Paul Theroux - My Secret History

“Why are you smiling?”

I could not tell her why.

“I just remembered where we are,” I said. “Did you sleep all right?”

That was another lover’s question, and so was Can I get you anything?

“Like a log,” she said.

I pushed the windowshade up and was blinded for a moment, dazzled by the brightness — not only the sunny sky but the brilliant green of rice fields and tall slender palms. I turned away and saw Eden’s face — sallow, with lank hair and pale lips and swollen eyes in the same truthful and scorching light of the Indian plains. She had hardly slept; perhaps her little lie was her way of appeasing me.

She said, “I’m sorry I was cross with you yesterday. But you provoked me.”

“Maybe I should apologize in that case.”

She made a face and said, “I hate your sarcasm. I’ve just apologized, for Christ’s sake. Why don’t you accept it?”

I said nothing. We passed a station and the signboard flashed on the mirror at the back of the door. We clattered over a set of points and shimmied sideways onto a different line, and the motion made Eden’s cheeks shake.

I started to get up. I swung my legs out of the tangled sheet and gathered myself to rise and dress.

Eden said disgustedly, “That’s it. Run away. You always do that when we have an argument.”

“I’m not running away. I’m getting out of bed.”

“You completely ignored what I said.”

“I didn’t ignore it.”

“It was a fucking apology! What more do you want?”

She began to cry, looking sick and sleepless, in her rumpled blouse — and then her face was creased and rumpled, too, from her weeping. “I think you enjoy tormenting me,” she said.

I embraced her and as I did so glanced at my watch. It was seven-fifteen. I wanted to lie down and go back to sleep. I felt rattled and tired, though I had woken feeling wonderful. Holding Eden I sensed energy being drawn from me. There were some people I had known in my life who weakened me with their presence; something in their dependency drained my strength away, and they became frisky as I went limp.

After a moment Eden batted my arms away.

“Leave me alone. I can do without your sympathy.”

She hunched over and became a figure of grief with bent shoulders, looking sadder because of the bright sunlight on her pale skin and black hair.

Without another word, I left the compartment and went to the toilet, a damp cubicle of metal and battered gray paint, with a hole in the floor — the blurred tracks rushing past — and a cracked porcelain sink. As the train raced on I braced myself and took an inaccurate piss, and then washed — my feet, my face, and stuck my head under the faucet. I brushed my teeth using toothpaste but no water, NOT FOR DRINKING a sign said in two languages over the sink. I looked into the mirror and was surprised by my grouchy hedgehog face: I hated being shouted at in the morning. I took two aspirin, swallowing them without water, and lingered there looking at my face — trying to see my other face in those features — until someone urgently rattled the door handle.

My compartment was locked. I tried it and pushed the door.

“Who is it?” Eden’s voice was suspicious.

“It’s me,” I said, and I was going to say more when I heard the bolt being shot.

“Hurry up,” she said, snatching the door open.

The shade was drawn, the compartment was in semidarkness, with only cracks of light at the margins of the window. Yet there was enough light to see her. She wore a T-shirt and high-heeled shoes, and nothing else.

“Lock the door,” she said, and as I turned to do it, she hugged me from behind and ran her hands over me, and said, “I’m in charge. I’m a wicked filthy woman and you’re my sex slave. You have to do whatever I want you to.” She chewed my ear and moved her hands again and said, “This is mine, and this is mine, and this — this belongs to me.” She sat on the edge of the lower berth, with her legs parted. “Get on your knees.”

The dark compartment and the deafening noise of the train made her reckless. She insisted we make love again in the afternoon, but that time it was my turn, and I took all my cues from the games she had taught me in the morning. That day on the train was broken into many parts — eating, sleeping, making love, looking out of the window, and she read Emily Eden’s Up the Country while I scribbled notes. My notes were like an explorer’s, details of the weather and the distance and the landscape, and nothing about Eden, or about taking turns being slaves for each other in the hot compartment. We entered And-hra Pradesh and at nightfall were at Warangal, among glowing huts and chirruping rice fields.

“The second night on a train you always sleep better.”

“God, I hope so,” Eden said in her bunk.

We were brought tin trays of food — vegetables and rice and dhal, and three sodden chapatis, which had the discouraged look of failed tortillas.

“I can’t eat it,” Eden said. “I think I’ll just read.”

Within minutes she was asleep. I switched off the light and locked the door, but left the window open and the shade up, so that I could see the stars and the stations flashing past. And then I was asleep, and dreaming of my other life.

I woke hot and guilty in the bright sunshine of an early morning in Madras.

The Hotel Vishnu was old and hot and badly lit. It had the rotting carpets of all poor hotels in India: the carpets simply decayed in the damp shadows. It was airless and stank of mildew. The bathroom floor was wet, knobs were missing from the bureau drawer, in the closet were two misshapen wire hangers. The picture on the wall, cut from a calendar and framed, was of Mount Matterhorn, with a Swiss village in the foreground, a man in leather shorts, a woman in a bonnet and apron, some muscular cows.

Eden said, “It could be worse. At least I can have a shower.”

But when she had stripped and turned on the faucet there was no water.

She swore and then she began to cry. She said, “I haven’t had a bath for two days. I’ve had a bath every day of my life!”

I complained to the manager, a kindly man named Thumboosamy, with a black ratlike face. I had asked him whether that was his first name or his last, and he had replied, “Both!” He clucked and assured me that if we waited the shower would work. We had to be patient, he said.

“Water will come,” he said in the odd prophesying way that Tamils adopted when they were being badgered.

I heard the shower bubbling and spitting as soon as I entered the room, and Eden was under it slapping soap on her thighs.

“It’s cold but at least it’s wet,” she said. “It started just after you left the room.”

She apologized for having made a fuss; and I said nothing.

She said, “It’s all right, as long as we’re together.”

Later on, we bought oranges and bananas at a stall and ate them on a bench just off Beach Road.

“Why did we come here?” Eden said.

“For my Indian story. It’s been over ten years since I was here last. I’m going to all the places I visited before, to see what they’re like now.”

“What’s your conclusion?”

“I’ll let you know,” I said. “I’m also trying to see what I am like now.”

Eden said, “Maybe I’m the one who should be writing this story.”

“You’re helping,” I said.

“No, I’m not,” she said. “All I’ve done is obstruct you. I haven’t helped you at all. I’m ashamed of myself — but I’m desperate to be with you. I know you’d be traveling much faster without me, and probably seeing more. You’ll never cover all those places you visited before.”

“I know. I’ll have to come back in July.”