Paul Theroux - My Secret History

“Rosie is not here,” another girl said, and she stayed to talk. Her name was Grace.

Between us we drank eleven bottles of beer and when my eyes refused to focus I knew I had had enough. I stood up clumsily and headed for the door. On the veranda I paused and felt a hand close over my fingers. I thought it was Rosie, because it was cracked and large and had weight but no grip, like a kind of dog’s paw. It was Grace.

“I come with you.”

I couldn’t speak. I was moving forward. I tripped on the edge of the open sewer and staggered.

“Sorry!” she cried.

I turned back and tried to set my eyes on her. She was a blur. And yet I did not feel drunk. I was small and sober inside a big drunken body.

“I love you, mister,” she said.

She insisted on pushing my bike. I was grateful to her for that. I walked behind her, catching my toes on the ruts, and feeling unsteady in the darkness. At Chamba we did not talk. We went to bed like an old married couple and were immediately asleep. But in a dark morning hour I woke up and felt her damp skin against mine, and I snuggled against her. She helped me and then almost killed my desire as she chafed me with her rough hands. She muttered and sighed in pleasure, a kind of laughter, and then she went snufflingly to sleep.

Her smell kept me awake for a while. She had the same odor as my students — soap, dirt, skin, sweat. It was a human smell — a rank sort of dead-and-alive odor. It was dusty and undefinable, like mushrooms.

She was gone in the morning. She had vanished, leaving a dent and a smell on the sheet that was about the size of her body.

Captain said, “She told me ‘sorry’—she is seeing her sister today,” and he put a plate of eggs in front of me.

He was a small, bucktoothed man who had been a cook in the King’s African Rifles. He could make scones, he could make mint sauce and gravy, he baked bread. He spoke little English but he knew words like “roast” and “joint” and “pudding.” He spoke army Swahili, though we stuck to Chinyanja. He was a Yao from Fort Johnson, and a muslim. Now that he had seen me with African girls he seemed to regard me in a different light. He became friendlier, slightly more talkative and familiar, but at the same time protective.

“Next time I can take the girl back to town on your bicycle — if you say yes.”

He used the slang word for bicycle: njinga , which was the sound of a bicycle bell.

“Yes,” I said. “Next time.”

He knew something that I had only just realized, that there would be many more times. I was happy, but that Monday morning, walking down the road I had built, towards the school, I itched. Before morning assembly I found dark flecks clinging to my pubic hair. I pinched one out and took it to the science block to examine it under a microscope. I saw that a crab louse is aptly named.

There were other customers in Mulji’s Cash Chemist in Maravi that afternoon, so I whispered lice .

“Crab lice or body lice?” Mulji said out loud, and everyone heard: Grab lice or bhodee lice?

The powder he sold me killed them all. I combed out the dead nits, spent a busy week at the school, and on Friday I was back at the Beautiful Bamboo.

That had been my first week in the country, and that was how it was every subsequent week. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights I picked up African girls at the Bamboo and took them back to Chamba. I returned them to town in the morning, or else Captain did, carrying them on the crossbar of my bike. There were about twenty different girls at the Bamboo. They were not jealous. They never asked for money. I think they simply wanted the experience of sleeping with an American. And I wanted them.

We danced in a jumping, shaking way, to the Beatles and Elvis and Major Lance and Little Millie and “The Wah-Watusi.” A song I hated was “How Do You Do It” sung by Jerry and the Pacemakers, but they played it all the time. I developed a taste for the woozy penny-whistle music they said was South African.

Being dancing partners was part of their function at the Bamboo. And yet they were neither customers nor workers. They hinted that they were runaways. They hung around. There was always food for them, and always beer. I never saw money change hands.

On Fridays I was impatient. I had a few beers and went home early, with an African girl. They were interested in my house, but not particularly impressed. I liked the place. I lived alone. I had three bedrooms and a fireplace and all of Campbell’s old Spectators . I liked sitting on the veranda and looking at Mlanje Plateau — the great slab of rock rising out of the dark-green tea estates. I had a flower garden, and Campbell’s herbaceous borders, and my own pigeon loft. Some days, Captain put a cloth over his head and slaughtered a pair of pigeons, cutting their throats according to muslim custom, and made them into pigeon curry.

Captain also did the shopping, leaving me free on Saturdays. That was the day I stayed late at the Bamboo. I did not leave until well after midnight. I never left alone. Often I reached home as dawn was breaking. I would be pushing my bike uphill. That was lovely. The sky would lift and lighten, and night seemed to dissolve and grow rosier as I reached the top of the road and left the forest. The birds would be screeching and the cocks crowing. There was always mist in the air and the grass was soaked.

I walked to the center of my sloping lawn as the sun appeared at the edge of the far-off plateau. The African girl was behind me, parking the bike under the pigeon loft, and the jingling woke and fluttered the birds.

And then on the lawn I unzipped and pissed into the sunrise, a whole night’s beer, rocking back on my heels and feeling wonderful the morning chill, the pink dawn, the dampness, and the tootling birds.

The African girl walked in front of me and laughed at what I was doing. She left footprints in the dewy grass — dark feet showing in silver. She stood there — the bursting sunrise behind her thin skirt dazzling between her legs.

That was how it was for five months; and then Likoni left and I took his place, and for the next two months it was even better. As headmaster, I made the rules. And that was the situation — frenetic, happy, I lost count of the nights and girls — when Willy Msemba was brought into my office and given bricks to make.

It had all been a secret activity. It was what Africans themselves did on weekends. The Peace Corps office didn’t know anything, but so what? To me it seemed almost virtuous — making love to African girls. What was the point in being in Africa if I didn’t do that? Promiscuous was not the word for it. My activity was different, it was explosive. During the week it was nothing, and then it was a frenzy — three girls a weekend. It overstimulated me, and those days I could not sleep; but by Monday I was calm again.

I was young, I felt it was temporary, I had just had my twenty-third birthday. That day I copied Milton’s poem about turning twenty-three into my notebook. It contained a line that gave me a pang: Time, the subtle thief of youth … I was changing fast. I mistook maturing for aging and was desperate to use all the time I had. I could not have done more. It made me extremely tired.

Once I went to sleep while teaching a class. It was night school. I taught it Tuesday and Thursday evenings. It surprised me: I had never heard of anyone going to sleep while talking. I had been telling my English class the story of Animal Farm . They were too dim to read it themselves.

“The pigs began to quarrel,” I said.

The Tilly lamp fizzed on my desk.

“They accused each other of trying to waw … aw …”