Paul Theroux - My Secret History

“My father wants to see you,” she said. “His name is Maxwell.”

No one asked where I had been.

Maxwell lay in a cot, in the largest hut in the village. He looked much sicker even than any of the men I had bathed at The Queen Elizabeth, and I was sure he was dying. It was a bare room. There was no medicine near him, only a glass of water and a Bible.

I watched him for a moment. Perhaps he was dead already?

His voice came gasping out of the stillness.

“Are you saved?”

I said I didn’t know.

“Then you aren’t saved,” he said. “You would know if you were.”

There was a long silence, during which I realized that he had spoken to me in English.

Finally, I said, “I thought you wanted to talk.”

“If you’re not saved I have nothing to say to you.”

Gloria was waiting for me outside. She seemed stupid and eager. She took my hand and led me away. She did not mention her father.

She said, “Tonight I will come to your hut. It will be easy. You are sleeping with my two small brothers.”

I was shocked. First the father’s Are you saved? and then the daughter’s plan to make love in the same room where her two brothers were sleeping, the little naked boys, Redson and Walton.

Seeing that I was hesitant she said, “You were once such a dog that you took me and that little girl home with you and you screwed both of us.”

That was true, but it seemed a long time ago. And I hated to be reminded of it. I believed that I had changed a bit, but when I was forced to think about it I saw that I had not changed at all.

I said, “What if the kids wake up? Do you want them to see us?”

“They never wake up.”

“I can’t screw in the same room with children, sister.”

“They are used to it.”

“And your father would hate it if he knew. You didn’t tell me he’s a religious man.”

“He is so foolish. These village people are primitive”—she said “primitive” in English—“They don’t know anything.”

“I am a guest, so I have to behave myself.”

“You are my guest, so you have to do what I say.”

I had always thought she was submissive. What was this? I said, “What do you want, sister?”

“Jig-jig.”

“Sorry. Not with your brothers near us.”

They didn’t sleep in beds. They had mats, which seemed to me much worse. The mats were beside the bed and under it. We would be screwing on top of them.

“We can do it somewhere else,” she said.

I thought of the snakes I had seen that afternoon.

“Here,” she said. “My man.”

We were standing beside a dead tree in the darkness, whispering.

“There are snakes on the ground here.”

“We will screw standing up,” she said. “Come near. Near.”

The word was pafoopee —an easy word to say lewdly.

I said no, but she insisted, and she got me started with her rough hand. She leaned against the tree and held the hem of her dress. Then she balanced herself on an upraised root and we went at it like a couple of monkeys. When we were done I remembered that her father was dying in a hut on the other side of the village. She wanted me again. Pafoopee , she said.

All night I heard the two children snoring beneath my bed. I was wakeful, fearing that Gloria would come in. But she stayed away.

She gave me a basin of water and a chunk of soap the next morning. No matter how thoroughly I washed I still felt filthy afterwards. Africans always looked clean. It was their secret. How did they manage to keep clean in mud huts? I was very grubby, and having washed only my hands and face, the rest of my body itched. I didn’t shave, and I was too unsure of the water to brush my teeth with it.

But Gloria looked even worse than me. Her dress was dirty, and what was this dancing dress doing here? The buttons down the back were undone, and I could see the row of knucklebones on her spine. By the second day, which was Sunday, she looked very slovenly, and the other women and girls seemed embarrassed by her. She was cranky, her feet were dirty, her dress was torn.

She was oblivious of this. She said the other women got on her nerves. In the town of Zimba she was known as one of the stylish girls from the Beautiful Bamboo; but in this little village she looked whorish and silly.

The women were quiet and rather shy. They were solicitous towards me, urging me to stay in the shade and eat. They brought me African beer. It was sour, almost rancid, but I was flattered to be treated in a traditional way.

Gloria said something which I was sure was, “He doesn’t drink that crap.”

She told me to give one of her brothers some money to buy a bottle of Castle Lager in Balaka. I didn’t want it, but rather than make a scene I gave in.

“These people are stupid.”

I thought what a horrible person she was and regretted that I had come. But I was ashamed of myself too, for the more I thought about her the more convinced I was that she was like me. Had I made her that way? It was not that she was Americanized. She wasn’t that, by far. It was that she was a scold and a slob and very stupid.

“The old man wants to see you again.”

He lay in the darkness.

“I have been thinking about you,” he said.

That mattered to me and moved me. He was a wise man. Perhaps what I had sought in his daughter he would offer me. I imagined folk stories and proverbs, and memories of the settlers. He was over seventy, which meant he had been born in the nineteenth century. I looked upon his sunken face, this man from another age. He had been thinking about me.

“Yes, you are lost,” he said. It seemed to me that he was chuckling. “You are damned.”

I thought: That’s what everyone says.

The mail train left Balaka at midnight. We boarded it, and I stretched out on the wooden slatted seat, inhaling coal smoke from the chimney. The insects shrieked at the open windows, from the black woods. Gloria was also sleeping. At one point she woke me up crying, “Help!” She said it was not a nightmare but a song. I woke at dawn, as we drew into Blantyre. My back ached; but I was glad, the sun was up, the air was cool.

But when we walked to the bus depot I knew that something had changed between us. I had seen her village. She had been ashamed of it, ashamed of her father and the “primitive” people. She was distant with me now, as if I might make fun of her. I had seen her secret. She thought I knew too much.

She said, “Bye-bye.”

She never showed any affection in public, but then Africans in Nyasaland seldom did.

She was going back to her life and I to mine.

Rockwell was waiting in my office. He wanted the key to the tool shed.

I saw that his whole face was swollen. It was the same pinky bareness that his chin had been, but it was an entire mask of it.

He gave me one of his hacking laughs that meant Watch out! and told me that he had plucked some whiskers out of his chin and that had given him an idea. He wondered if he could do more. Over the weekend he had had nothing to do (“Because you took the key to the tool shed with you, Parent, thanks a million”) and had plucked all the hairs out of his upper lip, the mustache area. He had used a pair of tweezers. He said it hurt at first.

“Then I thought what the heck. I started again yesterday and did my whole face. Hey, what if it doesn’t grow back?”

The African girls never talked about politics. There had been no mention of it in Gloria’s village. The British had gone, a black government was coming — everyone knew that. But for now no one was in charge. It was not anarchy, it was peace. People walked in the road there were so few cars, and poor people put on their best clothes and went to get drunk, men in ties, women in dresses. Strangers talked to each other: “Hello, father,”