Read The Last Train to Zona Verde Online
Authors: Paul Theroux
The Last Train to Zona Verde (48 page)
What am I doing here? I knew at last. I am preparing to leave. On the red clay roads of the African bush among poor and overlooked people, I often thought of the poor in America, living in just the same way, precariously, on the red roads of the Deep South, on low farms, poor pelting villages, sheepcotes, and mills — people I knew only from books, as I’d first known Africans — and I felt beckoned home.
*
It was Arthur Rimbaud’s in Aden, in 1884, unemployed, writing home and lamenting in the heat. “What a deplorable existence I lead in this absurd climate and under what frightful conditions! How boring! How stupid life is! What am I doing here?” (quoted in Jean Marie Carré,
A Season in Hell
, 1931).