Paul Theroux - My Secret History

“Why don’t you cook, if he’s so bad?”

“I hate cooking,” she said.

Then it was clear to me why she treated him so rudely. It was one bad cook blaming another.

“I just like eating,” she said.

The cook was padding back and forth, one room away. We sat restlessly, and her sentence still hung in the air. The ceiling fan went ark-ark . Someone else’s radio penetrated our wall, and there were children’s shouts from the street, and laboring cars and choking dogs. The kitchen door clattered: the cook was gone.

“I’m still hungry,” Francesca said.

“I’m not surprised.”

But she was smiling.

“Now I’m going to eat you.”

She switched the light off, but the yellow light from the street brightened the room and gave the packing cases crooked shadows. Francesca was standing before me.

“I like these Ghanaian dresses,” she said. “So easy to take off.”

She unknotted it and it slipped to the floor. She was naked. Her body was lighted by the streetlamps and stripes lay across her curves like contours — the shadows of the window bars showing on her skin. She dropped to her knees. I looked up at the ceiling. Ark-ark —the fan had a froggy voice; and later with the bed creaking it was like a jungle racket.

I woke up the next morning feeling ill. The humid heat was a weight that squeezed my eyes. It was a sense of oppression, like a memory of suffocation, and I sweated as though running a temperature. Francesca said it was a normal day in Accra. A normal day was like a fever.

I foresaw a week of this fever and this food.

“Why don’t we take a trip?” I said. “We could drive somewhere up-country in your car.”

I had a feeling that if we went north it would be cooler, and I hated this broken-down city.

Francesca was frowning — her way of showing me she was thinking.

“We don’t have any plans for New Year’s. There’s hardly any food in the cupboard. And there’s nothing to drink.”

“You are criticizing me,” she said peevishly.

I denied it and said I was sorry, but so feebly she knew I was lying.

“And it might be fun to take a trip.”

Now I regretted leaving London so suddenly, and I missed Prasad and Rosamond and the black gleaming streets.

“We could go to Kumasi,” Francesca said. “There’s a hotel where no one ever stays. It’s very green in Kumasi and a bit cooler. But what about those Africans you wanted to meet?”

“Where are they?”

“One lives in the next block of flats,” Francesca said. “He works for the government. He might have some stories for you. His name is Kofi. Everyone is named Kofi or Kwame. We can see him before we go.”

I was so eager to leave I immediately packed my bag, and began hurrying Francesca. But this made her dawdle all the more. At last she said there wasn’t time to see Kofi, and he was so boring what was the point?

“I have to see him,” I said.

He was a man in his late twenties, with the sort of protruding teeth that gave him an amiable expression. He laughed each time he spoke, and everything he said was a compliment. “You are so young. You are so handsome. When Francesca told me you were a professor I imagined an old man. But not a smartly dressed young lad—”

Was this what Francesca meant by boring? I found it worse than that. I wanted to tell him to shut up. I said, “What ministry are you with?”

“Ministry of Works.” He smiled. “It is all bribery and corruption. That is the African way. It is hopeless.”

“The roads are in rough shape in Accra.”

He laughed very hard in a mirthless way.

“In Accra they are good! You should see the rest of the country!” His laugh went ark-ark-ark like Francesca’s fan. “The minister steals money and gives it to his wives. He has four wives. He has a house in London. He is a devil.” He laughed again.

“You don’t sound angry.”

“Why be angry? Life is short. We say ‘Be happy — don’t worry.’ You are in Africa, my young friend. Have a drink. It is New Year’s Eve.”

He took a bottle of beer from a crate on the floor and opened it. He splashed some beer on the threshold. “That is a libation,” he said. “For the gods.”

“Which gods?”

“All of them.”

He filled three glasses.

All this time Francesca was sighing — a sort of audible boredom. We drank a little and Kofi emptied the last of the bottle of beer into my glass. It was very bad for the host to drink the last of the beer, he said.

“I thought they were out of beer in Accra. How did you get it?”

“Bribery and corruption,” he said. Ark-ark . “I will get you some crates. As many as you want. Leave it to me, my friend.”

There was a murmur in the next room. Kofi yapped in his own language, a sort of crow-squawk, and a woman appeared. She was about fifteen years old, and wrapped in a pink cloth; she was pregnant and perspiring.

“This is my lady wife, Mr. Endro,” Kofi said. “She doesn’t speak English. Just a simple village girl.”

She was barefoot, and breathless from the heat. She dabbed her face.

“When is the baby due?”

“One month or so,” Kofi said. “It will be our first child. You can be godparents. Or uncle and auntie.”

Francesca sighed again, but Kofi did not seem to mind. He was flattering, obtuse, full of promises and compliments. He never sat down. He walked up and down, laughing in his croaky way, urging us to drink more. He was much cheerier than the rather solemn-looking Ugandans I was used to. But he was repetitious, and I wondered whether he were drunk. He was scathing about the Ghana government. “They are like vultures,” he said. “There will be another coup, oh sure,” and he told me — laughing the whole time — how Nkrumah had misgoverned the country.

“I’d like to meet someone in the government,” I said.

“Sure. The minister? The perm sec? The deputy minister? I can arrange it for you. Have another cup of beer, please.”

Everything seemed so easy. An hour with a politician or civil servant was just what I needed. I could see someone at the American Embassy (“A western diplomatic source told me”), and talk to people at the market in Accra, or other friends of Francesca’s; and I would have my article about Ghana, which would be my air fare for this month of travel.

“Any of them,” I said. “All of them. I just want to ask a few questions. Listen, are you sure you can fix it up?”

“Leave it to me. I can fix it up.” He seemed to be trying out my words, making them his own. “When you come back from Kumasi give me a tinkle and I will fix it up.”

He uttered two crow-squawks at his wife, who stopped dabbing at her perspiring face and tramped heavily out of the room. She returned with two bottles of beer.

“I’ve had enough,” I said, and snatched my glass off the table.

“This is a present,” he said. “You take them with you. Happy New Year. African custom.”

“We don’t want it,” Francesca said, bluntly, snapping her jaws at him.

“But the young man wants the beer,” Kofi said, winking at me.

Francesca was annoyed, and it showed. But Kofi seemed not to notice, or perhaps he didn’t care.

“You are welcome here,” Kofi said. “We respect teachers in Ghana. They are like gods to us. We are thirsty for education.”

On the road to Kumasi, I said, “You weren’t very polite to him.”

“Kofi? He is like an Italian,” Francesca said. “He thinks only of himself.”

“If he gets me an interview with the minister I’ll forgive him for anything.”

After a long silence Francesca said, “Sometimes you say such stupid things.”