Paul Theroux - The Lower River

Too late. His health was gone, and he could tell almost to the day when he’d realized he was too old. Malabo had made him an old man, had tipped him into near senility. He needed those long nights, that silence, that darkness, not just to be restored by sleep but for the illusion that he was free to dream — good dreams, of home and friends and health. He forgave everyone at home, forgave Deena and Chicky. They had not hurt him. Deena had freed him, and Chicky had merely turned her back on him. But when he woke in his hut in Malabo in the monotonous heat of the morning, he was reminded that he was a prisoner.

The boys — the brothers, as they called themselves — did not leave the village, as he assumed they might. They remained, sitting in the shady area of the courtyard at Manyenga’s compound, and Hock knew they could do that only with Manyenga’s permission. He saw them chatting with Manyenga during the day, as he himself had once done, believing he was a friend. He saw them being brought black kettles of hot water, and in the evening he saw them seated on mats near Manyenga’s cooking fire, where he had once sat as an honored guest. They had displaced him, these boys in sunglasses, and he had the sense that they were hovering, waiting — for what?

The tolerance in Malabo for any outsider lasted just a matter of days. Then the guest had to do some work, or leave. Hock saw the boys lingering and, it seemed, running up a debt. Manyenga was too shrewd to endure these boys eating his food and drinking his tea and crowding him, unless something else was happening — a protracted negotiation, Hock guessed, like all the talk over the months it took to arrive at an acceptable bride price.

Strangers in a village usually caused a buzz of activity — speculation, giggling, whispers. But the presence of these boys created a greater silence, a solemn watchfulness; the villagers were more cautious, less talkative, brisker in their walk. And they avoided Hock in the way they avoided anyone with an illness. The days were hotter, the cicadas louder.

“Our friends are still here,” he said to Gilbert, who had called him mzungu and asked him for money. Gilbert was a fisherman, pushing his bike through the deep sand at the edge of Malabo, setting off for a riverside village near the boma. It would take him the whole day to ride those thirty-odd miles; he’d launch his canoe tomorrow morning.

Gilbert gazed at him with a blank deaf stare. Irony was lost on him. What friends?

“Those boys from the bush,” Hock said, “staying with Festus.”

“I am not knowing,” Gilbert said in English.

When anyone spoke English to him, it was a way of warning him that the conversation would be brief, vague, and probably untruthful.

No one now asked Hock for money, or for anything. Women walked past his hut without looking at him. Only children took an interest, but it was a form of play; nothing frightened them. And when he strolled through the village in the cooler early evening, searching for snakes at the edge of the marsh or in the low-lying dimbas, no one, not even children, acknowledged him. He seemed to drift like a ghost, as though he had no substance.

He was real only to Zizi. She brought him food, cleaned what clothing was left, crouched near him on his veranda, and sometimes in secret she danced for him, his only joy. The paradox of a naked girl, entirely dusted with flour, dancing slowly by lantern light in the suffocating hut, his greatest reality and his only hope.

“Why do you dance for me?” he asked.

“I dance because it makes you happy.”

Zizi brought him news of the brothers: they still lived at Manyenga’s compound. “Still talking.” Naturally suspicious, full of warnings at the best of times, she told Hock that they had designs on him.

“Gala told you this?”

“I can see them,” she said.

“They pay no attention to me at all.”

“That means they are always thinking about you,” she said. “They are proud.”

He said, “If I could bring a message to the boma — post a letter — my friends in Blantyre would help me.”

Zizi stared with widened eyes, swallowed a little, giving herself dimples, then said, “I can do it.”

“They’d see you.”

“Not at night.”

The very word “night” was like a curse. He said, “No one goes out at night. There are animals in the night. It’s not safe.”

He could see he was worrying her. He’d thought of sending her, but he knew it was too risky; and anyway, she couldn’t walk that distance. He told her that.

“ Njinga, ” she said. The jingle of a bicycle bell was the word for bike.

“You don’t have a bike.”

“But my friend,” she said, and swallowed again, “is having.”

He was past the point of allowing his hopes to be raised with any scheme. Nothing had worked. He was almost resigned to living here, to decaying here, like Gala. To dying here.

Yet in the long mute smothering hours of the night after that talk with Zizi, he kept himself awake in the dark, lying on his back, composing the letter in his head.

To the American consul, he began, murmuring under his mosquito net. This is an urgent appeal for your help. I am being held against my will in the village of Malabo on the Lower River, Nsanje District. There is no phone here or I would call. I can’t get to the boma. I am sending this message to you with the help of a trusted villager who is at considerable risk, in the hope it will reach you safely.

I have no money left. It has all been taken from me. I have no possessions to speak of, other than a change of clothes and a few other items. I came here in the belief that I might be useful to these people. That was a mistake.

I have made several attempts to escape, but each time I failed, and this has hardened the villagers against me.

I am not well, having suffered several bouts of fever, and the effects still linger. My health is gone and I am in fear of my life. I have no allies here other than the individual who is posting this letter. My medicine is used up.

The village of Malabo is known to you. I think someone came here from your consulate to deliver school supplies for me and was told I was away. That was a lie. I was seriously ill.

Please come at once. I will pay all expenses. I am absolutely desperate, and I’m afraid that if I am not rescued soon I will be taken from here, perhaps downriver into Mozambique, and kept as a hostage, for ransom. In that case, someone will have to search for me.

I am not sure …

But there he stopped, near tears, too sad to continue, fear making him wakeful, his misery keeping him silent.

In the morning he sat and wrote the message on a sheet of paper torn from a copybook, one of the many copybooks he’d bought for the school that had lain unused. He printed in block capitals, taking his time. When he was done, he reread it and began to cry, holding his hand over his mouth to stifle his sobs.

His own letter terrified him, as weeks before, at the Agency compound, he’d seen his face in the polished side of the water tank and been stricken by the sight of the defeated eyes and hollow cheeks of the old man staring back at him.

Until now, he had not put his plight into words, and so he had survived, even managed to convince himself that there was a way out. The days had passed with little to remember except for Zizi’s kindnesses. He thought, Something will happen, someone will help. He avoided the mirror in his hut, but his letter was a mirror of his feelings, and the very sight of it frightened him. His cheeks were dirty with tears.

He had not read anything, nor written anything in his journal, for over a month, since heading downriver with Simon and the paddlers. Something about his writing, the order of his sentences, his voice on the page, reminded him of his other life, the world he had left; and seeing his plea, the pressure of his inky pen point, the helpless words, left him in despair.