Paul Theroux - My Secret History

Harry Gombo wore a three-piece suit and carried a carved walking stick. He usually wore a felt hat, too.

“Do you like my sombrero?” he said.

We were on our way to the Kanjedza shop everyone called the canteen.

“We call that a porkpie hat,” I said. “You’re a snappy dresser, Harry.”

He told me that he had grown up in the low-lying town of Port Herald and had never worn more than a pair of shorts until he was eighteen.

“And then I went about in a little singlet.”

“What’s a singlet?” I said, taking out my small notebook.

“A vest.”

He meant an undershirt.

He said, “But you Americans have everything.”

“There were a lot of things I didn’t have.”

He said he was surprised, but he believed me. And when I didn’t say anything more, he asked, “What things?”

I thought awhile. I wanted to be truthful.

He said, “A gun?”

“No, I had a gun.”

“What, then?”

“Sex, mainly.”

He said, “I poked my first girl when I was eight or nine.” He was smoothing his silk tie as we approached the canteen. Then he sat on the bench in front, but very carefully, to keep the creases in his trousers. “When did you start?”

“Too late — later than I wanted,” I said. “When you have to wait a long time for things you never get enough.”

“Sex is like eating.”

“America’s a very hungry country, Harry.”

“I had a white woman once. She was big and fat. I loved her. But she was transferred. Her husband was in the Forestry Commission.” He smiled gently and said, “Doris.”

“What are we doing here?”

He stood up and tapped his walking stick on the veranda of the canteen.

“Cuff links,” he said.

African girls were what I needed. Just after I left Harry I saw Abby hurrying to her house.

I said, “Want to visit me, sister?”

If they said yes it meant everything. I sometimes said, “Want to go upstairs?” This was regarded as a great joke, because the houses all had one story. But that upstairs business was also unambiguous.

Abby said, “Okay.”

As soon as we finished making love she said she had to go quickly — she was late for running practice.

“Why did you come with me then?”

“Because you wanted me.”

I walked with her to the track and on my way home a barefoot girl beckoned me from beside the Lalji Kurji Building. I was curious. She said, “Do it to me here,” and leaned backwards against the fence, bowlegged.

“I can’t.”

She laughed because I was ridiculous. Didn’t I see it was the only way? She said she lived in a small hut in Chiggamoola with her mother. She demanded that I begin. She said, “Put it in.”

“My feet hurt. I’ve got wicked arches. I have to wear cookies in my shoes.”

She was still laughing.

“That’s why I can’t do it standing up.”

One Friday, feeling eager, I asked a girl named Gloria to come home with me. She said she couldn’t leave without her friend, a skinny girl no more than fourteen. The girl was in conversation with a sinister-looking man in sunglasses — one of the black miners who worked in South Africa and who often showed up at the Bamboo.

“I have bought this girl a bottle of beer,” he said, when I took the little girl’s arm. “I can’t let her go just like that.”

He meant that for this two-shilling bottle of Castle Lager the skinny girl was his.

I said, “You should be ashamed of yourself, brother.”

The young girl wore greasy makeup — skin lightener, mascara, and lipstick. Her face was a popeyed mask. But she had no shape. Her yellow dress hung straight down like a school uniform. She bent over like a boy to buckle her plastic sandal and I saw she was wearing school bloomers.

“What’s your name, sister?”

She said something that sounded like “Boopy.”

“You’d better come with us,” I said, and put my arm around Gloria. I could feel her dark sinuous body beneath the loose dress. She was still damp from dancing and touching her excited me — it was like holding a snake against me.

Back at Kanjedza I locked Captain into his room, gave Boopy some blankets, and showed her where to sleep in the hallway. I made love in my room to Gloria and later woke her again. She said she was too tired. She said that she wanted to sleep — a sort of apologetic complaint.

“Take my friend.”

“No!” I said. I was shocked, and I waited for her to react.

But all I heard were snores from Gloria, and her snoring made me wakeful. I lay wide-eyed in the darkness of my room, breathing in little sips.

The young girl Boopy snuffled and swallowed when I woke her, and then she giggled a little and held me. Caressing her, I was running my fingers over all her bones. She was very thin but she had large bush-baby eyes. She was a child in my arms, but as soon as I took her on the floor she snorted and sighed, and she moved like a woman who knew what she wanted.

None of my students lived here in the township — they were too poor even for this place. A few lived in the slum, Chiggamoola, but I never saw them. And so I had more freedom than I had ever had at my house up at Chamba.

I sometimes visited Rockwell at the house. It was not friendship, though I felt friendlier now that I saw less of him. It was curiosity, and a suspicion in my mind that one day he might hang himself. I liked to think that I might interrupt him and prevent it.

He had refused to hire a cook. He said, “They don’t wash their hands. They don’t boil the water. It’s dirty.”

“That’s Nyasaland. That’s the world. That’s the norm, Ward.”

“America’s clean.”

“America’s unusual.”

He lived on peanut butter sandwiches. “Hey, it’s good. They grow peanuts here.” His lips were always bluish. “Kool-Aid,” he explained.

The Africans told me that Rockwell was wopusa , which meant crazy and cruel, as well as stupid; and he was cheap, refusing to hire anyone to cook his food or tend his garden. I said that Americans did not have servants, but I knew that Africans resented whites who lived alone and separate, and who didn’t offer them work. I didn’t like ratting on Rockwell, but I could see that living by himself, so far from Africans, he was becoming even stranger. What did he know about Africans?

I asked him this question.

He said, “I’ll tell you. You very seldom see a bald one.”

He had a way of nodding that was almost as alarming as the things he said.

“I’ve been thinking about bald people a lot recently. Ever notice how bald men often have cuts and scabs and wounds on their heads? You always see a Band-Aid up there. Now why is that?”

I said, “I’m not sure, Ward.”

“I am just so grateful to you for handing over your chimbuzi to me. Chimbuzi , huh? Learning the language, huh?”

“It’s coming right along, Ward.”

“But I get scared,” he said. “When I finish it I’ll have nothing else to do.”

That fear made him go slowly. The chimbuzi was much bigger than I had envisaged — great beehive stacks of bricks were accumulating and from what he had so far built I could see that he had made an elaborate design.

“Look familiar?” he asked me one day.

I said, “In a way.”

“I based it on The Alamo. See the way the wings shoot out?”

What kept me from reporting him to Ed Wently was the fact that he got on so well with Miss Natwick. When he had reached the end of his tether, she would tell me. They sat together in the staff room every recess, drinking tea and eating dry cookies. After Deputy Mambo and Mr. Nyirongo left the room, Miss Natwick said, “You can’t teach these people anything.”