V. Naipaul - Guerrillas

Stephens’ mother’s house was in a dirt road that branched off one of the older, asphalted streets. Roche parked on the asphalt, away from the corner. It was two o’clock, the hottest and stillest time of day. The streets were empty and exposed; the telegraph poles hardly cast a shadow; the shadows on houses had withdrawn right up to the eaves. As he was locking the car door he heard a hiss. He began to turn, but then didn’t. A boy crossed the asphalt street and came directly toward him. Roche put on his dark glasses.

The boy said, “You. Gimme a dollar.”

Roche didn’t turn away. He looked at the boy. He saw the dull, close-set eyes, a pimple on the right eyelid: the mind half eaten away, human debris already, his cause already lost.

The boy said, “Wash your car for a dollar.”

Roche tested the handle of the car door. “You will watch my car for a dollar?” He began to walk to the corner.

The boy walked beside him, gesticulating with both hands, keeping his elbows low, flinging out his arms, making stiff, scattering gestures with his open palms, and appearing to work himself into a rage. He chanted, shouted, “A dollar, man, a dollar, eh-eh!”

Roche concentrated less on the boy than on the yard from which the boy had come: perhaps the boy’s friends were there, watching.

A man was crossing the dirt road and coming toward them. Roche, turning to his left to go up the dirt road, heard the man say, “Eh-eh, why you don’t leave the man?”

It was the voice that alerted Roche. A deep, relaxed voice. A calm face: a face that knew its own worth. Someone who could spend money on soft leather shoes, plain and unpolished and covered with dust, but elegant in the instep. A man with a job, a man with a purpose. After surprise, instinct: the man was a plainclothesman. And as soon as the suspicion came to Roche he knew, from a swift second glance at the man, already on his way, brisk even in this heat, his unsweated short-sleeved Yucatan-style shirt dancing above his worn jeans, that he was right. He thought: The house is being watched.

He thought, walking slowly up the hills, exaggeratedly avoiding stones, holes, and dusty litter: Should I become involved in this? But he knew that it was already too late to turn back.

The house had once been the last on the left. But the unpaved road had since continued up the hillside in an irregular dirt track, with houses on either side; the track had been worn smooth, and looked as hard and slippery as if it had been plastered; and little timber houses and huts were scattered about the hillside at the end of little branch tracks.

Mrs. Stephens’ house was one of the miniature houses of the area. It had concrete walls and a corrugated-iron roof, and it stood on concrete pillars about four feet high. Chickens, open-beaked and clucking in the heat, roosted in hollows in the thick, dry, dungy dust about the pillars. The house had some pretensions; it wasn’t a shack; it belonged more to the asphalt streets than to the hillside. It was built according to the standard pattern of the area: divided lengthwise down the middle, with bedrooms on the right — the frosted casement window of the front bedroom open, with a half-curtain in lace hanging from a slack curtain wire — and on the left a toy veranda, living room, and kitchen.

Roche went up the shallow flight of red-colored concrete steps to the veranda. Two morris chairs with blistered arms and faded cushions almost filled it. The white paint on the frame of the living room door was cracked and dingy. He knocked: and then, sucking on the temple of his dark glasses, he turned and looked up at the sky, the yellow, built-up hillside, and then down the unpaved road to where he had seen the man in the Yucatan-style shirt. Two blocks away he saw a parlor-bar level to the pavement, its open doorway black below a rusty corrugated-iron awning.

He hadn’t intended to stay long at the house. He wanted only to ask about Stephens and to gauge whether Mrs. Stephens knew anything about her son. But when Mrs. Stephens wrenched open the rickety frosted-glass door Roche found he had decided to say nothing about her son.

Mrs. Stephens was a big, well-proportioned mulatto woman. Her dress, which went down to her knees, was tight about her breasts and her belly. Her short hair was done up in little plaits. Her eyes were sunken, and about her cheeks there was an unhealthy, shiny puffiness.

Roche was glad he wasn’t going to ask about Stephens, because when Mrs. Stephens said, “Eh! Mr. Roche. But you give me a shock. I see this person through the glass and I ask myself who this white fellow is,” he knew from her tone and her distant manner — she appeared to be talking to someone over his right shoulder — that she was less than friendly.

And there was a calculated casualness in the way, having let him in, her eyes seeming to search the street and the hillside the while, she turned and walked back into the room, dragging her slippers on the varnished floor, picking her way through the clutter of furniture: the remainder of the morris suite, a center table, a sideboard, a large dining table with six chairs — standard old-fashioned furniture of the island, miniatures of the furniture in Roche’s own house on the Ridge.

Mrs. Stephens was not alone. In the far corner of the room, just at the side of the window, an older woman was sitting on one of the dining chairs. She was smaller than Mrs. Stephens, with slacker flesh; her squashed face was set in a smile.

Roche said, “I was just passing, Mrs. Stephens.”

Mrs. Stephens said, “Yes, yes. All my friends pass in. You would like some cold juice? Neighbor, you would like some juice?” As she went through the door at the back, she said, “Is only my children who don’t come to look for me.”

Roche smiled at the old woman. She smiled back and said nothing.

Mrs. Stephens had made her declaration about her son. The rebuke and suspicion of her words lingered in the choked room, which was airless, even with the open casement window. There was nothing more to say; but Roche had committed himself now to the social call. The room depressed him and made him uneasy; he felt alien. On the pale-pink concrete wall there were framed photographs of some of Mrs. Stephens’ children. One young man was in an academic gown: it was like a photograph in a photographer’s window in London, with the photographer’s satire hidden from the sitter, who saw only the flattery. And those other faces: faces of the street, unremarkable in the street, and here, oddly, where they were honored, looking more vulnerable. So fragile this world, where the furniture, heavy and excessive, filled the room and yet seemed not to belong: it was easy to imagine the morris set absent, and the dining set; it was easy to have a sense of the house as a hollow, flimsy structure in a small patch of yellow dirt.

The concrete walls were scratched, dusty plaster showing below pink distemper, with a shine of dirt at hip level; old putty had fallen out of the wooden partition that divided the tiny living room from the two bedrooms: dark caverns beyond half-open doors. On this partition was the Thrushcross Grange poster: I’m Nobody’s Slave or Stallion, I’m a Warrior and Torch Bearer — Haji James Ahmed . Roche’s nervousness grew. Fragile, fragile, this world, requiring endless tolerance, endless forbearance: the furniture, the poster, the photograph of the young man in the academic gown.

The old woman, following Roche’s eye, said of the photograph of the young man in the academic gown, “That one is Lloyd. Madeleine’s first.” Her voice was pleasant and educated; she seemed better educated than Mrs. Stephens; and yet she spoke of Madeleine with respect and of Lloyd as a success. “He’s in England.” And having spoken, she smiled again, and nodded.