V. Naipaul - The nightwatchman's occurrence book - and other comic inventions

‘The natives are excited,’ a tourist said to me.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I think there is a good chance they will eat us. We look pretty appetizing.’

Red dust hung in a cloud above the bauxite loading station, disfiguring the city and the hills. The tourists gazed, lining the rails in bermuda shorts, bright cotton shirts and straw hats. They looked vulnerable.

‘Here is an appeal from the Ministry of Public Order and Education.…’

I imagined the appeal going to the barbershops, rumshops, cafés and back-yards of the ramshackle town I had known.

The radio played a commercial for a type of shirt; an organ moaned and some deaths were announced; there was a commercial for a washing powder; then the time was tremendously announced and there were details of weather and temperature.

A woman said, ‘They get worked up about the time and the weather here too.’

Her husband, his bitterness scarcely disguised by the gaiety of his tourist costume, said, ‘Why the hell shouldn’t they?’

They were not playing as a team.

I went down to my cabin. On the way I ran into the happier team, already dressed as for a carnival.

‘You’re not going ashore?’ asked the male.

‘No. I think I will just stay here and read.’

And in my self-imposed isolation, I did try to read. I put on my spectacles and tried to savour my shrinking, mortified flesh. But it was no use; the jungle pressed; confusion and threat were already being converted into that internal excitement which is in itself fulfilment, and exhaustion.

Here on this Moore-McCormack liner everything was Moore-McCormack. In my white cabin the name called to me from every corner, from every article, from towels, from toilet paper, from writing paper, from table cloth, from pillow-cases, from bed sheets, from blankets, from cups and menus. So that the name appeared to have gone deep, to have penetrated, like the radiation we have been told to fear, the skin of all those exposed to it, to have shaped itself in living red corpuscles within bodies.

Moore-McCormack, Moore-McCormack. Man had become God. Impossible in this cabin to escape; yet I knew that once we were out of the ship the name would lose its power. So that my decision was almost made for me. I would go ashore; I would spend the night ashore. My mood was on me; I let it settle; I let it take possession of me. Then I saw that I too, putting away briefcase, papers, letters, passport, was capable of my own feeble assertions. I too had tried to give myself labels, and none of my labels could convince me that I belonged to myself.

This is part of my mood; it heightens my anxiety; I feel the whole world is being washed away and that I am being washed away with it. I feel my time is short. The child, testing his courage, steps into the swiftly moving stream, and though the water does not go above his ankles, in an instant the safe solid earth vanishes, and he is aware only of the terror of sky and trees and the force at his feet. Split seconds of lucidity add to his terror. So, we can use the same toothpaste for years and end by not seeing the colour of the tube; but set us among strange labels, set us in disturbance, in an unfamiliar landscape; and every unregarded article we possess becomes isolated and speaks of our peculiar dependence.

‘You are going to spend the night ashore?’

The question came from a small intelligent-looking man with a round, kind face. He had been as withdrawn from the life of the ship as myself, and I had always seen him in the company of a big grey-suited man whose face I had never been able to commit to memory. I had heard rumours that he was very rich, but I had paid no attention; as I had paid no attention to the other rumour that we had a Russian spy on board as a prisoner.

‘Yes, I am going to be brave.’

‘Oh, I am glad,’ he said, ‘we are going to have lots of fun together.’

‘Thanks for asking me.’

‘When I say fun, I don’t mean what you mean.’

‘I don’t know what you mean either.’

He did not stop smiling. ‘I imagine that you are going ashore for pleasure.’

‘Well, I suppose that you could call it that.’

‘I am glad we put in here.’ His expression became that of a man burdened by duty. ‘You see I have a little business to do here.’ He spoke gravely, but his excitement was clear. ‘Do you know the island?’

‘I used to know it very well.’

‘Well, I am so glad we have met. You are just the sort of person I want to meet. You could be of great help to me.’

‘I can simplify matters for you by giving you a list of places you must on no account go to.’

He looked pained. ‘I am really here on business.’

‘You can do good business here. I used to.’

Pleasure? I was already exhausted. My stomach felt tight; and all the unexpended energy of days, of weeks, seemed to have turned sour. Already the craving for shellfish and seafood was on me. I could almost feel its sick stale taste in my mouth, and I knew that for all that had happened in the past, I would eat no complete meal for some time ahead, and that while my mood lasted the pleasures I looked for would quickly turn to a distressing-satisfying endurance test, would end by being pain.

I had been the coldest of tourists, unexcited by the unexpected holiday. Now, as we landed, I was among the most eager.

‘Hey, that was a pretty quick read.’

‘I read the last page — the butler did it.’

In the smart reception building, well-groomed girls, full of self-conscious charm, chosen for race and colour, with one or two totally, diplomatically black, pressed island souvenirs on us: toy steel-drums, market-women dolls in cotton, musicians in wire, totem-like faces carved from coconuts. Beyond the wire-netting fence, the taxi drivers of the city seethed. It seemed a frail barrier.

‘It’s like the zoo,’ the woman said.

‘Yes,’ said her embittered husband. ‘They might even throw you some nuts.’

I looked for a telephone. I asked for a directory. It was a small directory.

‘A toy directory,’ the happy tourist said.

‘It’s full of the numbers of dolls,’ I said.

I dialled, I waited. A voice I knew said, ‘Hullo.’ I closed my eyes to listen. The voice said, ‘Hullo, hullo.’ I put the receiver down.

‘Naughty.’

It was my friend from the ship. His companion stood at the other end of the room, his back to us; he was looking at books on a revolving bookstand.

‘What do you think Sinclair is interested in? Shall we go and see?’

We moved over. Sinclair shuffled off.

Most of the books displayed were by a man called H. J. B. White. The back of each book had a picture of the author. A tormented writer’s-photograph face. But I imagined it winking at me. I winked back.

‘Do you know him?’ my friend asked.

‘I don’t know whether any of us really knew Mr Blackwhite,’ I said. ‘He was a man who moved with the times.’

‘Local writer?’

‘Very local.’

He counted the titles with an awed finger. ‘He looks tremendous. Oh, I hope I can see him. Oh, this looks very good.’

The book he picked up was called I Hate You, with the sub-title One Man’s Search for Identity. He opened the book greedily and began moving his lips, ‘ “I am a man without identity. Hate has consumed my identity. My personality has been distorted by hate. My hymns have not been hymns of praise, but of hate. How terrible to be Caliban, you say. But I say, how tremendous. Tremendousness is therefore my unlikely subject” ’

He stopped reading, held the book out to the assistant and said, ‘Miss, Miss, I would like to buy this.’ Then, indicating one title after the other: ‘And this, and this, and this, and this.’