it was futile desire. She was the only friend he had; he couldn’t risk changing that friendship to anything else, nor did he have the right.

Normally, Snowdon would have chased her and watched her do the dishes. But he sat near Hock with his stumpy forefinger in his mouth, gaping at him, perhaps smiling, perhaps wincing because of the strong glare.

When Zizi returned, Hock said, “Maybe it’s true. Maybe he’s not afraid of me.”

“It is true,” she said.

“What about you?”

Zizi folded her arms as if to defy him, and seemed haughty with her head lifted.

“Are you afraid of me?”

She said, “Now I am.”

“Why?”

She mumbled some words. He heard the word for rat. He asked her to repeat it. She gave him part of a Sena proverb he recognized: Koswe wapazala— the fleeing rat…

“The fleeing rat exposes all the others,” he said. “That’s what you think of him?”

She crouched near the dwarf and made that face again, twisting her mouth like a reluctant child, screwing up one eye.

That was another reason his desire was dampened: she was not a child, but she could seem childlike. She was still whole, as Aubrey had slyly intimated — locked, kept from her initiation. Still innocent: Hock couldn’t take that from her. In the village it mattered more than anything. Her virginity was a form of wealth, the value of her bride price, her pride, her only possession.

The day was hot, and the fact that Aubrey had already set off for Blantyre helped raise Hock’s hopes. If Aubrey succeeded, he might not be in Malabo much longer, but Hock quickly dismissed this forbidden thought. It was still early. How to give a point to the day was always a problem. The days in Malabo were shapeless and empty, and he felt assaulted by them — the emptiness, the screech of the cicadas, the squealing of bats; the days were idiots.