Paul Theroux: The Black House

On other occasions, that first night he had made love to Caroline, or when he had met her furtively in the barn or in the church, he had come back to Emma and felt a kind of revulsion. Touched by lust, he could not bear to be near her. But tonight he wanted to hold her; he was wide awake and he wanted her to hear him and throw her arms about him and pull him to her. It had happened—on nights when she had, half-awake, seen his sleeplessness and believed he was troubled; in Africa, where the moon was so large and clear it lighted the curtains, and the air in the room was heated like accusation, preventing sleep: she had comforted him then.

Now, he nearly shook her. But he would be gentle. Resting would calm him. Sex had starved him of sleep, and he envisioned a life without sleep, being awake to each moment, snared in nerves—that horror of having to endure without rest what one rested to forget. He lay on his back, next to Emma for comfort, feeling the heat of his bruises, the teethmarks like stitches Caroline had left on his flesh. He tried to Seize sleep with his eyes and draw it into his head.

He craved a simpler world, one he had a hand in inventing and could inhabit easily. For an hour or more in his wakefulness he imagined such a world, of order and sunlight, where neat huts were ringed by fences of flowers and people hoed in hillside terraces of vegetables; where the pattern of life, approved by the anthropologist, was unalterable, and all around were mountains, white cliff-faces, and forest, and secured by jungle too dense to admit any adventurer. But he saw that it was not of his imagination; it was an actual place he had cast himself away froih, and it was not so peaceful: some nights, sleeping in their rickety huts, children had their faces chewed by hyenas, and he had been unhappy at times—but never afraid or desperate. He had traded it for the shadowy menace of the Black House, but in this mockery of home there was no danger except fear: the menace was the shadow, and one was made free by risking fear, choosing a way through it.

He got up on one elbow and shook Emma lightly. She was turned away. He put his face close to her ear. He had lain there so long and wide awake that his voice had an unfamiliar clarity. “You were right,” he said. “We can still go.” His words didn’t wake her. He said, “I want you to forgive me, please. It was her doing. You don’t have to say anything now—just trust me. I love you, Emma, I always have. I want to stay with you.” He leaned over and took her shoulder in his hand and pulled her towards him. She seemed to object; the stiffness in her he took to be deep sleep was like resistance, her flesh had the feel of clay, and she was heavy. When he let her go she rolled back to her original slumbering position. He kissed her hair and said, "Emma—” Her arm was tightly crooked against her stomach. He wanted her to wake so that he could tell her they were saved. But her sleep was perfect; he could not rouse her gently; he would not rouse her at all.

There was the other to tell. He could face her now with his refusal. He got out of bed and went down the hall to the last bedroom.

“Caroline?”

He kicked the door open and saw the empty bed, and at the window the first of dawn, a frosty yellow-blue light on the glass. He sprang to the closet and opened it. An old black coat turned on a hanger and under it were dusty misshapen shoes.

Methodically, in the feeble light, he searched for her, knowing that ,as he did so he was ridding himself of the Black House, room by room. He looked again down the hallway with its long carpet and he saw enormous footprints, a giantress’s tread, where it was worn. He listened to the silence until his ears roared. He opened the door to the box room (a trunk, cartons, a crippled chair) and a tide of cold air paused on his skin and shrank it. He went into the two other bedrooms, the one with the child’s religious picture in a frame on the wall, the larger one, where Silvano had slept—an aroma of the African's perfumed soap still floated in a narrow layer. Each room Munday noticed had its own distinct hum, and the whole house murmured. He crept in his bare feet down the stairs to the kitchen. A light that had come on when the power was restored burned uselessly over the sink of dirty dishes. He looked in the back hall among the rubber boots and walking sticks, and in the bathroom with its wet streaming windows. He was anxious to find her, to put her to flight, but a foretaste of disgust kept him from taking any pleasure in it.

He threw open the door to the living room, but saw only the empty chairs, the vicious cushions, the shelves of decaying books. The fire was out, ashes were heaped on the irons and spilled from these mounds into ths fire screen. The wrinkled plaster, the stained walls and split beam and the stale odors of wax and wood-smoke, gave the room a feel of senility; it was something he had never seen in the house before— fragile and harmless, propped there over his head, the house was revealed in the morning light with all its cracks apparent. He could pull it to pieces.

Someone was watching him. He glimpsed a movement and turned to face a pale intruder with wild hair entering from a side room, startled in the posture of being caught, with terrified eyes and lined cheeks. It was a trespasser, an awful portrait of one; then as he went closer, he saw the flaw in the mirror, the ripple of his pajamas, the flaw scarring his face, the chimney behind his head.

He made his way to the study. But he stopped; she would not be there, and he did not want to see his weapons, his notebook, his unfinished work. She was gone, there was no doubt of that. The Black House was empty, and for seconds he imagined that not even he was there—that it remained for him to admit it with some final act. It was a despair he had heard of in Africa, where a man might rise one morning, send his touseboy to market with a long detailed shopping list, lock the door and shoot himself. But he had never felt that despair, he had never feared any village, and now he knew that no matter how remote he was he would survive, for here in a village where there was no sheltering fabric of jungle, where birdsong took the place of locusts’ whines, and church bells drums, which had at times appeared to him stranger than any African outpost, he had mastered solitude.

He had been haunted, and though Emma had slept through it all, put to sleep by her injured heart— a heart she had once given him to fail and bum at his own lungs—she had always been with him. He had never been alone. He said her name softly, then louder, then broke off and left himself with the echo.

The room grew dark, and he felt a chill, his feet prickled with cold, as the sunrise was eclipsed by cloud. Sleeping in bed, he might have missed those early minutes of sun that had helped him search the house, the warmth of the early-morning dazzle that had appeared only to recede under the eaves of sky. He sat down and warmed his hands under his thighs and saw Africa, green and burning, people scattering as if stampeded by the sun. Then the dark fire spread, the Black House matched Africa, and it was alight, cracking with heat and fire and falling in upon itself, crushed by its own weight and size.

But that was another anxious dream. The Black House was indestructible; only its tenants could be destroyed—if they didn’t know their time was up and stayed too long. Caroline had taught him that, but he would leave with Emma. It puzzled him that she was still in bed. An early riser, she had always been up before him; but it was some satisfaction that on this morning he was first. He sat in the empty room, studying the dead fire, and waited for Emma to wake.