V. Naipaul - Guerrillas

Marie-Thérèse had left, but she hadn’t gone far. The civil servant whose mistress she had become lived on the Ridge as well. She still acknowledged certain duties toward Harry and visited their house two or three times a week to see that everything worked. There was even some question that she might be coming to the beach house on this Sunday. But now, near midday, it was clear that she was spending the day elsewhere.

Harry said, “You met her on Friday, Jane. Did she tell you she was coming?”

“She didn’t say.”

Harry rocked in the hammock that was slung from the two front pillars of the porch. To Jane, in a chair at the back of the porch, he seemed to be swinging between the sea and the sky in his fringed Bermuda shorts and white canvas shoes and red-striped jersey. His arms were folded tight over his chest; there were dark rings below his sunken, distressed eyes.

Harry said, “I asked Meredith and Pamela. But it look as if something keeping them back too. That’s the trouble. When you lose your wife it’s like a wedding in reverse. Some people on the boy’s side, some people on the girl’s side.”

Harry’s turns of phrase, and his musical speech, could suggest humor where he intended none. Roche laughed. Jane watched for his tall, blackened molars. And she continued to study Roche’s face as he said, in his calm, reflective way, as though no human experience was outside his comprehension, “It’s the standard crisis. She’ll come back. When we are forty-one we all think it would be nice to make a fresh start. It’s the kind of thing we laugh at when we’re forty-two.”

Harry said, “Yes, Peter. That’s what you told me. And that’s the little philosophical bit I’ve been holding. But I don’t know, man. This damn thing going on too long now. I begin to feel they’re playing for keeps. I don’t know what come over Marie-Thérèse. She is a completely different person. I don’t know how anybody could change so much. I told her the other day, ‘Marie-Thérèse, that guy is just having a damn good time in bed with you.’ And you know what she said? Jane? Peter? She said, ‘What do you think I am having?’ You would believe that?”

Jane said, “I can believe it.” Her face had lost a little of its chalkiness. The rum punch was having an effect: she spoke quickly, gobbling up the words, and she laughed after she had spoken.

Harry said, “Then you see more than me. I never know Marie-Thérèse talk like that. She even moving differently. She come in the house these days and she start moving about like some kind of ghost. Quiet, but fast . When I tell you, boy. Those hands of hers just going like that, whish-whish-bam-bam, and that’s it. She straighten everything and she ready to go. She is like some kind of nun when she come home these days. You know those working nuns? Really, it’s as though she’s under some kind of spell. What’s this guy’s technique? That’s what I ask her only Friday gone. ‘Marie-Thérèse, what’s this guy’s technique? Has he read some book or something? Tell me, Marie-Thérèse. I can read too.’ ”

From seriousness he had moved to self-satire. He laughed, swung out of his hammock and said, “Let me go and see what Joseph is getting up to, eh.” As he went inside they heard him say, as though unwilling to let go of his joke, “Marie-Thérèse shouldn’t have done this to me.”

Roche swayed in his hammock. Jane sipped at her rum punch and then took a gulp. She was drinking too quickly. She had no palate, Roche thought. She ate and drank as she sometimes spoke, in the same gobbling way. It was something about her he had begun to define, an aspect of the physical gracelessness he had begun to notice since they had moved apart and she no longer required his comfort. She lay back in her aluminum-framed easy chair and held her hand over her eyes. Her face was irregularly flushed now and looked blotched; her eyes were moist. She lit a cigarette; but then almost immediately, with a flick of her middle finger, shot it into the dry lawn. She lay back in the chair looking abstracted, distressed, but as though preparing to relax. She was still for a minute; then, abruptly, she swung her legs to one side of the chair and stood up and went inside.

Roche let his hammock sway. The light now had a settled incandescence. The sounds, of wind and sea, seemed to have altered, were no longer the fresh sounds of early morning. Steady, repetitive, they emphasized the midday stillness. The cigarette Jane had thrown on the lawn smoked fiercely. As if from far away there came the sound of bells; and having heard this sound, Roche continued to hear it on the wind. His eyes felt strained. It was the light; he could feel a headache building up. He got out of the hammock and went inside to get his dark glasses.

It was dark in the living room, and cool; and in the bedroom, up two or three steps from the living room, it was darker, the window facing the sea wire-netted, the external storm shutters half closed, the wooden louvers inside tilted up, with just stripes of white light showing through the slats. Jane was standing on the other side of the bed, next to the window. She was naked below her cotton blouse; her blue trousers, with the pants inside them, were thrown on the bed. Half naked like this, she looked big and tall. She glanced at Roche as he came in; then, turning her back to him, and facing the window, she seemed about to sit on the bed. She came down hard on the very edge of the bed, which dipped below her weight; but she didn’t sit; she threw herself backward in an apparently abandoned attitude, opened her legs, raising her feet up against the wall, and inserted what Roche now realized was the tampon she held in her hand; and then almost immediately she was sitting, had seized the blue plastic tampon case from the bed and sent it spinning with a low, level flick of the wrist to the corner of the room where their basket was, with their beach things. The tampon case struck the concrete wall and clattered on the floor.

It had all been done swiftly, in as it were one action; and she had appeared quite athletic. Her shoulders had barely touched the bed before she had jerked herself up into a sitting position; and even while, fumbling at the bedside table with his dark glasses, which lay there with his car keys, Roche was recovering from what he had seen, Jane had pulled on her pants and trousers and, without a word to him, had gone out.

He remained behind in the room, looking at the window and the stripes of light, putting on his dark glasses, raising them above his eyes, playing with the contrast of glare and cool. Apart from the first glance as he had entered the room, she had not looked at him. That throwing back of herself on the bed, the swift gesture of insertion, and, above all, the shooting of the plastic container to the corner, that gesture with her large hands: it was as though she didn’t belong to her body, as though there was some spirit within her that was at odds with the body which she yet cherished and whose needs she sought to satisfy.

He stayed in the bedroom a while longer. When he went out to the porch, Jane was again lying in her chair, smoking; and Harry was swinging in his hammock, his arms tightly crossed, as though he was cold.

“Lovely, eh?” Harry said, looking out toward the sea. And after a pause: “It could be so damn lovely here, man.”

His words lingered between them. Then he said, “Well, I suppose Marie-Thérèse isn’t coming. And Meredith and Pamela had better hurry up. Otherwise I am man enough to start eating without them. I feel Meredith is coming late for spite, you know. Merry’s getting a little funny these days. I don’t know whether you notice. I hear he’s getting a little closer to the powers that be. I tell you, boy, whatever people say, I’m damn happy I’ve acquired this Canadian landed-immigrant status, you hear?” He laughed; it turned into a choked, asthmatic gasp. “It’s a damn funny way to live. When you were inside I was sitting here and looking up at that rusty hammock hook and thinking, ‘I better get the place repainted soon, before that rust take hold.’ And I don’t even know who will be here to enjoy the house next year. It’s a funny way to live, living in a place and not knowing whether you staying.”