“Good God,” Vidia said. “But you see? I told you. It is going back to bush.”
We were stopped at a succession of military roadblocks and asked where we were going. At one of them the soldiers took an interest in Vidia’s bush hat and sunglasses, but Vidia scowled back. One soldier said, “Nice goggles,” and I thought he would demand them, but he just smiled in admiration.
Soldiers made Vidia nervous. These men had a fearsome reputation for incompetence and bad temper. They had recently been engaged in a messy full-scale siege and many of them had been involved in killing. I told Vidia how, during the Emergency, a Ugandan soldier had stopped an Indian friend of mine. The soldier’s friends had called “Hurry up!” to him from their Land Rover.
“What should I do with this muhindi?”
“Kill him and let’s go,” one of the soldiers yelled.
“Please don’t kill me,” my Indian friend said.
“Hurry up! Kill him and let’s go!”
The soldier waved his rifle back and forth and was so flustered by the nagging of his comrades and the pleading of the Indian that he left the man standing, gibbering in fear, beside his car. There wasn’t enough time to kill him. Many of the murders had happened in that casually violent way. Kill him and let’s go!
“That scares the hell out of me, man,” Vidia said.
But soon there were no more roadblocks and we were on the open road, in sunshine, heading southwest in a swampy area near a stream called the Katonga, which drained into Lake Victoria a few miles south. The Katonga was famous for the density of its reeds— masses of papyrus, a lovely pale green plant with a feathery crown on its stalk that always reminded me of Uganda’s connection to the Nile. Papyrus was Egyptian in its beauty; its image had been carved into ancient tombs along with hieroglyphics; it had been prized for its many uses — not just to make paper and cloth, but its pith was eaten and its root used for fuel. Yet in Uganda it was just another plant that choked the waterways and was good for nothing.
“Do you find those African girls frightfully beautiful?” Vidia asked. “The ones at that bar?”
“Some of them, yes. Very beautiful. A few remind me of Yomo.”
“What do you hear from her?”
“She had an abortion and is planning to go back to college.” I had recently had a sorrowful note from her and a letter from her brother. “The father of the child wouldn’t marry her.”
“Oh, God.”
I could not say anything more. I missed her badly and my life had been empty since she left. We traveled ten miles before I spoke again.
“Do you find them beautiful?”
He thought awhile, “No,” he said. Then “No” again. And “No” after another pause. “But Derek Walcott is married to a woman of mixed race who is very beautiful.” He considered this. “I could just imagine myself with her. Do you know Walcott’s poetry?” He recited:
This island is heaven — away from the dustblown blood of cities;
See the curve of bay, watch the straggling flower, pretty is
The wing’d sound of trees, the sparse-powdered sky, when lit is
The night. For beauty has surrounded
Its black children, and freed them from homeless ditties.
“That word ‘ditties’ sounds precious, but it is right somehow,” he said. And then he made his disgusted face and said, “The narrator of my novel goes to prostitutes.”
He had a way of letting his narrator stand for him, and so I knew what he was driving at and we discussed the narrator.
“Frequents prostitutes,” he said, trying out the literary phrase. His expression was still sour. “Afterwards, you hate yourself for being a man.”
That shocked me. Making love to a woman did not have that effect on me at all. Afterwards I was calm, happy, tired, at rest, the opposite of disgusted. I felt rewarded and fulfilled. Sex was magic, mind-expanding, enacted in energetic postures that I recalled later, seeing myself kneeling, standing, knotted, on all fours. It was knowledge, too — not blind lust, though wild monkey-lust was part of it, helping to illuminate the act, which was for me a source of serenity.
I enjoyed every aspect of it, from its first intimation, which was the woman’s returned glance, to the quiver of anticipation, sensing my scalp tighten at the prospect, the warmth on my skin and my fingers becoming tremulous, the sense of blood beginning to pound behind my eyes and my breath coming in gasps, my chest tightening, my mouth dry, as though I were on a narrow path, working my way slowly into a jungle, following a bird with brilliant plumage and a flicking tail.
To touch a woman who wanted to be touched was for me the height of pleasure; to kiss her and be kissed with the same desire, to feel the great excitement of being touched by her, the pressure in every fingertip a wordless promise. I changed by degrees from a reflective smiling soul sifting through my dreams to an engine of desire, and my whole body burned. However casual the act may have seemed — for I had a tendency to mask my desire when I mentioned it — it was passionate and serious. It was the slap of bodies, the crack of bone on bone, and it left me breathless. There were groans of pleasure, but it was a profound raking of the nerves and a wrenching of muscles: no laughter, no jokes. In this descent into the deepest part of my body, I felt an inarticulate animal fury, like a worker bee in pursuit of the queen, frantic to mate. It exhausted me and helped me understand the single-mindedness of desire, the urgent monomania of the libido.
I said this in a simple form to Vidia, not wishing to reveal too much: that I loved being with a woman; that I was alone the rest of the time because there was no one in my life; that I hoped to meet someone and fall in love.
“But prostitutes can be so depressing,” he said.
“Maybe in Europe, but not here. This is Masaka, by the way.”
Mid-morning in Masaka, which was a stretch of Indian shops on either side of the road: fruit vendors and hawkers crouched near verandahs, the open-air businesses of bicycle mending and cobbling shoes, the bright clothing of the rural African women. Vidia fingered his camera but took no pictures.
“In Britain, I suppose they hate their customers,” I said. “They’re famous for hating men, aren’t they? Here the women are eager, they’re hungry. They take pleasure in it. Half of them are looking for husbands. They’re not prostitutes in the classic sense. A lot of times they don’t mention money. They just want to go dancing afterwards.”
“I was a big prostitute man at one time,” Vidia said. “I was with a prostitute in London one day. It was in the afternoon. When we got to her room she said, ‘I saw you on the telly last night.’ It was one of those panel games.” He laughed at the incongruity of it, then murmured the woman’s words again.
“Then what happened?”
“We talked about the television program!”
That I could understand. The African bar girls were full of opinions, about other tribes, about politics, about neighboring countries, about Indians. The women were sometimes religious and always superstitious. Many had children, some had husbands, but they were on their own. I knew that Vidia saw a vast cultural difference, and of course there was, but living in Uganda there was also common ground and like-mindedness. I saw aspects of my own temperament in them.
“I have often gone to Amsterdam and made myself sick, eating and drinking,” Vidia said. “And then getting a woman, one of those Dutch prostitutes.” He made his disgusted face, frowning miserably, looking poisoned. “You hate yourself.”