Free My Other Life by Paul Theroux Page B

night vision that was also hallucinatory, and I saw them, the dancers—many of them naked, their gleaming bodies lit by flames, their black shadows jumping in my room.
    Through burning eyes I saw the young girl Amina flinging herself into the jostling mob of dancers, working her thin arms and legs, thrilled by the drums, her face streaming with sweat, her small breasts reddened by the firelight, her eyes rolled up so that only the whites showed. And then her cloth wraparound slipped and was trampled. She was entranced and did not notice, only became more sinuous, and brighter, her body like a single flame, while her granny stared with blind eyes, hearing the drums, perhaps wondering where the girl had gone.
    In her room in the convent. Birdie also heard the drumming. She too imagined the black sweating bodies, the crackling fire, the yodeling women. The village which slumbered in the dust all day came alive at night. Nothing in daylight mattered. I tried to think about what Birdie felt when she heard it—was she aroused or disgusted? She was excited, of course, but appalled at her excitement, and so she would pretend to disapprove.
    My fever helped me see it all clearly, not just the drumming and dancing, but the girl Amina, and Birdie, the nuns, the priests, sweating in their upper rooms, some of them praying. My illness fed me visions and made these people familiar. I knew them all better in my fever.
    And then I began to think that it was my lesson. I had to be sick and feverish and lying on my back, unable to form a word with my scummy tongue, to realize that any effort here seemed pointless.
    Simon went through the motions of bringing me wet towels and tea and soup and medicine. But neither he nor any of the priests seemed unduly alarmed. They did their duty and they were watchful. But their attitude was as fatalistic as the lepers'. How in this world of lepers could I expect sympathy for my fever? In spite of what they said, they looked upon me as someone who might die.
    "There was drumming again last night," I said to Simon, stating the obvious, just to hear my own voice.
    "There is drumming every night."
    "And dancing?"
    "Yes, Father."
    I was sure it was as I imagined it, the lepers naked and stamping, Amina twitching before her blind granny.
    "Is it some sort of harvest festival?"
    "But we have no harvest, Father," he said. "We work in our gardens all the year."
    "Then what is the
chamba
about?" I asked, using the word that meant dancing generally.
    "It is not
chamba
but
zinyao.
"
    I did not know the word, and so I asked him to explain it.
    Simon shook his head, as though he could not disclose the secret. "Perhaps you will see it sometime when you get well."
    I had begun to sit up, to sleep better, and my head ached less. My fever was intermittent. I still swallowed many bitter-tasting tablets and six or eight aspirin a day. I felt better—not stronger, but less feverish. And then I began to eat more, a slice or two of Simon's crumbly bread with the soup.
    Eating more did not make me well or even strong. It simply gave me diarrhea. So instead of using the chamber pot, I had to hobble to the latrine. I had always used the one outside the kitchen. But there was one in an overgrown part of the garden, all mossy bricks and weeds, just outside my room. It was as old as the house itself. It was a nightmare, but it was near.
    This shed—mud walls, thatched roof, sagging door, spider webs—was built on to a back entryway near my part of the corridor. Now and then I heard it used, because its door hinges squeaked, sometimes at the oddest hours of the day. It had been part of my feverish hallucination, this squeaking in the dark before morning.
    I was surprised to find that there were no door hinges. I stood, dizzy from being upright, and saw that the door was fixed with loops of knotted rope. But I had not imagined the rusty scrape of metal—I heard it again as I stood in the sun, just outside this old