“I’ve never felt that, actually.”
“It’s so dreadful,” he said. He was still talking and watching the road ahead but probably seeing the red-light district of Amsterdam or a whore’s tiny room with its meretricious decor, the clock and the calendar and the horrible little dog.
“I’ve never been to Amsterdam.”
“You’re a man and you’re sick with it,” Vidia was saying.
“I hate it when they say ‘Hurry up.’ But that’s not an African thing.”
“Or ‘Are you done yet?’”
“That’s more your clock-watching Western hooker.”
Vidia laughed and said, “Graham Greene goes to prostitutes all the time. He’s absolutely addicted, so I’m told. Greene will be walking down a street at night. He will see one, catch her eye, then move on. Ten minutes later, still thinking about her, he will go back. You see, he becomes obsessed.”
“That has happened to me — a lot.”
Vidia had made it sound like a distraction, but it was deeper than that. When my work was done and I was alone, I looked for a woman and always hoped to find one who was looking for me.
“You’re young. And I’ve seen your poems, Paul. All that libido!”
“Lord Rochester, that’s me,” I said. “But I sometimes get jealous if I see a bar girl I know with another man. Odd, isn’t it?”
“Paul, Paul,” he said in an uncle-like way.
We jogged along the dusty road past thorn trees.
“I’d like to find a woman to marry,” I said.
“I met Patsy at Oxford. We got married in 1954. The ceremony was a small affair. She has always worked. That’s good, you know. And it’s rather grand being the history mistress at an English girls’ school. She earns a few pence.”
“It would be great to be married to a woman with money.”
“I don’t know,” Vidia said. “But I was at university with a chap who was studying Malory. He had no money. His fiancée was very well off, though — had a sort of stipend. I used to say, ‘It will work beautifully. You have your Malory and she has her salary.’”
Smiling beneath his sunglasses, he said he loved the expression “lots of money.” Someone saying “I have lots of money” tickled him. As we drove along he tried out the words, saying them in different ways: “Lots of money… Lots of money…”
The road was dustier now, and in this rural district where passing cars were rare, Africans walked in the middle of the road, always barefoot, sometimes with their cattle. The women carried heavy-looking burdens on their heads, baskets of fruit or stacks of firewood.
We were traveling along the dry savannah to Mbarara and could see gazelles and antelopes and African buffalo and herd boys tending goats. I refueled at a new Agip station in Mbarara. We bought some fruit and ate it. Vidia would not eat anything he could not peel — a healthy rule in Africa. There would be no more fuel or food until Kabale, several hours down a winding road that climbed through the hills. The road slowed our progress, but there was hardly any traffic except the enormous trailer trucks that came at us down the center of the road from Rwanda and the Congo.
Vidia was alert the whole time, and talkative. At one point, speaking of discipline, he quoted a calypso song with approval.
“I thought you hated music,” I said.
“I do. But the calypso is something else.”
“Harry Belafonte.”
“A complete fraud.”
I sang, “Ma-til-da, she take me money—”
“No, no.”
Vidia cleared his throat with the sudden scouring and hoicking of an asthmatic cleaning his pipes, and after a moment a reedy sound vibrated in his throat — his voice, of course, but the words were fragile, rustling scraps of dusty tissue paper being slowly torn. I recognized at once the rattly sound of a wind-up phonograph, the needle on a revolving black disk, a quavering dirgelike song coming out of a huge scallop-edged horn: “It was loooove, love alone, cause King Edward to leave his throne.”
“That sounds like an old record,” I said.
“I heard it on an old record.”
It was also the title of a story in Miguel Street, a book in which ten calypsos were quoted. So what was all this business about hating music? I didn’t ask.
He had perfectly imitated the sound, as when my parrot, Hamid, mimicked the agony of the hinges of my door squeaking. I thought, Now I’ve heard everything.
On the subject of the calypso singers of Trinidad he was both knowledgeable and enthusiastic. The culture they sang about was tough, breezy, unsentimental. Vidia had written, in The Middle Passage, “It is only in the calypso that the Trinidadian touches reality. The calypso is a purely local form.” It was important and peculiar, dealing with local life in the local language. Tell your sister to come down, boy. I have something here for she. That was Mighty Sparrow, whom Vidia called Sparrow. Lord Invader, another calypso singer, he called, familiarly, Invader.
One of Lord Invader’s songs was “That Old-Time Cat-o-Nine,” which Vidia sang in his scratchy needle-on-record voice:
The only thing to stop these hooligans from causing panic in the island;
Well, I go by the government,
Say they need another kind of punishment,
I say one thing to cool on this crime
Is bring back that old-time cat-o-nine—
He took a breath and, in the same tone-deaf voice that oddly affected me, sang the chorus:
That old-time cat-o-nine
Bring it back!
That old-time cat-o-nine
Hit them harder!
Send them to Carrera where it licks like fire
And they bound to surrender!
“Words to live by,” I said.
“Where are we?”
We had left the Kingdom of Ankole, ruled by the now emasculated and chastened Omugabe, and filled with wild game — antelopes (specifically, the Uganda kob) and elephants and zebras. We were approaching the Kigezi district, in the southwest corner of the country, where Uganda, Rwanda, and the Congo met. But the borders were obscure because they lay at a high altitude, among the volcanic Virunga Mountains, which were forested and thick with browsing gorilla families. The people here were called the Bachiga, who were sneered at for their diminutive size and their unusual customs. In addition to the urine ceremony, there was something called the fire dance, which encouraged sexual precocity in young boys. And, unlike the cow-tending, beef-eating Banyankole, the Bachiga ate monkeys.
Vidia wanted to know this. He wanted to know much more. He was the most wide-awake person I had ever traveled with. He needed to know the name of that river, that large tree, that flower, that mountain range, and when he saw a peak on the horizon, he had to know what it was called. It was called Mount Muhavura, 13,500 feet and beautifully shaped, like all these mountains, which were symmetrical cones, the very emblem of vulcanism, some of them still smoking.
He asked about my name. What was my reaction when people spelled it wrong?
“Everyone spells it wrong.”
“That’s an insult,” Vidia said. He said he had once received a letter from Penguin Books addressed to “V.S. Naipull.” It was from a man named Anthony Mott. Vidia replied, typing on the envelope, “To A Mutt,” and began his letter, “Dear Mr. Mutt…”