Paul Theroux: Blinding Light

“I am writing some things,” he said, and the others smiled at sum sings. His face tightened, as though he knew he was being silently mocked. He said, “Yah, I do journalism, but I am looking into psychotropic substances, too.” He put his face near Sabra’s and said, “Ich bin Forscher und Wissenschaftler. Verstehen Sie ?”

Ava had been playing with her blindfold. She put it back on and smiled, as if reentering a familiar and hospitable room.

Steadman watched her for a while, enjoying the animation on her face, the shape of her lips, her shallow breathing. But he was thinking that he had not told anyone his name or where he was from or that he was a writer. And he was happy in his own anonymity. What people knew of you diminished you, robbed you of your strength. You were never stronger than when they were in the dark. Because of his reticence, Ava had taken charge. As a writer, nothing pleased Steadman more than holding a conversation in which the other person told him everything and he responded giving nothing away.

The seat belt light came on. The plane skimmed across the tufts of a pillowy layer of clouds. The pilot announced that they would be landing in Quito soon and gave a weather report and the temperature.

Still wearing her blindfold, Ava leaned over and whispered, “I’m glad I’m not your girlfriend anymore.”

ON THE WAY into the cloud-dampened and sloping city, with its chilly, hard-to-breathe air, sitting next to Ava in the taxi, under overcast skies and the slope of the rubbly volcano Pichincha which was strewn with precariously sited huts, Steadman was thinking how this would be the last trip he’d ever take with her. The particular thought was not a sentence or phrase in his mind, not words at all, but rather a specific image, the sight of her nearest knee, pale from always being covered by her surgical smock, looking pinched and plaintive, as dimpled as a new potato, and representing a mute farewell.

That ambiguous little knee made Ava seem again like a stranger, enigmatic and yet unpromising. She had withdrawn from him, she was less helpful, a bit too brisk, and at times she seemed bored — not hostile but indifferent — casting her gaze beyond him when she looked in his direction. She was like the people on the plane, who had brushed past him at the baggage claim area and were now dispersing — Hack and Janey, Wood and Sabra, the hurrying Manfred, who scuttled, bent over, spider-like, as though on extra legs, reaching as he moved. And all the others whom he imagined to be bird watchers, trekkers, and ecotourists in their Trespassing gear, colorful fuzzy jackets and hats and thick socks, wearing the most expensive sunglasses and wristwatches in the catalogue. Manfred had carried his thick Medicinal Plants book and studied it, making notes in the margins. He wore a black jacket and at his waist a soiled misshapen fanny pack. Sabra wore a small and neatly zipped TOG pouch. He’d had a glimpse of their luggage — slightly bruised Trespassing duffels and chubby leather satchels chafed at the edges and the best bags from the Trespassing line. Ava was now like one of these people, and Steadman was just a man who happened to be sleeping in her room.

This distant failing country and the strangers and the thin gritty air made their separation more emphatic. They looked lost here, they were alien to each other, and the foreign place represented their estrangement. He had heard of couples taking a long joyless trip, sometimes as a formality, in order to end a love affair or signify and seal an ending. Steadman understood that effort now. Some brutal landscapes, some lovely jungles, threw relationships into stark relief. You might go away with someone in order to make an announcement, and it might be a farewell. The far-off place was neutral ground. Steadman and Ava managed to be civil to each other, but they were through, it was over, and the other people probably sensed it. Then the others were gone, as though dissolved in the Ecuadorian air. “Good riddance,” she said, and he knew she was talking about the others.

From the taxi window, filmed with dust and finger smears, Quito was both more orderly and more ramshackle than Steadman had expected. It depended where you looked. Off the fairly new main drag were side streets lined with hovels. Yet in the distance the hovels seemed substantial, and in the foreground the newer buildings were rundown and the gutters littered.

Steadman inclined his head and thought, In the Third World you smile at the strangeness, then you look closely and see ruin and misery, or that something is badly broken, or that woman is ill, that child is an old man. From the lovely veranda you saw mangy dogs and a man pissing against a wall — a wall on which someone had scribbled an angry slogan in Spanish, bracketed by exclamation marks, ¡FUERA GRINGOS INVASORES! From the loveliest window you saw filthy-faced children huddled in doorways. The bottom of the heap was not far from the top, and all of it was home, turned upside down and stinking.

“Mi casa, por acá. My ’ouse down there,” the taxi driver said, smiling as a street flashed past, and in that brief glimpse Steadman could see it was shallow and ruinous.

“Where is Nestor?” Steadman asked, since the driver had voluntarily spoken in English.

“Veesy. He see you later.” His breath was moist with chocolate and tobacco. The man’s pungent breath had a greater reality than his words.

“He didn’t leave a message?”

“Yes. That is the message.”

Though he was simple, even crude, the driver’s succinct directness in basic English made him seem intelligent.

Steadman turned to Ava. He had felt slightly nauseated and lightheaded since the customs delay at the airport. A headache made of raw nerves tightened beneath his skull. He said, “The air’s so thin.”

“What did you expect at ten thousand feet?”

He expected something else. The high-altitude air was chilly, dusty with grit, and a dampness caught in his throat and scratched his eyes, like the furry air in a house of cats.

Searching the side streets for the grimmer sights, for it seemed that truth lay at the very margins of this ride, he saw a procession, girls and women in white smocks and black veils, boys and men carrying a tottering holy figure on a litter, shoulder-high.

“Is a fiesta,” the driver said, sucking candy, his tongue gummy. He was small, in a tight sweater of pilled dusty wool. Though the sky was overcast he wore sunglasses. “Is coming Todos los Santos. And Día de Difuntos. How you say fiesta in English?”

“Fiesta.” Steadman was staring at some masked children ahead.

“Halloween,” Ava said. “They celebrate it here.”

At the stoplight, the children approached wearing Halloween masks — cat masks, witches’ hats. Their clothes were clean, they had good teeth. Steadman had expected urchins. He rolled down the taxi window and offered a dollar to one of the masked children.

“Por su máscara’’ Steadman said, lifting the mask with one hand and handing over the dollar with the other. The black satin cat mask was trimmed with black lace and seemed like an obscure intimate garment, like a cache-sexe.

Hearing the driver’s empty squawk of mirth, Steadman reflected that in places like this, demoralized and humiliated countries, someone’s laughter seldom meant that something was funny. The driver had been disturbed, perhaps insulted, by Steadman’s boldness — the dollar, the swap, the snatch. He winced and squawked again when Steadman put on the cat mask.

“That sort of scares me,” Ava said, sounding stern. He knew that severe tone: she meant what she said. He took the mask off.

The hotel was the Colon. Ava said she had imagined it to be smaller and simpler, but checking in, Steadman reminded her that it was supposed to be only one night.