Read Online Sir Vidia's Shadow by Paul Theroux - Free Book Online Page B

heat, envious songs, and desperate children: so far, not much consolation on this safari.
    A sign reading
Very Big Lion
was nailed to a tree near Mityana, where I stopped on my way back to Kampala. Another sign said
Good News—To See A Very Big Lion—It eats 50 lbs of Meat Daily
. A coastal Swahili man with gray eyes in a grubby skullcap asked me for a shilling and then showed me the lion.
    â€œ
Simba! Simba!
”
    Covered with flies, the lion lay in a pen made of corrugated iron, thrown up in a clearing near the road. The man in the skullcap made the beast growl by poking it with the skinned and bloody leg of a dead animal, a gazelle’s perhaps. The lion thrashed but could not seize the meat in its yellow stumps of teeth. I looked into the lion’s eyes and saw the sort of lonely torment that I felt.
    â€œ
Bwana. Mumpa cigara
.”
    Within a week the lion had escaped and killed six villagers and was finally shot by the Mityana district game warden. All that violence for the lion’s being in a pen. I saw a link between that hunger and the animal’s captivity—that appetite, that denial. I tried to write a story about it, but there was no story, only the incident.
    â€œSomeday you will use it,” Vidia said, though he said he disliked animal stories. He told me that when he was my age, working on his first book, a man had told him to read Hemingway’s story “Hills Like White Elephants.”
    I said, “For anyone who lives in Africa—for me, at any rate—Hemingway is unreadable.”
    â€œNevertheless, I read the story immediately it was recommended to me.”
    Vidia was still helping me with my essay on cowardice, frowning over it, the tenth version. He said that it was improving but that it would be better if I cut it by half. I nodded but doubted that I would.
    He said, “I know when I make comments on it you listen and get very tired.”
    That was exactly how I felt.
    â€œIt’s normal. But this is an important statement—how you feel about Vietnam, how you feel about your life. You must get it right.”
    The problem was language, he said. He was passionate on the subject of misapplied words and meaningless mystification. I had lived too long in a place where the wrong words were used. Africans called Kampala a city. But it was not a city. “‘University’ is a misleading word for this crummy place, and is this a government?” The teaching was not teaching, these were not real academics, the daily newspaper, the
Uganda Argus
, contained no news. “This is all fraudulent!” The writing by credulous well-wishers about African literature had corrupted the language. He emphasized that I must pay close attention to the words I used and evaluate how they worked. Putting his fastidious finger on the page, Vidia made me justify each word in the essay. “Why ‘fat’?” “Why ‘hapless’?” “Don’t use words for effect,” he said. “Tell the truth.”
    â€œI have said before that writing is like sleight of hand. You simply mention a chair and it’s shadowy. You say it’s stained with wedding saffron and suddenly the chair is there, visible.”
    This was spoken at his house, which smelled of fresh cement and red floor wax and new paint; the sun streaming through the windows that had no curtains; the house he hated, within earshot of the noise from the brick-and-thatch servants’ quarters.
    â€œAnd that is not music. Listen to the bitches!”
    Sometimes students brought him their work. He did not encourage them, but he allowed them. He saw the occasional lecturer. Sometimes he was asked a question about literature or the world.
    I was present when he told a man with a serious inquiry, “I can’t answer that. I would need written notice of that question.”
    After the man left, Vidia said, “That’s what he wanted to hear, you know. He