Paul Theroux - My Secret History

“First I want to dance here.”

“We can dance, and then you can come over to my house,” I said. The little boy has a fatal disease, and one of them — probably the nun — has a hand grenade. But it was an impossible story to write — too static. No action. “We can go upstairs.”

Grace laughed in her throat — a kind of gulping.

“That’s a very pretty dress,” I said.

“Seven pounds at the Indian shop,” she said. “And shoes. Three pounds.”

That meant expensive, stylish, smart. She was boasting.

“So what about it?” I asked.

She stared at me.

I thought: A story about coincidences — enormous ones. A man goes out to buy some cigarettes for his wife and is hit by a car. At the same moment she electrocutes herself with her hair dryer in the bathroom. Upstairs their infant daughter sleeps soundly, not knowing she is an orphan. No, forget it.

“Let’s go, sister.”

“Not just yet,” she said, and laughed again. Unwelcome laughter was so irritating. She kept it up.

Could I ever get used to that laugh? Another story. A divorce. It was the way she laughed, your honor.

“First you give me money,” Grace said.

This sobered me. I considered what she had said and found that I was very shocked.

I thought of a story in which the most innocent and dependable person one could think of demands suddenly: First you give me money.

I said to Grace, “Maybe I’ll ask someone else — another girl,” and glanced around.

“She will want money.”

Why had I not guessed this would happen?

The radio was going, Banda at the stadium leading a hymn, “Bringing in the Sheaves.”

Just about then — because the hymn continued in my dream — I fell asleep where I sat, with my head on my arms.

“Sorry,” Grace said, waking me with her hard fingers stabbing me in my spine.

Night had fallen while I slept. The Independence Celebrations were over. African girls sat quietly at the tables in the Beautiful Bamboo. They watched the door, but no one entered. A few of them muttered as I left with Grace — and I was limping, still waking up.

We went back to my house in the darkness, saying nothing, listening to the trees drip as we walked. Captain had left a small tin oil-lamp burning in my room, and in this feeble light Grace undressed. She hung her blouse and skirt on the back of a chair; she folded the rag she called her cardigan. She stood her shoes side by side against the wall.

There were so many ways that a woman got into bed — all the postures that meant I’m joining you , and the slow, reluctant movements a woman made when she was simply tired, the way she lay down flat, with no sideways motion, as though she were alone.

But I was still awake, and shortly I was on Grace. Her eyes were open, but her body seemed asleep.

“Are you finished yet?” she said.

And then I could not continue. I rolled over and looked at the ceiling. Even in this cold season, Captain had draped the bed with a mosquito net. It looked mockingly like a bridal veil.

“Do you want to stay?”

“It will cost more.”

I was thinking about Africa. What an excellent place it was in the dark, and how lucky I was to be out of America and out of Vietnam. I could go on living, and from here in Central Africa I had a good vantage point on both those places; I could begin to write something that was my own. I considered the word nocturnes . There was no writing here at all, and nocturnes was a word that had to be written — no one ever said it, which was why it was still so beautiful. I had tried to write a story about these African girls, but it kept coming out funny. I did not know that its comedy was its truth. I needed to write, because so much had happened to me to make me feel lonely, and writing about these past events was the best way of being free of their power. The thought stirred me and made me want to live a long time.

That took seconds.

Grace slammed the door hard and woke the dogs, and people started calling out, and cocks crowed, as light appeared in slashes between my curtains — another day. Though something had ended in Africa I was still smiling. I wanted to go on remembering this.

No one looks more like a displaced person than an Indian in an overcoat. My friend, S. Prasad, the writer, was waiting for me behind the glass doors at Victoria Air Terminal. His winter clothes, and his thick meerschaum pipe, and the way he glowered — his complexion was more gray than brown this December day — made him seem forbidding. But I knew better. He was an unusual alien: he knew everything about England, he had an Oxford degree, owned his own house, and had published half a shelf of books. He had won five literary prizes. “I don’t want to hear about prizes,” he sometimes said, making his famous face of disgust. He had lived here since he was eighteen. Still, he called himself an exile. He said he didn’t belong — he looked it in his winter coat. Seeing me, he frowned with satisfaction.

He told me about his being an exile as we crossed London in the back of a taxi on the way to his house. I was listening, but I was also rejoicing in the weather.

In Uganda, where I now lived, the sun’s dazzle filled the sky, so most days there was no sky. After that dangerous and squan-dered-looking sunlight, England this wet day looked like a city underground. It was cold, it gleamed, it was black, it seemed indestructible. But this was only a holiday interval for me. I was tired of spending hot drunken Christmases in Africa. This time I would do it right — stay here, sing carols, tramp through the snowy streets; then back to the jungle.

“I have no home,” Prasad was saying, biting his pipestem. “You Americans are so lucky — you can always go home. But how can I go back to that ridiculous little island? Exile is a real word for me, you know. These chaps—”

We were at a red light and men in bowler hats and black suits, like a crowd of morticians, were crossing the road in front of our taxi.

“—these chaps have no idea. They have pensions and families and houses and, good God, they have children. They’re secure. They’re doing very nicely — probably putting a few pence away. What is that bespectacled son of a bitch looking at?”

It was a skinny-faced Indian in a pin-striped suit, waiting for the light to change and glancing at S. Prasad as we drove off.

“Pakistanis. They’re everywhere,” Prasad said. “Can you blame the English for complaining? They’re no better than your bow-and-arrow men.”

I said nothing, because I knew he was only half serious, and he was at his best when he was allowed to range freely. He was an intensely private and usually silent man, which was why when he stepped out and began to speak he could be startling. Also, he tested his opinions on perfect strangers. I hate music was one of the first things he ever said to me. He never repeated it, and so I assumed he probably did not mean it. Now he was talking about Pakistanis and Islam and Mr. Jinnah.

I was transfixed by the people — the pretty girls in short skirts, the purposeful way they walked, the curve of their thighs, and all the hurrying people, so different from the shufflers in Wandegeya.

Prasad saw that I was interested, but before I could speak he said, “London does not swing for me.” And he smiled. “It might for you, Andre.”

We crossed a bridge over the Thames and we seemed to be traveling outdoors for the length of it. I got a glimpse of the river and the pale winter light: white sky, black buildings. Then darkness again on the far side, and the taxi buried us in south London.