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

Blackwhite softened. ‘You really think so, Henry?’

‘Yes, man, it was really nice. I can’t wait to hear what happen to Lady Theresa Phillips.’

‘No. You are lying, you are lying.’

‘What happened in the end, Mr Blackwhite?’ I slapped at an ant on my leg.

‘You just scratch yourself and keep quiet,’ he said to me. ‘I hate you. I don’t believe you can even read. You think that black people don’t write, eh?’

Albert the postman said, ‘It was a real nice story, Blackwhite. And I prophesy, boy, that one day all those white people who now sending back your books going to be coming here and begging you to write for them.’

‘Let them beg, let them beg. I won’t write for them when they beg. Oh, my God. All that worrying, all that typing. Not going to write a single line more. Not a blasted line.’ He grew wild again. ‘I hate you, Henry, too. I am going to have this place closed, if it’s the last thing I do.’

Henry threw up his hands.

‘To hell with you,’ Blackwhite said. ‘To hell with Lady Theresa Phillips.’ To me he said pointing, ‘You don’t like me.’ And then to Henry: ‘And you don’t like me either. Henry, I don’t know how a man could change like you. At one time it was always Niya Binghi and death to the whites. Now you could just wrap yourself in the Stars and Stripes and parade the streets.’

‘Niya Binghi?’ I asked.

‘Was during the Abyssinian War,’ Henry said, ‘and the old queen did just die. Death to the whites. Twenty million on the march. You know our black people. The great revenge. Twenty million on the march. And always when you look back, is you alone. Nobody behind you. But the Stars and Stripes,’ he added. ‘You know, Blackwhite, I believe you have an idea there. Good idea for Carnival. Me as sort of Uncle Sam. Gentleman, it have such a thing as Stars and Stripes at the base?’

‘Oh, he’s one of those, is he?’ Blackwhite said. ‘One of our American merchantmen?’

‘I believe I can get you a Stars and Stripes,’ I said.

Blackwhite went silent. I could see he was intrigued. His aggressiveness when he spoke wasn’t very convincing. ‘I suppose that you people have the biggest typewriters in the world, as you have the biggest everything else?’

‘It’s too early in the morning for obscene language,’ Henry said.

‘I am not boasting,’ I said. ‘But I am always interested in writing and writers. Tell me, Mr Blackwhite, do you work regularly, or do you wait for inspiration?’

The question pleased him. He said, ‘It is a mixture of both, a mixture of both.’

‘Do you write it out all in longhand, or do you use a typewriter?’

‘On the typewriter. But I am not being bribed, remember. I am not being bribed. But if the naked gentleman is interested in our native customs and local festivals, I am prepared to listen.’ His manner changed. ‘Tell me, man, you have a little pattern book of uniforms? I don’t want to appear in any and every sort of costume at Carnival, you know.’

‘Some of those costumes can be expensive,’ I said.

‘Money, money,’ Blackwhite said. ‘It had to come up. But of course I will pay.’

*

This was how it started; this was how I began to be a purveyor of naval supplies. First to Mr Henry and to Mr Blackwhite and then to the street. I brought uniforms; money changed hands. I brought steel drums; money changed hands. I brought cartons of cigarettes and chewing gum; money changed hands. I brought a couple of Underwood standard typewriters. Money didn’t change hands.

Blackwhite said, ‘Frankie, I think art ought to be its own reward.’

It wasn’t though. A new line went up on Blackwhite’s board:

ALSO TYPING LESSONS

‘Also typing lessons, Blackwhite?’

‘Also typing lessons. Black people don’t type?’

This had become his joke. We were in his room. His walls were hung with coloured drawings of the English countryside in spring. There were many of these, but they were not as numerous as the photographs of himself, in black and white, in sepia, in coarse colour. He had an especially large photograph of himself between smaller ones of Churchill and Roosevelt.

‘The trouble, you know, Blackwhite,’ I said, ‘is that you are not black at all.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You are terribly white.’

‘God, I am not going to be insulted by a beachcomber.’

‘Beachcomber. That’s very good. But you are not only white. You are English. All those lords and ladies, Blackwhite. All that Jane Austen.’

‘What’s wrong with that? Why should I deny myself any aspect of the world?’

‘Rubbish. I was wondering, though, whether you couldn’t start writing about the island. Writing about Selma and Mano and Henry and the others.’

‘But you think they will want to read about these people? These people don’t exist, you know. This is just an interlude for you, Frankie. This is your little Greenwich Village. I know, I can read. Bam bam, bram, bram. Fun. Afterwards you leave us and go back. This place, I tell you, is nowhere. It doesn’t exist. People are just born here. They all want to go away, and for you it is only a holiday. I don’t want to be any part of your Greenwich Village. You beach-comb, you buy sympathy. The big rich man always behind the love, the I-am-just-like-you. I have been listening to you talking to people in Henry’s yard about the States; about the big cinemas with wide screens and refrigerators as big as houses and everybody becoming film stars and presidents. And you are damn frightened of the whole thing. Always ready for the injection of rum, always looking for the nice and simple natives to pick you up.’

It was so. We turn experience continually into stories to lend drama to dullness, to maintain our self-respect. But we never see ourselves; only occasionally do we get an undistorted reflection. He was right. I was buying sympathy, I was buying fellowship. And I knew, better than he had said, the fraudulence of my position in the street.

He pointed to Churchill on the wall. ‘What do you think would have happened to him if he was born here?’

‘Hold your head that way, Blackwhite. Yes, definitely Churchillian.’

‘Funny. You think we would have been hearing about him today? He would have been working in a bank. He would have been in the civil service. He would have been importing sewing machines and exporting cocoa.’

I studied the photograph.

‘You like this street. You like those boys in the back-yard beating the pans. You like Selma who has nowhere to go, poor little wabeen. Big thing, big love. But she is only a wabeen and you are going back, and neither of you is fooling the other. You like Mr Lambert sitting on the steps drinking his one glass of rum in the morning and tacking up a few ledgers. Because Mr Lambert can only drink one glass of rum in the morning and tack up a few ledgers. You like seeing Mano practising for the walking race that is never going to come off. You look at these things and you say, “How nice, how quaint, this is what life should be.” You don’t see that we here are all mad and we are getting madder all the time, turning life into a Carnival.’

And Carnival came.

It had been permitted that year under stringent police supervision. The men from the yards near Henry’s made up their bands in the uniforms I had provided; and paraded through the streets. Henry was Uncle Sam; Selma was the Empress Theodora; the other girls were slave girls and concubines. There were marines and infantrymen and airforce pilots on the Pacific atolls; and in a jeep with which I had provided him stood Mr Blackwhite. He stood still, dressed in a fantastically braided uniform. He wore dark glasses, smoked a corncob pipe and his left hand was held aloft in a salute which was like a benediction. He did not dance, he did not sway to the music. He was MacArthur, promising to return.