My Secret History (30 page)

This was my home—at last, an African hut.

The girls I brought to it were not so intimidated as they had been by my house on Chamba Hill. One of the girls was a neighbor. Her name was Abby. She worked at the Rainbow Cinema, taking tickets. She was nineteen, she had two children, she was long-legged and pretty—and strangest of all, she was a runner on the Zimba town track team.

She said she was a very fast runner. “I do not know why!”

It was a mystery to her why she was able to run the two-twenty in less than 33.2 seconds. She was not interested in distance running; she was a sprinter. She was that way in bed, too: very frantic and then it was all over.

More than anything Abby wanted to run in Rhodesia. Rhodesia seemed distant and glamorous. She was sure she could win the women’s two-twenty in Nyasaland and be sent to Salisbury to compete.

Nyasaland had these prodigies—the natural athlete (a mother of two); the math genius (barefoot village boy); the long-distance traveler (the young man who walked two thousand miles to Nairobi “for an education”). One of my students, a tiny Tonga with a swollen face, was brilliant on the penny-whistle; and another, a ball boy at the Blantyre Sports Club, was an inspired tennis player. But these exceptional people were seldom taken seriously, and indeed most of them saw themselves as clowns. They would do little more with their gifts than be messengers or hawkers, and they would all die young.

Harry Gombo was a book salesman. He wore a cowboy hat,
which contrasted oddly with his buck teeth and his pin-striped suit. He liked the singer Jim Reeves. He wondered whether I had met the man. Harry sang “This World Is Not My Home (I’m Just A-Passing Through).” He wrote long abusive letters to his district manager in Salisbury.

“I have sent another fizzing rocket to the bwana.”

He wanted a company car.

He said he was glad to have an American for a neighbor. He admired me for romancing Abby, the track star. He worried about her and her two children. He said I could be their daddy. He sang the Jim Reeves song, “That Dear Old Daddy of Mine.”

Abby brought her two children over to my house when she worked late at the Rainbow. That did not help. It changed my mood when I came with her and had to step over their little sleeping forms—so still on the floor, like mealy-sacks—in order to get into bed with Abby. She roused them and sent them to sleep in the narrow hallway between the two rooms. They picked up their ragged blankets and tottered sleepily away, and they were soon asleep again. But that took away all my ardor.

One night I took Rosie home, and the next morning I saw that she had a bulging belly.

“Are you pregnant, sister?”

She said yes with that click of her teeth.

“Whose is it?”

She said, “Yours!” and laughed in a taunting way.

She kept it up and my blood ran cold. I was so worried that I started to do calculations. It was hopeless, because I could not remember when I had made love to her—all the times. But I said it was impossible and I tried to seem very certain.

“Get on me,” she said. She rolled onto her back and lifted her legs. Foreplay was unknown in that country.

I could not perform. The mention of her baby, the size of her belly, and the sun streaming through the window all killed my desire. I had been genuinely afraid by the easy mocking way she had said, “Yours!”

I suggested that instead of making love we have a cup of tea. She said okay and hopped out of bed. Captain made us breakfast and while he was out of the room I asked her how many months?

“Three or four,” she said.

I screamed, “I haven’t touched you for six months!”

“Don’t make noise,” she said and squinted at me.

“I am not the father.”

She said, “I was just joking.”

“Black humor.”

She said she had no idea who the father was, but when the baby was born she would go to the Chiperoni Blanket Factory and compare the child’s features with the men in the rag room, and then she would know.

Captain took her into town on the bike and that night I brought home a different girl. I always saw Abby on Sundays, because there was only one evening show. These days she never stayed late. Her coach had told her to drink a lot of milk and to sleep well. She was training for the race that would get her to Rhodesia.

I asked her why—though she was in training—she let me make love to her.

“Because I am so close to you,” she said.

This seemed very tender.

“My house is just this side. It’s easy.”

The township was a mess—it smelled, it was muddy, it was noisy, and at night it was so dark that if you weren’t careful you would fall into a ditch. All these were characteristics of the country. But there was no crime. The Africans in Kanjedza were too poor to get very drunk, and they worked too hard to stay up at night raising hell. There was cooperation—people helped each other, minded each other’s children, cooked for each other, did their washing together at the standpipe: clothes in the morning, dishes at night. They were village courtesies, and though it seemed an unlikely place to find them practiced, the Africans saw nothing unusual in it. The township was not a mess to them. They said they were proud of their cement huts and tin roofs. But they were city Africans and rather lonely.

In spite of the bleakness and the outward dirtiness of the huts, the broken and smeared windows, the ragged curtains and splintered doors and the way they put boulders on the roof to hold the tin down—in spite of this, when the African girls emerged from the huts they were fresh-faced and clean, in starched blouses and pleated skirts. All day they lurked looking frumpish in sarongs and old coats and rubber sandals; but when they went
into town they were dressed up and unrecognizable. They wore pretty dresses and the men wore neckties and jackets.

Harry Gombo wore a three-piece suit and carried a carved walking stick. He usually wore a felt hat, too.

“Do you like my sombrero?” he said.

We were on our way to the Kanjedza shop everyone called the canteen.

“We call that a porkpie hat,” I said. “You’re a snappy dresser, Harry.”

He told me that he had grown up in the low-lying town of Port Herald and had never worn more than a pair of shorts until he was eighteen.

“And then I went about in a little singlet.”

“What’s a singlet?” I said, taking out my small notebook.

“A vest.”

He meant an undershirt.

He said, “But you Americans have everything.”

“There were a lot of things I didn’t have.”

He said he was surprised, but he believed me. And when I didn’t say anything more, he asked, “What things?”

I thought awhile. I wanted to be truthful.

He said, “A gun?”

“No, I had a gun.”

“What, then?”

“Sex, mainly.”

He said, “I poked my first girl when I was eight or nine.” He was smoothing his silk tie as we approached the canteen. Then he sat on the bench in front, but very carefully, to keep the creases in his trousers. “When did you start?”

“Too late—later than I wanted,” I said. “When you have to wait a long time for things you never get enough.”

“Sex is like eating.”

“America’s a very hungry country, Harry.”

“I had a white woman once. She was big and fat. I loved her. But she was transferred. Her husband was in the Forestry Commission.” He smiled gently and said, “Doris.”

“What are we doing here?”

He stood up and tapped his walking stick on the veranda of the canteen.

“Cuff links,” he said.

African girls were what I needed. Just after I left Harry I saw Abby hurrying to her house.

I said, “Want to visit me, sister?”

If they said yes it meant everything. I sometimes said, “Want to go upstairs?” This was regarded as a great joke, because the houses all had one story. But that upstairs business was also unambiguous.

Abby said, “Okay.”

As soon as we finished making love she said she had to go quickly—she was late for running practice.

“Why did you come with me then?”

“Because you wanted me.”

I walked with her to the track and on my way home a barefoot girl beckoned me from beside the Lalji Kurji Building. I was curious. She said, “Do it to me here,” and leaned backwards against the fence, bowlegged.

“I can’t.”

She laughed because I was ridiculous. Didn’t I see it was the only way? She said she lived in a small hut in Chiggamoola with her mother. She demanded that I begin. She said, “Put it in.”

“My feet hurt. I’ve got wicked arches. I have to wear cookies in my shoes.”

She was still laughing.

“That’s why I can’t do it standing up.”

One Friday, feeling eager, I asked a girl named Gloria to come home with me. She said she couldn’t leave without her friend, a skinny girl no more than fourteen. The girl was in conversation with a sinister-looking man in sunglasses—one of the black miners who worked in South Africa and who often showed up at the Bamboo.

“I have bought this girl a bottle of beer,” he said, when I took the little girl’s arm. “I can’t let her go just like that.”

He meant that for this two-shilling bottle of Castle Lager the skinny girl was his.

I said, “You should be ashamed of yourself, brother.”

The young girl wore greasy makeup—skin lightener, mascara, and lipstick. Her face was a popeyed mask. But she had no shape. Her yellow dress hung straight down like a school uniform. She bent over like a boy to buckle her plastic sandal and I saw she was wearing school bloomers.

“What’s your name, sister?”

She said something that sounded like “Boopy.”

“You’d better come with us,” I said, and put my arm around Gloria. I could feel her dark sinuous body beneath the loose dress. She was still damp from dancing and touching her excited me—it was like holding a snake against me.

Back at Kanjedza I locked Captain into his room, gave Boopy some blankets, and showed her where to sleep in the hallway. I made love in my room to Gloria and later woke her again. She said she was too tired. She said that she wanted to sleep—a sort of apologetic complaint.

“Take my friend.”

“No!” I said. I was shocked, and I waited for her to react.

But all I heard were snores from Gloria, and her snoring made me wakeful. I lay wide-eyed in the darkness of my room, breathing in little sips.

The young girl Boopy snuffled and swallowed when I woke her, and then she giggled a little and held me. Caressing her, I was running my fingers over all her bones. She was very thin but she had large bush-baby eyes. She was a child in my arms, but as soon as I took her on the floor she snorted and sighed, and she moved like a woman who knew what she wanted.

None of my students lived here in the township—they were too poor even for this place. A few lived in the slum, Chiggamoola, but I never saw them. And so I had more freedom than I had ever had at my house up at Chamba.

I sometimes visited Rockwell at the house. It was not friendship, though I felt friendlier now that I saw less of him. It was curiosity, and a suspicion in my mind that one day he might hang himself. I liked to think that I might interrupt him and prevent it.

He had refused to hire a cook. He said, “They don’t wash their hands. They don’t boil the water. It’s dirty.”

“That’s Nyasaland. That’s the world. That’s the norm, Ward.”

“America’s clean.”

“America’s unusual.”

He lived on peanut butter sandwiches. “Hey, it’s good. They grow peanuts here.” His lips were always bluish. “Kool-Aid,” he explained.

The Africans told me that Rockwell was
wopusa
, which meant crazy and cruel, as well as stupid; and he was cheap, refusing to hire anyone to cook his food or tend his garden. I said that Americans did not have servants, but I knew that Africans resented whites who lived alone and separate, and who didn’t offer them work. I didn’t like ratting on Rockwell, but I could see that living by himself, so far from Africans, he was becoming even stranger. What did he know about Africans?

I asked him this question.

He said, “I’ll tell you. You very seldom see a bald one.”

He had a way of nodding that was almost as alarming as the things he said.

“I’ve been thinking about bald people a lot recently. Ever notice how bald men often have cuts and scabs and wounds on their heads? You always see a Band-Aid up there. Now why is that?”

I said, “I’m not sure, Ward.”

“I am just so grateful to you for handing over your
chimbuzi
to me.
Chimbuzi
, huh? Learning the language, huh?”

“It’s coming right along, Ward.”

“But I get scared,” he said. “When I finish it I’ll have nothing else to do.”

That fear made him go slowly. The
chimbuzi
was much bigger than I had envisaged—great beehive stacks of bricks were accumulating and from what he had so far built I could see that he had made an elaborate design.

“Look familiar?” he asked me one day.

I said, “In a way.”

“I based it on The Alamo. See the way the wings shoot out?”

What kept me from reporting him to Ed Wently was the fact that he got on so well with Miss Natwick. When he had reached the end of his tether, she would tell me. They sat together in the staff room every recess, drinking tea and eating dry cookies. After Deputy Mambo and Mr. Nyirongo left
the
room, Miss Natwick said, “You can’t teach these people anything.”

“That’s just what I was going to say.”

“I’ll shepherd those lambs who’ve cast their idols well away,” Miss Natwick said, seeming to quote a hymn. After a moment, her face hardened and she added, “And if they haven’t, bugger them.”

Miss Natwick would then offer Rockwell a Kitkat or a chocolate finger from her handbag and they would be there until Deputy Mambo returned for another cup of tea.

Sometimes the school seemed hopeless—not simply the shambles Miss Natwick said it was, but chaos. It was always on the verge of flying apart. But it held. I thought: This is Africa. This is the world. It is not chaos but only disorder. Dirt is the norm. Bad water is the norm. Filthy toilets are typical. Stinks are natural, and all dogs are wild. If you walk barefoot hookworms bore into the balls of your feet. Stretch out your arm and mosquitoes inject sleeping sickness into it. Sit still for a moment and fleas leap onto your body. Embrace your lover and you get lice. Because this is the world. America is very unusual.