Paul Theroux - My Secret History

And then I went to sleep. My hand still supported my head and the warm buzz of the lamp kept me under.

When I woke up, no one spoke; no one giggled. They were mostly older people, very polite, and they liked me. Falling asleep while teaching made me seem eccentric and harmless. And of course half of them slept through the lesson, too. I became popular. Tell us about cowboys, they said. Tell us about guns. Do you have a horse? Have you flown in a plane? Did you ever meet Elvis? Are you rich? Are you a Christian? What language do Negroes talk? Can Superman really fly? Not one of them believed the world was round, but all believed in witches. They felt they had been swindled by the British. I had arrived in the country at the perfect time: they were ready to be Americans. I could only encourage them.

The African girls at the Beautiful Bamboo had the same attitude as my students. They were not merely susceptible to Americans, they were infatuated. Having overcome their fear of whites, they realized that we found them desirable, and they liked themselves better. Some of them had stopped wearing torn dresses, and now wore printed T-shirts and blue jeans. One shaven-headed barefoot girl wore a floppy sweatshirt printed with the head of Beethoven.

Some were very young — fourteen or fifteen; and none was older than twenty. They were sturdy, hard-fleshed and slim — in Nyasaland no African was fat. At least I had not seen one. Their hands were so calloused they could hold hot pots without noticing; they walked miles barefoot; and they could pop bottle caps off with their teeth.

They had one thing in common: they were unmarriageable. They had disgraced themselves in various ways, and had been kicked out of their villages. A few were rebels and had run away, but most had had children or abortions or been involved in intrigues. A few had committed petty crimes. At least one was a witch — or so the others said. None could expect to marry an African man. They had no status, they had no dowry.

It took months for me to discover these things, but when I did I understood why they were amazed that we chased them and took them home and made love to them. We desired them! They had been rejected by their families and their villages, and we romanced them.

I was single-minded, but it was not much trouble. I had everything I wanted: unlimited and guiltless sex. And because this was Africa and they were black it was not only a pleasure, it was also an act of political commitment. I pondered the fact that I was in Nyasaland, in Central Africa; and then I smiled, knowing there was nowhere else I wished to be. Sometimes I thought: I’ll never leave.

All that sex could have driven me mad, but I think it made me judicious. It concentrated my mind during the week and it kept me from pawing the students. I felt it was my duty to discourage such practices, though Deputy Mambo and Mr. Nyirongo did it all the time — fucking the little girl students in the grim, scolding way that they had learned from the missionaries.

I was occasionally tempted. After night school one evening a big goon named Eddyson — a part-time janitor — knocked at the window of my house. Usually he found me wild pigeons for my loft, but tonight he brought me a slender girl. She was smiling nervously and wringing her hands.

“Thanks, brother,” I said.

The three of us stood on the shadowy veranda.

“Take her, Mr. Anderea.”

Her name was Emmy. She had big dark eyes and a thin pretty face, and she reminded me of a warm reptile. She would wrap herself around me and laugh with her tongue out. I knew such girls, younger than she — I took her to be fifteen. It was not her age. She was a student. I couldn’t.

I sent them away. I didn’t want Eddyson pimping for me and I knew there had to be a clear line between my two lives.

They crashed away, trampled the herbaceous border and cut through the hibiscus hedge, Eddyson explaining that I was probably too tired and Emmy meekly agreeing. Later he told me he had her himself on the way home, tipped her onto her back, just like that, under a tree. “And I got mud on my knees!”

It was not hard to lead two lives and to keep them separate when they were both so satisfying. One was sex, the other work.

There were no more mentions at school of the Msemba incident, but the silence was so deliberate it was like an accusation. They had had a hint from Msemba of my secret life and I imagined they were reminded of it every time they saw his twenty stacked bricks. And were probably reminded of my failure, too. We would never get the new chimbuzi at this rate.

I endured a week of silence, feeling defensive but fairly happy; and then had a visit from the Peace Corps. My conscience was usually clear but authority made me feel guilty. I was in my office adding up the attendance register and heard a vehicle on my road — the tickey road. That was a rare enough sight, but it was more unusual even than that — the Peace Corps jeep, with Ed Wently at the wheel. I heard chairs being scraped and teachers calling their classes to order. Kids were springing from their desks and standing up to see who the visitors were. It was their road, too.

Someone else was with Wently on the front seat. I guessed it was an agency man or a poverty tourist — why else would anyone come here? — but when the jeep drew up to my office I saw that it was a fellow about my age, with the look of a volunteer. It was the ready-for-anything look: willing but a little wary.

“Got a new recruit for you, Parent.”

His name was Rockwell, he was nervous, and I knew at once it would be a mistake to call him Rocky. He was round-shouldered and a little pale and sly-looking. He did not smile. But like a lot of humorless and unsmiling people he had a startling laugh. It was sudden and terrible, not really a laugh at all.

“We don’t actually need a new teacher, Ed.”

“You can find room for him. What do you say?”

That was the Peace Corps attitude — make room, double up, hustle, look good, compromise, and keep smiling: very old-fashioned. Be full of pep! The Peace Corps showed up without notice and you were supposed to jump; and then you wouldn’t see them for months. They were in Washington, being congratulated on their good work. Or they were at embassy parties in Blantyre.

Ed Wently disliked me. He was a jock, a member of the Blantyre Club rugby team. The club did not have any African members.

“They don’t play rugby,” Wently had said.

I wanted to make an issue of it and force him to resign from the club, but I could not get any volunteers to agree with me. My feeling was partly political and partly a desire to be a nuisance. And then I stopped caring. I lived my own life. I believed that I was on my own, in my wrinkled suit and squashed hat; in my house, with my cook, and my pigeon loft, the only mzungu for miles around.

That was why I was so dismayed when Wently told me to make room for Rockwell.

“We don’t have a spare house.”

“You’ve got three bedrooms, Andy!”

I thought: Shit. And there was something in Rockwell’s expression that told me he was none too keen on living with me. He had hardly said a word. He had only laughed and that had alarmed me.

“You’ve got a Peace Corps house,” Wently said. “You have to be flexible.”

That was always the possibility in bush posts — that once you got used to them the circumstances changed, and you had to adjust again. And because we never had advance warning, every visit was a surprise.

I liked the country, I enjoyed being headmaster, I loved the African girls. But the thought of being in the Peace Corps discouraged me. I hated this jock, Wently, bringing up the Peace Corps — they offered no support, they only imposed on me, and they took all the credit.