My Secret History (27 page)

That made me uncomfortable. I walked into the rain. There was not much else in the town—five Indian shops, all selling identical merchandise, canned goods and cloth; a car-repair shop and gas station, a branch of Grindlay’s Bank, a fish and chip shop, a bakery, and The Nyasaland Trading Company. None were run by Africans. Two old women were the sales clerks in The Nyasaland Trading Company. This was a general store in
a low wooden building. It stocked colonial merchandise—-jars of jam, stationery, clothes, last month’s London newspapers, books, ink, shoes, oil lamps, rubber boots. When I walked in, one of the women was wiping a feather duster (and they sold those too) against a contraption they called a radiogram—a large varnished cabinet with a yellow plastic window.

“It’s a wireless, and it also plays gramophone records,” the woman had told me on my first visit, and I had gone away mumbling the words.

Most of the white settlers had left the country for good. The shelves were becoming very dusty. Africans did not buy Birds Custard, Bovril, Swan Vestas, Dundee Thick-Cut Marmalade, Fenwick’s Gumboots, Hacks Honey Lemons, Gentleman’s Relish, Nairn’s Capital Oatcakes, tins of Bath Olivers or Battley’s Pickled Walnuts.

I browsed in the Nyasaland Trading Company until the rain stopped, bought a Penguin paperback—a novel set in the tropics by a writer I admired, S. Prasad—and then I started back to Chamba on my bike, bracing myself for the three-mile journey, which was mostly uphill.

Passing another shop, I saw a mass of small bottles and cartons in the window, and it was my first indication of the Nyasalanders’ liking for patent medicine—DeWitt’s Worm Syrup, Philipps’ Gripe Water, Goodmorning Lung Tonic, Iron Tonic, Liver Elixir, Red Syrup (“For Strength”), Kidney and Bladder Pills by Baxter, Fam-Lax, Day-Glo, X-Pell, Reg-U-Letts, and Letrax (“Expells Roundworms, Hookworms, Whip-Worms and Threadworms”). There were skin lighteners—TV Beautybox Day and Night Skin Lightening Pack, Dear Heart Skin Brightener and Glo-Tone. And hair straighteners—Hairstrate, and Glyco Superstrate. This shop had customers inside, but reading these labels I thought: Where am I?

Farther up the road, at the edge of town, there were African men lingering outside a shopfront. There was music at the door, a harmonious howling. Later I realized that this was my first taste of the Beatles: in a back street, in Zimba, a small town in Nyasaland, in Central Africa. It was not a shop. I went nearer. It was noisy, there were African girls at the windows, and young men in sunglasses watched me from the veranda. A sign above them was clumsily lettered
BEAUTIFUL BAMBOO BAR
.

Did someone wave to me? I thought I saw an African girl beckon, but she had vanished when I looked again. Anyway, I went in. It seemed dark inside. The few lights made the interior indistinct and had the effect of making the place seem darker and more shadowy. It was one room and it smelled dankly of piss and dirt, like a crawlspace. It was damp, smoke blew through one window, the mirror was streaked with green and red paint, and on the walls were shelves of beer—small plump bottles of Lion and Castle Lager.

The bartender wore a T-shirt and a tweed vest and ragged shorts and plastic sandals. He approached me nervously.

I said,
“Moni. Muli bwanji, achimwene?”

Hello brother: it was the friendliest greeting.

He was too astonished to reply at once. Then he said, “You are speaking.”

“Yes, brother.”

“Oh, thank you, father,” he said.

“What is your name, brother?”

“My name is Wilson.”

They all had names like that—Wilson, Millson, Edison, Redison; and Henderson and Johnston.

“Thank you, Wilson.”

“And what is your name, father?”

“Please stop calling me father.”

“What is your name, sir?”

“Please, brother.”

“Yes,
achimwene”
—and he almost choked on the word—“what is your name?”

“My name is Andy.”

“Oh, thank you, Mr. Undie,” he said.

He told me that I was the first
mzungu
ever to go into the Beautiful Bamboo Bar. That cheered me up. Wasn’t that the point of my being in Africa?

Nearby, there were five or six girls sitting at wooden tables. The first thing I noticed about them was that they had no hair—or very little, no more than fuzz. But their shaven heads seemed to emphasize the shapeliness of their bodies. They wore dresses, but even among the shadows in the bar I could tell they were naked underneath. They were barefoot, but that seemed strangely appropriate to their having no hair on their heads.

I sat at a table with two of them and drank a beer, and I talked to them in their own language. They asked me where I had learned it.

“Would you believe Syracuse University?” And I added, “Upstate New York. United States.”

They laughed, because everywhere outside Nyasaland sounded magical. And yet I knew that Nyasaland was the only place that I wanted to be.

“American,” one girl said, trying the word out.

It seemed that they were working casually in the Bamboo. They had come from distant villages. They believed Zimba was the big city; they had attached themselves to this bar. They lived out back. The jukebox was playing
Shimmy Shimmy Koko Bop
, and an African girl was doing a flat-footed African dance.

Her name was Rosie. She said her favorite singer was Chubby Checker. She also liked Elvis, Del Shannon and The Orions.

“Who are the Orlons?”

“Wah-Watusi,” Rosie said.

“Oh, them.”

“And Spokes Mashiani,” she said. “South African.”

That was the kind of conversation—names of singers, names of songs, and how much can you drink, and have you ever seen a lion? And
Shimmy shimmy koko bop
.

Finally, Rosie said, “You’re the teacher up at Chamba?”

I said yes, and turned to the door. It had gone dark outside.

“The big house with the flowers in front,” she said.

Shimmy shimmy bop
.

“It used to belong to Mr. Campbell. He went back to England.”

“They all went back to England,” Rosie said. The other girl said wistfully, “They just left us.” She sounded like an abandoned child.

I said, “But I’m not leaving.”

“That’s good,” Rosie said.

I said, “Come and visit me someday.”

“Yes,” she said, and put her hand over her face and giggled behind it.

I took a breath and said, “What about now, sister?”

She made a sound, her tongue against her teeth, that was stronger than yes.

We left, walking side by side. I pushed my bike because I could not carry her on my crossbar uphill. She said that no one minded her leaving: the Bamboo was not very busy.

“No money for European beer—just for African beer.” She meant the porridgey stuff the market women sold in old oil cans.

In the pitch-black forest I took her hand. It was hard and heavy, tough fingers and a palm the texture of an old boot. But I hung on to it.

At home I sat her down and poured her a glass of gin. She sipped it, making faces. She was barefoot, and I could see that her feet were rough and cracked like her hands. Her green dress was both fancy and ragged, and the strip of lace at her collar was torn.

I made a fire in the fireplace, burning eucalyptus logs, and we sat in front of it on the sofa Mr. Campbell had left. But Rosie was restless. She sniffed around the room.

“Books,” she said.

She looked at the pictures—of Scotland, from calendars. Of cats, of dogs. I asked if she liked them. She said no. She kept prowling.

“Table.” She smoothed it with her hand. “Flowers. Looking glass. Curtains. Carpet. Knife and fork. Tomato sauce. Mustard.”

Next to the cluster of sticky bottles on the table—they too were Campbell’s—we had dinner, served by Captain. Captain was my cook: he also had been left by Campbell. He was too nervous to disguise his leering, and he spoke to Rosie in a language I did not know, perhaps Yao or Tonga. I caught the word “American.”

She ate hungrily and with a lot of noise, wetting her fingers on the food and then wiping her lips with the back of her hand. I learned then that the frantic manners of the poor are their way of not wasting a crumb. Eating made her perspire, too, and sitting across from her at the table I was aroused and wanted to make love to her.

After the kitchen was silent—Captain gone—I took her leathery hand and, saying nothing, led her into the bedroom. She stepped out of her dress and folded it neatly on a chair. Then she sat on the bed and tipped onto her back and lifted her legs. I knelt before her and started, and a moment later she shrieked,
“Mwamuna wanga!”
(“My man!”). As soon as I had finished she wanted me again. We made love three times in the same sort of sandwichlike way. It had been over a month of abstinence for me. She fell asleep and snored all night. In the morning I took her back to town—downhill, on the crossbar of my bike.

“Do you want money?”

She just laughed.

“I want a beer,” she said.

It was nine o’clock in the morning, but the Beautiful Bamboo was open. I bought a Castle Lager for Rosie from the sleepy-eyed bartender and a glass of sugary tea for myself. We sat in the empty bar, saying nothing, listening to the bell at the Catholic mission being rung. It sounded stern, like a school bell.

That was Sunday. I spent the rest of the day writing letters, and Rosie appeared in some of these letters. Letters were all I had. I lived for them—writing them, receiving them. Nyasaland was a country with no writing. And I was always touched by the wornout way the envelopes looked—so battered and resolute, having reached me from so far.

I kept writing until the sun set behind Chamba Hill. I was happy. I often found memory sexier than actual experience, and anticipating a woman was always an erotic pleasure. All day I had been preparing myself for my return to the Beautiful Bamboo. I went after dinner, my bicycle lamp shaking in the dark on the bad road.

“Rosie is not here,” another girl said, and she stayed to talk. Her name was Grace.

Between us we drank eleven bottles of beer and when my eyes refused to focus I knew I had had enough. I stood up clumsily and headed for the door. On the veranda I paused and felt a hand close over my fingers. I thought it was Rosie, because it was cracked and large and had weight but no grip, like a kind of dog’s paw. It was Grace.

“I come with you.”

I couldn’t speak. I was moving forward. I tripped on the edge of the open sewer and staggered.

“Sorry!” she cried.

I turned back and tried to set my eyes on her. She was a blur. And yet I did not feel drunk. I was small and sober inside a big drunken body.

“I love you, mister,” she said.

She insisted on pushing my bike. I was grateful to her for that. I walked behind her, catching my toes on the ruts, and feeling unsteady in the darkness. At Chamba we did not talk. We went to bed like an old married couple and were immediately asleep. But in a dark morning hour I woke up and felt her damp skin against mine, and I snuggled against her. She helped me and then almost killed my desire as she chafed me with her rough hands. She muttered and sighed in pleasure, a kind of laughter, and then she went snufflingly to sleep.

Her smell kept me awake for a while. She had the same odor as my students—soap, dirt, skin, sweat. It was a human smell—a rank sort of dead-and-alive odor. It was dusty and undefinable, like mushrooms.

She was gone in the morning. She had vanished, leaving a dent and a smell on the sheet that was about the size of her body.

Captain said, “She told me ‘sorry’—she is seeing her sister today,” and he put a plate of eggs in front of me.

He was a small, bucktoothed man who had been a cook in the King’s African Rifles. He could make scones, he could make mint sauce and gravy, he baked bread. He spoke little English but he knew words like “roast” and “joint” and “pudding.” He spoke army Swahili, though we stuck to Chinyanja. He was a Yao from Fort Johnson, and a muslim. Now that he had seen me with African girls he seemed to regard me in a different light. He became friendlier, slightly more talkative and familiar, but at the same time protective.

“Next time I can take the girl back to town on your bicycle—if you say yes.”

He used the slang word for bicycle:
njinga
, which was the sound of a bicycle bell.

“Yes,” I said. “Next time.”

He knew something that I had only just realized, that there would be many more times. I was happy, but that Monday morning, walking down the road I had built, towards the school, I itched. Before morning assembly I found dark flecks clinging to my pubic hair. I pinched one out and took it to the science block to examine it under a microscope. I saw that a crab louse is aptly named.

There were other customers in Mulji’s Cash Chemist in Maravi that afternoon, so I whispered
lice
.

“Crab lice or body lice?” Mulji said out loud, and everyone heard:
Grab lice or bhodee lice?

The powder he sold me killed them all. I combed out the dead nits, spent a busy week at the school, and on Friday I was back at the Beautiful Bamboo.

That had been my first week in the country, and that was how it was every subsequent week. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights I picked up African girls at the Bamboo and took them back to Chamba. I returned them to town in the morning, or else Captain did, carrying them on the crossbar of my bike. There were about twenty different girls at the Bamboo. They were not jealous. They never asked for money. I think they simply wanted the experience of sleeping with an American. And I wanted them.

We danced in a jumping, shaking way, to the Beatles and Elvis and Major Lance and Little Millie and “The Wah-Watusi.” A song I hated was “How Do You Do It” sung by Jerry and the Pacemakers, but they played it all the time. I developed a taste for the woozy penny-whistle music they said was South African.

Being dancing partners was part of their function at the Bamboo. And yet they were neither customers nor workers. They hinted that they were runaways. They hung around. There was always food for them, and always beer. I never saw money change hands.