My Other Life

  "I didn't hear your poem," he said, tottering like a bear with his cheeks blown out and facing the man who had just recited the poem, "because I had a mouthful of crackers and I like to hear them crunching loud in my ears as I chew."

  They were Uneeda Biscuits, he said. Weed Wacker, Beard Buster, Froot Loops, Panty Shields, Odor Eaters, Sno-Pake, and Duck Tape were other names he liked saying.

  The Duck Tape he used for mending his glasses, and there was so much it made them lopsided. He squirted oil on his shoes, and boasted about how cheap it was, until his shoes caught fire when someone accidentally threw a match. He bought two-gallon jars of mayonnaise that were labeled "For Restaurants and Institutions." One Christmas he gave my forty-three-year-old aunt a baby doll with a crack through its wooden head and told her it was very valuable.

  That same year he gave me a pair of nutcrackers. They were rusty, but Uncle Hal said, "Made in Germany. The finest nutcrackers are made in Germany."

  For three years Uncle Hal had worn nothing but black clothes and—someone said—a cape. I never saw the cape. He was expert at table tennis, pool, basketball, and chess. He claimed to know the obscure rules of various card games. He was unbeatable at checkers and tic-tac-toe. He said he had once eaten kangaroo meat, smoke-dried, on the Gulf of Carpentaria, in Australia. You would have to marvel at this, because if you doubted it, he would go silent and vanish again.

  He could not swim, and once, out quahogging, he stepped in a mudhole and almost drowned. "Quicksand!" he said afterwards. He was afraid of spiders and loud noises—thunder in particular—and said he was disgusted by the sight of other people's feet. He hated high winds, and after a whole summer of wind he climbed on his roof and fired his shotgun into the gusts. Ice cream, he said, was his weakness. He would drive fifteen miles to a place that sold frozen pudding flavor. ("Howard Hughes was addicted to banana nut," he said, "which is another difference between us.") He had a fondness also for pumpkins, lobsters, and pistachios ("It means 'grinning' in Farsi, as you know"). He often snacked on dog biscuits.

  He had a habit of leaving notes for you—stuck in the window or shoved under the door or squeezed beneath the windshield wiper. The messages said I totally disagree with you, or Do not make any attempt to communicate with me, or I will be unavailable until November. The simple message was hurtful enough, and then you realized that in order for him to get the message to you in this way, he had to sneak over to your house in the darkness, sometime between two o'clock and five o'clock that morning.

  "I'm busy! I've got a million things to do!" he would shriek just before he left us. He had no wife, he had no children, he had no job, he lived alone, he never traveled. We could not imagine what he was busy doing. Don't put Uncle Hal on the spot was a family caution.

  On one occasion Uncle Hal began to reminisce, to an Irishman, about Dublin, Ireland. He named specific streets and pubs where he had drunk pints of ale, and churches where he had prayed. He lamented that it was all gone, replaced by cheapness and fakery.

  Afterwards it gave me a pang to recall the look on that Irishman's face as he listened. But some years later I discovered that Uncle Hal had never been to Ireland, nor had he been to Australia. He said he could speak Swahili, but since no one else in the family knew how, there was no way of verifying it. "Conversational Latin" was how he described another language he knew.

  He liked telling the story of how he had had an appointment with a billionaire ("There are only thirty-six in the entire world, and I know five of them"). This was to have taken place at the Ritz-Carlton in Boston, but Uncle Hal had been turned away by the doorman for not wearing a tie—he was wearing a war-surplus sailor suit and rubbers. The billionaire had to meet him at the Shamrock Luncheonette. The business was unspecified.

  He had been bitten on the thigh by a rat, he said. "This was in the market in Antsirabe, in Madagascar. Oh, years ago."

  He owned a pair of wooden skis, a wooden tennis racket, a leather hat, a manual typewriter of cast iron, clamp-on roller skates, and a bike with no gears. He claimed he used them all the time. I never saw him use any of them.

  After he stopped visiting us, Uncle Hal was seen playing with the neighborhood children who regularly came to his house. He gave them candy, he showed them his Japanese sword, he taught them how to do the bunny hop, he played tag with them, he encouraged them to tell him about their fears and hopes. At Halloween, he put on a mask and led them around the neighborhood. He was Santa Claus at Christmas, he was the Easter bunny, and on the Fourth of July he set off fireworks in his orchard.

  While these small children boldly went upstairs and demanded candy, we older kids hung back, too afraid to approach, afraid he would angrily send us home. We stood at the margins of his yard and saw him playing—running, screeching, his gray hair twisted, his shirttails flying. "You can't catch me!"

  People saw him at the playground, the beach, the schoolyard, the swings.

  I was at college then. One weekend, returning from Boston—this was the spring I graduated—I bumped into Uncle Hal at the post office. He was sending a large parcel and being very mysterious about it, concealing the address from me. I never knew what sort of welcome I would get from him and so I gave him the most tentative greeting. He surprised me by saying how glad he was to see me. "Want to see something? Huh? Something really amazing?"

  He pushed the parcel across the counter and then he was breathless, he was flying. His shirt was inside out, he was wearing striped pants and high-top sneakers. He hurried me to his house and pulled out a drawer—one of his treasure drawers. He took out a toy rifle—an air rifle, but an old one.

  "It's a BB gun—the original. I had that very model when I was ten years old. See the Red Ryder insignia on the stock? Listen, it's in perfect working order."

  He aimed it and went pah! pah! pah! "I've been looking for one of these for years."

  There was more in the drawer. A green plastic water pistol. A pack of bubble gum wrapped in colored waxed paper and containing two baseball cards. A Sky King ring with a secret compartment. A copy of Tales from the Crypt comic book. A hat—but no ordinary hat. He put it on.

  "We used to call this a beanie," Uncle Hal said. There was a propeller on top. He spun the propeller with his finger and said in a small boy's quavering, stuttering voice, "I got an idea! Let's go down to Billy's house and play marbles. Hey, I got my bag of aggies. These are good shooters." He swung a little clinking bag out of the drawer. "This one's a real pisser. Hey, what's wrong, Paulie, don't you want to come?"

  He took me by the arm. The propeller on his beanie was still turning. Was he defying me to make a remark?

  I clutched the books I had brought home to study for the weekend, for a paper I had to write.

  "Malinowski makes the point," Uncle Hal said—but how had he seen the small printed name on the spine of the book?—"that in the Trobriand Islands the relationship between a woman's brother and her son is stronger than between the boy and his father. In other words, the uncle and nephew—because there is definite proof of a blood relationship and there is always an element of doubt about the true paternity of a child. And similarly in Beowulf you see the same affinity, and a specific Anglo-Saxon word for the relationship—the uncle and nephew usually fighting together in battle."

  As he spoke, the propeller on his beanie still spun.

  "Paulie, don't you see that I am showing you how to fight," he said, "and how to live?"

  The propeller slowed as he stared at me. I was too afraid to say anything.

  "What are your plans?"

  "I joined the Peace Corps. I'm going to Africa. Nyasaland."

  "Capital, Zomba," Uncle Hal said. Jerking his head in a nod of self-congratulation, he got the propeller going again.

  He went to a bookshelf and hunted for a moment, then found what he was looking for, a bulky biography entitled Rimbaud. He opened it and, with the propeller on his beanie still slowly turning, he read, '"I am obliged to chatter their gibberish, to eat th
eir filthy messes, to endure a thousand and one annoyances that come from their idleness, their treachery, and their stupidity. But that is not the worst. The worst is the fear of becoming doltish oneself, isolated as one is, and cut off from any intellectual companionship.'"

  Listening, but also watching the propeller on his beanie, I was too distracted to reply.

  "Am I keeping you?" he asked in a voice as dry as paper.

  He's a terrible enemy, people used to say, but he can be much worse as a friend.

  We saw less and less of him. He stopped phoning. He didn't even call us when he needed to move a ladder or jump-start his car. Instead, we heard stories about him. His name would come up and someone in the room would say softly, in a wounded voice, "I once got a letter from Hal," and would turn pale and serious, remembering. You would not want to hear any more.

  Or someone would tell how Uncle Hal had been very ill and had spent a month in the hospital. We would feel ashamed that we had not known. But then the stories would come out—how he insisted on wearing his bobble hat while being x-rayed; how he had accused a distinguished surgeon of stealing his old pocket watch; how he had run up an enormous phone bill by making repeated calls to London, England; how he had begged his nurse to marry him and then changed his mind when he discovered that she had been recently divorced. "Damaged goods" was all he said. After he was discharged from the hospital, the telephone in his room was found missing, and an armchair, and a huge bottle ("For Institutional Use") of aspirin.

  Another story began circulating—that he had been seeing a psychiatrist for some time, that he had told this man about his childhood, and how his mother, my grandmother, had never picked him up when he had cried in his crib. And that was not all. There were childhood humiliations, episodes of loneliness and rejection and total isolation, and tales of his imaginary friend Robin, who was sometimes a boy and sometimes a girl, and his nightmares and his rituals about opening jars and crossing streets.

  In this story about Uncle Hal and the psychiatrist, the analysis went on for about a year, and then after listening to so many of these sad, strange tales, the psychiatrist became depressed, canceled the remainder of the sessions, and killed himself.

  Uncle Hal vanished so completely we thought that he had died. People wondered about him, and then even the stories stopped. We moved. There was no word of him. Better not to ask, we said. We got on with our lives, feeling steadier and more certain now that he was gone.

  He was not dead. How silly of us not to have realized what he had been doing all this time.

  When Uncle Hal's novel was published it was praised for its humanity, its luminous subtlety, its sense of fun, its quiet wisdom. It was, everyone agreed, a masterpiece of sanity and elegance.

  TWO

  The Lepers of Moyo

  1

  BOARDING THE TRAIN in the African darkness just before dawn was like climbing into the body of a huge, dusty monster. I rejoiced in the strangeness of entering it, and I felt safe and happy inside, curled up half asleep on a wooden bench. After sunup it did not seem so huge. And in harsh daylight the dirty walls confined me, the bars on the windows became black and apparent, and my coach began to stink in the heat. I had a book on my lap, a new translation of Kafka's Diaries. I read only a few pages, in the way you nibble a sandwich, knowing it will have to last; and then I glanced around.

  The unpainted seats had been brought to a rich mellow shine, the wood buffed by years of ragged bottoms. The whistle blew, we started to move, and on the first bend I saw the gasping boiler of the steam engine, the locomotive drooling oil and water, looking wounded. It was just another old colonial train.

  Once we were out of town, in ten minutes or less, the huts beside the tracks were poorer—thatched roofs instead of tin, and clusters of them, the simplest villages, showing their skeletal framework of sticks through the mud and daub like the bones of their occupants, who squatted near them, watching us pass by. When I caught their eye they looked fearful and apologetic.

  The trees along the tracks were thin, the soil was poor, and this stony land became flatter and drier as the train labored north, snorting. When the sun was above those spindly branches, slanting into the gaping windows of the train, it heated the rusty bars and the battered interior, and the coach became very hot. And now I could see the peanut shells, the orange peels, the spat-out mass of bitten and chewed sugar-cane stalks on the floor. A woman in the next seat was nursing a child, but the child was seven or older and so this act of suckling seemed like incest, awkwardly sexual instead of maternal, because she was young and small and the child was large and greedy.

  Dust stirred by the locomotive and the front coaches floated through the windows with sticky smoke clouds, reeking of burned coal. The locomotive dated from the British period—the war perhaps. This thick engine smoke left a layer of soot and greasy smuts everywhere, and it soon blackened my bare arms. I sweated and smeared it. I had not thought to bring food. I had nothing to drink. And I was alone on this first day of October, known in Malawi as "the suicide month" because of the intense heat.

  This trip should have been miserable. It was magic.

  It was my first taste of freedom in Africa; it was drama, it was romance, too. I had the sense that I had successfully escaped in this big clumsy train. Although I had not published any of the poems I had written, this trip made me feel like a writer. It was something about the risk I was taking—into the unknown—but it was also the sense that I was making discoveries. The train was carrying me away from the only Africa I knew, a demoralized place of bungalows and shanty settlements, the white club, the black slums, the Indian shops, a town that was no more than one wide street. I had come to dislike Blantyre for its being ordinary. I needed something darker, stranger. I needed risk—danger, even.

  For almost a year I had been teaching at a small school just outside the town, and the more time I spent at the school the more tame it had seemed. I had grown used to it, but I had wanted more. All this time I had wanted to travel in the bush. Now was my chance.

  "Going upcountry?" my friend Mark had asked the day before I left. He was English, from Southern Rhodesia.

  "Upcountry" said it all.

  This was my vacation work. We Peace Corps teachers were told to get jobs or to do something useful during the African school holidays. I could have stayed at my school and catalogued books, or led a team of brush cutters for the new sports field. I could have invented a job, or made any excuse to stay at the school. Then one of my students mentioned that he was from Central Province, near the lake shore. He told me the name of his village and said it was on the way to the mission hospital, Moyo.

  "The leprosarium," he said.

  I had never heard this English word before and I was bewitched by it and grateful to the student who taught it to me.

  My student went on to say that at this mission the priests and nuns were mzungus, like me.

  I wrote to the Father Superior and said that I wanted to visit during the long school holiday. I could teach English, I said. Father DeVoss replied, saying that I would be welcome. For the next few weeks I thought of nothing else.

  Everything about the trip excited me. I would be traveling by steam train to a remote part of the country. I would be in the bush alone, in a leper colony. I would be leaving behind politics and order and dullness. It was what I craved, a place in Africa that was wild. Wilderness was paradise, where you could begin again.

  "Leprosarium" was a fascinating word. I was tantalized by the name of the disease, by the remoteness of the place. It was not just unusual, I felt; it verged on the bizarre. Leprosy was a primitive and dark disease, like an ancient curse. It suggested the unclean, it called to mind outcasts. There was something forbidden about it. It was an aspect of old unsubde Africa. Leper, leper, leper. I was sick of metaphors. I wanted words to have unambiguous meanings: leper, wilderness, poverty, heat.

  These were my thoughts. The tropical sky was vast and pale. I liked the heat. I w
as grubby and comfortable, buying food from old women at the stations where we stopped, and sitting in the sooty coach, peeling oranges, eating peanuts, like the rest of the passengers.

  Such a journey had been my object in coming to Africa. I was twenty-three years old. I wanted to make my living as a writer. I yearned to know the inside of the continent—its secrets. I was disappointed in my town, Blantyre. I hated its muddy main street.

  These towns in central Africa had been laid out by the British, and they had the look of garrisons. There were bars and there was a movie theater and a fish and chips shop. But I had not come to Africa to drink beer and go to the movies. There were girls who hung around the bars and they went home with anyone and never asked for money. Prostitution and political tyranny were in the future. These were years of innocence in Africa.

  I looked up from my book and out the window of the train and saw that we were penetrating the bush. I was happy.

  Besides Kafka's Diaries, in two volumes, which had recently been sent to me, I had my own writing, a folder of poems, my notebooks. I planned to work in the daytime and be a poet at night, the way I lived at my school. This was like a voyage. I had prepared for it as though I were going to sea, and that was how the bush seemed to me, like an ocean.

  I had never been in a train that moved so slowly. It made the trip especially strange, this ponderous movement. After three hours the train seemed not clumsy and old anymore but venerable and important, and the image of the bush as an ocean that had come to me earlier was part of it, the train like an old vessel plowing this ocean. It stopped often and everywhere, not always at a station or a platform but in the middle of nowhere, in the yellowy bush, the spindly tree limbs stuck against the window, and the wall of foliage so close that the locomotive's racket echoed against it. There seemed no point in these stops, fifteen or twenty of them before noon, and several times the train hesitated, rolled backwards for half a minute, lurched, and then started up again. I was not dismayed. Like the slow speed, the sudden stops and reverses made the whole business odd and agreeable.