Paul Theroux - The Lower River

Hock served as a counselor, wrote letters for the villagers, sent messages, and read letters for those villagers who couldn’t read, whispering the words for the sake of privacy. All the languages in the region were written phonetically, so he could convey the meaning even when he didn’t have any idea of what was written on the torn-out copybook page.

In the first year, he improved the existing school building, bought sheets of corrugated pressed fiberglass for the roof, and put up a new brick latrine they called the chimbudzi. In his second year, he organized brickmaking and built a second block of classrooms, with a wide veranda that served as a stage where he conducted morning assembly.

The villagers had pitched in. His fellow American teacher hated the Lower River, and Malabo particularly, but got no sympathy from Hock and begged to be transferred. So Hock was alone, out of touch; he seldom left the district, and the telephone at the boma was unreliable. By the light of a Tilley lamp Hock corrected copybooks and sometimes read. He had never forgotten reading The Death of Ivan Ilych, especially the death scene, because of the fizzing and flickering of the lamp. Hock learned the Sena language and was one of those volunteer teachers about whom the other Americans talked with respect tinged with satire, because they never saw him, and no one wanted to go to the Lower River.

For the Sena he was the mzungu, then the American, and at last Snake Man. He fell in love with a Sena woman who was a student teacher in Port Herald. Her name was Gala. She had dark, slanted, almost Asiatic eyes, suggesting Zulu ancestry, a thin face, a perpetual frown that showed she was trying not to laugh, and usually a head wrap that contrasted in color with her long gown-like dress. He invited her for tea, welcomed her into his house, and urged her to sit on his bed, where he joined her. But when he embraced her, she resisted him so strenuously he knew she was not a coquette but was defending her virtue, and he was ashamed. She explained that she had been promised to a man from her village near the boma, and that if it became known that she slept with Hock, the man would reject her and not hand over the bride price of three cows her father had demanded. Her fiancé was a party official, and she suggested that he was well connected.

Still, Hock had considered wooing her, persuading her father that he was worthy, and perhaps marrying her, becoming a resident, staying in the country, raising a family, spending his life there.

The term was two years. Hock stayed almost four — later judged to be a record for any foreigner in the hot, miserable, bug-ridden, swampy Lower River, among the half-naked Sena people and their procrastinations.

The happiest years of his life.

THE LOWER RIVER remained in his mind in the way that the notion of home might persist in someone else’s. When all hope is lost and everything is up the wall, he thought, reassuring himself, I can always go back there. As for Gala, because he’d loved her and been denied sex with her, he’d never stopped thinking about her — perhaps his desire persisted as a yearning through all those years because fulfillment had been thwarted.

What was it about having lived in Africa that made him so certain of it as a refuge? Africa cast a green glow in his memory, and its capacity for happiness occupied his mind. He had been much more than a mere visitor or resident. He had worked there, he was invested there, he felt proudly proprietary about Africa, though it was something he believed so strongly he never spoke about it. He was obscurely offended when he read of a celebrity who’d started a school in Africa, or a billionaire who’d funded a medical intervention, or an actress adopting an African child, or an actor involving himself in a pacification effort among warring tribes. That was the effect of Africa, of the people and the great spaces, and its simplicity. Maybe outsiders felt that in this green preindustrial continent it might still be possible to avoid the horrors that had come to Europe — war, machines, materialism, frozen food — to develop a happier place. He often felt that, as well as a sense of responsibility, almost the conceit of ownership. As long as Africa remained unfinished, there was hope. But the name Africa — grand and meaningless — was just his code word for the Lower River.

He was alone again after almost thirty-five years.

He’d made an early success of the business; he’d been happy as a father and husband. But the business was destroyed by imports and cheap competition, and his family had fallen apart. These weren’t failures. You had to adapt and go on living. He had enough money to see himself into his old age, yet he wanted more than that: the joy he’d known as a young man in Africa. Nothing he’d gained in his life had matched the pleasure he’d known then. Even at the time he’d thought, I have everything I want.

Looking back, he saw that it had all been a digression — business, marriage, children. Now, at sixty-two, he had money, he had all the time in the world. Apart from reading — travel, some natural history, snakes — he had no recreations. His family had been fractured, the parts dispersed. No one needed him.

For years he’d thought of going away, but he never had. A vacation was a burden, idleness was a burden, and he had a store to look after. But when he found a buyer — the electronics chain, specializing in cell-phone technology, which saw potential in the location — he had no excuse for procrastinating.

Now he had a plan. He had a destination — Malabo. He even had a departure date, yet he was uneasy about leaving, uneasy just thinking about it. Something important remained to be done, but what? He could not imagine what it might be, yet it mattered — one of those anxious thoughts that troubled his mind when he woke in the old Medford High condo he’d begun to hate. Was it a debt he’d incurred, a promise he’d made, a threat against him in the dream he’d interrupted by waking from it?

He had never stopped thinking about Africa, yet he hadn’t dared to let it preoccupy and possess him, because he’d felt it would remain unrealized, a torment. But the woman’s snake had brought it all back, given his reverie a distinctive smell, the odor of earth and straw, the rich vegetable aroma of snake flesh, the crackly hum of old snake skin that had been shed and that lay like a white ghost-husk of the snake itself.

The experience of the snake had directed him, and without any help or consultation he had gone online, found a flight to Malawi and a good fare, found a connecting flight to Blantyre, a hotel there, conducted the whole business without speaking to a single soul. Using his computer, paying by credit card, he felt self-consciously secretive, as if he was planning something illicit, sneaking away, escaping to Africa.

Yet he’d wanted to share his excitement with at least one person. Not sharing it made him feel covert in a way that suffocated him and made him superstitious. He wished that Teya had been a listener, that she’d known him better, so he could startle her by saying out of the blue, “By the way, I’m leaving. Going to Africa.”

I’m clearing out, he wanted to say, even if, as he knew, it was only for a few weeks.

He wanted someone to know he was going. Without a cell phone, he began to send Deena an email from his computer. He had rehearsed what he was going to tell her.

As he typed his message to her, tapping the keys, no more than two sentences into it, he imagined her reply. After such a long marriage he knew exactly what she would say. She wouldn’t reply by email. She would find a way of calling him — he had a landline in his condo — saying, “That is so you, announcing what you’re going to do — no give-and-take, just a flat pronouncement, and what I want to know — let me finish — is what — I said let me finish — what on earth has this got to do with me?”