My Secret History (31 page)

I went to Abby’s race at the track in Zimba. She had trained and slept well and drunk milk. But it did her no good. She came fifth in the two-twenty. She said she was through with running—it was too much for a woman with kids. She was better off, she said, collecting tickets at the Rainbow Cinema and fooling with me.

That was another day, and that night another night.

The best way to teach English, I felt, was to get in there and start them talking. I asked questions, I had them chant the answers, I made them compete, and when I ran out of prize candy I gave them cough drops from Mulji’s, which they liked just as much. Miss Natwick complained that the students said “What?” instead of “Pardon?” and she objected to their saying “You’re welcome.”

People complained that things happened too slowly in Africa, but my experience so far was that everything moved too quickly—it was a time of rapid change, and the change inspired hope and confidence. In a matter of months the students had
taken on American accents. They said, “I wanna” and “I gudda” and “I’m tryanna” and “I dunno” and “Whatcha doin” and “Whaa?” The popular songs helped. I heard a little girl named Msonko sing, “Put your sweet lips a little closer to the phone—” Miss Natwick wrote to the minister of education. She got no reply. There was no minister of education. There wouldn’t be one until July.

“No one’s in charge,” she said. “They’ve just shut up shop.”

“Flew the coop is more like it.”

“Blimy, the way you Yanks talk.”

“Suspended animation,” I said. “Politically.”

“Ward Rockwell is very well-spoken though,” she said. “But you’re as bad as the students.”

“Your needlework class is waiting, Miss Natwick.”

I was in charge! I was headmaster!

Of course the students overdid the lingo; but it was also a political act. They had been taught by the British to say “Pardon” and “chaps” and “My singlet is very tatty.” They had learned expressions like “It’s jolly hard” and “He’s a cheeky devil” and “Pull your socks up”—and they didn’t wear any. The country was about to become independent, and so learning to talk American was a way of getting even with the British.

They didn’t hate the British. They hardly knew them. They were somewhat beaten and bewildered, and they felt their country was a flop—they knew they were in the bush—and so they blamed their confusion on the British. When they were angry, which was usually when they were drunk, they could be very self-pitying and abusive. But the antagonism did not go very deep.

It was simple, I knew. Like many other Africans they were very lonely. The end of colonialism meant that they had woken up and found the world very large. Being poor was only part of it. They felt small and weak. And every day they were reminded of this by big strong Americans. It had probably been a good thing that the British ignored them. We took them seriously, but the gulf between us seemed to make them very sad. They did not know what to do or where to go.

And then it occurred to me that we were tempting them.

“I want to go to the United States,” Deputy Mambo said. “I want to go to Kansas City.”

Kansas City was always mentioned in songs.

“And Pasadena.”

That was a new one on me.

“Mr. Rockwell is from Pasadena. He says there are no Africans there. That’s why I want to go.”

Willy Msemba wanted to go to New York. It was the setting of
My Gun Is Quick
. He wanted to meet a “tomato.”

It made them more lonely when we said we were leaving next year and that they would be running the school.

“I want to go to your country,” Deputy Mambo said.

I did not believe he was serious. It was temptation—a moment of envy and fantasy. I could not imagine why anyone would want to leave Africa. Was it because they had no novelty in their lives? It was the curse of being poor—monotony. And so they were attracted by anything new. Language was one such novelty: the American way. They had started saying “Lemme see” and “I wanna do it” and—frequently—“I gudda get outa here,” meaning Nyasaland.

They were eager to learn. I was still an English teacher, although I had taken over all the headmaster’s duties. But being headmaster was no burden. I had discovered early in my life that promotion made life easier. It was simpler to be a headmaster than a teacher, better to be a teacher than a student, and the hardest job of all was the janitor’s. Eddyson Chimanga, the pigeon man, had the longest hours, the heaviest work, and the worst pay. Teaching English was a sort of penance I performed.

The American way of speaking was picked up by the girls at the Beautiful Bamboo, too. All of them now spoke English fairly well, and most of them were better at it than my students—a bigger working vocabulary, full of exotic items. Faak. Saak. Beech. Sheet. Bustud. Demmit. Deets. Breek. Us whole. Shooting. It was not only the Peace Corps Volunteers who took them home; it was also their listening to popular songs in a concentrated way.
I wanna hold your hand
, they said. And,
Whuddle I do when you’ve gone and left me
.

In a short time—just months—the American language had spread widely and taken hold.

If you don’t like it
, an African girl said to me one night at the Bamboo, and she showed me her drunken face,
shove it up
.

I laughed. Perhaps this was what it was like to have children and watch them grow. They were learning.

Lemme get this thing off
. It was Margaret, a thin Angoni girl, struggling with her dress and doing a little two-step as she danced out of it.

It always excited and amazed me to see how women’s clothes looked so small and shriveled when they took them off. A man’s made a bulky mound, but a woman’s were no more than a tiny heap, and insubstantial, like a shucked-off snakeskin.

Hey, cut it out!
she said.
Not so fast! Gimme a chance!

I suspected that the students too spoke that way and for the same reason—because they liked us. They wanted to imitate us. They were lonely. They really did want to get out of the country. It made our jobs as teachers easier, and it enlivened every weekend for me.

It was very pleasant to be liked. To be conspicuous and liked was the best of it. I felt special. I was young and far from home: I belonged here. It was the easiest place in the world to be. All week I was headmaster, and then on weekends I walked into the Bamboo with a buzz of excitement, thinking:
Whatever I want …

I still spent Friday night with one, and Saturday night with another, and Sunday with a third.

Rockwell said he had heard that some volunteers were picking up girls in town and taking them home.

“How can people do that?”

I said, “Are you saying that we’re just exploiting them? That we’re not giving anything back?”

“That’s the opposite of what I mean,” he said. “They’re exploiting us. All we do is give.”

He meant his latrine.

“All they do is take.”

I said, “We’re not doing much for them. This is an experience for us. They’re not getting much in return.”

“They love it,” he said.

He was partly right, which was always his most annoying characteristic.

“You probably take African girls home with you.”

I said nothing. I concealed everything from him—everything I did. And I concealed it from everyone else. It was important, it was my strength, that no one knew anything about my secret life; that way they did not know me at all.

“ ‘This is an experience for us,’ ” Rockwell said. “You sound so grateful.”

“I am grateful. Ward, we could be in Vietnam.”

“I’m four-F on account of my feet, so speak for yourself,” he said. “Listen, they’ve got incurable diseases. Hookworm, eye-worm, bilharzia, malaria, sleeping sickness.”

“You don’t get those from screwing, Ward.”

“They’ve got the clap. We had a movie about it in training.”

“Oh, dry up.”

“You’re going to get the crud.”

Everyone said that.
He got a dose in Rhodesia
. But this was not that kind of place. It was innocent, it was new. We were still children, all of us. That was perhaps why it seemed such an odd experience, at times a kind of frenzy, and to an outsider like Rockwell it must have looked like insanity. It had become such a habit that I hated to be alone.

Sex was an expression of friendship: in Africa it was like holding hands. There were times when I felt uncomfortably that it was exploitation, but then I thought: How could it be? It was friendly and fun. There was no coercion. It was offered willingly.

“You like me?” Boopy said.

“I like you, sister.”

“You buy me beer?”

“I buy you two beers, sister.”

“You take me home?”

“I take you home right now, sister.”

“That is better,” she said, and pinched me with her skinny fingers. “Okay.”

They never asked for money. It seemed to be the easiest thing in the world, and now that I had moved out of my house in Chamba and was living in the African township of Kanjedza I felt I was practically on equal terms with the girls.

Equality itself was a new thing. But I also tried to please them. I was gallant and attentive. I was very grateful. In Nyasaland these were novelties, which was why I was such a success. I was not imposing a system on them, I was simply attaching myself to their system and trying to treat them fairly. These African girls had been kicked out of their villages. I was far from home, too.

I used to imagine that I had attained a kind of maturity, and
I knew I was very lucky. I thought: This is the right time, this is the right place, and I know it. It is all happening now. I was headmaster; I had a little responsibility, and a little power. And there was something about teaching English and hearing it spoken back to me that was very satisfying. Everything seemed to be working perfectly.

My weeks were full. After the busy weekend I went seriously about my duties at the school. I woke early and cycled up to Chamba through the dripping steepness of pines that had been planted by Her Majesty’s Forestry Commission. I conducted morning assembly and taught my classes and answered memos. If someone forgot to do something, I did it. The
chimbuzi
was rising. If I asked anyone to do anything the answer was yes. They always said yes. The students said yes. The people at Kanjedza said yes. The African girls said “okay” and that meant everything.

One Tuesday at the end of May I was teaching my English class and felt a tickling at the end of my penis. The lesson was gerunds and participles. I sat down behind my desk, still talking, and covertly touched myself. Was my underwear too tight?

“And gerunds include words like touching, tickling and rubbing. But the word order is very important. It’s a verbal noun. Take ‘itching.’ ‘The itching was driving him crazy.’ What’s the subject of that sentence? Miss Malinki?”

I stood up, wrote the sentence on the blackboard, and was stung again. But when I sat behind my desk to touch it I only made it worse. But touching also gave me little moments of relief.

“ ‘Squeezing’ is a gerund, too. Not ‘They were squeezing the banana’—that’s a verb. But ‘Squeezing is something that often produces pain.’ ”

And I squeezed. It was agony. My penis was limp and overheated, and pinching it made it raw.

“Excuse me.”

I hurried to the
chim
. It had walls but no roof yet, though it really had begun to look like The Alamo. And because all the pipes were in it was usable. Rockwell was nowhere in sight, and I assumed he was taking his math class.

I swayed and pissed razor blades, but the pain didn’t go.
There was ground glass still streaming out of my bladder. Pinching my penis brought tears to my eyes and yet I felt it would relieve the itch.

“Anything wrong, Andy?”

That startled me. Rockwell was above me, laying brick, his head and shoulders above the end wall.

“Of course not,” I said. Had he seen the flame colored rosette at the tip of my dick?

“I think this is coming along real good, if I do say so myself.”

He disappeared, and I heard his boots on the rungs of the ladder. I tried to leave, but he met me at the door and began gesturing with his trowel.

“Notice how I staggered the joists and reinforced the supports? That’s for added strength. And what do you think about the returns on those corners?”

He wanted to talk. He propped himself against the door, blocking my way, and drew my attention to the hardwood beams.

“They look great,” I said. My penis was on fire.

“I figured a traditional design was best. Something you could adapt. You’re probably wondering why I didn’t make it look like an African hut, with mock-mud walls and a thatched roof.”

I had been wondering—and what was the point of making a traditional American design, the primitive Spanish look of Fort Alamo? But I wanted to scratch myself.

“I’m not wondering, Ward. Excuse me.”

He didn’t hear. Bores are always deaf.

“See, the point is they never had sanitary facilities before.
Chimbuzi
, as I understand it, just means latrine—well, we’re just talking about a trench.”

“It’s beautiful.”

“I’m not asking you how it looks,” he said, somewhat offended. “I’m also talking about strength and durability.”

“It’s the best
chimbuzi
in Nyasaland.”

“Don’t put me on.”

I wanted to claw the itch out of my penis.

I said, “Ward, it’s a shithouse. It’s a great shithouse, but it’s still a shithouse. Don’t get carried away. Did you join the Peace Corps to build shithouses?”

He set his face at me. I frowned at him. I was perspiring; my penis throbbed.

“You’re a very moody guy,” he said.

“I have to get back to my class!”

But he was deaf.

“Hey, if I can say after two years in Africa that I managed to accomplish one thing—and even if that one thing is a sanitary facility, I’ll be very proud. Now you’re probably saying to yourself, ‘Hey—’ ”

I was saying to myself: I once thought that. It was as though in his wordy way he was satirizing me. And God I was in pain.