Paul Theroux - My Secret History

“What can you teach?”

Rockwell said, “I was doing a little chemistry and math at my last place.”

“Where was that?”

“Sierra Leone. I asked for a transfer.”

Probably bush fever: a crazy — a freak.

I said, “We’re trying to build a chimbuzi . You can get going on that. And you can help Mr. Nyirongo with Form Three math.”

“What’s a chimbuzi?”

“You’ll have to start learning the language,” I said. “It’s a shithouse.”

Rockwell then pronounced a strange sentence.

“I’ve always been very excited about sanitary facilities.”

We stared at him.

“That’s what I couldn’t stand about Sierra Leone.”

I could not think of anything to say.

“The restrooms,” he said.

“The restrooms?”

Even Wently was baffled.

Rockwell said, “Yeah. People went to the bathroom in the street.”

I reminded myself to write that down.

“No one does that in Nyasaland,” Wently said, and put his arm around Rockwell’s shoulder, the way jocks hug each other. “You’re going to love it here, Ward.”

So his name was Ward Rockwell. But from that moment I thought of him as Weird Rockwell.

“Bodily hygiene is so important,” Rockwell was saying as he went down the road.

It was a bad start. And things did not improve. He did not speak the language. That was crucial. Without noticing it I had been using it constantly. I gave him my grammar book and taught him the greetings, but he showed no aptitude.

I asked him whether he spoke any foreign languages.

“A little Tex-Mex,” he said.

“Is that like pig Latin?”

“Are you serious?” he said.

He pronounced it sirius , like the constellation. That was the California in him. He had been raised in Houston but after UCLA he had stayed in Los Angeles. He said contimpree peeners when I mentioned (to irritate him) that I liked the look of rotting flesh in the work of Ivan Albright. His birth sign was Jiminie .

It was bad enough that he spoke no Chinyanja. It did not help that his English was peculiar. Innerteenmint , he said and hoorible .

“Hey, that cook. When I tell him to inner, I want him to inner.”

It took me awhile to work that one out.

“The cook’s name is Captain. He doesn’t speak English.”

“Everyone spoke English in Sierra Leone, even the servants.”

I thought of three rejoinders to this. But we were in the bush. An ill-judged remark could cause weeks of miffed silence. I decided not to risk it just then.

“But my cook in Kenema was minilly deficient,” he said, and made his first and only joke in the year I knew him. “Kenema was an enema.”

He had the California way of saying hamburgers , heavy on the ham and swallowing the burgers .

He was pudgy and lumpish and he had the heavy person’s curse: terrible feet. They were visibly twisted and made him totter. “I’ve got wicked arches,” he explained. “I have to wear cookies in my shoes.” He made the word sound like shees .

The word hygiene made him show his teeth, and he said it constantly. It occurred to me that all his talk about cleanliness was just a way of talking about filth; and his bowels were his favorite subject. He was preoccupied rather than obsessed, and not disgusting enough to be truly interesting. But his cast of mind made him an untiring latrine-builder.

Only a few days after he arrived there was progress. He staked out the footings and started digging the runoffs, and near the clay pit was a rising stack of new bricks. I showed him my design for the chimbuzi but he said it was not ambitious enough. He took me around the site and showed me how he was going to enlarge it. I helped him measure the new dimensions. He talked about his bowels as he worked on the latrine, like a gourmet cook rejoicing in his hearty appetite.

Captain did not like him. He asked me if the new bwana was a Yehudi . I hated having to answer but the answer was no in any case.

Rockwell could only speak to Captain through me. “Tell him I hate hard-boiled eggs,” “Tell him not to inner my room,” “Tell him—”

“Look,” I said. “Captain works for me. Don’t keep giving him orders. If you don’t like it here, find another place.”

“It’s okay here,” Rockwell said. “But I sometimes wonder if that guy washes.”

“He’s a muslim. He washes more often than you do.”

“Yeah,” he said doubtfully.

“Five times a day.”

This impressed Rockwell. “Bodily hygiene is real important.”

He washed his own floor, he scrubbed his own clothes, he disinfected the bathroom every day, he hung a container of chemicals in the cistern that turned the toilet water blue. Sometimes he did not talk to me for several days, and then he would talk nonstop, often incomprehensibly, about a mail-order business he wanted to start in California. And he talked about our chimbuzi . He took that very seriously. He dug test holes, drainage ditches, and laid some of the foundation stones. “It’s the basics and the insides that really count. It’s like your body. You’ve got to be clean inside, get all the poisons out—”

A parcel was delivered in a Land-Rover from the Nyasaland Trading Company. It weighed ten pounds and even well-wrapped its odor made my eyes sting.

Rockwell was delighted when I gave it to him.

“It’s urinal candy,” he said. “For our new sanitary facility.”

He was very methodical, which made him heavy going in conversation, because he talked the way he worked. His political conservatism seemed like another aspect of his toilet-talk, and he had stories to support his theories. One revolting one was about some Africans in Sierra Leone who refused to flush toilet paper down the hopper.

“See? You can’t teach these people anything.”

“Not true. The Peace Corps brought oral sex to Nyasaland.”

“That turns my stomach,” he said, and looked genuinely wretched. “Think of the germs.”

But I had wanted to upset him. The only way I could live in the same house was to disagree with everything he said. It was a way of doing battle. I discovered that doing that, disagreeing on principle, meant I was wrong a great deal of the time and often made a fool of myself.

Rockwell did not usually answer back. If I hurt his feelings he sulked. He wouldn’t fight. He said, “Words! Words!” and ran to his room. But after his silences he opened up: bodily hygiene, what happens to food in your intestines, the new sanitary facility — and sometimes it was Africa and the Peace Corps.

“When I go back I’m going to write a book. I’m going to call it The Big Lie.”

“I thought you were going to start a mail-order business.”

“The mail-order business will give me the free time to write,” he said. “By the way, I notice you write. Always whacking away at your typewriter. What is it?”

It was my other secret; but so dark was the riddle of writing that even though I did it every day I was afraid to think about my ambition, and never said a word to anyone else about it. Rockwell had heard me typing, that was all. It was a source of pride to me that no one in the world had ever seen me write a word of fiction.

“Letters home,” I said. “Anyway, what kind of mail-order business?”

“You promise you won’t steal my ideas?”

“I promise. That’s a performatory utterance, you know.”

“Words.” He was grinning. “Words are neat.”

This was late one night in front of the fire. The fire always gave him frightening features, and his eagerness tonight combined with the jumping flames on his face made him seem much crazier than usual.