Jungle lovers by Theroux Paul

Author:Theroux, Paul
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Boston, Houghton Mifflin
Published: 1971-08-05T16:00:00+00:00

The old lady did as she was told, but after a few weeks she disinterred the paper bag to count the money again, and she discovered that ants or perhaps termites had chewed the bills to shreds. Calvin insured her, accepting the confetti of her cash. But he ended her policy when he had a remedy for the termites. He refunded her money, giving her new bills for the shreds, and told her to sprinkle the bills with goat piss before she buried it. This would, he said, repel all insects and keep the money safe.

The sort of insurance Africans needed, Homemakers' Mutual did not sell. Ogilvie was dead, the minister of defense was dead; there were rumors of worse. Extra money wouldn't help anyone — it would only make him more liable to theft. A person who appeared the least bit prosperous was nationalized and burgled; if he refused he got his skull cracked by the Youth Wingers. Insurance: there was no future in it; Africans needed it like a hole in the head. And the country (not a country, more a wild little parish) was bankrupt, underpopulated and shrinking like a cheap shirt. To Calvin it wasn't foreign anymore: usually it was a broiling hot nothingness, sometimes it was unaccountably cold, it was doused occasionally by rain, a heavy mist obscured it in the early morning. The phenomena were friendly, the clouds of dust sifting back to the road in the wake of a jeep, the startling sameness of glorious sunsets, the flowering trees always in season: all very routine, usual, familiar — the beauty had a trustworthy permanence.

Understanding everything, Calvin was not contemptuous of the place. He stopped comparing Malawi to Massachusetts — though Malawi came out well in that comparison. (There was no Mafia in Malawi, there was less graft on Chichiri Hill than on Beacon Hill, and the Brahmins in Blantyre were real ones, not descendants of bootleggers as in Boston.) Calvin stopped sizing up the Africans. He was concerned about them, but this was no special feeling. Provoked, he defended them. The girls at the eating house were black, the customers

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.