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

‘Frank,’ I heard a voice whisper.

‘Leonard,’ I whispered back.

‘O boy, I am glad I’ve found you. I’ve had such a time looking for you. I have been in so many different bars, so many. I’ve got all these nice names, all these interesting people I’ve got to assist and give money to. Sometimes I had trouble getting the names. You know how people misunderstand. I was worried about you. Sinclair was worried about you too.’

Sinclair was sitting at a table in the distance with his back to us, drinking.

Caught between Leonard and a demand for fried chicken, I bought the fried chicken.

‘You know,’ Leonard said confidentially, ‘it seems that the place to go to is The Coconut Grove. It sounds terrific, just what I am looking for. You know it?’

‘I know it.’

‘Well look, why don’t we all three of us just go there now.’

‘Not me at The Coconut Grove,’ the girl said.

Leonard said to me, ‘I meant you and me and Sinclair.’

‘What the hell you mean?’ She stood up and held the bottle of stout at an angle over Leonard’s head, as though ready to pour. She called, ‘Percy!’

Leonard closed his eyes, passive and expectant.

‘I’ll be with you in a minute, Leonard,’ I said, and I ran down the steps with the girl who was still holding the bottle of stout.

‘How you get so impatient so sudden?’

‘I don’t know, but this is your big chance.’

The open car door at the foot of the steps was like an invitation. We got in, the door slammed behind us.

‘I’ve got to get away from those people upstairs. They’re mad, they’re quite mad. You don’t know what I rescued you from.’

She looked at me.

So it began: the walking out past tables; the casual stares; the refusal to walk the hundred yards to the hotel; the two-dollar taxi; the unswept concrete steps; the dimly lit rooms; the cheap wooden furniture; the gaudy calendars on the wall, mocking desire, mocking flesh; the blue shimmer of television screens; Gary Priestland, now with the news of the hurricane; the startling gentility of glass cabinets; the much-used bed.

And in lucid intermissions, the telephone: the squawks, the slams.

So it began. The bars, the hotels, pointless conversations with girls. ‘What’s your name? Where do you come from? What do you want?’ The drinks; the bloated feeling in the stomach; the sick taste of island oysters and red pepper sauce; the airless rooms; the wastepaper baskets, wetly and whitely littered; and white washbasins which, supine on stale beds, one associated with hospitals, medicines, operations, feverishness, delirium.

‘No!’

‘But I ain’t even touched you yet.’

Above me a foolish face, the poor body offering its charms that were no charms. Poor body, poor flesh; poor man.

And again confusion. I must have spoken the words. A woman wailed, claiming insult and calling for brave men, and the bare wooden staircase resounded. Then among trellis and roses, dozens of luminous white roses, a dog barked, and growled. The offended black body turned white with insult. The same screams, the same call for vengeance. Down an aisle, between hundreds and hundreds of fully clothed men with spectacles and pads and pencils, the body chased me. To another entrance; another tiled floor; another discreet board:

ALLIANCE FRANÇAISE

Art Course

Paris Model

(Admission free)

And the glimpses of Leonard: like scenes imagined, the man with the million dollars to give away, the Pied Piper whom as in a dream I saw walking down the street followed by processions of steel-bandsmen, singers, and women calling for his money. At the head he walked, benign, stunned, smiling.

The day had faded, the night moved in jerks, in great swallows of hours. Lighted docks had wise and patient faces.

The bar smelled of rum and latrines. The beer and some notes and some silver were pushed at me through the gap in the wire-netting. My right hand was gripped and the black face, smiling, menacing, humorous, frightening, which I seemed to study pore by pore, hair by hair, was saying, ‘Leave the change for me, nuh.’

Confusion. Glimpses of faces expressing interest rather than hostility. A tumbling and rumbling; a wet floor; my own shouts of ‘No’, and the repeated answering sentence: ‘Next time you walk with money.’

And in the silent street off the deserted square, midnight approaching, the Cinderella hour, I was sitting on the pavement, totally lucid, with my feet in the gutter, sucking an orange. Sitting below the old straw-hatted lady, lit by the yellow smoking flame of a bottle flambeau. On the television in the shop window, Gary Priest-land and the Ma-Ho Four, frantic and mute behind plate-glass.

‘Better?’ she said.

‘Better.’

‘These people nowadays, they never have, they only want.’

‘What do they want?’

‘What you have. Look.’

The voice was mock American: ‘Man, I can get anything for you?’

‘What do you have?’

‘I have white,’ the taxi driver said. ‘I have Chinese, I have Portuguese, I have Indian, I have Spanish. Don’t ask me for black. I don’t do black.’

‘That’s right, boy,’ the old lady said. ‘Keep them out of mischief.’

‘I couldn’t do black or white now.’

‘Was what I was thinking,’ the orange lady said.

‘Then you want The Coconut Grove,’ the taxi driver said. ‘Very cultural. All the older shots go there.’

‘You make it sound very gay.’

‘I know what you mean. This culture would do, but it wouldn’t pay. Is just a lot of provocation if you ask me. A lot of wicked scanty clothing and all you doing with your two hands at the end is clapping. The spirit of the older shots being willing, but the flesh being weak.’

‘That sounds like me. After mature consideration I think we will go to The Coconut Grove.’

‘And too besides, I was going to say, they wouldn’t take you in like this, old man. Look at you.’

‘I don’t know, I believe I have lost you somewhere. Do you want me to go to this place?’

‘I don’t want nothing. I was just remarking that they wouldn’t take you in.’

‘Let’s try.’

‘In these cultural joints they have big bouncers, you know.’

We drove through silent streets in which occasionally neon lights flashed PRIDE, TOIL, CULTURE. On the car radio came the news of midnight. Terrific news, from the way it was presented. Then came news of wind velocity and temperature, and of the hurricane, still out there.

‘You see what I mean,’ the taxi driver said when we stopped.

‘It has changed,’ I said. ‘It used to be an ordinary house, you know. You know those wooden houses with gables and fretwork along the eaves?’

‘Oh, the old-fashioned ones. We are pulling them down all the time now. You mustn’t think a lot of them still remain.’

Henry’s was new and square, with much glass. Behind the glass, potted greenery; and behind that, blinds. Rough stone walls, recessed mortar, a heavy glass door, heavy, too, with recommendations from clubs and travel associations, like the suitcase of an old-fashioned traveller. And behind the door, the bouncer.

‘Big, eh?’ the taxi driver said.

‘He’s a big man.’

‘You want to try your luck?’

‘Perhaps a little later. Just now I just want you to drive slowly down the street.’

The bouncer watched us move off. I looked back at him; he continued to look at me. And how could I have forgotten? Opposite The Coconut Grove, what? I looked. I saw.

Ministry of Order and Public Education

University College

Creative Writing Department

Principal: H. J. B. White

Grams: Olympus

‘You don’t mind going so slowly?’ I asked the driver.