Paul Theroux - The Lower River

She turned away and hung her cloth on the window, to serve as a curtain, and when she faced him again, with light on her body, Hock could see that she was white from head to toe, and looking closer, he understood. She was dusted in white flour. She had stepped outside and rolled herself naked on the mat of maize flour that she herself had pounded and spread to bleach in the sun. She had sprinkled the flour on her head, rubbed it on her face, her breasts, her whole body.

Some dancers whitened their faces with flour, some women sprinkled flour on themselves in order to achieve trance states, believing the spirit would come to inhabit this suitably decorated body. But Hock had never seen or heard of any woman this way, coated in white flour, with smooth powdered skin.

Thus arrayed, entirely whitened in flour, she danced for him. Her body was so thin it seemed incomplete, unfinished, yet her nakedness was softened and made sculptural with the dusting of white.

Untwining her fingers, lifting her hands, bending slightly, she parted her legs, then raised one knee and then the other, rolling her head — all the time looking aside, meeting his gaze only in the mirror. She planted her feet lightly, as she’d done at the feast. She had slender arms, spindly legs, and small staring breasts; her eyes gleamed with anxiety. As she danced, humming softly, stepping forward then back, raising her arms, she shook the grains of flour from her body. They dropped to the floor, and stepping in the flour, she left a pattern of dusted footprints.

Lying on his cot, glancing from the mirror to Zizi and back again, without moving, almost unable to breathe, Hock lay watching her whitened form. He ached with desire. He had never known such an agony of pleasure as this simple performance, the slow ghost dance, the powdered legs rising and falling, her head twisting on her long agile neck, the grains of flour sifting to the floor as she danced.

***

Someone must have seen. It took only one person to see, for everyone to know. She had been reckless: she’d gone outside and rolled on the mat of flour in front of her hut, near the mortar. She’d taken the risk to please him; in his wildest fantasies he would not have thought of her doing that, and if he had, he would not have dared to ask her. But once she had started, he could not bear the thought of her stopping. And when, after a long while, she found herself dancing in darkness, she giggled a little and snatched her wrap from the window and ran out of the hut.

He had not gone near her, only watched. The flour was a barrier — perhaps she knew that. Dusted that way, she was untouchable.

Soon afterward, the whole village seemed to know what happened. And that incident, an example of his weakness — resentment, boredom, a pang of desperation — had the effect of convincing the village that he meant to stay, that he’d found a way of being happy, that at last Zizi had devised a strategy to satisfy him, perhaps to please him. Was it considered odd in Malabo that Zizi had coated herself in flour to dance for him? Perhaps not. And it was not unknown for a woman to dance with a whitened face. To do so naked was simply taking it to the extreme. It had worked; it had cost nothing; and the mzungu was satisfied. They could not have known his true feeling, that he had watched her with inexpressible delight.

But they knew he was beguiled. A man with brown blotches on the whites of his eyes, a cousin to Manyenga (he said brother, but brother was a general term), came to him and said he wanted to buy a motorbike. He did not mention money; that was understood.

“And what will you do for me?” Hock said.

“Zizi will dance for you, sure.” The man stared at him, a smile in his spotted eyes, and he said no more.

Hock handed him some money, saying, “But I want a ride on your bike to the boma.”

“I will give you, father.”

Hock was ashamed. He wondered if money alone was sufficient atonement for his lapse of judgment. But he also knew it was a setup. And he longed for Zizi to perform her ghost dance again, but secretly, so that no one would see.

Manyenga visited after that. Hock told him of the man who claimed to be his brother.

“He will eat the money. He will drink the money,” Manyenga said. And then he asked for another loan.

They knew how much he had. They’d stolen some; they could take the rest at any time.

But as a way of jeering at him, Hock said, “Remember the law of diminishing returns?”

The day of Manyenga’s visit, Hock set off across the compound with Zizi and Snowdon. He heard the warning whistle, and ignoring it, still walking, the whistle became more insistent, drowning out all other sounds, even the shrillness of the birds. Some of the older boys followed him, keeping just behind him. Hock walked in an almost stately way, holding a basket to his chest. It was the basket in which he kept his money with the snake.

At the creek bank, he stooped and released the snake onto the hot sand, but before the snake could gather itself and slip away, Hock pinned it with a forked stick and let it thrash, whipping a pattern into the swale of sand with its thickened body. The village saw him bearing the empty basket from the creek and across the clearing to his hut, Zizi and the dwarf following him in a shuffling procession. The snake, a puff adder, was not especially venomous, but to Malabo it was deadly. They would know it was safe to steal from him again, and when the money was gone they’d release him.

After that, they didn’t whistle in the same way after he left his hut — it wasn’t the rising note of urgency that became shriller; it was a softer note, like birdsong, just a signaling tweet. And he knew why.

He walked to the ruined school, looked in on the orphan boys in their lair at the old school office. He went to the clinic and the creek bank, or to the graveyard near the mango tree, where no one ever went because of the azimu, the malicious spirits of the dead, that were invisibly twisted in the air there — Zizi and the dwarf hung back, crouching at a distance, as he sat in the shade of the tree, unapproachable, among the tumbled piles of burial stones.

And whenever he returned to his hut, almost without fail some money was missing from the basket where he’d kept the snake.

During this week — the week of the separate raids on his stash of money — he fell ill again. This time it came quickly, wrenching him sideways. It hit him as he was walking back from the ruined school, first a dizziness, then an aching throat and pain behind his eyes, a soreness in his limp muscles, and an urgent thirst.

He wondered whether it was the return of his malaria, or dehydration. He sat down on the bare ground and pressed his eyes. He could not walk any farther. He called for water, though he knew he might be past the point of being able to absorb any liquid.

“Water with salt,” he murmured to Zizi, and remembered mchere. But she smiled at the word and seemed too bewildered to move. “And sugar.”

Women carrying babies in cloth slings on their way home from hoeing weeds in the pumpkin fields stopped and watched him, more out of curiosity than pity, as he clutched his head.

“ Mzungu, ” he heard them whisper. And, “Sick.”

What happened to “chief”? They surrounded him as they would have a dog in distress, or any dying creature, and therefore a diversion and not a threat.

Snowdon was near him. Hock saw him from between his numbed fingers, creeping close.

“Water,” Hock said, and repeated it in Sena.

The dwarf scuttled away on his wounded feet, and was soon back, approaching Hock with an enamel cup. But leaning over, he stumbled and lost it. The women laughed and clapped, excited by the spectacle, the slumped man, the patch of dampened dust, the dirty cup, the dwarf on his knees.