My Secret History by Paul Theroux

Author:Paul Theroux [Theroux, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-79026-2
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-04-19T16:00:00+00:00

9.

On a cold drizzly afternoon in July—Malawi’s independence day—I rode my bicycle into town. I could hear music coming from the stadium, and howling crowd-voices, and applause. But the celebrations had nothing to do with me. I was just a foreign teacher; Mambo was headmaster. I hated seeing my students doing their Israeli marching, and I hated the Youth League in their red shirts. But most of all I sensed that this little phase was ending, and I was sorry, because I had liked living in a place that was neither a colony nor a republic. It had been nothing with a name, and very pleasant: it had resembled my own mood. In this special interval I had been able to pursue my secret life.

The natural place for me that day was the Beautiful Bamboo. I realized then that a bar is a safe neutral place, where I had a right to be. And the fact that there were African girls in the bar made it friendlier. More than that—it was where I belonged. Looking around, I saw that at one time or another I had slept with every girl I could see.

They were draped over the chairs and leaning on the bar and staring out the window at the rain. It was too wet and cold to go to the stadium, and anyway, the main independence celebration was in the capital. It was taking place at the moment. The radio was on. I could hear the band playing “Everything Belongs to Kamuzu Banda.”

“This rain is very strong,” I said in Chinyanja. The word I used for rain, mpemera, was very precise. It meant the sweeping rain driven into the veranda by the wind.

“Sure is,” a girl said, and another said, “Yah.”

How long had they been replying this way?

The Beautiful Bamboo had never looked dingier. It was filled with hairy smells and the droning odor of wet shoes and muddy boots and sodden clothes. The shadowy darkness seemed to make it stinkier, and the noise didn’t help—the shouting African men, none I knew, and the radio competing with the jukebox, playing “Downtown” by a British singer.

And over the radio came the sounds of the Malawi Police Band. Until today there had been no Malawi Police—who needed them? But the band was playing so that students all over the country could do their Israeli marching. In the Zimba stadium Mr. Mambo was standing under his headmaster’s umbrella, taking credit for his goose-stepping students as he had for Rockwell’s chimbuzi.

Rosie was heavily pregnant. She went back and forth with a tray. I bought a bottle of beer and sat alone, near the radio, to drink it. I bought another bottle. Twelve was my limit. I had a long way to go.

The Chiffons were singing, “He’s So Fine.”

“What these stupid colonialist people did not understand,” Doctor Banda shrieked, “was that we Malawians want to be free! That is why I came from London. They called me! I heeded the call. Kwacha, they said—”

His words were drowned by a group called The Shangri-Las singing “Leader of the Pack.

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