V. Naipaul - Guerrillas

Harry de Tunja, interrupting his deep-breathing exercises, said asthmatically, “I don’t know why, but I don’t like seeing this thing at all.” And he choked in the hot moist air.

Jane and Roche waited for him to catch his breath. After a series of gasps he fell again into the rhythm of his deep breathing.

Jane said, “Wax and water. Fire and water.”

A fat barefooted woman, with three elderly women attendants in white, was preaching, shouting, chanting. And Mary lay dong, and de chile lay dong: they were the only words that were clear, and she spoke them again and again between passages of gibberish. She looked down at the beach; she seemed to be addressing someone stretched out there, for whom, from her gestures, she continually spread an imaginary rug or sheet. It was a private frenzy. No one was listening to her; no one stopped to watch; her three attendants in white stood quiet and relaxed, holding Bibles, not looking at her, looking vacantly at the sea and the people passing up and down.

Bells rang on the dry sandy bluff. A blindfolded group was being prepared for the walk out to the sea. They marched without moving, holding unlighted candles; and about them black-gowned and red-gowned men and women chanted. On the wet beach below the bluff people watched: half naked these watchers, black and brown bodies on which sand had stuck in patches and dried gray, and they stood and swayed as though infected by the rhythm of the bells and the stamp of the six blindfolded marchers above them, who were fully dressed, and stamping holes in the dry sand.

The marchers were in two columns of three. The woman in front was middle-aged; she held her candle upright and worked her hands and hips in an easy grinding way. The man was youngish; whenever he stamped his left foot he seemed about to collapse, but it was his own variation of the march: it was what he was allowing his body to do, this quivering descent, this mock half-fall. They stamped and stamped, digging their feet deeper into the sand. The woman sweated prodigiously; great circles of sweat had spread from under the arms of her white bodice. She held herself erect; her pumping elbows and her stamping feet created their own rhythm. She marched like a leader. The man beside her marched like a clown. The white blindfold emphasized his broad forehead, his heavy, ill-formed lips and his sagging jaw. The bells rang and rang. And though about the chief bell ringer, stylish in a black gown with a yellow sash, there was something of the showman, pleased to draw a crowd, and though among the watchers there were those who had begun, half humorously, to mimic the marchers, all eyes were on the marchers, on those repetitive steps, on the upright woman, her blindfolded face held up, her hands and elbows moving in steady rhythmic circles, and on the semicollapsing man in khaki trousers and white shirt, both man and woman seemingly locked, behind the blindfold, in a private world.

Harry de Tunja said after a while, “I think we should be moving on.”

Jane, chalky white from her period, and with little red spots at the side of her mouth, said, “Do they object?”

Harry said, “For them, man, the more the merrier.” As they walked off he added, “But sometimes when I watch these things I can feel the ground moving below me.”

They walked past a plump woman in a yellow bathing suit and a red hat sitting with her dimpled brown legs flat on the muddy sand, past family parties and other groups detached from the ceremonies, past the wreckage of box-board rafts and the scatter of whole candles, to where the river channel ended, the cliff wall rose up, and the beach narrowed again, washed clean by the receding tide, with only the fresh sea litter of weeds and berries and entangled vines like broken garlands. Bells and radios, the reggae as repetitive as the bells, were muffled by the wind and the sea, less placid here, with shingle grating down the curved beach with every wave.

A zigzag of massive concrete steps — high tides, searching out the weaknesses of cliff and concrete, had left the lower steps exposed and isolated, like some rock formation — led up to Harry’s house. Harry paused after every few steps to catch his breath. When he got to the top he put his hands on his hips, threw out his chest and breathed deeply five or six times. And then he seemed to be all right.

He said, “You see, it’s under control now. I know I’ve got it beaten. The trouble is, I don’t know whether it’s the honey diet, the yoga, or the deep breathing. And the damn doctors here don’t know either. I ask old Phillips about it, and he say, ‘Well, Harry-boy, I don’t know what to say. I feel it must be psychological.’ ”

Harry’s speech, now that it was unobstructed, was extraordinarily musical, rising, falling, with unexpected passages of emphasis and unexpected changes of pace. Psychological, as Harry spoke it, was like a line of song.

The air was fresher, even at this low height; it was without the hot salty moistness of the air at the estuary. The house was set back from the cliff end; the parched, pebbly lawn was shaded by Honduras pines and almond trees, flat round leaves of green and red and brown on horizontal black branches; and in the porch, where there was only a view of the sky and the distant sea, and no reflected glare, it was cool. Chairs had been put out, two Guatemalan hammocks strung up. Rum punch, tumblers, and a bowl of ice cubes were on a table.

Harry said, “When you’re up here, you wouldn’t believe that that nonsense is going on down there.”

This was the routine of Sunday at Harry de Tunja’s beach house: the early morning drive down from the Ridge through the silent city, the quiet suburbs and factory area, the uncrowded roads; the drive through the bush of what had once been coffee and cocoa plantations, past the weatherbeaten little tin-and-timber huts that dated from that time; along the rocky coast, little bays of untrodden sand, sharp rocks, and white, crashing waves, turbulent rock-bound coves; through the forest then, thinning out on the cliff above the sea: arrival, the early morning breeze, the early morning light, the walk along the beach, and then rum punch until midday.

Jane had been to the beach house about half a dozen times. This was the routine she knew. But today something was missing; the house was missing some presence. It was missing Marie-Thérèse, Harry’s wife. She had, without warning, left him. One afternoon she had driven their two children to the airport — they were going back to their school in Canada after the holidays — and she hadn’t returned home. It was a drama. The de Tunja house was one of the best known on the Ridge. To people who didn’t know them well, like Jane when she had just arrived, the gaiety of the de Tunjas could seem excessive, even forced; they seemed to like too many people; they offered friendship too easily. But the naturalness of the de Tunjas had overcome all doubts; they were like people without secrets; and they had become Jane and Roche’s only friends. It had seemed such a settled house; they had taken such pride in its fixtures and its garden and the frivolities of the dark and very cold air-conditioned room known as Harry’s Bar. The breakup had unsettled many people. But there was little sympathy for Harry, because with the breakup the even more unsettling news had come out that the de Tunjas had been establishing their status as Canadian “landed immigrants.” Harry had been the complete Ridge man. Now, to many people on the Ridge, his news was like a double confirmation of the instability in which they all knew they lived.

Something of this instability, of an order suddenly undermined, extended to the beach house, so that, independently, both Jane and Roche understood they had come to the end of the last pleasure they shared on the island: Sunday at Harry’s beach house. The furniture in the porch was the same; the striped hammocks were the same; Joseph was busy in the kitchen; yet the day had been reduced to its routine and the house was already like something vacated.