V. Naipaul - Guerrillas

He said, “It looks as though we’re losing some of our rations.”

Jane went to the kitchen and said, “You’ve made a lot of sandwiches, Adela.”

Adela said, “I taking it down to the station.”

The station: the police station. Jane could say nothing. She stood by, watching and not interfering, while Adela, still with knitted brow, and still with deft hands, lined two wickerwork shopping baskets with a damp cloth, packed the sandwiches in, covered them with another damp cloth, and then knotted the bundle within each basket.

Feeding the warriors, the protectors. Where had Adela acquired this knowledge? She behaved as though she had been through crises like this before, as though, at times like this, certain things had to be done, as certain things had to be done when a baby was born or when someone died. She hadn’t asked for permission to prepare the sandwiches; she hadn’t asked for help. And when she was ready she didn’t ask for a lift. She hooked the baskets on her sturdy arms; and Jane watched her stride down the drive to the gate, brisk in the sun, her shadow dancing, looking like a nurse in her white uniform, which dazzled. It was oddly reassuring.

The sun was now falling on the front of the house, on the concrete wall and the louvers and the sealed glass of the picture window. It was time to open the back door, which had been closed after lunch to keep out the glare. When Jane opened the door she saw the shadow of the house was just covering the porch; and she sat in one of the metal chairs, still warm, and waited for Adela to return. The silent city burned in four or five places now. The smoke from the first fire was still black, but less dense.

Then she saw the plane. She had heard nothing. It was the faint brown smoke trail, rapidly vanishing, that led her eye to the plane climbing above the airport and away from the city.

She stayed where she was, in the metal chair, and watched the shadow of the house move down the slope of the back garden. She saw the heat waves disappear and felt the porch and the ground about the porch grow cool. She heard Adela come back. She had been waiting for Adela, for the reassurance of her presence, for the life she would give to the house, which she knew better than Jane or Roche and treated with a respect she withheld from them. She had also been waiting for Adela’s news. But she didn’t go to see Adela. She remained in her chair, and Adela didn’t come out to her.

She heard Roche moving restlessly about the house. But he too didn’t come out to the porch. She heard him talking to Adela and attempting in his polite and roundabout way to get some news from her. Adela’s tone was abrupt and sour; and though later Roche succeeded in getting her to talk, her words were not easy to follow and Jane didn’t listen.

The sunlight yellowed. The shadow of the house spread further down the garden slope. The light turned amber and gave a richness to the choked soft growth of Bermuda grass against the retaining wall, where the grass seed had been washed down, during the now distant time of the rains, from the clay of the front and back lawns: thin blanched stalks of grass, pale green at the tips and browning toward the roots. The amber light deepened and fleetingly the garden and the dusty brown vegetation of the hill glowed.

She heard the telephone ring. She didn’t get up. Roche answered; she heard him talking to Harry; she closed her mind to his words.

The amber light died. The city remained silent. Below the splendor of the early evening sky the city and the sea went dark and the fires in the city were little patches of glow. They became dimmer when the electric lights came on. Yet occasionally, in a brightening glow, the movement of black smoke could be seen. It became cold on the porch. The fluorescent light began to jump in the kitchen and then the blue-white light fell on the back lawn and melted away into the darkness of the sloping garden. Jane heard a tap running in the kitchen. Water. She got up at last, to go inside. She was thinking: After this, I’ll live alone.

Throughout the evening that resolution, which was like a new comfort, was with her. It was with her in the morning: the silence continuing, a strain now, the lawn wet again, the metal chairs on the porch wet, the fires in the city thinner, less black, seemingly almost burnt out.

Her calm did not break through all the routine of Tuesday morning: Adela’s bedroom noises and radio program, the BBC news, breakfast. Her calm came to an end, and for the first time during the crisis she knew panic when, lunchtime past, with no call from Adela, she left her louvered room and looked for Adela and couldn’t find her. The back door was open: the brick porch baked.

Without Adela the house was empty. Adela had been the link for the last day and a half between Roche and herself. Without Adela the house had no meaning. Jane could feel the thinness of its walls, the brittleness of the louvers, the breakability of its glass, the exposed position of the house on the Ridge. So that even in the dark of her bedroom she no longer felt protected or confined. That was where she stayed, waiting for Adela through all the heat of the afternoon, through fantasies of bigger fires starting in the city, around the squarer, taller buildings that rose above the brown tufts of trees in the main park. She waited until sunset. And when the telephone rang she hurried to the warm sitting room to answer it.

It was Harry, telephoning for the second time that day.

He said, “It’s bad, girl. They say the police cracking up. Guys taking off their uniforms and running away. But I don’t know. The police are still at our station. And Joseph is still taking food down there.”

“Oh, is Joseph taking food too?” And Jane realized, from the difficulty she had in getting out those words, that she hadn’t spoken for twenty-four hours.

“Marie-Thérèse telephone him,” Harry said. “Is what everybody around here doing.”

Jane said, “Adela took some sandwiches down.”

“I don’t see how you can blame the police. They don’t know who they fighting or who they fighting for. Everybody down there is a leader now. I hear there isn’t even a government. You hear about Meredith? He went out braver-danger , you know, to try to talk to them. They chase him.”

“Meredith can look after himself.”

“Well, I suppose you right, child.”

“How is Marie-Thérèse?”

“She’s all right. She’s telephoning all the time. I don’t know what she’s saying to Joseph, but he is keeping very cool.”

“Adela has left us.”

“Jane.”

“She left this midday.”

“She’s probably just gone for a little stroll. With all the excitement, nuh, she’s probably deciding to put first things first. She’s probably got some little thing going down the gully somewhere.”

“She’s taken her transistor.”

“Well, child, I don’t know whether you lucky or unlucky. I don’t know whether I should ask you to come over here for the night. Or whether I should be coming to you. To tell you the truth, I am not too happy living alone in this house with Joseph.”

When she put down the telephone, there was again the silence. Time had jumped: it was night. The lights had come on, but not everywhere. Parts of the city remained in darkness. The irregular shapes of the lit-up areas, linked sometimes by the white lights of main roads, created an odd pattern, as of something seen under a microscope. The smoldering rubbish dump glowed faintly in the darkness that surrounded it. In the dark areas of the city itself there were about half a dozen fires. Abruptly sometimes a fire glowed and lit up the smoke that rose from it; then the glow faded and the smoke was hard to see.

. . .

EARLY IN the morning Harry came. Jane had not been long on the back porch — the sea glassy, the smoke from last night’s fires in the city white and thin, the newspaper Roche had left out on the metal table on the porch sodden with dew (one of the things that infuriated Adela) — when she heard the car idling at the front gate and then driving in. She walked round to the front lawn. Harry had parked in the drive and was closing the gate.