Sir Vidia's Shadow by Paul Theroux
“This deteriorating road. These crummy houses,” Vidia said.
I told him my thoughts about colonials as mechanics.
“My narrator mentions how a society needs to be maintained,” he said.
“Your novel,” I said, “is it based on a sort of political memoir?”
“Not exactly. I had to find a form for it. It was terribly difficult.”
We had walked through the center of town, past a bandstand, an abandoned fun fair, and some banners and lights strung across the main street. We came to a part of the road that was severely potholed and with villas that were shuttered and rundown.
“I suffered over it,” he said. “I wasn’t sure how to tell the story. One day it came to me, the structure. I was so pleased. I called Patsy at her school. I said, ‘I’ve got it.’”
It was easy to imagine Vidia doing this, but I could not see myself on the phone, calling my wife and telling her about my unwritten book. Anyway, I had a book, but where was my wife? The whole business seemed enviable, someone caring that much about my writing. I had been working in the dark, just groping, until I had met Vidia.
“When I started out, I found it so hard to write I got sick,” he said. “I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t perform the physical labor of it. It exhausted me.”
I knew better than to tell him that I did not find the process of writing difficult. I sat, I wrote, the words came. I did not suffer. But he distrusted writing that was so fluent. “When it comes easily, throw it away. It can’t be any good,” he said. There had to be an element of struggle in all writing, which reflected a struggle in life. It was also why he hated hitchhikers.
Writing was a relief to me. Everything else was a struggle. I knew that I was nowhere—just a teacher living alone in the middle of Africa. It had been my luck to meet Vidia, but now he spoke all the time about leaving. He made it sound as though he were going to the center of things, back to his house, his friends, parties, his publisher, his wife, his life. I did not envy him his fame, or the glamour, but I admired the life he had made for himself.
“This is already starting to go back to bush,” he said. “Look, the jungle.”
As in Kigali, the sidewalks were erupting. The glass-spiked walls around the lakeside villas were cracking. Some walls had been vandalized, others had been painted with slogans or had political posters stuck to them. It was tropical Belgium, suburban Brussels gone jungly, penetrated by rubber trees and fungoid growths. Colonial decrepitude depressed Vidia, but it fascinated me—the crumbling houses, the chipped cornices, the remnants of the dead past, the Africans squatting against the nigh walls that were scorched and blackened by their cooking fires.
I told him this.
“Horror interest,” he said.
We walked on.
“I am going to see André when I go back,” he said.
André Deutsch was his publisher. He was still thinking about his novel, thoughts I had provoked with my questions about writing.
“I am going to say, André, I want a thousand pounds for this book.’”
It seemed a great deal of money to me, yet it was less than I earned in a year on my Uganda government contract.
“I think he’ll understand,” Vidia said. “I think he’ll give it to me.”
We were still walking in the empty rubbly road, the fallen leaves and blown papers unswept, in the middle of Kisenyi, among the darkened villas, hearing the lap of lake water where the night was blackest.
The dogs did not warn us—perhaps they were watching, waiting for us to walk closer. At first there was no barking at all. But it was soon clear that we had gone too far into the residential part of the town, for we were at once beset by a pack of dogs, panting in fear and effort, and only when we were surrounded did they begin to bark. They barked horribly, all their teeth bared, their neck fur bristling. They made odd choking noises. They slavered near my ankles and sounded crazy, as though they were going to kill us and eat us—that hunger and cruelty and strength were in their barking.
“They’ve been trained to attack Africans,” Vidia said.
He was calmer than I expected. I retained a childhood fear of aggressive dogs. “They know you’re afraid,” people had said. “That’s why they’re barking.” That was crap. Most dogs were wolfish and reactive and pack-minded, which is why they barked. Their owners were the alpha males, encouraging this behavior in the dog, their weapon, their slave.
“Kwenda! Kwenda!” I yelled—Go away!—believing they might know Swahili. This only maddened them more.
Vidia was careful not to turn his back to the dogs, which were perhaps both guard dogs and strays. He lunged at them and made as if to punt them.
“What they need is a kick.”
The dogs scattered, moving back but still barking fiercely.
“If they felt this veldshoen on their hide, they’d know it.”
He was wearing his heavy shoes and swinging his walking stick. His bush hat was crammed on his head. Seeing the dogs react, he went after them again, driving them further back. I was impressed by this small man in the dark street of a remote African town, taking on the dogs.
They did not stop barking. In fact they barked louder, protesting, after Vidia intimidated them. But now we were able to move along. I was grateful to him. He had not been fazed in this showdown. He was frowning.
“Another one-whore town,” he said.
The Belgian family were still quarreling when we got back to the Miramar. They were in the lounge, drinking coffee and shouting amid the glaring table lamps. There were armchairs and doilies and footstools and little porcelain shepherdesses on shelves and framed lithographs of Liège and Ghent and Antwerp. An African servant stood in the hallway, doing sentry duty, holding a tin tray, waiting to be summoned.
“It’s all so crummy.”
Yes, I saw that, but I also felt it was a glimpse of the colonial past, a curious antique that was now worn out and broken. I did not really think that the jungle was moving in, as Vidia had said. I felt that this Belgian culture would be displaced by Rwandan culture and that we had no way of anticipating what it might be.
“Is your business always this bad?” Vidia asked the Belgian proprietress of the Miramar, in his challenging way.
The big woman shrugged and matched his directness, saying, “Business is good whenever there is a revolution in the Congo.”
The next day we drove across to Goma and had lunch at a café on Lake Kivu. Cheese sandwiches again: Africa was an unrewarding place for a vegetarian.
“I will meet you at ‘the coffee,’ they say in France and Italy and Spain. Even quite educated people make that simple mistake.” He saw that I was only half listening. He said, “You are thinking about your writing.”
“No,” I said. But I had been—the simple problem. How did I get from where I was to where he was?
“Are you sure you want to be a writer?” he asked. “It’s a terrible profession. Yes, you have your freedom. But it can kill you if you’re not up to it.”
I said I was up to it.
“Come to London. I will introduce you to some people.”
I said I would try to visit, perhaps at Christmas.
“These people are infies. They know nothing. Their leaders—Ian Smith, for example—”
Ian Smith had recently issued a unilateral declaration of independence in Rhodesia, and a minority of whites were governing the country.
“—Ian Smith is an infy. He is qualified to mend bicycles in Surrey. Nothing more than that.”
Vidia had been looking into the distance as he had been talking. After we finished lunch, he suggested we walk down the adjacent road. When we were on it I realized he had been looking at a sign that said R.J. Patel, and that evangelism was on his mind.
“Hello,” the Indian shopkeeper said, smiling at the Indian in the bush hat who had just entered his shop. “You are not Congo people. I am knowing.”
“We’re from Uganda,” I said.
&n
“So-so. Not bad. People are needing. I am exclusive stockist for a large variety of goods.”
“Do you have a family?”
“That is my daughter,” Mr. Patel said, gesturing at a young woman near the shelves whose back was turned. Mr. Patel was standing before a large basin heaped with salt. “She is running shop. I am attending to so many other businesses.”
“What sort of businesses?”
“Too many to tell you,” Mr. Patel said. He opened his mouth wide and the approximation of a laugh came out of it. “This is just a simple shop. My other businesses occupy my time. Properties also.”
“But the money here is worthless,” Vidia said. “How do you manage?”
“I am managing. I have many ways.”
“So you’re not worried?”
“Ha! I am doing very well.” Wery vell was what he said.
He began filling a paper bag with scoopfuls of salt, murmuring with each scoop.
“What will you do when the crunch comes? The crunch is coming, you know.”
“I have my ways,” Mr. Patel said. He had grown solemn under Vidia’s questioning. He was still scooping, murmuring, crinkling the brown paper bag. “I will be okay.”
“And your daughter?”
“She will be all right.” He then went silent. He said, “Excuse me,” and turned his back on Vidia.
“So what do you think?” I asked.
We were out of the shop, swinging along the empty Goma road, Vidia marching like a soldier.
“He’s lying.”
He had not believed a single word the man had said.
“He can’t move his pence. The Africans will take his shop and all his goods. He’s lying about those other businesses. And look what he’s doing to his daughter, forcing her to work there.”
Lake Kivu was dull silver under a gray equatorial sky that sagged with humidity. The grayness gave the trees along the lakeshore a dark, impenetrable look. People on the street stared at us, though the soldiers in their faded uniforms did not glance our way but walked heavily past, stirring up the dust in big clomping boots. Their boots and their rifles were old-fashioned and indestructible-looking. Music played, the Congolese songs that sounded Brazilian, with marimbas and blaring trumpets. Soldiers, waifs, dogs, chickens, and broken signs in this distant corner of the Congo.
“He’s a dead man,” Vidia said of R. J. Patel. “They’re all dead men.”
I had heard him say that before, in Kampala and Nairobi. But I had believed Patel when he said he would be all right. And I had been excited at being in the heart of Africa. It seemed to me that if you put your finger on the middle of a map of the continent it would be on this place, Goma, this muddy lakeshore. I tried to see it with Vidia’s eyes, but I could not. I had neither lived his life nor written his books. He made up his mind quickly: observation for him was about drawing conclusions. I knew that whatever I wrote would be different from his view. It was probably a good thing that he did not ask me what I thought.
“I’m glad I saw this,” he said. “Now I think it’s time to go.”
Another night at the Miramar, among the squabbling Belgians and the food-strewn dining table and the overbright lamps, and then we were off to Ruhengeri again and the Uganda border. We stopped only to snap pictures at a dramatic curve, dangerous for its being unprotected, over an abyss called the Karnaba Gap. I was wearing my tweed jacket and my horn-rimmed glasses that gave me a scowling expression.
“I think you will do well,” Vidia said. He was upbeat, cheerier now that we were heading home.
I had turned twenty-five in April. I had not published anything outside Africa. I ached to have a publisher for my novel. In a halting way, I told him so.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “The most important thing is to avoid making an enormous amount of money before you’re forty. Promise me you won’t do that.”
I made this promise, that I would not make my fortune in the next fifteen years.
“Concentrate on your writing. After you’re forty, fine—make all the money you like.”
Vidia was well under forty, yet he seemed older than my father.
We drove on, up and down the Kigezi hills, squeezing the car around corners, into the savannah again, past the big game and the long-legged herons and the marsh of papyrus, under the vast African sky. It was all familiar now.
Back in Kampala, at my house, where he was still a guest, I was full of his talk and of ideas I wanted to write down. Even before I had a bath or washed off the dust of the safari, I hurried to my study and sat and began to write.
Passing the room, Vidia looked in and exclaimed, “Yes!” He was delighted. “I used to do that. Sometimes at night, after we got home from a party I would go to my room and write, just like that, without even taking my coat off.”
He stepped into the room and glanced at the pages. He was looking at them upside down. I was about to turn them so that he could see, but he said, “No, I’m not reading. I’m looking at your handwriting.”
He looked closely.
“Yes. Yes. Yes.” He nodded. “It’s not American. It’s distinct. Hasty. Intelligent. It’s you.” This was more of his approval.
For weeks he had been speaking eagerly of leaving Uganda, of going back to London. Before he left, he gave me a necktie he had brought from England. “I knew I would meet someone to give this to. I want you to have it.” It was new and very narrow—that was the style—and orange. It was still in its shallow box. I never wore ties, but I was grateful for the gift. He gave me another gift the day he left. He told me in detail a dream he had had, which concerned his brother and a murder he had committed. I listened closely, and when he was gone I wrote the dream down in my notebook.
I was sorry to see him go. I was losing my teacher, and he had also become my friend. It mattered to me that he took me seriously, that he treated me like a fellow writer. No one else did, but that did not matter, because I had him.
Then an unexpected thing happened. I had never been homesick in Africa, nor had I despaired at what I saw. I was there to work and was grateful for the job. I liked my life. I was self-sufficient. Some days I was Albert Camus, a schoolteacher in remote Algeria. Some days I was George Orwell, preparing to shoot an elephant. There were days when I was myself, writing something that I believed had never been written before, that would surprise the world. But when Vidia left on the plane from Entebbe, I drove back to town feeling lonely, and my loneliness stayed with me. From then on, I liked the place less. I had begun to see it with his eyes and to speak about it using his words.
He had believed in me. He had talked about how in writing you served an apprenticeship. He said we were freer than any writers had been in the past. “We are free from dogma, religious and political dogma. Use that freedom.” I remembered the many times that he had peered into my face (“a man’s life is in his face”) or traced my palm and said, “You’re going to be all right, Paul.” What did he see?
A note of comedy crept into my writing. It was an effect of my loneliness, and it startled me, but it gave me vitality. And it seemed more authentic than the solemnity it had displaced. I began to understand that the truest expression of life was humor, especially at its most disturbing. Much of what happened in Africa was not tragedy but farce. It was the influence of Vidia.
Friendship is plainer but deeper than love. A friend knows your faults and forgives them, but more than that, a friend is a witness. I needed Vidia as a friend, because he saw something in me I did not see. He said I was a writer. He spoke about it with his customary directness. That meant everything to me, because I had no idea what I was going to do next.
And I certainly had no idea that my meeting with Vidia would loom so large in my life, or his. But long after this, in an introduction to one of Vidia’s books, the English critic Karl Miller wrote, “The novelist Paul Theroux was with Naipaul in a disrupted Uganda, rather as one might once have be
PART TWO
THE WRITER’S WRITER
5
Christmas Pudding
JUST BEFORE he left Kampala, Vidia released me. He looked one last time at my much-slashed and -amended essay on cowardice, which was already scheduled to be published. He said that it was finished, though I guessed that it still did not seem quite right to him.
Move on to something new, he said; the new thing would be better for what I had learned from him. I was sorry to see him go. I had come to depend on his reading and his friendly advice. Needing him to put his whole philosophy into a sentence, I mocked myself by thinking of the man who asked Christ, “Good Master, what good thing shall I do that I may have eternal life?” Christ gives him a quick summary of the essentials, beginning with “Do not kill” and ending with “Sell everything you have.”
I found a way of framing the question and managed to stammer it to Vidia.
Vidia’s answer was “Tell the truth.”
And there was his dream, the one I had written down. It went this way.
Vidia and his brother, Shiva, were staying with a family in which there were two other children, a boy and a girl. Shiva hated the boy, and one day when Vidia, his brother, and the boy were on an outing, an argument started. Shiva set upon the boy and killed him.
“Look what you’ve done—you’ve killed him!” Vidia said.
Vidia and Shiva dug a hole and hid the corpse of the boy in it.
Now it so happened that the boy was to have been away for several days; there were no questions or suspicions when Vidia and Shiva returned to the family. They were feeling horribly guilty for the murder, however; they could not screw up their courage sufficiently to tell the truth. They knew that the body would be found and that they would be blamed.
A few days later the newspapers were full of the story of the disappearance, and the body was soon found. During this time the child’s father underwent a severe change—he remembered various petty cruelties he had inflicted on the boy, and he began blaming himself for the crime. He said, “I know what happened ... I made him cut his throat.” Naipaul and his brother remained silent—guilty but so far not blamed. They did not speak of the crime, and yet they were not off the hook. End of dream: night sweats, terror, anxiety, guilt.