My Secret History (28 page)

On Fridays I was impatient. I had a few beers and went home early, with an African girl. They were interested in my house, but not particularly impressed. I liked the place. I lived alone. I had three bedrooms and a fireplace and all of Campbell’s old
Spectators
. I liked sitting on the veranda and looking at Mlanje Plateau—the great slab of rock rising out of the dark-green tea estates. I had a flower garden, and Campbell’s herbaceous borders, and my own pigeon loft. Some days, Captain put a cloth over his head and slaughtered a pair of pigeons, cutting their throats according to muslim custom, and made them into pigeon curry.

Captain also did the shopping, leaving me free on Saturdays. That was the day I stayed late at the Bamboo. I did not leave until well after midnight. I never left alone. Often I reached home as dawn was breaking. I would be pushing my bike uphill.
That was lovely. The sky would lift and lighten, and night seemed to dissolve and grow rosier as I reached the top of the road and left the forest. The birds would be screeching and the cocks crowing. There was always mist in the air and the grass was soaked.

I walked to the center of my sloping lawn as the sun appeared at the edge of the far-off plateau. The African girl was behind me, parking the bike under the pigeon loft, and the jingling woke and fluttered the birds.

And then on the lawn I unzipped and pissed into the sunrise, a whole night’s beer, rocking back on my heels and feeling wonderful the morning chill, the pink dawn, the dampness, and the tootling birds.

The African girl walked in front of me and laughed at what I was doing. She left footprints in the dewy grass—dark feet showing in silver. She stood there—the bursting sunrise behind her thin skirt dazzling between her legs.

That was how it was for five months; and then Likoni left and I took his place, and for the next two months it was even better. As headmaster, I made the rules. And that was the situation—frenetic, happy, I lost count of the nights and girls—when Willy Msemba was brought into my office and given bricks to make.

It had all been a secret activity. It was what Africans themselves did on weekends. The Peace Corps office didn’t know anything, but so what? To me it seemed almost virtuous—making love to African girls. What was the point in being in Africa if I didn’t do that? Promiscuous was not the word for it. My activity was different, it was explosive. During the week it was nothing, and then it was a frenzy—three girls a weekend. It
overstimulated me, and those days I could not sleep; but by Monday I was calm again.

I was young, I felt it was temporary, I had just had my twenty-third birthday. That day I copied Milton’s poem about turning twenty-three into my notebook. It contained a line that gave me a pang:
Time, the subtle thief of youth …
I was changing fast. I mistook maturing for aging and was desperate to use all the time I had. I could not have done more. It made me extremely tired.

Once I went to sleep while teaching a class. It was night school. I taught it Tuesday and Thursday evenings. It surprised me: I had never heard of anyone going to sleep while talking. I had been telling my English class the story of
Animal Farm
. They were too dim to read it themselves.

“The pigs began to quarrel,” I said.

The Tilly lamp fizzed on my desk.

“They accused each other of trying to waw … aw …”

And then I went to sleep. My hand still supported my head and the warm buzz of the lamp kept me under.

When I woke up, no one spoke; no one giggled. They were mostly older people, very polite, and they liked me. Falling asleep while teaching made me seem eccentric and harmless. And of course half of them slept through the lesson, too. I became popular. Tell us about cowboys, they said. Tell us about guns. Do you have a horse? Have you flown in a plane? Did you ever meet Elvis? Are you rich? Are you a Christian? What language do Negroes talk? Can Superman really fly? Not one of them believed the world was round, but all believed in witches. They felt they had been swindled by the British. I had arrived in the country at the perfect time: they were ready to be Americans. I could only encourage them.

The African girls at the Beautiful Bamboo had the same attitude as my students. They were not merely susceptible to Americans, they were infatuated. Having overcome their fear of whites, they realized that we found them desirable, and they liked themselves better. Some of them had stopped wearing torn dresses, and now wore printed T-shirts and blue jeans. One shaven-headed barefoot girl wore a floppy sweatshirt printed with the head of Beethoven.

Some were very young—fourteen or fifteen; and none was older than twenty. They were sturdy, hard-fleshed and slim—in
Nyasaland no African was fat. At least I had not seen one. Their hands were so calloused they could hold hot pots without noticing; they walked miles barefoot; and they could pop bottle caps off with their teeth.

They had one thing in common: they were unmarriageable. They had disgraced themselves in various ways, and had been kicked out of their villages. A few were rebels and had run away, but most had had children or abortions or been involved in intrigues. A few had committed petty crimes. At least one was a witch—or so the others said. None could expect to marry an African man. They had no status, they had no dowry.

It took months for me to discover these things, but when I did I understood why they were amazed that we chased them and took them home and made love to them. We desired them! They had been rejected by their families and their villages, and we romanced them.

I was single-minded, but it was not much trouble. I had everything I wanted: unlimited and guiltless sex. And because this was Africa and they were black it was not only a pleasure, it was also an act of political commitment. I pondered the fact that I was in Nyasaland, in Central Africa; and then I smiled, knowing there was nowhere else I wished to be. Sometimes I thought: I’ll never leave.

All that sex could have driven me mad, but I think it made me judicious. It concentrated my mind during the week and it kept me from pawing the students. I felt it was my duty to discourage such practices, though Deputy Mambo and Mr. Nyirongo did it all the time—fucking the little girl students in the grim, scolding way that they had learned from the missionaries.

I was occasionally tempted. After night school one evening a big goon named Eddyson—a part-time janitor—knocked at the window of my house. Usually he found me wild pigeons for my loft, but tonight he brought me a slender girl. She was smiling nervously and wringing her hands.

“Thanks, brother,” I said.

The three of us stood on the shadowy veranda.

“Take her, Mr. Anderea.”

Her name was Emmy. She had big dark eyes and a thin pretty face, and she reminded me of a warm reptile. She would wrap herself around me and laugh with her tongue out. I knew such
girls, younger than she—I took her to be fifteen. It was not her age. She was a student. I couldn’t.

I sent them away. I didn’t want Eddyson pimping for me and I knew there had to be a clear line between my two lives.

They crashed away, trampled the herbaceous border and cut through the hibiscus hedge, Eddyson explaining that I was probably too tired and Emmy meekly agreeing. Later he told me he had her himself on the way home, tipped her onto her back, just like that, under a tree. “And I got mud on my knees!”

It was not hard to lead two lives and to keep them separate when they were both so satisfying. One was sex, the other work.

There were no more mentions at school of the Msemba incident, but the silence was so deliberate it was like an accusation. They had had a hint from Msemba of my secret life and I imagined they were reminded of it every time they saw his twenty stacked bricks. And were probably reminded of my failure, too. We would never get the new
chimbuzi
at this rate.

I endured a week of silence, feeling defensive but fairly happy; and then had a visit from the Peace Corps. My conscience was usually clear but authority made me feel guilty. I was in my office adding up the attendance register and heard a vehicle on my road—the tickey road. That was a rare enough sight, but it was more unusual even than that—the Peace Corps jeep, with Ed Wently at the wheel. I heard chairs being scraped and teachers calling their classes to order. Kids were springing from their desks and standing up to see who the visitors were. It was their road, too.

Someone else was with Wently on the front seat. I guessed it was an agency man or a poverty tourist—why else would anyone come here?—but when the jeep drew up to my office I saw that it was a fellow about my age, with the look of a volunteer. It was the ready-for-anything look: willing but a little wary.

“Got a new recruit for you, Parent.”

His name was Rockwell, he was nervous, and I knew at once it would be a mistake to call him Rocky. He was round-shouldered and a little pale and sly-looking. He did not smile. But like a lot of humorless and unsmiling people he had a startling laugh. It was sudden and terrible, not really a laugh at all.

“We don’t actually need a new teacher, Ed.”

“You can find room for him. What do you say?”

That was the Peace Corps attitude—make room, double up, hustle, look good, compromise, and keep smiling: very old-fashioned. Be full of pep! The Peace Corps showed up without notice and you were supposed to jump; and then you wouldn’t see them for months. They were in Washington, being congratulated on their good work. Or they were at embassy parties in Blantyre.

Ed Wently disliked me. He was a jock, a member of the Blantyre Club rugby team. The club did not have any African members.

“They don’t play rugby,” Wently had said.

I wanted to make an issue of it and force him to resign from the club, but I could not get any volunteers to agree with me. My feeling was partly political and partly a desire to be a nuisance. And then I stopped caring. I lived my own life. I believed that I was on my own, in my wrinkled suit and squashed hat; in my house, with my cook, and my pigeon loft, the only
mzungu
for miles around.

That was why I was so dismayed when Wently told me to make room for Rockwell.

“We don’t have a spare house.”

“You’ve got three bedrooms, Andy!”

I thought: Shit. And there was something in Rockwell’s expression that told me he was none too keen on living with me. He had hardly said a word. He had only laughed and that had alarmed me.

“You’ve got a Peace Corps house,” Wently said. “You have to be flexible.”

That was always the possibility in bush posts—that once you got used to them the circumstances changed, and you had to adjust again. And because we never had advance warning, every visit was a surprise.

I liked the country, I enjoyed being headmaster, I loved the African girls. But the thought of being in the Peace Corps discouraged me. I hated this jock, Wently, bringing up the Peace Corps—they offered no support, they only imposed on me, and they took all the credit.

“What can you teach?”

Rockwell said, “I was doing a little chemistry and math at my last place.”

“Where was that?”

“Sierra Leone. I asked for a transfer.”

Probably bush fever: a crazy—a freak.

I said, “We’re trying to build a
chimbuzi
. You can get going on that. And you can help Mr. Nyirongo with Form Three math.”

“What’s a
chimbuzi?”

“You’ll have to start learning the language,” I said. “It’s a shithouse.”

Rockwell then pronounced a strange sentence.

“I’ve always been very excited about sanitary facilities.”

We stared at him.

“That’s what I couldn’t stand about Sierra Leone.”

I could not think of anything to say.

“The restrooms,” he said.

“The restrooms?”

Even Wently was baffled.

Rockwell said, “Yeah. People went to the bathroom in the street.”

I reminded myself to write that down.

“No one does that in Nyasaland,” Wently said, and put his arm around Rockwell’s shoulder, the way jocks hug each other. “You’re going to love it here, Ward.”

So his name was Ward Rockwell. But from that moment I thought of him as Weird Rockwell.

“Bodily hygiene is so important,” Rockwell was saying as he went down the road.

It was a bad start. And things did not improve. He did not speak the language. That was crucial. Without noticing it I had been using it constantly. I gave him my grammar book and taught him the greetings, but he showed no aptitude.

I asked him whether he spoke any foreign languages.

“A little Tex-Mex,” he said.

“Is that like pig Latin?”

“Are you serious?” he said.

He pronounced it
sirius
, like the constellation. That was the California in him. He had been raised in Houston but after UCLA he had stayed in Los Angeles. He said
contimpree peeners
when I mentioned (to irritate him) that I liked the look of rotting flesh in the work of Ivan Albright. His birth sign was
Jiminie
.

It was bad enough that he spoke no Chinyanja. It did not help that his English was peculiar.
Innerteenmint
, he said and
hoorible
.

“Hey, that cook. When I tell him to inner, I want him to inner.”

It took me awhile to work that one out.

“The cook’s name is Captain. He doesn’t speak English.”

“Everyone spoke English in Sierra Leone, even the servants.”

I thought of three rejoinders to this. But we were in the bush. An ill-judged remark could cause weeks of miffed silence. I decided not to risk it just then.

“But my cook in Kenema was minilly deficient,” he said, and made his first and only joke in the year I knew him. “Kenema was an enema.”

He had the California way of saying
hamburgers
, heavy on the
ham
and swallowing the
burgers
.

He was pudgy and lumpish and he had the heavy person’s curse: terrible feet. They were visibly twisted and made him totter. “I’ve got wicked arches,” he explained. “I have to wear cookies in my shoes.” He made the word sound like
shees
.