Paul Theroux - The Lower River

Again Hock remembered her reply when he had asked her teasingly what it was that the men in the darkness want.

They want what all men want, she had said, and the memory shamed him. She was wiser than he, and now she looked at him, standing still, the only movement in her body the dark light in her eyes, her eyelashes dusted white.

Then she curtseyed with a formality that moved him, as though beginning not a village dance but a ballet, and this time she was calmer, her dance more graceful and measured than before.

She came to life in the dance, and was transformed, no longer the village girl with the kettle and the bowl of porridge, but a woman the shape of slender, spirit-like scissors, suspended in air, the suggestion of a trance in her whitened face and wild eyes.

The light of the lantern brightened the dusting of flour and gave her a new body, with subtle curves and shadows. After a series of small jumping and turning steps, she stood tall, rising on the balls of her feet, presenting herself to him. She marked out a semicircle on the floor with her whitened pointed foot, then slid her foot along the floor with her front knee bent, performed a full knee bend, with her heels off the floor, and kept her slender arms upraised, and in the course of the soundless dance shook the flour from her body and let the powder sift to the floorboards of the hut, each dance step a white footprint.

HOCK HAD ONCE tried to imagine a day like this, but hadn’t been able to understand how to achieve it. And now the day had arrived: no money in the snake basket, none in his wallet, his pockets empty. He was unburdened. He saw that arriving in Malabo with a bag of money had been his first, and most grievous, mistake; handing the money out, another. Long ago, as a teacher, he’d had nothing, and was invisible for having nothing. He should have come this time with nothing — nothing to steal, nothing to tempt or distract them, as a visiting bystander, detached, on the periphery where foreigners belonged, with only the clothes he stood up in and a ticket home. But he had become involved, entangled, and trapped.

Zizi’s dancing, dusted in flour, was his only pleasure, but a chaste one — the powder was like armor. He didn’t dare touch her. As for the rest, he was finished, nothing else could happen. The truth was stark, the village inert, encrusted, crumbled under a cloudy sun. Rain never fell. He felt skinny, picked clean, as naked and hungry and poor as anyone in Malabo. Nothing left — he had no money, and most of his spare clothes were gone, including his belt, which he needed now that he’d lost so much weight.

Snowdon lingered, drooled eagerly, and scratched his dirty palm with his stubby fingers, his way of asking for money. For a few coins he bought stalks of sugar cane, which he chewed and spat out, sucking the sweetness from the pith.

“Nothing,” Hock said, and was relieved.

Zizi never asked for money, but she represented his one joy, his strength, was his only friend. The village women expected some kwacha notes when they presented him with bananas or pumpkins. One of the women had helped Zizi with his laundry, bringing it in a stack that Zizi scorched to kill the putzi fly eggs embedded in the weave. But there was little laundry these days, because his clothes had been stolen too, and he owned no more than a thickness of threadbare cloth. The sight of it made him sad.

“Father,” the laundry woman said, setting down a folded shirt and a tattered T-shirt she’d wheedled from Zizi, in the hope of making money. She held a baby in a sling to her side.

“I have no money,” Hock said. He took a wild delight in declaring it.

The woman whined a little and gestured to the baby.

“All gone!” Hock said.

The woman implored him. Flies settled on the baby’s face and sucked at the edges of its eyelids and its prim lips.

“Now I’m like you,” he said.

Just like them, he was a wisp of diminishing humanity, with nothing in his pockets — hardly had pockets! — and he felt a lightness because of it. With no money he was insubstantial and beneath notice. As soon as everyone knew he had nothing, they would stop asking him for money, would stop talking to him altogether, probably. Yet tugging at this lightness was another sensation, of weight, his poverty like an anchor. He couldn’t move or go anywhere; he had no bargaining power. He was anchored by an absence of money, not just immovable but sitting and slipping lower.

More than ever they called him chief and great minister and father. The women were calmer and less competitive than the men. They wanted food for their children, or a tin pot. The men wanted motorbikes, or bus fare, or had a scheme for selling fish or obtaining contraband from Mozambique on the river. They asked for large amounts, and they resented the fact that Hock had no money left. They believed he was lying. And so they kept poking around his house when he was out walking. He encouraged them to do this by taking long conspicuous hikes, leaving his front door ajar.

“They went inside again,” Zizi would say.

But he wanted them to know that he had nothing left. And he hoped they would see that they themselves had had a share in reducing him to this. They had taken all his money, and everything of value. And they were no better off.

They were not diabolical; they were desperate. But desperation made them cruel and casual.

“ Mzungu, ” a man named Gilbert said, to get his attention. Some mischievous men called him “white man” to his face. No one used his name. It was as though when he lost all his money, he lost his name, too.

Gilbert said, “The woman Gala wants to talk to you.” And then, becoming even more familiar, the man said, “I am needing a scooter.”

Many of them believed he still had money, and some of those people called him mzungu, not father. Gala would never have called him that. She might have called him Ellis, since she knew him by that name, but they would have heard it as “Alice.”

Zizi walked with him under the mopane trees and through the thorn bushes on the hot path to Gala’s hut. He guessed that the old woman had divined that Zizi’s relationship with him had changed. Not that it was explicitly sexual: there was something pure and resolute in Zizi’s virginal face and her frowning mouth and the way she stood and moved. But Gala would have known — either from village whispers or a guess — that he had seen Zizi naked, dusted with white flour, and had possessed her with his gaze, which was true. It was not a question of his daring to go further with her; he had no right. As for the dancing, there was nothing scandalous in that, since she wasn’t truly naked: the flour was her costume, her adornment.

Walking in front of him, Zizi cleared the way, only hesitating at the point where, a month or so before, he had seen the snake rattling through the clutter of dry leaves. He watched her body as she pushed the branches aside, and he thought: Once you have seen someone lovely naked, she is never anything but naked for you, no matter how she is dressed. She was sinuous on the path, her velvety skin glowing, her shaven head beaded with sweat, her neck shining.

Gala was waiting for them. Someone must have seen them on the path and told her they were on their way. Yet she looked impassive, monumental in her bulk, her eyes slanted in her fleshy face.

Hock clapped his hands and called out, “ Odi, odi. ”

The old woman was sitting in the same chair as before, on her veranda, on the planks worn smooth by bare feet, in the same posture as when he had left her — how long ago? And this time, too, she tried to heave herself out of the creaking chair to greet him. To spare her — he could see her effort, the deliberate stages of her hoisting herself, her struggling arms, planting her feet — he mounted the steps quickly and took her hands, and she laughed in helpless apology.