V. Naipaul - Guerrillas

“SO PAMELA couldn’t make it, eh,” Harry said, leading Meredith out of the dark living room to the porch. Harry’s thick-soled canvas shoes flashed white at the end of his slender brown legs and appeared comically large. “Everybody behaving as though what happen between Marie-Thérèse and me is like a wedding in reverse. Some people on the groom side, some people on the bride side.”

Meredith, coming onto the porch, and acting out his entrance, said with a heavy local accent. “I hear she giving the feller hell, man, Harry. She after him to acquire landed-immigrant status.”

“Oh God, Merry, man. You too?”

Meredith was short and walked with a spring. He was slender but his body looked hard: he was heavier than he looked. He wore a white shirt with a button-down collar; it was unbuttoned at the neck but not too open, and it didn’t suggest holiday dress. The shirt was too tight over his solid shoulders, the collar was too close to the neck: a tie seemed to be missing.

Still making his entrance, he stood on the porch, swinging his hands together, rapping a box of matches against a pack of cigarettes. He said, “Jane.”

“Hello, Meredith.” She had rearranged her legs on the chair.

Meredith said, “Peter, I want to see you.”

“Is it good or bad?”

“That depends on you. Don’t look so frightened. We’ll talk later. What have you been doing this morning?” He sat down on the aluminum-framed stool beside Roche’s hammock.

Harry said, “The usual thing, nuh. We went for a walk on the beach. And we watched those people doing their business.” He made it sound a morning of pure pleasure. “Have you seen them?”

Meredith took a glass of rum punch. He said, “There’s a lot of mad people in this place.”

Jane said, “Are they mad?”

Harry said, “They’re not sane.”

“Jane doesn’t believe they’re sane either,” Roche said.

“The visitor’s courtesy,” Meredith said. “Cheers. ‘We’re just like you. You’re just like us.’ What’s new with Sablich’s these days, Peter?”

“I’m not sure I’m the person to ask,” Roche said. “I’ve decided to leave.”

Harry looked alarmed. “But you never told me, Peter.”

Meredith, sipping rum punch, smiled at Jane. “So you’re leaving us, Jane.”

She said, “It’s the first I’ve heard of it.”

Roche said, “I’ve only just decided.” He laughed and showed his molars. “It’s all these mad people I’ve been hearing about.”

Harry, sitting in his hammock, and moving back and forth, the tips of his canvas shoes touching the terrazzo floor, said, “But this place is full of mad people, for truth. I was just thinking about it the other day. I was at the races, and I was buying some nuts from ‘Nuts and Bolts’—you know the guy? And it suddenly hit me that all those people selling peanuts and cashew nuts are mad like hell. I say it suddenly hit me, but I’ve known it since I was a child. I always knew those fellers were mad like hell. The funny thing is I never found it funny. And, you know, once you realize you have madmen running about the place, you start seeing them everywhere. It’s a damn frightening thing.”

Meredith said, “You sound worried, Harry.”

“In any other country those guys would be put away. I don’t know how we start the fashion here that the moment a guy get mad he must hook up two big baskets on his arms, put on tennis shoes and start walking about the place, shouting, ‘Nuts, nuts.’ ”

Meredith said, “I will keep an eye on you.”

Jane said, “It sounds the most marvelous therapy.”

Roche said, “It will give a new dimension to swinging London.”

“An overgrown idiot boy lived near my elementary school,” Meredith said. “He was white. A big boy. He couldn’t close his mouth. He used to point at us and say, ‘Bam! Bam!’ That was all he wanted to do, to play cowboys-and-Indians with you. You could make him very happy if you bammed back. But that was committing yourself to a term-long relationship. We called him Bam. That was all. Nobody troubled him. He was just part of the scenery.”

Jane said, “How very humane.”

“Humane?” Harry said. “That is our downfall. We encourage too much slackness.”

Meredith said, “I think we should ask Peter about that.”

“I used to think we had to work with what was there. I don’t know what I think now.”

“We don’t make enough allowance for the madness,” Meredith said. “Read the papers, listen to the radio, read any government report: you will feel that we’re all very logical, rational people and we know where we want to go. I suppose that was my mistake. I knew about the madness. I knew about it in my bones. I grew up with the damn thing, after all. Like you, Harry. But I pretended it didn’t exist. I don’t know how it happens, but the moment you start thinking or writing or worrying about resources and your five-year plan, you forget the madness. You forget about those people down there on the beach. A good politician should never do that.”

Harry said, “But that’s a hell of a thing you’re telling us, Merry. This place could be a paradise, man, if people really planned. We could have real industries. We don’t have to let the Americans just take away our bauxite.”

“I traveled out with two of the bauxite Americans,” Jane said. “They spent all their time on the plane reading pornography. The hard stuff. Easy Lay and Sucked Dry.”

“We could have real industries,” Harry said, lying down in his hammock, his chest singing asthmatically, creating an effect of accompanying bird song. “Not this nonsense we have. One factory, one rich white businessman, one rich black politician.”

“All this is true,” Meredith said. “But they may not want what you want for them. They want other things. The people down there by the river have other needs.”

“Oh God, man, Merry, you know a lot of those fellers are just damn corrupt. You say so yourself. It make me so damn sad, seeing boys I go to school with going in for this thing. You always try to tell yourself, ‘Oh, this guy is still right. That guy is still okay.’ And then one day you see the feller with his belly hanging over his waistband, and you know he gone the way of all flesh. Jane, you know that? The moment you see one of these fellers getting to the belly-hanging-over-waistband stage you know how his mind working. You know what happen to him. It is the only thing you have to look for. The belly and the waistband. It make me so damn ashamed, man, to see those fellers at parties. Jane, they will take two drinks at the same time. And they will eat as though they’ve never seen food.”

Meredith said, “They’re very hungry.”

He had been looking at Harry with a fixed wounded smile. This smile, and the way he held his head, drew attention to the wide space between his nose and his mouth. This part of his face looked especially vulnerable: here could still be seen the bullied schoolboy he had perhaps been. And there was about his reply to Harry something of the pertness of the schoolboy.

Harry crossed his legs in the hammock and looked out at the dazzling sea. “Twenty, thirty years ago, everybody was lifting weights. You would see people exercising in every back yard. You remember the body-beautiful craze, Merry? It was a lovely thing, man. It used to make you feel so good. You remember how those boys used to walk?”

“ ‘Wings,’ ” Meredith said, and laughed. He put down his glass and acted out the posture: squaring his shoulders, raising his elbows, and letting his hands hang loose. “The gorilla walk. But those were the needs of those days.”

Harry said, “We’re not talking the same language.”

“You are pretending you don’t understand me,” Meredith said. His smile had vanished, and he spoke precisely, with an edge in his voice. “If those people down on the beach were a little saner, don’t you think they would burn the place down twice a year? Madness keeps the place going.”