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

‘Fifty,’ Leonard said.

‘Well, let’s make it a hundred.’

Leonard smiled. ‘Boy, I’m glad I met you. You believe me, don’t you, Frank?’

‘I believe you.’

‘You know, people don’t believe I have come here to work. They think I am making it up.’

The waiter brought Leonard his six oysters and brought me my hundred. The oysters were of the tiny island variety; six scarcely filled one indentation of Leonard’s oyster plate.

‘Are these six oysters?’ Leonard asked the waiter.

‘They are six oysters.’

‘Okay, okay,’ Leonard said soothingly, ‘I just wanted to find out. Of course,’ he said to me, ‘it doesn’t sound like work. You see—’

And here the liveried page walked back through the diningroom beating a bright tune on his toy pan and calling out a name.

‘—you see, I have got to give away a million dollars.’

My oysters had come in a tumbler. I scooped up about a dozen and swallowed them.

‘Exactly,’ Leonard said. ‘It doesn’t sound like work. But it is. One wants to be sure that one is using the money sensibly. It’s easy enough to make a million dollars, I always say. Much harder to spend it.’

‘That’s what I have always felt. Excuse me.’

I went up to my room. The oysters had been too many for me. The sick tightness was in my stomach. Even at this early stage it was necessary for me to drive myself on.

I was careful, as I always am on these occasions, to prepare sensibly. I lined the waist-band of my trousers with the new funny island money; I distributed notes all over my pockets; I even lay some flat in my shoes.

A letter from home among my papers. Nothing important; no news; just a little bit about the drains, the wonderful workmen who had helped. Brave girl. Brave.

I remembered again. I lifted the telephone, asked for a line, dialled. The same voice answered and again my courage left me and I listened to the squawks until the phone went dead.

I had stripped myself of all my labels, of all my assertions. Soon I would be free. Hilton, Hilton: man as God. Goodbye to that now. My excitement was high.

I went to the desk, transferred a fixed sum to the hotel vault. The final fraudulence that we cannot avoid: we might look for escape, but we are always careful to provide for escape from that escape.

While the clerk was busy I took the pen from the desk, blacked out the whites of Gary Priestland’s eyes and sent an arrow through his neck. The clerk was well trained. It was only after I had turned that he removed the disfigured poster and replaced it by a new one.

The liveried doorman whistled up a taxi. I gave him a local dollar; too much, but I enjoyed his attempt to look unsurprised. He opened the taxi door, closed it, saluted. It was the final moment of responsibility. I did not give the taxi driver the name of any bar; I gave him the name of a department store in the centre of the city. And when I got off I actually went into the store, as though the taxi driver was watching me and it was important that I should not step out of the character which he must have built up for me.

The store was airconditioned. The world was cool and muffled. My irritation was sharpened.

‘Can I help you, sir?’

‘No thank you, I am just passing through.’

I spoke with unnecessary aggressiveness; one or two customers stared and I instinctively waited for Leonard’s interjection.

‘Leonard,’ I whispered, turning.

But he wasn’t there.

The shop girl took a step backwards and I hurried out through the other door into the shock of damp heat, white light, and gutter smells. Hooray for airconditioning. My mood had taken possession of me. I was drunk on more, and on less, than alcohol.

The money began to leak out of my fingers. This is part of the excitement; money became paper over which other people fought. Two dollars entrance here; one dollar for a beer there; cigarettes at twice the price: I paid in paper. Bright rooms, killing bright, and noisy as the sea. The colours yellow, green, red, on drinks, labels, calendars on the walls. On the television intermittently through a series of such bars, Gary Priestland, chairing a discussion on love and marriage. And from a totally black face, a woman’s, black enough to be featureless, issued: ‘Well, I married for love.’ ‘No, she married for hate.’ Laughter was like the sea. Someone played with the knob on the set; and the thought, perhaps expressed, came to me. ‘It is an unkind medium.’

In bright rooms, bright seas, I floated. And I explored dark caves, so dark you groped and sat still and in the end you found that you were alone.

‘Where is everybody?’

‘They are coming just now.’

In an almost empty room — dim lights, dark walls, dark chairs — the man sitting at the edge of the table invited us to come close up to him. We all six in the room moved up to him, as to a floor show. He crossed his legs and swung them. ‘Is he going to strip?’

Confusion again. The door; the tiled entrance; the discreet board:

BRITISH COUNCIL

The Elizabethan Lyric

A Course of Six Lectures

I always feel it would be so much better if I could wait to pick and choose. Time after time I promise myself to do so. But when the girl came and said — so sad it seemed to me—‘I am going to screw you,’ I knew that this was how it would begin; that I wouldn’t have the will to resist.

PRIDE, flashed the neon light across the square.

She ordered a stout.

‘You are an honest girl.’

‘Stout does build me up.’

TOIL

The stout came.

‘Ah,’ she said, ‘my old bulldog.’

And from the neck label the bulldog growled at me. With the stout there also came two men dressed like calypsonians in the travel brochures, dressed like calypsonians on the climbing road to the hotel.

‘Allow me to welcome the gentleman to our colourful island.’

CULTURE

‘Get away,’ I shouted.

She looked a little nervous; she nodded uncertainly to someone behind me and said, ‘Is all right, Percy.’ Then to me: ‘Why you driving them away?’

‘They embarrass me.’

‘How you mean, they embarrass you?’

‘They’re not real. Look, I could put my hand through them.’

The man with the guitar lifted his arm; my hand went through.

The song went on: ‘In two-twos, this gentleman got the alcoholic blues.’

‘God!’

When I uncovered my face I saw a ringed hand before it. It was an expectant hand. I paid; I drank.

A fat white woman began to do a simple little dance on the raised floor. I couldn’t look.

‘What wrong with you?’

And when the woman made as if to discard the final garment, I stood up and shouted. ‘No!’

‘But how a big man like you could shame me so?’

The man who had been sitting with a stick at the top of the steps came to our table. He waved around the room, past paintings of steel-bands and women dancing on golden sand, and pointed to a sign:

Patrons are requested to abstain from

lewd and offensive gestures

By order, Ministry of Order and Public Education

‘Is all right, Percy,’ the girl said.

Percy could only point. Speech was out of the question because of the steel orchestra. I sat down.

Percy went away and the girl said gently: ‘Sit down and tell me why you finding everything embarrassing. What else you tourists come here for?’ She beckoned to the waitress. ‘I want a fry chicken.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘No damn fry chicken for you.’

At that moment the band stopped, and my words filled the room. The Japanese sailors — we had seen their trawlers in the harbour — looked up. The American airmen looked up. Percy looked up.

And in the silence the girl shouted to the room, ‘He finding everything embarrassing, and he damn mean with it.’ She stood up and pointed at me. ‘He travelling all over the world. And all I want is a fry chicken.’