Paul Theroux - The Consul's File

He wanted my friendship. He shared his experience with me: don't wear an undershirt, take a shower in the morning when the pipes are cold, keep drinking water in an old gin bottle, have a curry once a week, don't drink brandy after you've eaten a durian. That kind of thing; and as for unresponsive people, 'Beat them,' he said, 'just beat them with barbed wire until they do what you want.'

It was so simple with Squibb — you punished people and they obeyed. He had a theory that most people were glad to be dominated: it was the tyrant's contempt. 'They like to be kicked,' he'd say, and his mouth would go square with satisfaction. 'Like Alec.'

You know some of this. Wasn't it odd that he didn't like anyone — not anyone? That should have told us something about him. And he had failed at being a person, so he tried to succeed at being a character — someone out of Maugham. What tedious eccentricity Maugham was responsible for! He made heroes of these time-servers; he glorified them by being selective and leaving out their essential flaws. He gave people like Squibb destructive models to emulate, and he encouraged expatriates to pity themselves. It is the essence of the romantic lie.

Fiction is so often fatal; it hallows some places and it makes them look like dreamland: New York, London, Paris — like the label of an expensive suit. For other places it is a curse. Ayer Hitam seemed tainted, and it was cursed with romance that was undetectable to anyone who was not sitting on the Club verandah with a drink in his hand.

'He likes the lash.’ Squibb had said, about Alec, and he looked for my reaction.

I couldn't hide it. I was shocked. I made a face.

'The whip,' he said, giving a little provisional chuckle of mockery. 'His missus beats him. The rotan. Pain. Why else would he be here? He was cashiered from the Royal Navy for that.'

I didn't believe it, and yet what Squibb had said frightened me: it was cruel, pitiful, lonely agony. I could almost picture it. What if it was true? We lead lives that even the best fiction can't begin to suggest. Angela: was she the person who'd had a nervous breakdown, the queen of the Footlighters, or the Sultan's mistress? She was all three and much more, but no story could unify those three different lives; they were not consequences. The truth is too complicated for words: truth is water.

Squibb was animated that day, revealing secrets, trying to obligate me with his own rivalries. What more damaging fact could one learn about a doctor than that he was engrossed by pain and had another life as the victim in some strange sexual game?

I had said, 'What will you say about me?'

'Ever tried it — the lash?'

I closed my eyes.

He said, 'Don't take it so hard,' and he gave me a gloating, rueful laugh.

It was a brief conversation; it initiated me, it disturbed me deeply, and it affected everything that happened after that. I was circumspect with Alec, and Squibb went his own way. Because of what Squibb had said, I never got to know Alec very well. If Alec had a secret it was better left with him. And we got on fine because I never enquired further. He must have thought I was rather distant with him, and there were times — when he looked after you, for example — that I thought he was unnecessarily hard, confusing pleasure with its opposite and seeing pain as a cure, or at least a relief.

The person who appears to have no secret seems to be hiding something; and yet there is a simpler explanation for this apparent deception — there probably isn't any secret. We tend to see mystery in emptiness, but I knew from Africa that emptiness is more often just that: behind it is a greater emptiness.

I didn't like Squibb well enough to look for more in him. I liked Alec too much to invade his privacy. For the most part they stayed on the fringes of my life in. Ayer Hitam. I didn't depend on them. I never felt that I had been admitted to the society here, but I began to doubt that society of that kind — ambitious order — really existed.

Sometimes, after a session at the Club, Alec would say, 'I've got to be off. My missus is waiting.' And I would get a dull ache in my soul imagining that he was going back to his bungalow to be whipped. It made me wince. I didn't want to think about it. But the one fact that I had been told made me suspicious of everyone I met, and when I realized the sort of double life that people led — and had proof of it — I felt rather inadequate myself. What was my life? My job, my nationals, my files: hardly enough. I wasn't a character; it was the other people who mattered, not me. I've always been rather amused by novelists who write autobiographically: the credulous self-promotion, the limited vision, the display of style. Other people's lives are so much more interesting than one's own. I am an unrepentant eavesdropper and I find anonymity a consolation.

So I have had an interesting two years. And it looks even better — more full — now that it's nearly over: teeming with incident. Those were hours and days. I've already forgotten the months and months when nothing happened but the humdrum hell of the tropical world, the sun directly overhead and burning dustily down; steam and noise; the distant shouting that might have been some deaf man's radio, the fans blowing my papers to the floor and my sweaty hand losing its grip and slipping down the shaft of my ball-point pen. Who wouldn't reminisce about ghosts, and even miss them a little?

I never made a friend here. If I had I think I would have seen much less of this place. I am old enough now to see friendship as a constraint. Perhaps, as you say, we will meet again. But I'm rambling — I was telling you about Squibb. Is there more? Yes, if you stay long enough, 'look on and make no sound', and if you're patient enough, truth — colourless, odourless, tasteless — comes trickling out. Because no one forgets what he has said more quickly than a liar.

'You'll have to have a party,' said Squibb, when he heard I was being posted back to Washington. Need I say our numbers have been substantially reduced? For Squibb, a party these days is a way of excluding the locals — he doesn't count his Malay wife. Remember, I barely know the man.

The party at his house was his idea — drinks. I had never been to his place before. Strang; the Prossers; Evans (he's off to Australia at the end of the month), the Stewarts. Squibb had the good grace to invite Peeraswami, but the poor fellow didn't know which way to turn — he looked at the little sandwiches, the spring rolls, the vol-au-vents. 'This is having meat in it, Tuan?' he whispered. The shapes threw him a bit. Instead of eating, he drank; and he started talking loudly about the merits of Indian toddy. Then: 'What will happen to me when you go?' Perhaps I have made a friend. Poor Peeraswami.

Stewart made a speech: 'Our American colleague'— that kind of thing. Jokes: 'I approve of nudity — in the right places'; 'Keep that bottle up your end'; 'How can you be an expert in Asian affairs unless you've had one?' After this, several embarrassing minutes of Alec's personal history, begun — as such stories so often are — by Alec shouting, 'And I'm not ashamed to say—'

Peeraswami took out his hanky and vomited noisily into it. Then he ran out of the room.

As guest of honour, I could not leave until the others made a move. Without realizing it, I was wandering from room to room. Squibb has a library! Military histories, bad novels, Wallace's The Malay Archipelago, blood and thunder, and the usual bird and flower books one finds in every expatriate household. And souvenirs: sabres, spears, a samurai sword, bows, arrows, hatchets, Dyak weapons, Chinese daggers, a jewelled kris, and a rack of blowpipes that might have been flutes.

Squibb followed me in and boasted about how he'd stolen this and paid fifty cents for that. I saw a similar assortment on the wall of an adjoining room.