V. Naipaul - Guerrillas

The watchman sat in his Windsor chair. He looked without expression at Roche. Roche greeted the watchman, and was relieved when a smile appeared on the man’s smooth round baby face.

He had rehearsed, as far as he was able, the dangers of the afternoon drive home. In the business area of the city he watched out for the abrupt stops and starts of the route taxis, the bare arms of the drivers making dancer’s gestures outside their windows. Later, around the park, he watched out for the cyclists, and especially for the exhibitionists among them: the riders without hands, celebrating the end of the working week by riding with shirts open all the way down, shirttails flapping above their saddles, riding fast and swinging out to overtake more sedate cyclists. He watched out for the mule carts and the hand carts, the queues at bus stops.

The afternoon light, already touched with amber, shot through the dust kicked up by vehicles that ran over the broken edges of the asphalt road; the scorched verges were tawny. The road began to climb; the air became lighter, the streets wider. He passed the botanical gardens; bamboo clumps that had ignited and burned down created the effect of ruins. A little later, the road still climbing, he saw the black police cars, blocking half the road.

It was routine after some incident down in the city, this blocking of one of the escape routes to the hills. After seven months he had got to know the police officers who were posted in the area. As he slowed down he recognized the sergeant. He was expecting to be waved on. But the sergeant signaled to him to stop and pull over to the side. He smiled at the sergeant; the sergeant looked embarrassed. The men with the rifles didn’t smile. Other cars slowed down and were waved on. His car was searched: the trunk, the engine, under the seats. The padding on the doors was felt. And Roche stood exposed at the side of the road in the amber light.

A man pushing a bicycle up the hill, a laborer, shouted at the policemen: “Search him!”

And it didn’t help when, a little later, a young brown man, whose own car had been waved on, put his head out of the window and shouted to Roche: “Sue them! Sue them!”

The sergeant, from being embarrassed, had become official. They didn’t talk; and when the search was over Roche didn’t smile at the sergeant. They parted as strangers. Roche drove away slowly. The light was soft; the shadows of trees fell right across the road. As he drove up into the clearer air, into the region of gardens, children, uniformed servants, and well-fed watchdogs, he thought: Something is being prepared for me. Driving as carefully in these quiet roads as he had driven in the city, he thought: Perhaps I should get out.

A golden light touched the bare front lawn. He went into the house through the kitchen. Adela was not yet available; Jane was out. The house felt shut up and hot. He opened the door of the back room and went out on the porch. The cooler air refreshed him. From here he could see the airport and the white and silver glints of the planes. The evening haze was already building up above the rubbish dump and the swamp. He watched the light turn, saw color come to the tops of clouds: rose and gold and then lilac.

Pipes hissed in the house. Adela came out to him, in her ironed white uniform.

She said softly, “Water, Mr. Roche.”

He was taken aback by her gentleness.

She said, “You would like some tea?” And she spoke without aggression. She stood for a while on the porch: she had something to say. She said, “Your lady gone out with Mistress de Tunja.” But that wasn’t her news. She said, “You know Dr. Handy Byam, Mr. Roche?”

He had seen the posters for this latest American evangelist, but now he was confused by Adela’s aspirates and wasn’t sure whether the evangelist’s name was Andy or Handy.

“I feel so good, Mr. Roche, after last night. So good. Handy Byam say he wasn’t going to heal anybody with his own hands. Last night he say the people have to do their own healing now and he is just there to guide them. He say that Israel is in her glory and the power is now on the Nig-ro people. He ask us to turn to whoever was next to us and to hold their hands and to pray and pray hard, so that every man would heal his neighbor.”

She demonstrated, standing with her firm legs apart, rocking back on her heels, and making separate clasping gestures with her hands. The clasping hands became clenched fists; she closed her eyes and quivered.

“And I hold my neighbor like that, and he hold me like that, and we pray and pray until Handy Byam call on us to stop and shout if we was cured. And you shoulda hear the shout then, Mr. Roche. You know Handy Byam, Mr. Roche? One-among-you should get to know him, you know. He is like you too, a little bit. Your size and your color.”

It was like a tribute. It was the first time she had shown him such regard.

THE COAST here was intermittently rocky. At high tide, below what Harry de Tunja called his beach house, there was no beach; the sea came right up to the foot of the low cliff. Low tide exposed a narrow, steeply curving rim of coarse sand littered with seaweed and sea grapes, the debris of the sea. Two hundred yards away there was a breach in the cliff wall. A forest river had once emptied itself into the sea at this point. Great trees now grew in the old river channel. The river had laid its silt far out into the sea in a wide convex bed, so that the sea here had receded and was calmer, with little waves breaking at odd angles. At low tide there was a beach: an expanse of waterlogged muddy sand, declining gradually to sea, with gray islets of shingle, crushed shells, tiny brown crabs, and small stranded fish. Of the forest river there remained now the merest stream, ending in a woodland pool, dark and green from the trees it reflected; and the pool spilled over onto the beach in a miniature estuary of ever-changing channels, inches deep, that left rippled or plaited patterns on the gray sand.

It was an ancient site. Aboriginal Indians had beached their canoes here; around this shady river bed, a meeting place, there had been Indian villages and food gardens. The gardens had lasted longer than the people: even after forest, the plantations, and now the beach houses, cassava grew in unexpected places. Seafarers from Europe knew the site for its fresh-water stream. Now it was a local pleasure spot, not a place for tourists, not a place for bathing, but a place for Sunday excursions, for drinking parties, and for the celebration of certain religious rites that required the sea or a river.

At eleven o’clock it was crowded. Old buses with locally built bodies of wood and tacked-on tin were parked in the side road above, their windows hung with clothes. Clothes hung on bushes; and bundles and baskets were everywhere. Radios played the reggae. Out of the shade of the trees, on a little bluff of dry sand, men and women gowned in black or red rang bells and chanted, facing the sea. The sky, blue inland, was silver here in the heat.

Jane, Roche, and Harry de Tunja had walked far beyond the little estuary and the crowds, and were now walking back. They walked in the narrow strip of sand between the cliff and the ebbing sea; and soon they began again to see the long white candles on the sand, amid the tangle of weed, the dead coconut branches, the unfamiliar tins dropped somewhere in mid-ocean. Long white candles, still whole, still fresh, with only the tips of the wicks burned. And, here and there, the little nailed-up rafts, hatcheted strips of hairy yellow box boards, on which the candles had been sent out on the water, to be doused at the first wave or to collapse at the first turbulence: a drama taking place again, in the distance, in the shallows outside the estuary: a black-gowned man, standing up to his waist in the sea, ringing a bell with one hand, holding a little raft steady with the other hand, a blindfolded woman in a pink chemise beside him, with a lighted candle in her hand. Yellow box-board rafts, pushed far from their launching places by the wavelets that broke at odd angles, bobbed about at the edge of the sea, struck muddy sand, floated again, were stranded. Candles, splashed with gritty black mud, littered the estuary beach.