mzungu-roo
25.12.05, 04:52
nudy takie, wiec poczytajmy sobie cus
na poczatek Mzungu Paul Theroux chwali sie jak spedzil Christmas w Zambii...
heheh
www.granta.com/extracts/2090
With Christmas approaching I went via a roundabout route to Zambia and on
Christmas Eve was sitting in an almost empty and rather dirty bar outside
Lusaka, talking to the only other drinkers, a man and woman.
‘This is for you,’ I said, giving the man a bottle of beer. ‘And this is for
your wife. Happy Christmas.’
‘Happy Christmas to you,’ the man said. ‘But she is not my wife. She is my
sister. And she likes you very much.’
At closing time they invited me to their house. This involved a long taxi
ride into the bush. ‘Happy Christmas. You give him money.’ I paid. They led
me to a hut. I was shown a small room, the woman followed me in. I stepped on
a sleeping child—there was a squawk—and the woman woke him and shooed him
from his blanket into the next room. Then she sat me down, and she undressed
me, and we made love on the warm patch on the blanket where the child had
been lying.
That was pleasant. I had had a year of women in Malawi, the casual okay, the
smiles, the fooling, Jika’s bantering, Ismail’s leers. But, in the morning,
when I said I had to leave, to go to my hotel in Lusaka, the woman—Nina—
said, ‘No. It is Christmas,’ and made a fuss.
The brother—George—overhearing, came into the room and said that it was time
to go to the bar. It was hardly eight in the morning; yet we went, and drank
all day, and whenever beer was ordered, they said, ‘Mzungu’—the white man is
paying, and I paid. We were all drunk by mid-afternoon. The woman was taunted
for being with a white man. She answered back, drunkenly. The brother stopped
several angry men from hitting her. Loud, drunken fights began in the bar.
We went back to the village hut and I lay half-sick in the stinking room.
Nina undressed me and sat on me and laughed, and jeered at me.
I was dressing in the morning when she asked me where I was going. Once
again, I said I had to leave.
‘No. It is Boxing Day.’ And she summoned her brother.
‘We go,’ George said and tapped my shoulder and smiled. His smile meant: You
do what I tell you to do. We spent Boxing Day as we had done Christmas: the
bar, beer, fights, abuse, and finally that dizzy nauseating feeling of mid-
afternoon drunkenness. Another night, Nina’s laughter in her orgasm and in
the morning the reminder that I was trapped. ‘You stay!’
In her refusal to let me go was not just nastiness but a hint of threat. And
her brother backed her up, sometimes accusing me of not respecting them. ‘You
don’t like us!’
When I protested that of course I did, they smiled and we ate boiled eggs or
cold peeled cassava roots or a whitish porridge, and then off we went to the
bar, to get drunk again in the filthy place. And as she grew drunker she
pawed me and promised me sex—now an almost frightening thought. Another day
passed and I realized I did not know these people at all. The food was
disgusting. The hut was horrible. The village was unfriendly, the bar was
outright hostile. The beer drinking was making me ill. I was the only mzungu
in the place—as far as I knew, the only one for miles around. The language
that I knew—Chichewa—was not their language, though they spoke it. Their own
language—Bemba, I think—was incomprehensible to me, and I knew they were
plotting against me when they spoke it—quickly, muttering, so that I wouldn’t
know what they were saying. I belonged to them, like a valuable animal they
had poached. Whenever they wanted money for beer, for snacks, for presents,
for whatever reason, they demanded it from me. When I handed it over they
were excessively friendly, the woman kissing me, licking my face, pretending
to be submissive; her brother and the hangers-on praising me, praising
America, saying Britain was bloody shit and asking me to let them wear my
sunglasses.
That first night I had been wearing a light-coloured suit. The suit was now
rumpled and stained; my shirt was a sweaty mess. They were the only clothes I
had.
They said what a great friend I was, but I knew better: I was a captive. They
were out of money. My weakness and arrogance had sent me straying into their
world from my own world. And I represented something to them—money,
certainly; prestige, perhaps; style, maybe. After the first night we never
had a sober conversation. I was a colour, a white man, a mzungu. I had been
captured and they wanted to keep me: I was useful. When they said, as they
often did, ‘You no go!’ I was afraid, because they spoke with such irrational
loudness and threat. The boldness in Nina that had attracted me I now feared
as wildness. Drinking deafened her and made her a bully as cruel as her
brother. George peered at me with odd brown-spotted eyes, as though at an
enemy. Sometimes at night I was wakened by the human stinks in the hut.
I think it was the fourth day. My terror was so great and the days so similar
I lost track of time. We went to the bar in the morning and at noon they were
still drinking—I had lost my taste for it, as I had lost my libido; I just
stood there and paid with my diminishing wad of kwacha notes. I said, ‘I’m
going to the chimbudzi.’
‘Go with him,’ Nina said to one of the tough boys hovering near. I protested.
‘He will not come back,’ she said, and I realized how shrewd she was. She had
read my mind, another suggestion of her malevolence. I took off my suit
jacket and folded it on the bar.
‘Here’s my jacket, here’s some money. Buy me a beer, get some for yourselves,
and hand over the jacket when I get back.’ The chimbudzi was outside the bar,
a roofless shed behind the tin-roofed building, upright bamboos and poles.
Maggots squirmed in the shallow bog hole. I stood there and was too disgusted
even to unzip, and then I stepped outside, looked around, and seeing no one,
I ran—at first cautiously, then really hard until I got to the road and
flagged down a car. Of course the man stopped. He was African, I was white,
it was Christmas, he needed money for petrol. He took me to my hotel: I had
not slept even one night there. I asked him to wait, I paid my bill and got
in again and when the driver said where, I said, ‘Just keep going.’ He drove
me twenty miles outside town and dropped me at a roadhouse, where I spent a
sleepless night.
What a fool I had been to trespass. The time I spent had not helped me to
understand them. Apart from my initial sexual desire, my curiosity, my
recklessness, there was no common ground, other than mutual exploitation. I
was reminded of who I really was, a presumptuous American. In spite of my
politics and my teaching in the bush school, I was little more than a
tourist, taking advantage. To me they were desperate Africans, seizing their
chance to possess me. It was Tarzan turned inside out, and redefining itself.
I saw nothing more. I had simply feared them and I wanted to get out of
there. Later the incident kept resonating, telling me who I was. Much more
dangerous things happened to me in Africa—serious fights, deportations,
gunplay—was there anything more upsetting than being held at gunpoint? But
this was my first true experience of captivity and difference, memorable for
being horribly satirical. It had shocked me and made me feel American.
