Paul Theroux - My Secret History

There was no word in Swahili for it, or if there was no one knew it. We all spoke it badly there — it wasn’t anyone’s native language, and it was hardly a language at all, more like three hundred everyday words. “Earthquake” was not one of them.

But it did not need a name: everyone had felt it. The next day everyone was talking about it. One of the minarets of the Ismaili mosque had fallen down, and cracks had appeared in the parliament building, and on the stone porch of the Aga Khan School. The lights had short-circuited on the antenna at Wireless Hill. The statue of George V had been jogged off its plinth, and at the National and Grindlay’s Bank a large mirror had shattered.

It was otherwise pretty harmless. Kampala was not a fragile town. So it was a thrill, and our pleasure of having lived through an extraordinary event resulted in a whole friendly day of perfect strangers talking to one another. “I thought it was thieves.” “I thought I was drunk.” “Did you see the mosque?”

Rashida had slept through it. She laughed at my attempts to describe it, because there was no word for it. I said the earth shook, and I tried to show her how it felt.

She said, “You are dancing,” and laughed.

Her laughter annoyed me. It was not just the silliness of it, nor my feeling like a buffoon for doing a charade of an earthquake because I didn’t know the word for it, nor my irritation that she had slept through it all. The fact was that she didn’t care. Even if I had been able to make her understand she would not have cared and would probably have laughed. Her fatalism would have turned it into one of those things she always accepted.

For me it had been a nightmare. If I laughed I did so out of blind paralytic fear — my giggle like a death rattle. I might have died in that narrow bed with this snoring teenager beside me. It was not how I wanted to go — crushed and buried by the cinderblocks of Semakokiro House, the staff quarters, at the age of twenty-six. The memory of it frightened me. I had not known that cement walls could bend without breaking. I kept imagining bricks falling on my face.

Rashida said, “It was the wind.”

For a moment I wanted to hit her for being so stupid. And then I saw how foolish it would be to hit her. An instant later I lost all interest in her. She was still laughing at me. I took her home to her hut.

I needed someone to share my fear with. But that evening there was no one on the streets. They were afraid of another quake. Most of the Africans felt it was a judgment — felt this not because they were ignorant savages from the bush but because they were Christians of a fairly forbidding type. The white expatriates did not have a better explanation.

I cruised in my car until the bats flew off, and then went back to Rashida’s.

“She has gone out,” a woman said from the depths of the hut.

Rashida always called this brown, serious woman “auntie,” and I had surprised her in her old faded wraparound.

“Did she go alone?”

“No. With an Indian.”

I was not jealous. I was cross with myself for having sworn that I was not going to see her tonight and then as a last resort dropping by, assuming she would be waiting. Why should she wait for me? I knew there was an Indian she liked — because he had a car and he took her dancing. He gave her lengths of printed cotton cloth from his shop, which she had made into dresses. Did he know I gave her fancy underwear?

It was very dark in Wandegeya, and it was quieter now that the bats had taken off. It was too late to go to the movies, too early to go home. I could have gone to the Hindoo Lodge but tonight I did not want to eat dinner alone. I saw some Africans peering through the back window of a shop, hanging on to the shutters and the bars, where inside an Indian family was watching I Love Lucy .

In this nighttime neighborhood anyone with electricity was conspicuous. You saw them through their windows because it was too hot for them to close their shutters. And when your eyes became accustomed to the darkness you could see the Africans by the roadside, standing or sitting, waiting for buses, roasting ears of corn, stirring peanut stew, staring back at you.

I hated driving at night, because of these wandering Africans on the road, and the cyclists and the dogs. Big dumb cows browsed by the roadside too. I sat in my car in the black night near Rashida’s hut, not thinking of her, but only of the earth tremor and the way my ceiling had twisted and seemed to fall, and all those burglar alarms that had made my heart pound.

When there was nowhere to go and nothing to do in Kampala there was always the Staff Club. It was just a room in an old building that stood on its own under a drooping gum tree. It had been chosen for its isolation, because of the noise. There was music — a phonograph beside the bar. And there were always shouts, but friendly ones. The members felt happy and heroic for being misfits.

I saw some bright drunken faces under the lights, through the open windows. Three cars were parked in the long grass. As soon as I shut my engine off I heard the voices — not angry, just loud and boozy, someone contradicting someone else.

It was Crowbridge, shouting, but he stopped when I entered.

“Look who’s here, our American friend, Bwana Parent,” Crowbridge said.

“So you all survived the earthquake,” I said.

There was a silence. Crowbridge said, “We’re not talking about that. We’re sick of hearing about it. If you want to talk about it you can bugger off right now, bwana.”

“You’re interrupting something, Andy,” Potter said.

Crowbridge went on with his story.

I knew it was about a man named Hassett, who had left Uganda at Independence, because Crowbridge said — he was speaking to Potter—“You remember his hangovers? He said if he could sleep till noon he’d be all right, but if someone woke him at eleven he’d suffer all day. Anyway, that bitch from Kololo we used to call the Marchioness of Gush was after him something chronic. She rang him up at half-past ten one morning. He had really tied one on the night before. He was still half full of alcohol. He got to the phone somehow and shouted into it, ‘I do not take personal calls at my residence before noon, now please get off the line!’ Bangs down the receiver.”

Mungai and Okello laughed, thinking the story was over, but Crowbridge took no notice of them.

“A few days later he was going past the post office. You know how he was — the way all drunks are — different every hour of the day. At five o’clock he was positively friendly. There’s the Marchioness up ahead with her two daughters, and they’re all tits and teeth. Hassett says, ‘Why hello there. I didn’t realize that you had such a lovely family. Give me a ring sometime — I’m usually at home in the morning.’ ”

This time no one laughed. Potter yawned into his hand. Mungai and Okello looked apprehensive. Crowbridge went on drinking. He didn’t seem to mind that his story had fallen flat. They were always telling stories about people who weren’t there. As soon as you left they talked about you — what you had just said, or the way you looked, or how much you had drunk.

An African named Kwasanja was at the far end of the bar with Godby’s wife — Godby nowhere in sight — talking to her in an aggrieved way.

“I didn’t mind it when they called me black,” he said. “But when they called me colored I hated it. I said to my landlady, ‘What do you mean colored? What color, eh?’ She did not know what to say. She was just some bloody working-class woman.”

Godby’s wife said without any feeling, “I’m a bloody working-class woman.” Then she turned to me and said, “You haven’t paid your bar bill.”