I used to imagine that I had attained a kind of maturity, and I knew I was very lucky. I thought: This is the right time, this is the right place, and I know it. It is all happening now. I was headmaster; I had a little responsibility, and a little power. And there was something about teaching English and hearing it spoken back to me that was very satisfying. Everything seemed to be working perfectly.
My weeks were full. After the busy weekend I went seriously about my duties at the school. I woke early and cycled up to Chamba through the dripping steepness of pines that had been planted by Her Majesty’s Forestry Commission. I conducted morning assembly and taught my classes and answered memos. If someone forgot to do something, I did it. The chimbuzi was rising. If I asked anyone to do anything the answer was yes. They always said yes. The students said yes. The people at Kanjedza said yes. The African girls said “okay” and that meant everything.
One Tuesday at the end of May I was teaching my English class and felt a tickling at the end of my penis. The lesson was gerunds and participles. I sat down behind my desk, still talking, and covertly touched myself. Was my underwear too tight?
“And gerunds include words like touching, tickling and rubbing. But the word order is very important. It’s a verbal noun. Take ‘itching.’ ‘The itching was driving him crazy.’ What’s the subject of that sentence? Miss Malinki?”
I stood up, wrote the sentence on the blackboard, and was stung again. But when I sat behind my desk to touch it I only made it worse. But touching also gave me little moments of relief.
“ ‘Squeezing’ is a gerund, too. Not ‘They were squeezing the banana’—that’s a verb. But ‘Squeezing is something that often produces pain.’ ”
And I squeezed. It was agony. My penis was limp and overheated, and pinching it made it raw.
“Excuse me.”
I hurried to the chim. It had walls but no roof yet, though it really had begun to look like The Alamo. And because all the pipes were in it was usable. Rockwell was nowhere in sight, and I assumed he was taking his math class.
I swayed and pissed razor blades, but the pain didn’t go. There was ground glass still streaming out of my bladder. Pinching my penis brought tears to my eyes and yet I felt it would relieve the itch.
“Anything wrong, Andy?”
That startled me. Rockwell was above me, laying brick, his head and shoulders above the end wall.
“Of course not,” I said. Had he seen the flame colored rosette at the tip of my dick?
“I think this is coming along real good, if I do say so myself.”
He disappeared, and I heard his boots on the rungs of the ladder. I tried to leave, but he met me at the door and began gesturing with his trowel.
“Notice how I staggered the joists and reinforced the supports? That’s for added strength. And what do you think about the returns on those corners?”
He wanted to talk. He propped himself against the door, blocking my way, and drew my attention to the hardwood beams.
“They look great,” I said. My penis was on fire.
“I figured a traditional design was best. Something you could adapt. You’re probably wondering why I didn’t make it look like an African hut, with mock-mud walls and a thatched roof.”
I had been wondering — and what was the point of making a traditional American design, the primitive Spanish look of Fort Alamo? But I wanted to scratch myself.
“I’m not wondering, Ward. Excuse me.”
He didn’t hear. Bores are always deaf.
“See, the point is they never had sanitary facilities before. Chimbuzi, as I understand it, just means latrine — well, we’re just talking about a trench.”
“It’s beautiful.”
“I’m not asking you how it looks,” he said, somewhat offended. “I’m also talking about strength and durability.”
“It’s the best chimbuzi in Nyasaland.”
“Don’t put me on.”
I wanted to claw the itch out of my penis.
I said, “Ward, it’s a shithouse. It’s a great shithouse, but it’s still a shithouse. Don’t get carried away. Did you join the Peace Corps to build shithouses?”
He set his face at me. I frowned at him. I was perspiring; my penis throbbed.
“You’re a very moody guy,” he said.
“I have to get back to my class!”
But he was deaf.
“Hey, if I can say after two years in Africa that I managed to accomplish one thing — and even if that one thing is a sanitary facility, I’ll be very proud. Now you’re probably saying to yourself, ‘Hey—’ ”
I was saying to myself: I once thought that. It was as though in his wordy way he was satirizing me. And God I was in pain.
“Later!” I said, and ran into my office. I slammed the door and massaged my penis, trying to ease it. But the tickle, which had become an itch, was now a fiery agony.
The pain was inside. It was enclosed, it was not visible, it was within me. It did not occupy a large space. It did not need to. It hurt like a sliver of blue flame. And as the hours passed it was like something molten, a hot pellet was forming in a vein of fire, and when I tried to soothe it I succeeded only in enlarging it and extruding it through the length of my penis. The pain was intense. I could not think of anything else.
I went back to my classroom and told them to start an essay, using as many gerunds as possible; and then I sat in my office and suffered.
The other effect, just as bad, was that it deadened my penis. And it was worse than dead — it was desecrated, mocked and humiliated. It was useless — impossible to erect, forever limp, and unimaginably painful to piss with. It could not function, and I hated myself for the euphonious phrase that it was neither a hose nor a horn. When the throbbing pain subsided it felt like a hot noodle. I imagined that it had turned black. I expected it to drop off. I tried to keep myself from clawing it, and yet — sitting there in my office — it felt as insignificant as a piece of string.
I was reminded of how important I regarded it. It was essential to me. Now it was inflamed and unusable, and I knew that something had gone seriously wrong. I was depressed. I canceled my afternoon class so that I could sit in my office and worry.
I wanted to peek at it, I kept having urges to look. Rockwell was still bricking in the latrine, so I went behind the filing cabinets and unzipped and took the sore thing in my hands. It was soft and swollen and looked mangled, like a half-cooked sausage.
“Mr. Parent?”
Miss Natwick had toppled in, flourishing a copybook.
“I think we have a plagiarist in the Fifth Form.”
“Just checking the paintwork here,” I said.
My surprise made me pretend to be very serious, and she immediately became suspicious.
“The paintwork?” she said in an incredulous way.
She stepped beside me as I finished stuffing the sore thing into my fly. I hitched up my trousers. I hated my penis. To divert Miss Natwick I knelt and began looking at the wall with regretful scrutiny.
“There’s nothing wrong with the paintwork,” she said, in a way that suggested that there was something wrong with me.
“It’s raw, it’s been scorched, it’s all coming apart. If you scratch it the whole thing will collapse. I just noticed it this morning. It’s like an infection—”
What was I talking about?
I think Miss Natwick knew. She narrowed her eyes at me and made pitying lips. She seemed disgusted when she left.