“That’s what they need, a good flogging.”
“Vidia, that’s quite enough of that,” Pat said, strong again, no sign of the tears and sobs of the other day.
His reading from the typescript and his unembarrassed candor in allowing me to hear it encouraged me to ask him again about writers he liked. So far, all I knew was that he disliked Orwell and that for pleasure he read the Bible and Martial. I had Nabokov’s Pale Fire with me and told him how much I liked it.
“I read Pnin . It was silly. There was nothing in it. What do people see in him?”
“Style, maybe?”
“What is his style? It’s bogus, calling attention to itself. Americans do that. All those beautiful sentences. What are they for?”
His interest, his passion, was located solely in his own writing. He saw it as new. Nothing like it had ever been written before. It was an error to look for any influences, for there were none; it was wrong to compare it with any other work; nothing came close to resembling it. It took me a little while to understand his utter faith in this conceit, but the day I did, and acknowledged that his writing was unique, and that he was a new man, was the day our friendship began.
Some people mistook the apparent spareness of his sentences for a faltering imagination, or a lack of stylistic ambition, or sheer monotony. But he said he was deliberate in everything he wrote, calculating each effect, and the simplicity was contrived. In his view, he was like someone making a model of an entire city out of the simplest material, a Rome made of matchsticks, say, a Rome whose bridges a full-sized human could stand on and run carts over. He detested falsity in style, he loathed manner in writing. He said he never prettified anything he saw or felt, and “prettified,” a new word to me, like “chuntering,” was added to my vocabulary.
“The truth is messy. It is not pretty. Writing must reflect that. Art must tell the truth.”
But early on, I had kept after him for the names of writers he admired. He shrugged. “Shakey, of course,” he said. “Jimmy Joyce. Tommy Mann.”
What books, I wondered, and why?
“Forget Nabokov. Read Death in Venice . Pay close attention to the accumulation of thought. Notice how each sentence builds and adds.”
What about American writers? Surely there was someone he liked.
“Do you know the first sentence of the short story ‘The Blue Hotel’ by Stephen Crane? About the color blue?” he asked. “I like that.”
His own work served as a better example of how complex and yet transparent prose fiction could be. It was original, freshly imagined in both form and content. Its brilliance was not obvious — he did not use the word “brilliance,” but he was wholly satisfied with the work, had no misgivings, saw nothing false or forced in it.
“ Miguel Street is deceptive,” he said. “Look at it again and you’ll see how I used my material. Look at those sentences. They seem simple. But that book nearly killed me, man.”
Marlon Brando had read Miguel Street with pleasure, he had been told by a mutual friend, the novelist Edna O’Brien, who had also reported that Brando was attracted to women with dark nipples. It pleased Naipaul to know that Brando admired the book, and that knowledge made Naipaul feel friendly towards the actor. The Teahouse of the August Moon was a film he had liked, he said. He had not gone to many films lately, but he had seen every film that had come to Trinidad between the years 1942 and 1950, when he left for Oxford.
“You know what Brando says about actors?”
I said I did not know.
“An actor is a guy who, if you ain’t talking about him, ain’t listening.” Naipaul laughed his deep appreciative laugh and repeated the sentence.
Yomo was in bed when I got back home.
“ Bibi gonjwa ,” the housegirl said in a low voice, sounding as though she had been scolded. “Your woman’s sick.”
Yomo said in a feeble voice that she was feeling awful and wished she had some kola nuts. I made a cup of tea for her and then rooted through my bookshelf and found an anthology of American short stories, which included “The Blue Hotel.”
This was how the story began: “The Palace Hotel at Fort Romper was painted a light blue, a shade that is on the legs of a kind of heron, causing the bird to declare its position against any background. The Palace Hotel, then, was always screaming and howling in a way that made the dazzling winter landscape of Nebraska seem only a gray swampish hush.”
Then Yomo was at the door, wearing the bed sheet like a toga, blinking in the lights and saying, “Please read to me.”
Naipaul complained so heartily about his house that I told him about my upstairs neighbors — newly married, a middle-aged man and a much younger woman — who giggled and chased each other around the house. They splashed in the bathtub and clattered plates and silver when they ate and called out constantly from room to room, “I can’t hear you!” But we could hear everything they said. It seemed at times they were carrying on for our benefit, using us as witnesses, proving something. They made love noisily — she was a screecher in her orgasms; it was a noise that built in volume and frequency, like someone working hard, pumping a tire, sawing a log. Their bed rocked and squeaked. At times it sounded like a muffled inquisition, the ordeal of someone whose confession was being painfully extracted.
“Who are they?” Naipaul asked.
“New people. From Canada.”
“Infies,” he said. “Doesn’t it make you hate all Canadians?”
I said no, and Pat laughed.
“Well, it would make me hate them,” Naipaul said. “Do you speak to them?”
“Sometimes.”
“You should cut them.”
“You mean not speak to them?”
“I mean not see them. You walk past them. You cut them. They don’t exist. Nothing at all.”
Not even the G. Ramsay Muir treatment — you just walked on.
The point about the rocking, squeaking hobbyhorse of a bed was that when I heard it, its first murmurs and jerks and hiccups, hesitating, just foreplay, nothing rhythmic yet, I prepared myself, and soon it was swaying and calling like a corncrake, and the woman was urging this late-night plowing. Then, almost against my will, I became aroused and woke Yomo and we made love.
One of those nights Yomo turned me away, hugged herself, and said she was really ill.
“You might be pregnant,” I said. “You have to see the doctor.”
“I don’t want the doctor. I don’t need him.”
“He’s good. He’ll need to examine you.”
“Indian doctor,” she said. “Bloody shit.”
Dr. Barot was a Gujarati, Uganda born, trained in the Indian city of Broach, who in the past had treated me for gonorrhea and for malaria. I asked him if he would see Yomo. He said of course, that he was also an obstetrician, and that it was important that he see Yomo soon.
Sleepy-eyed, reluctant, slightly sulky, Yomo finally agreed. She always took pains to dress up before leaving the house, but this was a greater occasion than most. She put on her brocade sash, her expensive cloak, her best turban. I loved seeing her dress up, and she became haughty and offhand when she wore her elegant clothes.
The February heat was oppressive. In the car Yomo said, “You don’t know. Black people get hotter than white people. It’s our skin.” I wondered whether this was true.
Dr. Barot greeted her and took her into his examining room. I heard the scraping sound of her disrobing, stiff colorful clothes sliding away, of her folding them. If she was going to have a baby, I would be happy. It was not what I had planned, but really I had no plans. There was something wrong with the very idea of a plan, and anyway I half believed that my life was prefigured — perhaps, as people said, like the lines on my palm. My random life was pleasant enough, and everything good that had happened to me had come accidentally. I just launched myself and trusted to luck. Mektoub —it is written.
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