My Other Life by Paul Theroux Read Free Book Online

eternity.
    Their clothes were dusty and dirty, but even so, that did not make them seem poor. On the contrary, it gave them a sense of serenity, made them seem indifferent and unworldly and spiritual.
    One night while I was making notes for my class, sitting at the dining table, where the only Tilly lamp stood, its brightness making me see double, Father DeVoss walked behind me, hesitated, picked up the English textbook,
Foundation Secondary English,
then examined it—looked it over rather than read it—and set it down. He did the same with Kafka's
Diaries,
which was also in the stack. He might have been picking up a pair of shoes, to look at the soles and the stitches. There was nothing inside these books for him. He was utterly uninterested, as though the books were mute objects without any function, like worn-out shoes—and this was, I was beginning to think, precisely what they were: dead weight.
    I felt the priests were humoring me about the English class. They were going along with it. I was not dismayed by their low expectations. That they helped me in spite of their lack of faith meant they liked me, and that pleased me. I found them congenial, even nervous Father Touchette.
    The two worst fears of an expatriate going to a new place in the African bush were that the weather might be awful and the local people unfriendly. This was a manner of speaking. "Awful weather" might mean deadly ninety-five-in-the-shade days and suffocating nights; "unfriendly" might mean murderous. It was hot here in Moyo, but bearable; and all the people I had met were friendly—the priests, the nuns, the lepers, the woman named Birdie. I was glad that I had come, and for the first time since arriving in Africa I did not want to be anywhere else.
    ***
    I had put up a sign on the dispensary wall, where medical calls and bandaging times were announced. My note, lettered in Chinyanja, said there would be an English class on Wednesday afternoon at five. It seemed to me an appropriate time. The lepers spent the morning lining up for medicine. It was too hot after lunch for a class. Life in the leprosarium resumed when the sun dipped below the treetops and the shadows lengthened. In the hottest, brightest part of the day, when the sun was overhead, life came to a stop and there was no one to be seen. People withdrew into their huts, where the dirt was damp and cool.
    Wednesday came. At breakfast Father DeVoss said, "You don't have to hold your class today. If it doesn't work out, there's always Friday, or next week."
    Time has little meaning here, he meant. But it was for my sake that I needed to make my English class seem urgent; otherwise, I would lose interest in it. I had been in Africa long enough to understand that to survive I had to impose a shape on the long day—break it into three parts—even if it was all a pretense.
    So I needed the class. I needed the certainty of the old bandaging room. The priests had their rituals, to deliver them from the days of harsh light and the nights of drumming and darkness.
    The bandaging room was a large, open-sided shed with a sloping tin roof and a large water butt at one outside corner under a rusty downspout. At one time, this water butt must have been important, perhaps a source of water for drinking or washing. But there were standpipes in the leper village now and so this big barrel, murky and haunted by breeding mosquitoes, was unused.
    Several men were waiting for me at five. I knew they were lepers from their walking sticks and their bandages. Seeing me approach, some other men got up from under a tree and came over. That made eight. Then an old woman shuffled in, guided by a young girl. It was clear that the old woman was blind. One eye looked as though it had been badly sewn shut—an illusion of the lashes—and the other distorted and as glazed and marbled as an agate. This old blind woman and the young girl were the only females in the class. The girl was in her