Sir Vidia's Shadow Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  AFRICA

  Famous in Kampala

  “I’m Not Everyone”

  The Kaptagat Arms

  On Safari in Rwanda

  THE WRITER’S WRITER

  Christmas Pudding

  Excursion to Oxford

  Air Letters: A Correspondence Course

  The 9:50 to Waterloo

  “I Must Keep Some Secrets”

  Lunch Party

  SIR VIDIA’S SHADOW

  The Householder

  My Friend’s Friend

  Death Is the Motif

  Tainted Vegetables

  “It’s Major”

  REVERSALS

  Poetry of Departures

  A Wedding Is a Happy Funeral

  Literature Is for the Wounded and the Damaged

  Exchanges

  Sir Vidia’s Shadow

  Afterword: Memory and Invention

  About the Author

  Footnotes

  First Mariner Books Edition 2000

  Afterword © 1999 by Paul Theroux

  Copyright © 1998 by Paul Theroux

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003

  www.hmhco.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  ISBN 978-0-618-00199-6 (pbk)

  Portions of this book have appeared in The New Yorker.

  The Afterword originally appeared, in different form, in The New York Times Book Review and the Observer in 1998.

  Lines by Derek Walcott are from Collected Poems 1948–1984 by Derek Walcott. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. Lines from “The Whitsun Weddings” are from Collected Poems by Philip Larkin. Copyright © 1988, 1989 by the Estate of Philip Larkin. Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd. The

  quotation from “Poetry of Departures” by Philip Larkin is reprinted from The Less Deceived by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.

  eISBN 978-0-547-52619-5

  v1.0214

  You must give me the pleasure of seeing what I look like. It would be like hearing one’s voice, seeing oneself walk down the street. You must feel free. I know, for instance, that I was once young; and that I have changed; lost and gained and sometimes strayed, as I have grown older. Show me!

  —V.S. Naipaul, in a letter to Paul Theroux,

  April 17, 1970

  That one person should wish to arouse in another memories relating to a third person is an obvious paradox. To pursue this paradox freely is the harmless intention of all biography. The fact of my having known Carriego does not, I contend—not in this particular case—modify the difficulty of the undertaking.

  —Jorge Luis Borges, Evaristo Carriego

  PART ONE

  AFRICA

  1

  Famous in Kampala

  IT IS A GOOD THING that time is a light, because so much of life is mumbling shadows and the future is just silence and darkness. But time passes, time’s torch illuminates, it finds connections, it makes sense of confusion, it reveals the truth. And you hardly know the oddness of life until you have lived a little. Then you get it. You are older, looking back. For a period you understand and can say, I see it all clearly. I remember everything.

  It can be a brief passage, for a revelation. Only a few days after Julian first met him, he realized that what he had taken to be a smile on the face of U. V. Pradesh was really a look of exquisite, almost martyrlike suffering. The man’s whole name, Urvash Vishnu Pradesh, was the slushiest Julian had ever heard, a saliva-making name like a cough drop that forced you to suck your cheeks and rinse your tongue with sudsy syllables.

  The fact that many people in Kampala had never heard of U. V. Pradesh made him more important in Julian’s eyes. He was said to be brilliant and difficult. He was smaller, more frenetic than any local Indian—the local Indians could be satirical, but they were sly. U. V. Pradesh’s face, tight with disapproval, gleamed in the Uganda heat. His hair was slick from his wearing a hat. Ugandan Indians didn’t wear hats, probably because Ugandan Africans sometimes did.

  U. V. Pradesh seldom smiled—he suffered a great deal, or at least he said he did. Life was torture, writing was hell, and he said he hated Africa. He was afraid. Much later he explained to Julian that he felt intimidated by “bush people.” He had “a fear of being swallowed by the bush, a fear of people of the bush.” New to Uganda, U. V. Pradesh looked at the place with his mouth turned down in disgust. From some things he said about African passions and his own restraint, Julian had a sense in him of smothered fires.

  Actually, U. V. Pradesh had reason to be afraid. The Kabaka of Buganda, Sir Edward Frederick Mutesa, whom Ugandans called King Freddy, was being threatened with overthrow and death by soldiers from the northern tribes. The mess came later, and was in turn buried by greater calamities that were much sadder and more violent even than U. V. Pradesh had predicted.

  “Listen to me, Julian.”

  Julian did nothing but listen, and he wanted U. V. Pradesh to call him Jules, as his family and friends did.

  “Julian, this will go back to bush,” U. V. Pradesh said, sometimes in a scolding way, sometimes as a curse. And that suffering grimace again. He walked in the slanting sun of Kampala, his shadow like a snare. “All of it, back to bush.”

  Sure of something, or pleased by the sound, he repeated the phrase, a verbal tic called bis. He was always sure, so his repetitions were frequent, a little chant and echo in his speech, still with the faintest singsong of the West Indies—U. V. Pradesh’s birthplace, the setting of many of his novels—lingering in the intonation.

  Julian started out knowing nothing, not any of this, not even what the initials U. V. stood for, and it was only long after that he understood. He was too young to look back, and knew only the terror of always having to look ahead at the looming darkness, and instead of reassurance seeing uncertainty and awful choices, or no choices, and risk, and doubt, feeling afraid.

  When Julian was young and he squinted at the big unreadable map of his life, even the magnificent light of Africa was no help. Yet he was hopeful. He felt he had what he wanted, and especially he had baraka, as they said in Swahili—good fortune, blessings. He was a teacher, but he spent most of his time writing. It did not matter to him that he was unknown in America. He was famous in Kampala.

  “Be grateful for what you have, Jules,” his father had told him before he left home. “No one owes you a thing.”

  It was wise advice for someone going to an African country. Julian felt lucky every time something good came his way, and luckiest of all his first full year in Uganda—his third in Africa. He had a good job, a reliable car, and a well-shaded house. Uganda was the greenest place he had ever seen. He was in love with an African girl. She was nineteen and he was twenty-four. He was at work on a novel. His life had at last begun.

  The African girl, Yomo Adebajo, was Julian’s own height, nearly six feet, and slender, from a tall, stately tribe in Nigeria’s Western Region. Julian had been traveling there the year before. He invited her to East Africa and, just like that, she crossed Africa to join him. In Uganda, which was a hothouse of steamy gossip and expatriate scandals, their liaison was singled out—their not being married, their living together, their aloofness from others in Kampala, and the way she dressed. West Africans, rare in Uganda, were much more exotic than whites or Indians. Ugandan women wore skirts and dresses—“frocks” was their word—and Mother Hubbards, all drapes a
nd frilly leg-of-mutton sleeves, oldfangled words for outdated fashions, designed by turn-of-the-century missionaries for the sake of modesty. Yomo stood out like a princess in a fable in her yellow and purple robes, her stiff brocade turban, and her sash that was woven with gilt thread.

  This young woman had the dark, drugged eyes and sculpted face you see in certain bewitching bronzes from her region of Nigeria. In poor provincial Uganda she was taken to be an Ethiopian or an Egyptian—“Nilotic,” people said, believing her to be a visitor from the upper Nile, someone who, from her looks, might have arrived sitting upright, cross-legged, on a flying carpet.

  Ugandans goggled at Yomo—they were smaller and had to look up—as though she were from some nation of the master race of blacks that lived beyond the Mountains of the Moon.

  She just laughed at them and said, “These people in Uganda are so primitive.”

  Yomo was even more sensual than she looked. When she and Julian made love, which was often and always by the light of candles, she howled eagerly in the ecstasy of sex like an addict injected, and her eyes rolled up in her skull and she stared, still howling, with big white eyes like a blind zombie that sees everything. Her howls and her thrashing body made the candle flames do a smoky dance. Afterwards, limp and sleepy, stupefied by sex, she draped over Julian like a snake and pleaded for a child.

  “Jules, give me a baby!”

  “Why do you want one?”

  “Because you are clever.”

  “Who says?”

  “Everyone says.”

  He was well known in Bundibugyo; people said hello to him in Gulu and West Nile; he was famous in Kampala. Part of the reason was that he wrote recklessly opinionated pieces in the local magazine Transition. He defended the Indians, he mocked the politicians, he insulted the tea planters and the sugar barons. A white planter wrote to the magazine and said he would hit this man Julian Lavalle if he saw him in the street.

  But the deeper reason for his fame in Kampala had nothing to do with his writing. It was the fact that he had been named in court, in a prominent divorce case, as the Corespondent, the delicate legal term for the outside party who fornicated in an adultery. He had been promised that nothing would be revealed, but the day after the case was heard, his name was published in the Uganda Argus. Everyone read it, and he was put down as a sneak and a rogue because the cuckold (called the Petitioner) was his best friend.

  Julian had not laid a hand on this man’s wife (called the Respondent), though the friend swore Julian had done so repeatedly, as detailed in paragraph 5—“That on or about the 23rd day of August 1965 the said Respondent committed adultery with JULIAN HENRI LAVALLE (hereinafter called Corespondent) at Kampala”—and paragraph 6: “That from the 23rd day of August 1965 the said Respondent has frequently committed adultery with the said Corespondent on dates and at addresses unknown to the Petitioner save that some were in Kampala, Uganda, as aforesaid.”

  There were more lies: “That the Petitioner has not in any way condoned the said adultery.” No, his best friend had said that if Julian wanted to make it true, and if this woman agreed, Julian could sleep with her all he wanted. And: “The Petitioner has not in any way been accessory to or connived at the said adultery.” No, he had urged it, he had set it up, he had begged Julian to connive with him. And: “That this Petition is not presented or prosecuted in collusion with the Respondent or the said Corespondent.” No, it was all collusion.

  A disturbing knock on Julian’s door one day was that of an Indian solicitor’s clerk, who handed over a prettily made-up document. It was signed and sealed. The official seal of Uganda showed a native shield with wavy and dancetté divisions between the gules tincture, full sun argent above a native drum argent, crossed spears behind the shield, with two creatures shown, the dexter supporter a gazelle rampant and the sinister supporter a crested crane rampant. The compartment ground beneath the full achievement was strewn with native flora, and below that, Uganda’s motto on a scroll: “For God and My Country.”

  The document was a Summons to Enter Appearance at the High Court of Uganda, signed by E. A. Oteng, the Acting Deputy Chief Registrar. It contained a warning. If Julian failed to enter an appearance by a specified date, the plaintiff—the Petitioner, his conniving friend—could proceed with the suit, and the judgment would be rendered in his absence.

  “I wouldn’t ask just anyone to do this,” his friend had said. “I asked you because I respect you more than anyone else I know.”

  Then the friend promised that nothing about the divorce case would appear in the newspaper. The ruse would remain a secret. So Julian agreed, and the two friends concocted the story of an adulterous relationship in order to speed the divorce. The man wanted to remarry. The woman wanted to enter an ashram in southern India. Fornication was unlawful, but Julian was much more a lawbreaker for his lies—in Uganda, connivance in such a case was a greater crime than adultery.

  “Isn’t this Mr. Lavalle a friend of yours?” the magistrate had asked.

  “Yes, my lord.”

  “Some friend!”

  The following morning, Julian’s name was published in the Argus. The tiny print in the “Court Proceedings” might as well have been a headline.

  “These shenzi Africans let you down every time!” the friend said. Shenzi meant worthless. “I was a fool to trust those idiot typesetters on that shenzi paper!”

  So Julian became notorious. This wickedness fit the image he had of the writer. Writers then were not the frequent and genial faces they are now in this age of promotion, when they are involved in the selling and distribution of their books—reading before a small, solemn throng of people you might mistake for early Christians at your corner bookshop; chatting to the bland man with fish eyes and lacquered hair on morning television; bantering on the radio or late at night with an interviewer, who is the authentic celebrity and the real reason for the vulgar and overfamiliar encounter.

  Before this age of intense peddling, which is the selling of the author rather than the book, the writer was an obscure and somewhat mythical figure, inevitably a loner, the subject of whispers—an outlaw, an enigma, an exile. Writers were the more powerful for their remoteness and their silences; the name alone was the aura. In many cases, the author had no public face and all you knew was the work. Today the face is first, the book comes last. A writer then was gnomic, priestlike, a magician, not merely writing a book but making a world and creating a new language. This was when Julian was growing up, the fifties and early sixties. A writer was a hero.

  In Kampala Julian was an upstart, known for his American brashness in this African town. He had an inkling of his impudence and considered it and thought: I am alone. I am making my own life. He had the freedom to do anything he wanted, but he had limited means. He saw himself staying in Africa, going deeper into the bush as the years passed, and finally setting up house somewhere beyond the Mountains of the Moon with Yomo, his Nigerian. He knew just the place, at a clearing near the village of Bundibugyo, in the shadow of the steep Ruwenzoris, in the damp mossy shade and vitreous greenness of the Ituri Forest, among the Mbuti Pygmies and the Bwaamba people, a small settlement on the Congo border in the heart of Africa.

  He had made many visits there and loved it for its being unknown. The Verona Fathers at the Bundi mission just chuckled at the wilderness. They had long ago given up hope of a widespread conversion, and one priest in his mid-eighties working on a dictionary complained to Julian, reader confiding to reader, that the local Africans, Mbuti and Bwaamba alike, often contradicted each other on the definition or the precise pronunciation of a word. The language was uncertain. Ndongola was Creator—no, it was Gongora—wait a minute, it was Gangara. The old priest knew he would never finish his translation of the Gospels. But it hardly mattered. The priests had been there so long they had fallen under the spell of the Bwaamba and gone bush in many of their habits. They even chattered and procrastinated like the Bwaamba and the Pygmies. At least one priest had produ
ced some of the coffee-colored children who played near the rectory and who filled Julian with the desire to see his own dark children playing on that frontier.

  “These people are so primitive,” Yomo said, with her deep Nigerian laugh and haughty heavy-lidded eyes that made her beautiful. But she said she would go with him. She imagined that she and Julian would be the only true humans there. She also said that she would go anywhere with him, and he loved her for that. This small wet valley behind the mountains, hemmed in by the vastness of the eastern Congo, was an ideal place in which to vanish. It was not on any map, and so it was for Julian to draw the map. As a writer he wanted that most of all, a world of his own, and he could make it himself, basing it on this almost blank and inaccessible place. It was not Bundibugyo, it was near Bundibugyo, and where was Bundibugyo?

  It suited Julian, trying to write, that he lived in a mostly illiterate republic. It did not matter that so few people could read. His secret was safe, the very act of writing was improbable, and he spoke to no one about it, because he had accomplished so little. He knew the worth of being famous in Kampala. Anyway, he was much better known for being a named adulterer than a published author. And Yomo, who knew the true story of the court case, found it a hilarious deception, of a Nigerian sort, and the better for there being no victim, except the law.

  Yomo slept late, her black nakedness starkly mummified in white sheets, calling out “Julian!” and demanding a kiss, and kissing him, howling into his mouth, demanding a baby. Then he left to teach. After a few classes, he walked up to the Senior Common Room in the main building and had coffee and read the papers. He had lunch at home with Yomo, and then a nap, and she plucked off his clothes and they made love: “Give me a baby!” In the late afternoon he picked up his mail, went to the Staff Club, and drank until Yomo came by to have a drink and tell him dinner was ready. The Ugandan men flirted with Yomo, but when they got too explicit she said, “Fock you,” and they faded away.