Paul Theroux - My Secret History

The roads through the township were so steep and rutted I could not ride my bike. When it rained the roads were sluices. Some of the huts had been undermined by rushing rainwater and were tipped and slumped into deep ditches. Others were cracked from having subsided. Weeds grew in the tin roofs. There were chimneys but there was smoke everywhere — and furious dogs and skinny chickens.

It was a peculiar mess of a place. Harry Gombo said Africans were not used to this sort of hut. They cooked inside and scorched the walls and sometimes set them on fire. They pissed against their walls. They did not plant anything — the ground was pitched too sharply and was too stony. They had chopped down all the trees and used them for firewood. Their goats had eaten the rest of the greenery — the bushes, the grass. The chickens pecked at rubble, the dogs fought over old corncobs. There was always a rubber tire smoking beside the road. It never caught fire, it never went out, it always stank.

To keep warm in this cold season the Africans built fires in buckets. Sometimes they asphyxiated themselves. None of the huts were painted. Each one was ugly and uncomfortable and had a nasty smell. Just behind, where there should have been a garden or a bougainvillaea, was a latrine in a shed — the chim .

Captain hated it here, I knew, but he did not complain. It was most of all a blow to his pride. It was also harder for him to cook properly in such poor conditions — no more scones, no more meat pies, no breadmaking, no slowly roasted joints. He was used to the electric stove at Chamba; the oven; the refrigerator. Here we had a screened-in box—“the meat-safe.” I urged him to cook African food, which was easy enough. He finally relented and then every meal was the same — a lump of steamed dough served with a dish of thick stew. You broke off a piece of dough, rolled it into a dumpling, made a deep thumbprint in it and pushed it through the stew. When it was very wet you ate it. I drank tea, I drank beer, and like the Africans I varied my diet with cookies and hard candy: biscuits and boiled sweets, the British legacy. Captain brought home finger bananas and sour oranges from the market. I killed the taste with black cigarettes which cost a penny each — a tickey for a box of three.

This was my home — at last, an African hut.

The girls I brought to it were not so intimidated as they had been by my house on Chamba Hill. One of the girls was a neighbor. Her name was Abby. She worked at the Rainbow Cinema, taking tickets. She was nineteen, she had two children, she was long-legged and pretty — and strangest of all, she was a runner on the Zimba town track team.

She said she was a very fast runner. “I do not know why!”

It was a mystery to her why she was able to run the two-twenty in less than 33.2 seconds. She was not interested in distance running; she was a sprinter. She was that way in bed, too: very frantic and then it was all over.

More than anything Abby wanted to run in Rhodesia. Rhodesia seemed distant and glamorous. She was sure she could win the women’s two-twenty in Nyasaland and be sent to Salisbury to compete.

Nyasaland had these prodigies — the natural athlete (a mother of two); the math genius (barefoot village boy); the long-distance traveler (the young man who walked two thousand miles to Nairobi “for an education”). One of my students, a tiny Tonga with a swollen face, was brilliant on the penny-whistle; and another, a ball boy at the Blantyre Sports Club, was an inspired tennis player. But these exceptional people were seldom taken seriously, and indeed most of them saw themselves as clowns. They would do little more with their gifts than be messengers or hawkers, and they would all die young.

Harry Gombo was a book salesman. He wore a cowboy hat, which contrasted oddly with his buck teeth and his pin-striped suit. He liked the singer Jim Reeves. He wondered whether I had met the man. Harry sang “This World Is Not My Home (I’m Just A-Passing Through).” He wrote long abusive letters to his district manager in Salisbury.

“I have sent another fizzing rocket to the bwana.”

He wanted a company car.

He said he was glad to have an American for a neighbor. He admired me for romancing Abby, the track star. He worried about her and her two children. He said I could be their daddy. He sang the Jim Reeves song, “That Dear Old Daddy of Mine.”

Abby brought her two children over to my house when she worked late at the Rainbow. That did not help. It changed my mood when I came with her and had to step over their little sleeping forms — so still on the floor, like mealy-sacks — in order to get into bed with Abby. She roused them and sent them to sleep in the narrow hallway between the two rooms. They picked up their ragged blankets and tottered sleepily away, and they were soon asleep again. But that took away all my ardor.

One night I took Rosie home, and the next morning I saw that she had a bulging belly.

“Are you pregnant, sister?”

She said yes with that click of her teeth.

“Whose is it?”

She said, “Yours!” and laughed in a taunting way.

She kept it up and my blood ran cold. I was so worried that I started to do calculations. It was hopeless, because I could not remember when I had made love to her — all the times. But I said it was impossible and I tried to seem very certain.

“Get on me,” she said. She rolled onto her back and lifted her legs. Foreplay was unknown in that country.

I could not perform. The mention of her baby, the size of her belly, and the sun streaming through the window all killed my desire. I had been genuinely afraid by the easy mocking way she had said, “Yours!”

I suggested that instead of making love we have a cup of tea. She said okay and hopped out of bed. Captain made us breakfast and while he was out of the room I asked her how many months?

“Three or four,” she said.

I screamed, “I haven’t touched you for six months!”

“Don’t make noise,” she said and squinted at me.

“I am not the father.”

She said, “I was just joking.”

“Black humor.”

She said she had no idea who the father was, but when the baby was born she would go to the Chiperoni Blanket Factory and compare the child’s features with the men in the rag room, and then she would know.

Captain took her into town on the bike and that night I brought home a different girl. I always saw Abby on Sundays, because there was only one evening show. These days she never stayed late. Her coach had told her to drink a lot of milk and to sleep well. She was training for the race that would get her to Rhodesia.

I asked her why — though she was in training — she let me make love to her.

“Because I am so close to you,” she said.

This seemed very tender.

“My house is just this side. It’s easy.”

The township was a mess — it smelled, it was muddy, it was noisy, and at night it was so dark that if you weren’t careful you would fall into a ditch. All these were characteristics of the country. But there was no crime. The Africans in Kanjedza were too poor to get very drunk, and they worked too hard to stay up at night raising hell. There was cooperation — people helped each other, minded each other’s children, cooked for each other, did their washing together at the standpipe: clothes in the morning, dishes at night. They were village courtesies, and though it seemed an unlikely place to find them practiced, the Africans saw nothing unusual in it. The township was not a mess to them. They said they were proud of their cement huts and tin roofs. But they were city Africans and rather lonely.

In spite of the bleakness and the outward dirtiness of the huts, the broken and smeared windows, the ragged curtains and splintered doors and the way they put boulders on the roof to hold the tin down — in spite of this, when the African girls emerged from the huts they were fresh-faced and clean, in starched blouses and pleated skirts. All day they lurked looking frumpish in sarongs and old coats and rubber sandals; but when they went into town they were dressed up and unrecognizable. They wore pretty dresses and the men wore neckties and jackets.