Paul Theroux - My Secret History

“And the girl — you must leave her, Andy,” he said. “Forget her. Forget the family. They’re nightmare people. The house. The opinions. Do you want that? Do you want that nonsense and a little monkey wagon?”

“I don’t know what to do,” I finally said.

Sarah was looking sadly at me and thinking Poor Andy .

“Just”—and then Prasad raised his hands, like a priest at the consecration, giving his words weight—“leave her.”

“I don’t want to hurt her.”

“She’ll be very relieved.”

After Sarah had gone to bed, Prasad took me into his study and opened a filing cabinet. He showed me some of his notebooks, his novels written in longhand. He was a man of great assurance and decisiveness, and so I was surprised — even shocked — to see his handwriting, the hesitations, the blotches and balloons and crossings out. Whole pages were disfigured, and many were recopied three or four times. And then I realized I hardly knew him.

“You want to be a writer, Andy. But you see?” He opened another notebook — words blacked out, scribbles, his fine handwriting deteriorating into a scrawl. “It’s terrible, man. But if you’re serious you have a lot of work ahead of you.”

He was gone when I woke up the next day. Sarah said he was lunching in Kensington. I watched for him, and I was standing at the window when his taxi drew up. There was someone else inside.

“Cyril Connolly,” he said. “We shared a taxi. You know him?”

“The Unquiet Grave is a masterpiece,” I said.

Prasad winced, as he always did when he didn’t agree with something I said.

“He saw you at the window. He asked who you were.”

“What did you tell him?”

“ ‘That’s Andre Parent. An American writer,’ Prasad said. “ ‘He’s going to the Gold Coast.’ ”

“What did he say?”

“That he knew your work,” Prasad said, a smile rising on his lips.

“What work?”

“Exactly. You haven’t a moment to lose.”

The main street of Accra was scattered with squashed branches and trash, and some of its potholes were large enough to hold three children, just their dark heads showing above the street as they played in the yellow mud of the hole. I felt sick to my stomach, queasy in this humidity and heat after the cold air of London. Africa now seemed to represent ill-health and failure.

Francesca was driving. She steered around a pothole that would almost have swallowed her little Fiat. “They always say they are going to fix them, but they never do. It’s always lies.”

She drove badly, making me sicker. We were shopping. We tried to buy beer for New Year’s Eve — tomorrow. There was none to be had in the entire city. But why were we buying it today? Why hadn’t she thought of this before? She had known a month ago that I was coming.

“They are always out of it! You can’t buy coffee! You can’t buy lipstick! Did you get the makeup I asked you to buy at Boots?”

“It’s in my bag.”

“And they always smile stupidly and say ‘Don’t worry.’ ” The cynic habitually says always and never , but after only three months in the country had she any right to be cynical?

Francesca was tough. That was surprising first of all because she was tiny and looked helpless. But she was solitary and self-reliant, and she had the melancholy of the Italian woman who faced life alone — no husband, no children, no church. They left Italy and made their lives elsewhere. In her independence and her anger she seemed to me extraordinary. But I was uncomfortable with her — because she was older than me, she wouldn’t say how much older; and because her melancholy could turn from thoughtful pessimism to bleak sadness. I knew when: sadness gave her bad posture.

She had gone first to London, where she had learned English, and then she visited Boston, where we had bumped into each other on a bus to Amherst. We had exhausted each other one weekend, making love, and then she was gone. We stayed in touch by letter. She was in Paris, then back in Sicily, among people she hated. My being in Africa gave her an idea. After a while she turned up in Ghana, teaching at the university, English, of all things. But it was not very demanding work. It was a place much like my own — middle-aged students doing high school work.

“These are the laziest students I have ever taught. They never do any studying. It’s always, T forget to read the book!’ ”

When a person with an accent imitates the accent of another person, the satire usually collapses into self-parody. And I had found that most people who tried to imitate the way Africans talked were racists. It took me a little while to realize that when Francesca criticized Ghana or the Africans she did not regard it as racism. She felt it was the opposite — proof that she was truly broadminded. Perhaps she was. She certainly seemed confident. It took confidence to laugh and mimic and lose your temper in Africa, but it was tiring for me to watch and listen.

“Africans are really hopeless,” she said.

“I need to meet some Ghanaians,” I said. “That’s why I came here.”

“I thought you came to see me.”

“Right. But I have to pay my way. I’m writing an article.”

“What is it about?”

“Ghana after Nkrumah,” I said — and she still had a questioning smirk on her face, so I continued, “What now? — Who’s in charge? — What next? — Are we at a crossroads? On the one hand this , on the other hand that . It’s a thumbsucker.”

She laughed — she liked hearing new expressions in English. And laughter turned her into a new person — she made a loud approving noise and her small body became supple. She had short black hair and golden skin. She loved the color green — dresses, scarves, even underwear — and because she was short she always wore interesting shoes — high heels and basketwork things with built-up soles.

“I can introduce you to some Africans,” she said, and drove on.

She lived in a hot little apartment in a building that was faced with plaster that had turned from yellow to gray in the damp heat. So many of the buildings in Accra looked brittle and moldy, like stale bread, and the streets too were crumbled like old cake. The sky was heavy with the dull gleam of stifling clouds, and even at night the air was clammy and unbreathable.

That first night, when we couldn’t buy any beer, we sat surrounded by packing crates and tea chests — she said that she hadn’t had time to unpack properly and anyway found them convenient for storing her things. They were like cupboards, she said. They gave the room the cluttered and stacked-up look of an attic or a storeroom. Her ceiling fan was no more than a whirring distraction. It made the calendar rattle against the wall, but it did not cool me.

Francesca wore a Ghanaian cloth wraparound, which slipped loose as she leaned over and spooned some sinister-looking stew into my plate. I looked down and saw lurid vegetables in greasy gravy. There was bread but it was hard and dusty, and the butter tasted of soap.

“This food is disgusting,” Francesca said. “My cook is good for nothing.”

I said nothing. It was obvious the food was bad. In any case I had no appetite. The coastal heat affected me like a sickness.

When I said I wasn’t hungry, Francesca squawked for the cook. He entered in a stiff and almost ceremonial way to remove the plates.

Francesca plopped her spoon into her plate, as the cook made a little bow.

“You want pooding, muddum?”

“No, no, no, no, no.” And she waved him away.

Silently the table was cleared, and I saw that it was not a table, but another packing crate.