Paul Theroux - My Secret History

I watched black buffaloes submerged to their nostrils in the wallows beside the track, and I envied the naked children leaping from the top of culverts into ditches of frothy water.

That day Jenny hardly spoke. She said she was too hot to eat much. She read a novel she had brought from London, a plotty and pretentious spy story. “My holiday book,” she called it.

“Why do you read him?” I said, irritated by the serene way she sat on her berth turning pages.

“Don’t be jealous,” she said. “Write another novel and I’ll read it. In the meantime, please don’t bother me. This is a bit overwritten but it’s not bad. Just childish in the way that spying is childish. It’s a game that men play, isn’t it?”

“Who cares?” I said, and turned away as the train jogged along through the heat. “My next book’s going to be travel.”

“I hate travel books,” Jenny said. “Oh, don’t be offended. You know what I mean. What’s the point of them? It’s usually just second-rate writers waffling on about themselves and looking for trouble. They have absolutely nothing to say.”

“Are you talking about me?”

“This is a discussion, Andy. It’s not personal,” and she smiled sweetly. “My feeling is that travel writers are like bitchy reviewers. They go to a place and review the weather, then they review the people, then the sights, then the hotels. That’s what travel writing is — it’s all bitchy reviews.”

She said this with such fluency and certainty that I found it funny, and as soon as I laughed, she faltered. She said, “They all write well these travel writers — that’s what’s so pathetic about them—” and then she stopped. “I’m hot,” she said.

She did not return to her book. Some minutes passed and then she said, “By the way, I’ve been watching you ever since we left Delhi.”

The train clunked across the points in a junction and then swayed as we passed a freight train. Jenny began to speak again, but she knew she would not be heard and so she paused until the noise subsided and we were in the open again.

“I hope you don’t mind that I’ve been observing you,” she said. “I couldn’t help it. I mean, it’s so obvious.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You haven’t really looked at any of the sights. You hardly glanced at the Taj Mahal — and that was gorgeous. You just plopped down at Fatehpur-Sikri as though you had dropsy or something. And for the past two days you’ve just been mooning around with your mouth open.”

Perhaps that was how it seemed, yet how could I admit that I had been observing her?

“Forgive me for asking,” she went on, “but don’t you have any work to do?”

“I’ve been making notes,” I said lamely.

“I’m not asking you for an explanation,” Jenny said, “but your attitude does seem extraordinarily casual.”

Then she went back to her book. We traveled all that day in the dusty train, on a route that seemed longer than it had a month before. I murmured to myself a line from a poem I loved, as I looked at a stupa painted white in a village at the center of some drowned rice fields: What spires, what farms are those?

I wished that Jenny had been reading something I had written. I thought of the tube train that morning I arrived in London, when I had seen the young woman reading a book of mine. Just watching her turn the pages was such a pleasure for me that time had passed quickly and I had almost missed my station. I loved the look of absorption on the woman’s face, her occasional smiles; she was a friend and she knew me intimately.

Watching Jenny read someone else’s boring book made time pass slowly. But it was my fault for not being busier. I should have been writing — making notes, at least. I was doing nothing, and I was agitated. Jenny always looked serene when she was idle, and she was happiest in repose. Her own contentment helped me: she did not require my constant attention, she never said, What are you thinking? which always meant Are you thinking about me?

I now knew how being married to her had freed me. What we were today we would continue to be, and so I could see clearly this same scene, but on the Cape, one afternoon under a cloudy sky left by a severe winter storm. We were in our house, the same house as ever, but it was warmer, cozier, quieter. Jack was going to call tonight from London, where he lived. In our silence we were anticipating that — his news, his mood, his new life. There was a kettle of stew on the stove, bread in the oven, the makings of a salad on the butcher’s block. We were so used to one another we hardly talked, and our lives were somewhat separate — we each had a car, and Jenny did some consultancy work in Boston. As ever she protected me from people I did not want to see, and I used her as my excuse. This was the life I had been tending towards for years, and this was the house I had planned, filled with my artifacts from India and China. Jenny had made a place for herself in it, though she occasionally complained of being an alien — in America, in this house. At intervals, short or long, like a sudden fit of sobbing that gives relief, we made love.

She saw me watching her.

“This book isn’t half bad,” she said. “I mean, it’s rubbish but it’s fairly readable.”

Then she looked out of the window of the train, at the evening sun dissolving into a flooded field of rice.

“God. India. Still there after all the miles we’ve gone.”

That night, still traveling, we shared a sticky meal.

“I’ve had better Indian food in Clapham,” Jenny said.

We turned in, climbing into our separate shelves, and we lay there in the heat, listening to the clatter of the wheels and every so often passing a station on the line and being raked with the glaring yellow lights of the railway lamps.

In the darkness, Jenny said, “Do you suppose anyone ever makes love on these trains?”

I said nothing; she was still murmuring.

“You’d probably dislocate your back.”

“Do you want to make love?” I asked, whispering from the lower berth.

“Not now. I’m too hot,” she said, and after a moment, “I’d rather have a nice cup of tea.”

Mr. Thumboosamy, the manager of the Hotel Vishnu in Madras, was anxiously watching Jenny’s face for a reaction as she took a deep dramatic breath. The door to Room 25—I had requested that one — had just been opened, but Jenny had hesitated on the threshold, Thumboosamy beside her with her bag in his hand.

“Yes,” Jenny said, and sniffed again.

Thumboosamy looked eager.

“That’s the smell of my mother’s house in Balham,” Jenny said, turning to Thumboosamy. And now she smiled. “Mice. I hate mice. I’m not superstitious. I’m not frightened of mice. I can’t stand them. They’re dirty. They spread disease. They crawl over you when you’re asleep. I’m not staying in this place.”

“This room, darling?”

“This hotel,” Jenny said.

“It’s the only hotel in town with rooms free,” I said.

Mr. Thumboosamy confirmed that this was so. Madras was packed with tourists, he said.

“There must be something,” Jenny said.

“Not available,” Mr. Thumboosamy said, making it a cluster of consonants, like a Tamil phrase.

“That’s absurd,” Jenny said. “Madras looks a hideous place. And this is the hot season. Who would want to come here? There must be lots of hotels with empty rooms.”

I said, “What if there aren’t any?”

“Then I’ll sleep under a tree,” she said. “Anywhere but here.”

We went to the Taj Coromandel, the luxury hotel just off Mount Road, and were told they had plenty of spare rooms. “This is more like it,” Jenny said of our clean pleasant room with its view over the city. She did not jeer at me, as I guessed she might, but simply said that perhaps I didn’t know as much as I thought I did about traveling in India.