Paul Theroux - The Mosquito Coast

"What's the president like?" Father asked.

"He is the same as Mussolini," Tosco said.

This name darkened Father's face, and with the shadow of the word still on it, he said, "And what was Mussolini like?"

Tosco said, "Tough. Strong. No fooling." He made a fist and shook it under Father's chin. "Like this."

"Then he'd better keep out of my way," Father said.

Father spent part of every day in town, and while he was there, Mother gave us lessons on the beach, under thundery skies. It was like play. She wrote with a stick on the damp sand, setting us arithmetic problems to solve, or words to spell. She taught us the different kinds of cloud formation. If we chanced upon a dead fish, she poked it apart and named each piece. There were flowers growing beneath the palms — she picked them and taught us the names of the parts in the blossoms. Back in Hatfield, we had studied indoors, to avoid the truant officer, but I preferred these outdoor lessons, studying whatever we happened to find on the beach.

She was not like Father. Father lectured us, but she never made speeches. When he was around she gave him her full attention, but when he was in town she was ours. She answered all our questions, even the silliest ones, such as "Where does sand come from?" and "How do fish breathe?"

Usually when we returned to The Gardenia, Father was on the piazza with someone from town. "This is Mr. Haddy," he would say. "He's a real old coaster." And the prune-skinned man would rise and creakily greet us. There was nothing Juanita Shumbo didn't know about rearing turkeys — she was an old black woman with red eyes. Mr. Sanchez had splashed up and down the Patuca — he was tiny and brown and had a crooked mustache. Mr. Diego spoke Zambu like a native, Father said, and he made that man sneeze a Zambu salutation. There were many others, and each of them listened closely to Father. They were respectful and seemed, sitting nervously on their chairseats out of the sun, to regard him with admiration.

"He's wonderful with strangers," Mother said. But the strangers made me uneasy, for I had no clear idea of Father's plans, or how these people fitted in. I wished I had Father's courage. Lacking it, I clung to him and Mother, for everything I had known that was comfortable had been taken away from me. The other kids were too young to realize how far we had drifted from home. Except for the Unicom, still at the pier, the past had been wiped away.

Coming back from the beach one afternoon, we saw Tosco at the hotel, talking to his Chevrolet. He asked it questions and called it improper names. He stood near its radiator grill and shouted and cuffed it and finally rocked it with a kick.

"She stupid," he said, wagging his foot in pain. "She no want to go. She hate me."

"My husband will fix it."

And that evening, with one of his new friends — it was Mr. Haddy — Father did fix it. He said machines had bodies but no brains. Mr. Haddy stared, as if Father had said something wise. Tosco was so grateful for the repair work he said we could use the car anytime we liked. The next day, Mother said she wanted to take us for a drive, while Father was occupied in town. Were we going to Tela? Tosco asked. No, Mother said, we were going east, toward Trujillo. Tosco laughed. He said, "You will come back soon," and gave Mother the keys.

"Which road do I take?"

He said, "There is only one."

We drove through town and at once I could see that it was both richer and poorer than I had guessed. There were chicken huts, like the shacks on the beach, but also large houses and green lawns. The best of them were surrounded by fences. That was the strangest thing to me, because the Connecticut Valley was a land without fences, except for horses and cows. It reminded me of what Captain Smalls had said about Honduras being like a zoo, only the animals were outside and the people inside the cages. But so far, we were outside.

From this town road we came to the flat main road and turned left. We went less than half a mile before the road became rutted and filled with broken rocks. Ahead was a bridge across a river. It was a railway bridge, but there was no other. Cars took turns using it. Mother waited and then drove along the planks and railway tracks of this girder bridge. Below us, women were washing clothes in the cocoa-colored river.

Beyond the bridge, the road gave out entirely. It was a wide mud puddle that seeped through the door frame, then a narrow track, and finally not a road at all, but a dry creek bed in which the rocks were higher than our front bumper.

"This is the end of the line," Mother said.

We were a mile from The Gardenia.

We tried other roads. One ended at the beach, another at a riverbank — the same riverbank as before — and a third became a quarry, which was part of a mountain. At the end of two of those roads, skinny barking dogs jumped at our windows. It was a town of dead ends.

"I'm not giving up this easily," Mother said. We drove toward Tela, on the road to the west. The mountainsides were full of slender palm trees, and beneath them, where the land was flat, there were banana plantations and grapefruit trees and fields of spiky pineapples. Mother stopped the car, so that we could study the way bananas grew, but when we got out of the car we saw a congregation of vultures in the tall grass of the road's shoulder. They were bald-headed and watching a dog chewing the pink ribs of a dead cow. The dog had eaten his way under a rugflap of skin. The cow must have been hit by a car, Mother said, and the carcass pushed into the grass. Every so often a vulture would jump out of the flock — there were twenty-three in the congregation — and snatch at the hanging strips of meat and try to gouge them away. But the dog, growling and chewing, kept the vultures waiting, and most of the time these horrible-looking birds stared like witches in skullcaps. Their wings were like dragging skirts.

Farther along this road we saw a dead dog. Five vultures were tearing at a hole in his belly. The vultures shuddered their wings and hopped aside to let our car pass. Then they returned to the dog's body. Clover and April said it was making them sick, and could we go back? So we did, without seeing Tela.

That was Honduras, so far. Dead dogs and vultures, a dirty beach, and chicken huts and roads leading nowhere. The view from the ship had been like a picture, but now we were inside that picture. It was all hunger and noise and cruelty. Next to this, the grapefruits hardly mattered, and the sunshine only made it worse. Was it for this Father had swept us away from home?

Back at The Gardenia, Father was sitting on the piazza with another man — not one I had seen before. Seeing Mother, the man stood up unsteadily, and when he spoke, spit flew out of his mouth.

"I am talking to your husband," he said. "He is crazy."

"Crazy like a fox," Mother said.

There was a crack of thunder and a sizzle of rain on the roof. It was sudden and straight down, making poke marks in the sand.

"This is the prettiest woman I see in my life," the man said.

Mother said, "You're not very old. Maybe that explains it," and took the kids away.

"Stick around," Father said to me. "Meet Mr. Weerwilly. We're talking real estate."

"Good, good," the man said.

"This is my oldest boy, Charlie."

Mr. Weerwilly cocked his head at me and said, "But I am German, so I call you Karl. You know what, Karl? This man is crazy."

I looked at Father. He was grinning. I said, "No."

"Yes! He is crazy! I tell him this is a rotten country. He says he likes it very much. This is crazy. You know, Karl, this is the last colony in the world, and I am one pee-sant in it. How many Germans here? Not more than twenty. But sousands of Americans — sousands!"