Paul Theroux - O-Zone

All the rest of that day they rested. The sun was terrific, beating through the branches, spangling the sea, and covering the land in a powerful silencing light. Holly went naked; Moura was bare-breasted but wore a sarong; Bligh wrapped herself in a loose gown which gave glimpses of her naked body when she walked and which Hooper found more thrilling than the waxen nudity that Holly flaunted. The men wore sarongs — Murdick had fastened his with an ammunition belt on which he hung a pistol.

All the guests were burned dark brown by the sun. These naked wandering people sauntered in the shade, many wearing pistols, and nearly all wore floppy hats and sandals. Some of them were painted with fantastic designs — flames and feathers and loops — like garish snakes coiled around their arms and legs. Their faces were painted with masks — their hungry bloodshot eyes peering through the greasy designs. Leaves were painted on them, and shattered circles, and fragments of the alphabet, and tiger stripes, and fire. One woman was a zebra, another wore giraffe blotches. Some of them were caked in white, others were totally black.

They wore jeweled belts and nothing else; they wore necklaces of bone and ivory. Some wore plaited hair, some wore plumes, one girl wore a devilish tail, another small girl was tattooed; all of them were naked. Except in the middle of the day, when the sun was unbearable, these people emerged and paraded in the grounds and gardens of the hotel compound, promenaded among the various clusters of huts in the villages, and walked along the white beach. There were guests in canoes and on surfboards and in sailboats. Some of them bravely played gasping games of tennis. But most of them simply prowled, or slumbered in the shade, amid the urgent screeching of birds.

Holly immediately adopted the painted style: she went naked, with red spirals and streaks on her body, and her hair dyed yellow, and a thin mask stretched around her eyes. Willis wore an African mask he had bought at the shop in Earthworks Lodge. It was made of a whole turtle shell, cut beautifully and fringed with feathers; and it was fitted with electronic detectors, a radio, an air-filter snout, and phones.

"I've always wanted one of these," he said in a quavering ducklike voice that came out of his snout. "You can see the workmanship. These aren't available anywhere else,"

Murdick practiced shooting with the other guests. They fired at coconuts that were lobbed over the water — blasting them with their beams. The weapons were silent, but the coconuts split apart and exploded with a loud cracking.

The atmosphere at Earthworks was African, and still wild, in spite of the clusters of other nearby hotels. A heavy odor of salt and seaweed saturated the air, and farther in, near the huts, the smell was of flowers and cut grass and the rankness of damp animals. The sunlight was of shattering intensity. The heat came and went. With all of this was the oddly jubilant sound of birds and insects.

In this isolated and drowsy place there was also activity— waiters carrying food and trays of drinks, gardeners on their knees, men raking the beach or, at sundown, musicians in the twilight playing drums and flutes and twanging harps. All of them were black — perspiring heavily. They were obedient, beaten-looking people. They seldom spoke. They were civilized and solemn in the most old-fashioned way, in thick cloth suits and neckties. They did not seem to notice or to care that the guests were naked, and what Hardy had said about Navigator Jimroy seemed to be true: nearly all of them were Pilgrims — they wore the rocket-pin and read the books and had the short haircut and military manners. They used the lingo.

"Are you a member of the program?" one African asked Murdick.

"No, thank you!" Murdick said.

Bligh was fascinated by the Africans — by their silence and good manners. But more than anything else she was fascinated by the food — vast amounts of it appeared every day on the buffet table on the lawn of their village. Even the New Yorkers, and the other Owners from America, and the various Europeans — Germans mostly — were excited by the food. The sight of so much of it got them shouting and reaching — snatching food from the tables and from each other's plates.

These high spirits caused horseplay and the result was usually a food-fight. The guests' nudity contributed to the riotousness of the event. Tureens of soup were emptied and fruit thrown back and forth, and the naked hollering guests kept it up until the table was bare. There was no check on them — no one stopped them. Afterward, the waiters vied with the marabou storks and the crows for the fragments.

There was a food-fight after lunch on their second day— they always seemed to happen after lunch, when the tables were still piled high and the guests no longer hungry. Hooper steered Bligh away when he realized what was about to happen. But he was a moment too late — before he could get her past the hedge she looked back and saw them flinging food and swiping at each other.

Tears welled in Bligh's eyes and she watched sadly as the buffet table was brought down. It had held a roasted pig and a long filleted fish, vegetables steamed in palm leaves, wooden bowls of salad, pots of stew and spitted chickens and cold platters of peeled fruit.

"Real food," Hooper said angrily, wanting Bligh to know that he too was disgusted. Bligh did not hear him. Hooper had seen food-fights before, but seeing them now with Bligh they seemed much worse — and he was grateful to her for inspiring in him a sense of outrage.

"That's murder," she said. "Those people are worse than animals."

Then it was forgotten. They spent these hot days in idleness, strolling on the beach or else sleeping in a hammock. They slept and ate and lay in the sun.

"Why are so many people wearing weapons?" Bligh asked.

That was the other worrying thing about the food-fight— most of those rowdy people had been well-armed.

"There used to be trouble here," Hooper said. "Everyone had weapons — the local people legalized them for visiting Owners. Then they just became fashionable, like the masks."

"Do they shoot them?"

"They kill poachers," he said.

"What's that?"

"Someone who is very hungry," he said, and surprised himself with the truth of it. He was seeing more and more with her eyes. That was what he meant by liking himself better.

Moura was at the pool with the Murdicks, wondering where Hardy had gone. It was supposed to be a vacation, and yet Hardy was rising early and catching planes, and returning exhausted at nightfall as if he'd done a day's work. And where did Hooper hide with that young girl? The Murdicks stuck with Moura, eating and napping and talking about the other guests. They gave the other guests names: Sweaty Betty, the Moonman, the Teapot, Knockers, and the Monkey. There was another breathless man who sat sloppily in a wicker chair watching Holly with his perspiring face.

"I've got him throbbing again," Holly said.

She called him the Haystack, because of his hair.

Moura was occupied by her own thoughts. She lay on a rock by the pool, like a lizard, her eyes half-closed. Occasionally she slid into the water with a narrow splash, to cool herself.

"Apparently Fidge is still in O-Zone," she said just before she dropped into the pool one afternoon.

When she surfaced, Murdick was gaping at her.

Murdick was equipment-conscious, even here. He wore a wide-brimmed safari hat, and a khaki flying jacket, and goggles and a wrist radio. His concession to Earthworks was his sarong, but he had a short-barreled rifle on his lap. Beside him, Holly was naked — she wore nothing but paint. Her breasts and nipples were outlined like popping eyes, and a nose was painted on her belly, and her groin rouged and marked and made into a mouth: her torso turned into a large leering face.