Paul Theroux - My Secret History

“How do you know this?”

“I am an Ibo,” he said. “And what do you do?”

“I’m a teacher,” I said. “In Uganda.”

“Are you on holiday?”

It was always foolish to mention writing or journalism in Africa, so I said, “Sort of. I’m also seeing a friend.”

“I thought all the foreigners left after the last coup.”

“My friend is a Nigerian,” I said.

“God help you!” he said, and he laughed so loudly that several people turned to stare at him.

And then the plane was descending, streaking past mud huts and junked cars and the scrappy rooftops of small shacks.

The economist hurried out of the plane. I thought: He’s not real . The next day, talking to other Nigerians — editors, a reporter, a publisher’s representative — and a U.S. Embassy official, I had the same thought, that they were not real either. They were acting. Their actual lives were hidden from me, but for my benefit they had cast themselves in the colorful role of writers or businessmen or teachers or tribesmen. In each public person was a smaller stranger person who bore no resemblance at all to the one I saw, and I was always on the point of demanding Who are you? or Who do you think you are? when I remembered, with a little shock, who I was.

I had not seen Femi for a year. I had never thought I would see her again. I did not want to startle her and so, instead of calling her, I called her brother George. This was after I saw the editors and officials, for the sake of my article.

George appeared at my hotel. He was so black and smooth he seemed to be wearing a second skin: he was like someone else within that slippery skin — but who?

“Come, we will have a drink!” He was hearty, expansive, energetic. He would not look me in the eye. We went to a noisy club five streets away. That was the strangeness of Lagos. From a fine, expensive hotel it was a short walk to a dangerous slum. There were prostitutes in the club — tall skinny girls in tight skirts, wearing orange and blonde wigs.

George shouted for two beers, and when they were brought and we touched glasses his eyes met mine and he lost his smile. “I am very sorry for what happened,” he said.

I could see this was going to be an impossible conversation. His mood was somber and apologetic, but the place was noisy — brass band, people dancing and flailing their arms, old women shrieking. I had to ask him to repeat that sentence, and the second time, shouting it so that I would hear it, he sounded insincere. But I knew he was not.

“The family is very ashamed!” he yelled.

“Let’s not talk about it.”

“We found the boy! We beat him! We took some money!”

“I can’t hear you,” I said, shaking my head. But I could, and I didn’t want to.

“Why are you not drinking your beer?”

“I’m sick!” The symptoms were gone but I was still taking the penicillin.

George smiled: he didn’t understand. He went on shouting.

I pretended I couldn’t hear him through the music and the noise, and at last he gave up.

Eventually he said, “Femi wants to see you.”

It was what I wanted to hear. I stood up, and George followed me outside.

As soon as we had left the noise of the club and were in the street, George changed. The apologies were over. He laughed at the heavy traffic and the horns. He told me he was planning to study engineering in Kaduna. He talked about his own life. And he seemed relieved to be talking about something other than Femi — that talk was lost and forgotten in the twanging music and the shadows of the club. He was no longer hearty. He looked depleted; he was quiet. After all that effort he had nothing more to say.

George had given me Femi’s address without telling me where it was. The taxi driver snorted when I told him, and he drove for an hour, never leaving the same ruined road. It was midday, and we went slowly in a line of contending cars, past low buildings and daubed signs. Did it look familiar to me because the whole of Lagos looked chaotically the same? It was an ugly place. Its noise and heat seemed like other aspects of the same disorder. That — the ruin — was real. Everything else was unreal. It was not a city, the money was worthless, the food was bad, the air stank, the poorest people were extravagantly dressed in bandannas and bright robes, with turbans and sashes and crisply folded togas.

It was the way Femi was clothed. Her turban matched her gownlike dress, the purple and white cloth shot through with gold thread; and there was something Egyptian in her bearing, the way she held herself, all that cloth wrapped neatly on her head, and even in her features, slanted and slightly hooded eyes and full lips and rising cheekbones — pharaonic. She was like a black cat wrapped in gold cloth.

That was how she looked when she shoved aside the rag that hung in place of a door. A chicken ran out from behind her, its head down, clucking madly.

Her village — if it was a village — was near the airport. It was part of the continuous ruin by the roadside. The planes roared low overhead, landing, taking off, leaving a smell of diesel fuel in the hot air. Gray soap bubbles and gobs of toothpaste ran in a trickle of wastewater through a furrow in the dirt and gurgled into a ditch — a lovely sound that made me look at the nauseating thing. Femi’s hut was made of paper and planks and flattened oil cans. But she was a beauty.

We didn’t kiss — we shook hands: her mother was there. Her mother did not speak English, and so she was especially attentive. She was also dressed in a lovely gown, with a shawl and a drooping headdress. She watched us closely while we were standing in the dusty hut, but as soon as we sat down on opposite sides of the room she seemed to lose interest and she drifted away.

“So, where are you coming from? George said London. I said hah!”

“I was in London for Christmas.”

“Sometimes even Nigerians go to London for Christmas,” Femi said. She had heavy lidded eyes that became absolutely unseeing when she was scornful. “I think it is a bloody waste of time.”

“Where would you go.”

She looked up, becoming interested again. “Maybe to Ikeja.”

She was from Ikeja.

“Or maybe to Uganda.”

I had hoped she wouldn’t say that.

“Everyone misses you,” I said.

“The people are very primitive, but it is a pretty place,” she said. “I remember the bush. The people are so backward there. That is why they are friendly. Bush people—”

A plane went overhead, perhaps taking off, perhaps landing. It drowned the rest of her words. She finished her sentence with a shrug.

“You like it better here?”

“Cities are better,” she said. “I don’t like it here. But this is my mother’s house. I came here after the surgery and just stayed.”

I almost asked What surgery? until it struck me what the euphemism stood for.

She stared at me. She was theatrically dressed, as for an opera or a pageant of some sort, something unreal; but the things she said were factual. They cut deep and made me remember.

“How is your life?” she asked.

“Moving right along,” I said. “And yours?”

“Not so bad. I’m still weak,” she said. “I thought I would never stop bleeding. They said to me that sometimes people die of it. That’s, what they told me afterwards.”

Her lids grew heavier and made her haughty again and more pharaonic as she raised her head.

Her mother reappeared. She had a skull-like simian face, the color of shoe leather and just as dry and full of creases. She entered laughing softly and set a bottle of orange soda onto a plate. She produced two glass tumblers from a cloth, and wiped them with the cloth, and poured the orange soda into them, taking her time and laughing, not hearing anything but watching with wet reddened eyes.