Paul Theroux: My Secret History

We had wandered to the river to find some shade under the trees.

I said, “If silence is truth, then what’s writing?”

“I don’t know. Are you going to tell me your theory of art?”

“I don’t think I have one.”

“Good. It’s too hot for that.”

I needed order. My writing came out of confusion and loneliness and joy — every emotion; and after I wrote, it was real. But I was never able to give a name to the process. It was my deepest secret, the life I led beyond all these others.

And I believed in ghosts — in my ghosts. They were powerful secrets. But I had been found out: now, in India, Jenny and I shared the same ghost. She didn’t want this thing in her life, though she had dealt with it obliquely — she had not blamed me, she hadn’t scolded. She knew that I was thinking What now? We slept with this ghost, we ate with it, the ghost hovered between us.

There were three of us, and it was awful, and I believed it was worse for me. We made love wildly one night, and Jenny was both passionate and remote, with that self-absorption and eagerness of which lust is the mainspring. It was as though I was a stranger she had taken home from a bar, someone she was using for her pleasure. She tied me to the bed with silk scarves, and held me captive; she sucked me and sat on me, and ardently caressed herself in my face, uttering long adoring sighs, while I watched, fascinated, wondering what fierce eroticism she kept in her mind. In the morning she was cold, she didn’t remember, and I was the stranger from last night who was expected to leave after breakfast. I felt mute and stupid and guilty.

I said, “I think we should see Indoo before we go.”

He took us to his club — Indian golfers, lots of handlebar mustaches, waiters with sashes and turbans. I liked the Greek pillars, the potted palms, the aquatints on the walls, the cool interiors and the dusty tigerskins.

A black Indian in a white dinner jacket sat straight in a chair next to a palm, playing a violin. His hair was parted in the middle, and a nearby lamp made his hair oil gleam. The very sight of him thrilled me. I wanted him to play “Beautiful Dreamer.”

Indoo said I should make this request of the violinist — he was most obliging. Then Indoo excused himself. “The Gents,” he said.

Perhaps the violinist didn’t understand my accent. He stood up to ask me to repeat it, and — standing — he looked conspicuous and out of place this hot night, holding his fragile, misshapen instrument.

I named the song again.

“You hum it, I play it,” the violinist said.

I liked that. I turned eagerly to Jenny.

“That’s my theory of art,” I said. “That’s what I do.”

She was not smiling, and yet she looked very calm. She first glanced in the direction in which Indoo had gone, and when she had established that he was not on his way back, she turned to me and spoke without emotion in simple declarative sentences.

“I know there’s someone else, Andy. I won’t put up with it. You will have to choose. If you don’t I’ll leave you.”

The violinist had not heard her. But I imagined how the words would shock him and make him sweat; how he would begin to dissolve, all the while staring at me — imploring me to act.

“I know exactly what to do,” I said.

And I was pretty sure I did, you know.

East Sandwich-Shanghai-London

1985–1988

PAUL THEROUX was born in Medford, Massachusetts, in 1941 and published his first novel, Waldo , in 1967. His subsequent novels include The Black House, The Family Arsenal, Picture Palace (winner of the Whitbread Prize for fiction), O-Zone, The Mosquito Coast , which was made into a hit movie starring Harrison Ford, the critically acclaimed My Secret History , and Chicago Loop . His bestselling and highly successful travel books include The Great Railway Bazaar, The Old Patagonian Express, Riding the Iron Rooster, To the Ends of the Earth , and The Happy Isles of Oceania .