Free My Other Life by Paul Theroux Page A

bolt and collapsed. And then Brother Piet was kneeling near my bed and murmur ing, "
Pepani, pepani
" —Sorry, sorry—and fumbling with a thermometer.
    My temperature was 103. I thought: I know something I did not know before. But I could not remember what it was.
    I lay there too weak to raise my head, yet I was glad that I had been found. It had been a long, painful night, at the edge of death. I had sensed myself slipping away, unable to call out. Now I had a chance.
    Father DeVoss visited me, his hands behind his back. He said, "It's lucky you decided to spend your holiday at a hospital."
    I had not thought of Moyo as only a hospital. It was everything—a mission, a church, a village, a leper colony. It was for castaways—lepers and syphilitics and snakebite victims—with extravagantly ugly afflictions; and they lay disfigured and hopeless. because they had been cast out of their own villages. Not a hospital, but a refuge for desperate people. They were not sick, they were cursed.
    A fever was something else, a ragged pain that droned like a buzz saw in my head and throughout my body. I was not like those other people. There was no cure for me—I knew that much. You lived with it and you suffered and in a week or so you either got better or steadily worse, and even if you got better you were never the same again, because the fever killed something inside you. That was what Africans said of fevers, and now I knew enough of fevers to believe it.
    "It could be malaria," Father DeVoss said, lightly speculating. He did not seem concerned, and he stood to one side as Brother Piet set down a tray.
    "You drink this while it is hot and then I give you
mankhwala,
" Brother Piet said. The seriousness of the occasion inspired more English words than I had so far heard him use. He offered me a cup of sweet, steaming tea. He dosed me with chloroquine, six tablets now, six more at noon, and paracetemol, to bring my temperature down.
    "Or blackwater fever. Even cholera. Or one of the fevers that doesn't have a name," Father DeVoss said. "But we'll treat you for malaria first, because we have the
mankhwala
for that."
    Drenched in sweat and gasping, I nodded and tried to smile and thanked them both in a croaky voice, glad that I had survived the night and that I had witnesses now to my fever.
    "I think Paul is feeling better already," Father DeVoss said.
    It had been an awful night. But now the attention of these kind men had raised my hopes and dulled my pain. I felt looked after, and I was reassured by Brother Piet's fussing. He carefully changed my sheets, and at once in dry sheets I felt calmer.
    Father DeVoss still smiled at me but in such a melancholy and benign way I felt he was blessing me. His forgiving eyes seemed to bestow grace. He was looking beyond my fever and my frailty to my soul, while Brother Piet was tending to my body.
    All that day Brother Piet and Simon the cook served me tea and made me gulp chloroquine tablets. When I grew feverish again in the early evening, Simon folded wet towels on my head to cool me and bring my temperature down. In the darkness of the night I still burned with fever, but I was less afraid. I prayed that I was on the mend, and when morning came—with the first light—I was more hopeful. I had made it through another night. Then it was hot tea and sour quinine and watery chicken soup that Simon made. As each day waned my temperature went up, my skin burned, my nerves ached, my eyes began to boil in their sockets. And I was afraid again that I might falter in the darkness and die.
    The drumming continued, carrying through the trees and up the slope from the leper village. I could smell the sharpness of the dust that was raised by the stamping feet of the dancers. I easily imagined them dancing, bringing their feet down as though they were killing the fat white worms they called
mphutsis.
My fever intensified with the drumbeats and the darkness, giving me a kind of