Paul Theroux - My Secret History

My apartment smelled of my parrot, Hamid, the plastery odor of his droppings. The bird made a bubbly growl when he saw me, and I let him out of his cage and smoothed his gray feathers and stroked his beak. He flapped around the room for a while, and then settled down, gnawing the spines of my books. There was plenty of food in his bowl, and his cage was clean, so I knew that Jackson had been feeding him.

I was restless, and yet I had no desire. I was still infected, still taking penicillin. I saw there were cockroaches in the pantry — dozens of them, from the food that Jackson had left. A moldy loaf of bread and an open bag of flour were covered with roaches. I wondered whether I should fire him. He had a habit when he was in a hurry of sweeping garbage into a kitchen drawer and forgetting about it. That drawer was the origin of our roaches.

I walked down to the Young Hok Grocery and the Chinese owner sold me some roach spray. After a satisfying hour of killing cockroaches and sweeping them up I unpacked my bag, made a stack of dirty laundry and looked over the books I had bought in London, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth , Conrad’s The Secret Sharer , and an old copy of Tarzan of the Apes .

Reading Tarzan and drinking gin I dozed on the sofa and then dragged myself to bed. It was not until I woke the next morning that I reflected on what had happened to me over the previous three weeks: staying with Prasad, my affair with Rosamond, catching the clap from Francesca, and seeing Femi again. I lay in bed turning it over in my mind, wincing when I remembered mentioning marriage to Rosamond, angry at the thought of Francesca introducing me to her venereal Ghanaian, and depressed at the thought of Femi wearing her finery in her dusty hut, and I am still bleeding . A week here, a few days there, an afternoon, a long night: it had all been hectic, but I could not help thinking that it had been a failure. It was as though I had been to a party — a great whirl; and I had come home alone.

I stayed in bed, enjoying my loneliness, pitying myself in my solitude, and savoring the thought that I was in debt and would have to work hard to write three articles to pay for the trip. It was a week’s work: it didn’t worry me. My anxiety lay in all I was hiding — concealing Francesca and the gonorrhea behind an essay on Ghanaian politics, and never letting on that in between my visits to Nigerian ministries I had seen Femi looking stately in her slum. And I would write something about England without mentioning Rosamond or S. Prasad. I hated conniving at what was unreal, and yet the concealment also fascinated me. I was not sure whether these different women and the odd and inconvenient events of their lives were more important and truer to the world than any of the stuff I wrote. Anyway, I suppressed it and kept it as my secret, and so it was like a parallel history in private. I sometimes suspected that it was vastly more important than anything that I had made public, but that it accumulated far too fast for me to make sense of it. Much better for the moment to write these articles and to continue my novel about Yung Hok, the Chinese grocer, another solitary man.

I was happiest in this divided mood when I was speaking another language. Jackson came in and said, “Habari gani, bwana?”

And I replied in Swahili. That other unreal self was let loose to be a bwana and jabber about his trip. I crouched inside him and looked around at the world.

I went to my office at nine. Veronica, the Muchiga secretary, brought me a cup of coffee and asked me if I would please dictate a letter to her.

“I want to take the examination, Mr. Anderea. I must improve my speed.”

I dictated a letter to the prime minister of Uganda, objecting to the practice of female circumcision in the eastern region.

“You are very rude, Mr. Anderea,” Veronica said, as she scribbled the shorthand notations. She then typed it on the letterhead where I was named, Andrew Parent, B.A., Acting Director, Adult Studies Institute .

“We Bachiga have no female circumcision,” Veronica said, watching me make corrections in her typing.

“No, but you have your delightful Urine Ceremony.”

She gave me an earthy smile. It was she who had described the ceremony to me — the new bride putting her naked bottom on the hands of all her husband’s brothers and pissing, to seal the bond.

“I think you also have funny customs,” she said.

“Really, Veronica?”

“Europeans like to have toilets inside their houses,” she said. “I think it is very unclean.”

“I agree.”

She went away, giggling at her audacity, and I swiveled my chair around, so that I could look out the window.

In the big splintered tree on the lawn outside my office there were gray herons nesting — I saw the mother heron shoving food down the open beaks of her fledglings. Beneath the tree the gardener was whacking clumps of weed with a sickle. He wore incredible rags that had once been trousers, and an overcoat from the King’s African Rifles, and a torn hat. He was perspiring and wiping his face with a brown rag. His bare feet were as big and as cracked as a pair of shoes.

Sitting in the shade of the hedge were the students who had stayed for the holidays — classes had not yet begun. I recognized Francis Omolo, a purplish man from West Nile, who had all his bottom teeth knocked out, according to the custom of his tribe; Mr. Kato, the schoolteacher from Trans-Nzoia, on the Kenya border; Chango Muwenga, who wore a Mao button; and an undersized man named Mgubi who lived on the other side of the Mountains of the Moon, among the pygmies of Bundibugyo. They stayed here, because it was too far to go home. They had books, but they sat on them. The grass was damp.

At the edge of the lawn were bamboos and weaver birds madly shrieking in their nests. I could hear the bicycle bells and car horns and the buses changing gear beyond the hedge; and I could just see the white minarets of the Ismaili mosque on a distant hill. Looking out this window I tried to call up the sight of the cold gleaming streets of London, but it wouldn’t come. I could only see Rosamond, her fur hat and long coat, and I felt vaguely disatisfied that we had parted so coldly. Yet I could not imagine her here — or Francesca either. I could not imagine this place, or myself, any different. Africa was what it was — permanently unformed. It was clay that never hardened. It was much better for someone far away to think about it and picture it than for that person to come here and be disappointed by the broken streets and the noise and its incompleteness. And what would they make of the bats? The name was enough. I envied people who had never seen Africa.

I scribbled a memo, Books set in Africa by writers who had never been there. Tarzan, Henderson the Rain King, The Unbearable Bassington and … Veronica interrupted me with another cup of coffee, and I briefly felt happy, understanding that I was having difficulty writing my novel about the Africa of the Chinese grocer because it was an Africa that had never been described before. How could I make that unexpected man believable? How could I make this real — the sunlight flooding my office and fading my books and yellowing the stack of curled-up letters on my shelves? “Acting Director” was right. I was just a caretaker, helping this place along, keeping it dusted. No one expected very much, because this was Africa. None of us was under any pressure at all. We could never succeed, nor could we fail. I had a job here, though I didn’t belong. I felt like Yung Hok, the Chinese grocer.

As I stirred my coffee, the bursar rang. He said, “Have you been away?”

I said no, just to see whether he would challenge me — after all, I had been away almost a month. He laughed — three quacks.