Paul Theroux - The Lower River

On the footpath through the tall grass, Hock picked his way in the half-dark of the cloud glow, parting the moonlit blades of grass.

“Why do you hate me?” Manyenga asked.

Hock said nothing, but Manyenga was aggrieved, or pretending to be, slashing at the grass with his bush knife.

“I have been protecting you!”

Swishing through the grass, Hock said in a small defeated voice, “I want to go.”

“You are so ungrateful,” Manyenga said. “And you are ignorant, too.”

The night was peaceful, not cool, though the heat was softened by the darkness. Hock knew without seeing any huts that they were at the perimeter of the village — he could smell the mud huts, the dead cooking fires, the human odors, old food, dead skin, dusty faces, sour feet, the stink of latrines.

“He was kidnapping you,” Manyenga said. “These people are thieves. He is a thief. I know this boy Aubrey. His father is my cousin. They think they are powerful. They work for the Agency. You don’t know!”

“How do you know so much?”

“That small boy told me everything. He knows the secrets. He was so angry. He said, ‘The mzungu gave me nothing.’”

“I should have given him something. Then I’d be free.”

“No, bwana. Don’t you see what they were going to do with you?”

“What were they going to do with me?”

Manyenga didn’t answer. Instead, he said loudly, “You are our chief, dear father.”

The talk had woken the roosters, which began to crow, unseen in the darkness. Across the clearing Hock could see a flashlight, and a length of its yellow beam wagging, coming closer, maybe Zizi.

ALL DAY LONG in Malabo the heat sank lower, darting its tongue at him, licking at his head, swelling, growing heavier, dropping over him, creeping closer as the day ran on, encircling him. Often there was no sky at all, nothing that matched the word, the sun just a ragged patch of muted light in a threadbare blanket overfolded above him, no blue anywhere, nothing but the fuzzy canopy of gray over the colorless village. The dimmer the sun got, the hotter it was, squeezing his eyelids shut, offering dancing mirages, like sprites flitting across his closed eyes. The heaviness stifled the last of his energy, and he thought, Never mind, and decided to stay in his chair. The heat turned him into someone else, someone he hardly knew, and in a voice he hardly recognized, he called out to Zizi for a drink.

That was probably how everyone here always felt, the reason so little happened. He did not despair at the lack of effort; he was astonished that anything was accomplished at all. Another escape attempt had been a failure, and with each successive failure he became smaller, emptier, narrower, feeling slowly devoured and different. They will eat your money and then they will eat you.

You come with money to the poor, and they are so frenzied by hunger that all they see is the money. They never see your face, and so when the money is gone, you are revealed as mere flesh: a surprise. They don’t know you. Who can you be?

Manyenga, believing he was a virtuoso, never understanding how barefaced he was, came back again for money. Hock hesitated at first, but gave him some so the man would listen to him.

“I was once a businessman,” Hock said.

“That means you are lucky, like an Indian.”

“That means I understand the law of diminishing returns,” Hock said. “That’s the only law that operates here.”

Manyenga smiled and cocked his head, as though he’d heard a phrase of music. Then he folded the money into his pocket, saying, “Thank you, father.”

He was mocked by the memory of the grateful man he’d been on the first day. And he saw he was changed, a different man, not bitter but sad, and more accepting. He was exhausted by his failed escapes, and the malaria from weeks back had not completely left him. A residue of tainted blood remained in his veins, bringing him down again, with symptoms like the flu: fever and muscle aches and weakness and no appetite. He felt a lassitude from the heat, from his disturbed sleep, from his being continually thwarted. He was unsteady on his feet, and the surprise to him was not that he despaired of his captivity, but that he was often in his smallness absurdly grateful to be waited on.

“Make hot water — tea,” he called again to Zizi.

He had always thought of himself as strong for his age, still willing — hadn’t this strength taken him back to Africa? But for the first time in his life he had an intimation of old age. These days in Malabo he felt like a fossil, like Norman Fogwill in Blantyre, or like those toothless elders — younger than he was — gabbing under the tree at Marka village by the river. He was weary, with a shaky hand, and he smiled to think of Manyenga’s plot to tempt him with a teenage girl. Zizi, his only friend!

Yet he was resentful, and some days after “You are our chief, dear father,” he grew sullen, knowing that this flattery was no more than an elaborate insult, Festus Manyenga trapping him with lies. He was in his hut, unable to stand the pressure of the heat on his body and the way the heated air raised the stinks of the village. He lay in his string bed, his mouth half open, breathing slowly. He was dazed, groggy from the heat.

Someone knocked, then he heard two handclaps, and Zizi’s voice, her soft singsong inquiry, “ Odi? ”

She entered, padded to the side table. The mirror shook as she set the cup of tea down.

Lying on his side, too tired to move, he was studying her reflection in the mirror. He spoke to the mirror. “I want to see you.”

Bewilderment showed on her pinched girl’s face for a moment, which gave way to a half-smile, almost womanish, as if she was quietly pleased he was asking something of her.

“Yes, father.”

“Take off your chitenje. ”

She drew in her lips and bit down on them, vexed, her face compressed in thought. Hock made a spiraling gesture with his finger that meant “unwrap.”

Zizi hesitated, and then, as though remembering, became calmer, turned away, and unknotted her cloth. She draped it over the chair back and faced him again, her hands clasped below her waist for the sake of modesty.

Still watching her in the mirror, Hock said, “Dance.”

She didn’t move, she simply blinked at the command, uvina.

“Dance,” he said, pleading.

It was late afternoon, the hottest time of day, the afternoon sun like a gray coal glowing in the glare of a smothering fattened cloud, slanting through the windows of the hut, the heat trapped in the motionless air under the tin roof. Zizi was perspiring, looking confused, hesitating on the uneven boards of the hut floor.

Picking up her cloth, she wrapped it loosely around her hips and left the hut, her feet thumping on the veranda planks and then on the steps as she fled.

I have lost her, Hock thought. He pressed his feverish head, tried to ease his burning eyes by massaging them with his fingers. As soon as he’d made the suggestion, he knew it had been a mistake. She was a girl, devoted to him — but a girl. And it was a great mistake because he had no other friend in Malabo. He rationalized what he’d said by telling himself that he was in despair. He had not embraced the village, but had decided to do just that, wishing to lift his spirits, by asking Zizi to dance for him, the only sweetness that Malabo was capable of offering him. But it was selfish and ill-timed. I have gone too far.

He heard the thump of feet on the loose planks of the veranda, the door opening and closing quickly, a gasp of effort, the small crooked bolt shot. Zizi stood in the hut, against the afternoon sun at the window. He could not see her face, only the outline of her long skinny body in silhouette, no features, no face, only darkness defined by the glare from outside.