Paul Theroux - My Secret History

“I had a girlfriend. That was before I joined the Peace Corps. It didn’t work out. If I was kissing her in her house and the phone rang, she always answered it, and she always talked about an hour.”

He said nothing for a long while. The jukebox played Chuck Berry singing “Maybelline,” and then Elvis’s “Return to Sender” and then “Knockin’ On My Front Door” by the El Dorados. The ideal woman of rock and roll songs was a crazy little mama .

“If I met someone who didn’t answer the phone at times like that I’d marry her.” He put his head in his hands, and started to sob. But he was saying something.

“What is it, Ward?”

He raised his red eye to me and said, “God, that was a beautiful toilet. I was going to have some more urinal candy shipped over. Some great flavor.”

After that, we drank without speaking, until at last he burped and said, “It’s time to go home.”

I looked at my watch.

“I mean the States,” he said. “Stop in Paris first.” Peeris .

“I don’t care if I ever go back,” I said. I realized that I meant it. I felt strangely solitary saying it. A moment later someone pinched me with a hard hand and put a friendly arm around me. It was an African girl. Crazy little mama .

“Hello, sister.”

“Hey, man,” she said.

On a cold drizzly afternoon in July — Malawi’s independence day — I rode my bicycle into town. I could hear music coming from the stadium, and howling crowd-voices, and applause. But the celebrations had nothing to do with me. I was just a foreign teacher; Mambo was headmaster. I hated seeing my students doing their Israeli marching, and I hated the Youth League in their red shirts. But most of all I sensed that this little phase was ending, and I was sorry, because I had liked living in a place that was neither a colony nor a republic. It had been nothing with a name, and very pleasant: it had resembled my own mood. In this special interval I had been able to pursue my secret life.

The natural place for me that day was the Beautiful Bamboo. I realized then that a bar is a safe neutral place, where I had a right to be. And the fact that there were African girls in the bar made it friendlier. More than that — it was where I belonged. Looking around, I saw that at one time or another I had slept with every girl I could see.

They were draped over the chairs and leaning on the bar and staring out the window at the rain. It was too wet and cold to go to the stadium, and anyway, the main independence celebration was in the capital. It was taking place at the moment. The radio was on. I could hear the band playing “Everything Belongs to Kamuzu Banda.”

“This rain is very strong,” I said in Chinyanja. The word I used for rain, mpemera , was very precise. It meant the sweeping rain driven into the veranda by the wind.

“Sure is,” a girl said, and another said, “Yah.”

How long had they been replying this way?

The Beautiful Bamboo had never looked dingier. It was filled with hairy smells and the droning odor of wet shoes and muddy boots and sodden clothes. The shadowy darkness seemed to make it stinkier, and the noise didn’t help — the shouting African men, none I knew, and the radio competing with the jukebox, playing “Downtown” by a British singer.

And over the radio came the sounds of the Malawi Police Band. Until today there had been no Malawi Police — who needed them? But the band was playing so that students all over the country could do their Israeli marching. In the Zimba stadium Mr. Mambo was standing under his headmaster’s umbrella, taking credit for his goose-stepping students as he had for Rockwell’s chimbuzi .

Rosie was heavily pregnant. She went back and forth with a tray. I bought a bottle of beer and sat alone, near the radio, to drink it. I bought another bottle. Twelve was my limit. I had a long way to go.

The Chiffons were singing, “He’s So Fine.”

“What these stupid colonialist people did not understand,” Doctor Banda shrieked, “was that we Malawians want to be free! That is why I came from London. They called me! I heeded the call. Kwacha , they said—”

His words were drowned by a group called The Shangri-Las singing “Leader of the Pack.” I could no longer hear the independence celebration clearly on the radio, only its crackle. An orange light glowed in the large plastic dial. I could feel the warm radio tubes on my face. It was not like a radio at all but rather like a device for heating a room.

Rosie came over with her tray. Her dress was tight against the ball of her big belly.

I said, “Kwacha.” Dawn: it was the slogan.

She said, “Hey, ya wanna beer?”

I said yes, and it frothed when she opened it.

Was that squawk Doctor Banda’s nagging voice on the radio? Americans said he was a charismatic leader. I never saw that. I suspected that he was insane. That freed me. What he said made no sense. But he was their problem.

It was then, in the noise of the Bamboo, that I was certain the interval was over. It had been an instant, no more than a tick or two of time. How rare it had been, how unexpected. I had seen it all. I was where I wanted to be, and I’d had everything I wished. I was still like a man on an island, among African girls. They were willing, unsuspicious, careless, and pretty. They did not attach the slightest importance to sex. It was too brief to be called pleasure, but it was fun. I felt very lucky.

The drunker I became the luckier I felt. I was braced against the bar feeling nothing but gratitude; and I was glad I was twenty-three. I felt, living in the far-flung world, I had everything.

One of my luckiest instincts lay in being able to tell when I was happy — at the time, not afterwards. Most people don’t realize until long afterwards that they have passed through a period of happiness. Their enjoyment takes the form of reminiscence, and it is always tinged with regret that they had not known at the time how happy they were. But I knew, and my memory (of bad times too) was detailed and intense.

So I made the most of those hours and days. I knew when a moment was rare. This was one, and there had been many in the months that preceded it. It warmed me like sunlight. But as I sat in the bar that day I felt the shadows lengthening, I sensed the light fading.

I thought: It was bad before under the British, and it will be bad in the future with a greedy government; but it’s perfect now.

Jim Reeves was singing, “This World Is Not My Home.”

Grace climbed onto the barstool next to me.

“Give me one beer, father,” she said.

The radio was still going, the dial was lit; a howl of Kwacha! came from the cloth on the loudspeaker.

“Kwacha ,” I said, giving Grace the beer.

“Rubbish,” she said. “Where have you been keeping, Mister Handy?”

“Here and there.” There was too much to tell: my VD, the hospital work; Gloria and her village; changes at the school — Mambo, his Israelis, the latrine ceremony, all that. “But I’m back now.”

She was drinking — slurping. She scratched her dark forearm slowly, a sound like sandpaper.

“You are still living on Kanjedza side?”

“Yes, sister.” I sipped my beer and became abstracted, thinking of a story about a waiting room. But in this waiting room no one is what he or she seems. The man with the little girl is not her father — he is a child molester.

“You are still having that smart house?” Grace said.

“Sure. Come over and see it.” And I thought: The married couple are actually saying goodbye — she is going to meet her lover, he’s off to visit his mistress. The cowboy is a homo.