Paul Theroux: The Lower River

“It makes for variety.”

“Know what? I really don’t think so.”

Hock gestured, turning his hands, encouraging her to explain.

“Whenever you’re near a college, there’s always this smell of pizza. It’s the students. And coffee shops with kids and their laptops. And their bad skin. And the way they walk. There’s a typical student walk, because their parents give them money to let them go on being kids and having bad posture. I should move. Maybe move to Medford.”

Hock visited more frequently, and the woman who seemed at first so easy to mock, so easy to dismiss for her robe and her rings and her New Age jargon, became a whole person. It turned out that she had an ex-husband, and a daughter of twenty-something. “She doesn’t want to be my friend,” Teya said, smiling sadly.

“I’ve got one of those,” Hock said.

“I was giving her money and she used it to self-medicate. For drugs.”

Teya worked part-time as a massage therapist — she gently corrected Hock when he used the term “masseuse”—and she was a volunteer at a hospice near Davis Square, doing physiotherapy, “to remind them that they’re alive.”

Hock, alert for decades to the way people dressed, sizing up customers who wandered into the store, guessing at what they might buy — always attentive to details of clothing — noticed that Teya was making an effort for him. And it was odd, because he couldn’t tell her that he was visiting not to see her and listen to her stories of her daughter, or the hospice, or her plans to travel, but only because he wanted to see the rock python.

He always brought something the python might eat, a pale pop-eyed mouse, a wobbly frog, a pair of baby guinea pigs — hairless, pink, mottled skin. Sometimes the snake pounced, its jaws wide open, but one mouse survived in the glass tank for a week or more, burrowing in the wood shavings, believing it was hidden.

Teya cooked meals for Hock, always vegetarian, dishes of lentils, curried cauliflower, a stir-fry, and she used these meals as an occasion to tell stories, speaking softly in a monotone, deaf to any interruption, oblivious to his reaction or any comment. Hock would have found her maddening, except the stories were unusual.

In one she’d broken her toe (“I hit it on the stone lingam in the puja room”) and was prescribed Vicodin as a painkiller. She found that her daughter was secretly stealing her pills — so many that Teya still had pain but no medicine, and the added pain of her daughter’s betrayal. Hock mentioned his daughter again, but Teya spoke over him, not hearing, changing the subject to folk dancing — Thai dancing — saying she had learned to bend her fingers back, Siamese-style. And there was an African student down the street who wore a skullcap and blue shawl and was stalking her. He was from Sudan, with teeth missing and ornamental scars on his face, and one day he left a pair of red shoes for her at her doorway upstairs — how had he gotten in? The police didn’t take it seriously, though the African was tall and very scary. She grew herbs, she grew marijuana plants, and explained that some weed was male and some female.

Hock was grateful; her stories were a helpful distraction to him in the last weeks of his business, which would close after Christmas. He even mentioned that. She didn’t listen. Jerry didn’t listen either. But Teya wanted to see him; she smiled gratefully when he showed up. She needed him as a listener. Customers at the store needed him as a listener. All you had to do to be a friend was show up and listen. He found that Teya could go on and on, and the more he listened and said nothing, the more she depended on him. She said he was a good conversationalist and that she liked talking with him, and he said nothing.

Her stories could be alarming. The Sudanese boy who brought her the red shoes was eventually arrested and charged with harassment. “I took out a restraining order on him.” But all her sadness was apparent in the stories, and since Hock remained silent, just nodded and encouraged her to continue, he seemed powerful to her, and supportive, not sad at all. He was touched by her telling him how she gave money to charities that worked with orphans in Africa.

Now and then he excused himself and went to the ripe-smelling back room that held the tank with the python. He sat before it in silence, waiting for its eye to open, its tongue to flick, admiring the gleam on its body, its complex coloring, the patterns straggling down its dorsum. And he reflected again on how the poor creature was trapped in a small space — this six-foot python that could move with such sinuous grace across stony ground could not stretch to even half its length in the tank, but lay coiled, half asleep in the wood shavings.

One Saturday morning Hock brought a kitten with him. He had not intended to feed it to the python, though seeing it, Teya said, “Oh, God, no,” and snatched the kitten from him and cuddled it, pressing it to her cheek. “Please don’t.”

He had guessed what her reaction might be, as he watched her nuzzling the small mewling creature.

He said, “I think our friend needs a new home.”

Holding the kitten, Teya watched as he shifted the heavy lid of the tank, and he lifted the long tangled snake, one hand pressed behind its head. Then he shook its thick coils into a burlap bag that he’d brought.

That same day he took the python to the Stoneham Zoo, on the far side of Spot Pond from Medford, where he had often gone as a child to see the caged bear and the mountain goat and the coatimundi. He had called in advance to say that he had a python, and he was told that one of the resident pythons had recently died, so this one was welcome.

“Regular meals, a nice clean cage, plenty of water and light,” the zookeeper said. “It’s why their life span is so short in captivity.”

“ Python sebae, ” Hock said.

“You’re a herpetologist?”

“I know a little. I’m in the clothing business, but before that I was in Africa.”

“That’s where this guy belongs. Out of his element here.”

From that day, instead of visiting Teya, Hock visited the zoo. Teya called the store a few times, and reminded him that she was a licensed massage therapist. But by then the sale of it was final, the new buyer a computer chain. When the Christmas blowout was over, the unsold clothing and all the fixtures were warehoused, the phone disconnected. Now no one could find him, not even Deena.

He spent much of his time at the zoo’s Snake House, always on weekdays so he could be alone — no families, no schoolchildren, no one tapping the glass of the snake cages.

The Snake House also contained some loud screeching birds; it was warm, damp most days, the air ripe with the scaly stink of snake and the tang of their piss, of the fat coiled bodies of the snakes in the cages, and the ancient reptilian odors that seemed like the emanations from an old tomb. On these December days in the overheated Snake House, the sun shining through the skylights, seeing a thick snake slipping from beneath a boulder to bask on the heated gravel of its cage, Hock would often close his eyes and listen to the birds and inhale the snakes’ sharp odors and imagine he was back in Malabo.

ON THOSE DAYS at the zoo, in his reverie, Hock remembered the Lower River, the southernmost part of the southern province, the poorest part of a poor country, home of the Sena people. The Sena, a neglected tribe, despised by those who didn’t know them, were associated with squalor, cruelty, and incompetence. And his village, Malabo, was so small, just a cluster of huts, a tiny chapel, and a primary school that he’d helped build, that on the rare occasions when he was buying supplies in Zomba or Blantyre, he’d say, “I live in Port Herald,” because no one would know his village. In his time, Port Herald was renamed Nsanje, but Malabo remained Malabo, unknown to anyone outside the district.