Paul Theroux - The Mosquito Coast

That was how we discovered guavas. The monkey had shown us that there were several bushes of them on the far side of the pool, and that day we brought a basket of them back to Jeronimo.

Mother said, "We can make them into jam."

But Father said they were too small and sour, because they were growing wild. If he put his mind to it, he said, he could grow sweet ones as big as tennis balls, and, "Speaking of food, you'd better start picking and peeling, or there won't be anything for lunch."

We did what was expected of us in Jeronimo, the usual chores. But we always returned to the Acre to live like monkeys. We missed the Maywits — I still thought of them by that name — but without them we had no need for the school or the store. We had the loose pages from Drainy's hymnbook, but we no longer held church services. Anyway, it was too hot to think about hell.

We knew from the Acre that it was the dry season. No one in Jeronimo knew this, or considered it important. The gardens were still growing, but we were in touch with the seasons: we had no inventions.

The Acre was primitive, a ragged hollow in the jungle, but the grass was soft, the pool made it pleasant, and we had everything we needed. For fun, we could swim or swing on the rope. The pool was unaffected by the jungle drought. I guessed that springs fed it. But the rest of the area was very dry. We watched wee-wee ants holding funerals — processions of them with corpses and leaf parasols. Snakes lived in the roots of a dead tree at one corner of the camp. We kept clear of that tree, but tried to think of ways of dropping them into the traps, to turn them into snake pits. The snakes and the walnut-sized beetles did not frighten us. We learned that the fiercest creatures were predictable, and though once it had all looked dangerous here, now it seemed more peaceful than Jeronimo.

We came here to escape Jeronimo. Ever since the building of Fat Boy, Father had been visited by people who wanted ice. They were talkers. They had heard of Father. They paid him compliments. Father put them to work, gave them simple jobs to do, and they took the ice away in canoes. There were always strangers in Jeronimo, admiring Father's inventions or looking for ice.

"Ain't do nothing with they ices but cool they bunya," Mr. Haddy said. Bunya was a drink of sour juice the local people made from cassava.

Father said, "That doesn't matter. They can wear it on their heads for all I care. Once they get accustomed to the idea of ice, the uses will be revealed to them. Each person will do something different — one man will preserve meat, another will make it into a painkiller, someone will get the idea of refrigerating his fish instead of smoking it, and how many will it bring out of sunstroke? Sure, it may take a generation, but think of the future — no one else does. Fat Boy is forever. No moving parts, Figgy!"

Father often talked of things being "revealed." That was true invention, he said, revealing something's use and magnifying it, discovering its imperfection, improving it, and putting it to work for you. A guava growing wild was to him an imperfection. You had to improve it to make it edible.

He said, "It's savage and superstitious to accept the world as it is. Fiddle around and find a use for it!" God had left the world incomplete, he said. It was man's job to understand how it worked, to tinker with it and finish it. I think that was why he hated missionaries so much: because they taught people to put up with their earthly burdens. For Father, there were no burdens that couldn't be fitted with a set of wheels, or runners, or a system of pulleys.

But instead of improving the world, he said, most people just tried to improve God. "God — the deceased God — was a hasty inventor of the sort you find in any patent office. Yes, He had a great idea in making the world, but He started it and moved on before He got it working properly. God is like the boy who gets his toy top spinning and then leaves the room and lets it wobble. How can you worship that? God got bored," Father said. "I know that kind of boredom, but I fight it."

Father saw the river and said, "Let's straighten it." Dragging the ice up the mountain, he had talked of nothing but the cable car for passengers and cargo. He still spoke of sinking a shaft — tapping the steam heat in the earth's core. And inventions themselves revealed unexpected things that Father called "the unanticipated wrinkle." An example of this was an exposed pipe on Fat Boy's shin. This collected drops of moisture from the humid air. Father added more pipes and turned this into a condenser that dripped into a tank. It was the purest water imaginable, and now he boasted that he could create water as well as freeze it — with fire! He had not expected this cold pipe to behave this way It was revealed to him He called it the Hamstring.

We kids said that if Father saw the Acre he would have a fit, or else laugh at us. He was a perfectionist. I could not forget how, on the mountain, he had kicked his lean-to apart and sat on the windy ground all night and said, "I want to sleep in my own bed!" He would suffer rather than sleep in a badly made hut, and he often looked at the Zambus' food or Mrs. Kennywick's wabool and said, "I'd starve before I'd eat that" — and he meant it.

We did not dare to say that you could eat what grew wild and sleep on the ground. His mosquito traps, "Bug Boxes," invited insects through inescapable baffles and kept Jeronimo free of flying bugs. But you did not need nets and Bug Boxes if you knew about the berry juice that acted like citronella. "Afraid of a few bugs?" he sometimes said, and, at other times, "It's not that I don't want them on my skin — I don't want them within three miles of me." We could have told him that we had learned that most work was needless, and a bathhouse wasn't necessary if you had a pool or a river. Father's homegrown carrots were tasty, but wild yautia was just as good, and no trouble. He had outlawed bananas and manioc—"They make you lazy, and I don't like the implications of bananas." And the ice — it was a marvel, but like most marvels all you could do was marvel at it.

The more I thought about, the more sure I was that we kids stayed in Jeronimo because of the Acre. It lay in the jungle between the mountains and the river, at the dead end of a narrow path our feet had made. It was invisible, it was safe.

We spent every afternoon at the Acre, and we were sorry we could not sleep there overnight. We wanted to prove to Father that it could be done. But at the end of every day, we pushed the bushes aside and walked back to Jeronimo and heard the pumps, their whops and claps, before we saw the buildings. Father would be smiling, for in the coolness of the late afternoon he cleared Fat Boy and gave ice to the river Creoles or Zambus who had worked for it. There he was, with his tongs and his pulley, hoisting great blocks of vapory ice out of this monster cupboard with its firebox blazing.

And always, when we came back, Father said, "Where have you been? Fooling in the bushes?"

We would say swimming or hiking.

"Look at them, people. We're killing ourselves and they're walking around the block."

The "people" were Mr. Haddy, the Zambus, Mr. Peaselee, and Mr. Harkins. They were his listeners for he never stopped telling them his plans. These days he spoke of freezing fish and rushing them inland where no one had ever seen big river fish. "Six-footers! Catfish! Could change their whole way of life. Especially if they're open-minded and not in the grip of some moral sneak who's preaching hellfire to them."

That was a frequent complaint. The Maywits had not come back. Father said it made him mad.

"And the funny thing about hellfire is, it's imaginary. But not Fat Boy! He's got more poison in him than a century of hells. Oh, gaw, I could teach those missionaries a thing or two about chemical combustion. If they saw hydrogen and ammonia get loose they'd believe in me, instead of the dead top-spinner! If Fat Boy blew his lid—"