V. Naipaul - Guerrillas

She was among people who didn’t have a world view — and a world view was what she had expected, once she had left England. She was among colonials who were interested only in their own situation and their own politicians, whose names she had given up attempting to learn. She was among people who didn’t understand her language; and she was adrift. And perhaps it was this feeling of being adrift among people who were narrow and literal that made her more forthright and passionate; perhaps it was this that had led to that famous, unforgotten incident at Mrs. Grandlieu’s when she had spoken of the horrors of the island and of “those black little animals ferreting about in the rubbish dump” and had, literally, stopped the conversation. It was her London manner, her wish to impose herself; she wasn’t sure what point she was making; it was her manner that had swept her on too far. She understood this; and, in response to Roche’s silence when they went back to their house, she gave the coy, flushed smile she had given when, at their first meeting, she had been unable to tell him why the publishing firm was ghastly.

Without an audience, then, to give her a familiar idea of herself, she had — in the house, with Roche, the only person who could half understand them — begun to relapse into her class certainties. And thus what London had masked the Ridge had layer by layer exposed. That obsession with England and her class, that vision of decay, of a world going up in flames: he had thought, in London, that it came out of her conviction that the world was not what it ought to be. The truth was simpler: the world was to go up in flames because it wasn’t what it had been, or what she thought it had been. At the back of that vision lay the certainties — of class and money — of which, in London, she had seemed so innocent.

And something of innocence remained. She was without memory: he had decided that long ago. She was under no obligation to make a whole of her attitudes or actions. It was useless, as he had found, to point out her contradictions. She was not abashed because she was not interested; she owed no one any explanations. She was only what she did or said at any given moment; she was then what she was. He had been drawn by what he had seen as her mystery. But where he had once looked for passion born of violation and distress, he now found inviolability.

She had invested little in this relationship. She had from the start, as it now seemed, held herself back, for this moment of withdrawal. The gesture, of leaving London and coming out to live with him, so soon after meeting him, had appeared to him grand, part of her passionate nature; yet it was contained within this sense of inviolability, her belief that everything could be undone. And he saw that he had moved from the role of comforter to that of violator. He was another of her failures, someone else who wasn’t what she had thought he was.

And from being the woman who had attempted to transmit her hysterical vision of the world to the inhabitants of the Ridge — those impressionistic, passionate comments which formed no pattern, which seemed about to lead her to some conclusion but never did, many things jumbled together: the contempt with which West Indian bus conductors were regarded in London, the shallowness of her women friends, the horror of the shantytowns on the island, the guerrillas in the hills — from this she had become calm, detached, the visitor.

She detached herself from his failure and from his job. She pretended, at first with irony, and then with indifference, not to know what he did. “Is that what Peter is up to these days?” “Did Peter say that?” So that the breakdown of their relationship was known on the Ridge; and it was thought that the inadequacy was his. On the Ridge, as he knew, this inadequacy could only be interpreted sexually; and he knew that it was interpreted as something connected with his imprisonment in South Africa.

She had come, again, to the end of a cycle. And now, from the angle of the rejected, he saw how she might get started on another. She had no audience here and was quiescent; but he saw how, in her own setting, with a familiar audience, and after another failed adventure, she might send out the same signals of passion, distress, violation: another total display, as instinctive and as without calculation as the one for which he had fallen. The sea anemone, rooted and secure, waving its strands at the bottom of the ocean.

This instinct, this innocence, this inviolability: he was obsessed with her. He longed to make some dent on that inviolability; he longed to reveal her to herself. But every day he went down from the Ridge to the decaying city, to his meaningless public relations job in the old offices of Sablich’s; every day he was undermined. He was without a function; he saw himself as she had begun to see him; and there was this that depressed him now, and it was like a confirmation of his present futility, that though his attitudes and Jane’s seemed to coincide, though they seldom argued because they were seldom opposed in what they said about the island and its possibilities, he had begun to long for some sign of admiration from her, some generosity, some comprehension of the life he had lived, the wasted endeavors, the spent optimism. He had never looked for this kind of approval before; he recognized it as a danger signal. Every morning he thought: I’ve built my whole life on sand.

IN THIS part of the city the streets were narrow, sometimes little more than lanes, and twisting. The houses, overhung by big breadfruit trees and mango trees, could be very small, sometimes like miniatures, each house standing in its own little plot and almost filling it. In the paintings done by local artists for the tourist trade it was still a picturesque area: red tin roofs edged with white fretwork against the tall green trees, pink oleander and red poinsettia leaning over narrow pavements, the winding lanes, the hills. But even in the paintings now the black asphalt streets could be seen to end in dirt tracks, thinning as they wavered up the hills and splitting into paths; and above the staggered red roofs could be seen the wooden shacks on thin stilts scattered about the stripped hillsides. The shacks, in this season of drought, were the color of dust; the eroded hills reflected light and heat; and the area was like a crater, enclosed and airless.

Once it had been a respectable lower-class area. And here and there respectability still showed, in some neatly fenced little house with a front gate still with a bell, or with ferns in hanging baskets shading a toy front veranda. But the community once contained in this area of greenery and red roofs and narrow lanes had exploded. Families still lived in certain houses; but many of the houses had become camping places, where young men looked for occasional shelter and an occasional meal, young men who at an early age had found themselves in the streets, without families, knowing only the older women of some houses as “aunts.”

It was a community now without rules; and the area was now apparently without municipal regulation. Empty house lots had been tuned into steel-band yards or open-air motor repair shops; cars and trucks without wheels choked the narrow lanes. Where garbage dammed the open gutters, wrinkled white films of scum formed on the black water. The walls were scrawled, and sometimes carefully marked, with old election slogans, racial slogans, and made-up African names: Kwame Mandingo (Slave Name — Butler). There was something competitive and whimsical about the slogans and the names. Humor, of a sort, was intended; and it seemed at variance with the words of threat and anger.

This was Stephens’ area. This was where he had had his gang. It was from this, three months ago, that Stephens had allowed himself to be led to Thrushcross Grange, and the land: Stephens allowing himself to fall, as Roche had intended he should fall, for his own semipolitical slogans: the land, the dignity of labor on the land, the revolution based on land. Now Stephens was missing; and Roche was worried. Jane, returning from her visit to Thrushcross Grange, had said that the Grange was a cover for the guerrillas. It was something she had thrown out and perhaps had already forgotten. But Roche had remembered. Roche didn’t believe in the guerrillas the newspapers, the radio, and the television spoke about. But he believed in the city gangs.