It was not hard to lead two lives and to keep them separate when they were both so satisfying. One was sex, the other work.
There were no more mentions at school of the Msemba incident, but the silence was so deliberate it was like an accusation. They had had a hint from Msemba of my secret life and I imagined they were reminded of it every time they saw his twenty stacked bricks. And were probably reminded of my failure, too. We would never get the new chimbuzi at this rate.
I endured a week of silence, feeling defensive but fairly happy; and then had a visit from the Peace Corps. My conscience was usually clear but authority made me feel guilty. I was in my office adding up the attendance register and heard a vehicle on my road — the tickey road. That was a rare enough sight, but it was more unusual even than that — the Peace Corps jeep, with Ed Wently at the wheel. I heard chairs being scraped and teachers calling their classes to order. Kids were springing from their desks and standing up to see who the visitors were. It was their road, too.
Someone else was with Wently on the front seat. I guessed it was an agency man or a poverty tourist — why else would anyone come here? — but when the jeep drew up to my office I saw that it was a fellow about my age, with the look of a volunteer. It was the ready-for-anything look: willing but a little wary.
“Got a new recruit for you, Parent.”
His name was Rockwell, he was nervous, and I knew at once it would be a mistake to call him Rocky. He was round-shouldered and a little pale and sly-looking. He did not smile. But like a lot of humorless and unsmiling people he had a startling laugh. It was sudden and terrible, not really a laugh at all.
“We don’t actually need a new teacher, Ed.”
“You can find room for him. What do you say?”
That was the Peace Corps attitude — make room, double up, hustle, look good, compromise, and keep smiling: very old-fashioned. Be full of pep! The Peace Corps showed up without notice and you were supposed to jump; and then you wouldn’t see them for months. They were in Washington, being congratulated on their good work. Or they were at embassy parties in Blantyre.
Ed Wently disliked me. He was a jock, a member of the Blantyre Club rugby team. The club did not have any African members.
“They don’t play rugby,” Wently had said.
I wanted to make an issue of it and force him to resign from the club, but I could not get any volunteers to agree with me. My feeling was partly political and partly a desire to be a nuisance. And then I stopped caring. I lived my own life. I believed that I was on my own, in my wrinkled suit and squashed hat; in my house, with my cook, and my pigeon loft, the only mzungu for miles around.
That was why I was so dismayed when Wently told me to make room for Rockwell.
“We don’t have a spare house.”
“You’ve got three bedrooms, Andy!”
I thought: Shit. And there was something in Rockwell’s expression that told me he was none too keen on living with me. He had hardly said a word. He had only laughed and that had alarmed me.
“You’ve got a Peace Corps house,” Wently said. “You have to be flexible.”
That was always the possibility in bush posts — that once you got used to them the circumstances changed, and you had to adjust again. And because we never had advance warning, every visit was a surprise.
I liked the country, I enjoyed being headmaster, I loved the African girls. But the thought of being in the Peace Corps discouraged me. I hated this jock, Wently, bringing up the Peace Corps — they offered no support, they only imposed on me, and they took all the credit.
“What can you teach?”
Rockwell said, “I was doing a little chemistry and math at my last place.”
“Where was that?”
“Sierra Leone. I asked for a transfer.”
Probably bush fever: a crazy — a freak.
I said, “We’re trying to build a chimbuzi. You can get going on that. And you can help Mr. Nyirongo with Form Three math.”
“What’s a chimbuzi?”
“You’ll have to start learning the language,” I said. “It’s a shithouse.”
Rockwell then pronounced a strange sentence.
“I’ve always been very excited about sanitary facilities.”
We stared at him.
“That’s what I couldn’t stand about Sierra Leone.”
I could not think of anything to say.
“The restrooms,” he said.
“The restrooms?”
Even Wently was baffled.
Rockwell said, “Yeah. People went to the bathroom in the street.”
I reminded myself to write that down.
“No one does that in Nyasaland,” Wently said, and put his arm around Rockwell’s shoulder, the way jocks hug each other. “You’re going to love it here, Ward.”
So his name was Ward Rockwell. But from that moment I thought of him as Weird Rockwell.
“Bodily hygiene is so important,” Rockwell was saying as he went down the road.
It was a bad start. And things did not improve. He did not speak the language. That was crucial. Without noticing it I had been using it constantly. I gave him my grammar book and taught him the greetings, but he showed no aptitude.
I asked him whether he spoke any foreign languages.
“A little Tex-Mex,” he said.
“Is that like pig Latin?”
“Are you serious?” he said.
He pronounced it sirius, like the constellation. That was the California in him. He had been raised in Houston but after UCLA he had stayed in Los Angeles. He said contimpree peeners when I mentioned (to irritate him) that I liked the look of rotting flesh in the work of Ivan Albright. His birth sign was Jiminie.
It was bad enough that he spoke no Chinyanja. It did not help that his English was peculiar. Innerteenmint, he said and hoorible.
“Hey, that cook. When I tell him to inner, I want him to inner.”
It took me awhile to work that one out.
“The cook’s name is Captain. He doesn’t speak English.”
“Everyone spoke English in Sierra Leone, even the servants.”
I thought of three rejoinders to this. But we were in the bush. An ill-judged remark could cause weeks of miffed silence. I decided not to risk it just then.
“But my cook in Kenema was minilly deficient,” he said, and made his first and only joke in the year I knew him. “Kenema was an enema.”
He had the California way of saying hamburgers, heavy on the ham and swallowing the burgers.
He was pudgy and lumpish and he had the heavy person’s curse: terrible feet. They were visibly twisted and made him totter. “I’ve got wicked arches,” he explained. “I have to wear cookies in my shoes.” He made the word sound like shees.
The word hygiene made him show his teeth, and he said it constantly. It occurred to me that all his talk about cleanliness was just a way of talking about filth; and his bowels were his favorite subject. He was preoccupied rather than obsessed, and not disgusting enough to be truly interesting. But his cast of mind made him an untiring latrine-builder.
Only a few days after he arrived there was progress. He staked out the footings and started digging the runoffs, and near the clay pit was a rising stack of new bricks. I showed him my design for the chimbuzi but he said it was not ambitious enough. He took me around the site and showed me how he was going to enlarge it. I helped him measure the new dimensions. He talked about his bowels as he worked on the latrine, like a gourmet cook rejoicing in his hearty appetite.