V. Naipaul - Guerrillas

He came back to the breakfast table. Jane and Roche were sitting silent, not looking at one another.

Harry said, “Good news. If it’s true. Bertie says he thinks the police are holding out. It was just that airplane on Monday. It demoralized a lot of people.”

Jane filled the coffee cups again, and they all went out on the porch. Jane cleared away the sodden newspaper, and she and Harry wiped the wet table and chairs.

When they were all seated, Harry said, “Can you imagine this green, Jane?”

She said, “It was green when I came. But that’s how it always is. I always have to imagine what I’m missing.”

Roche said, “Did Bertie say anything about the government?”

“He didn’t say anything. But I assume the boys are still in control. The only lucky thing is that none of the big guys have been killed yet. Because, once that kind of killing starts, it isn’t going to stop. It’s going to be South America for a couple of generations. Meredith frightened me on Sunday. He talked about Jimmy Ahmed as though he wanted to kill the man. I’d never heard anything like that before. But that was when they were dressing Merry up to throw him to the crowd. Now the two of them have to run.”

Roche said, “So Jimmy is washed up?”

“I think so. According to what I hear. Nobody is mentioning him anymore. He gambled and lost.”

Roche said, “I can’t imagine Jimmy taking that kind of gamble. I wonder whether things didn’t just happen around him.”

Harry said, “Jimmy was always washed up here. I don’t know who told him otherwise. I don’t know what they told him in London. But at a time like this he is just another Chinaman.”

Roche said, “I suppose I’m washed up too.”

Harry said, “I wouldn’t say so.”

Roche smiled. “Sablich’s will also want to dress up somebody to throw to the crowd.”

Harry said, “Let us listen to the news, nuh. Bring out the radio, nuh, Jane. They had a little thing on it last night. I don’t know whether you hear it. ‘The causes of the disturbances are still not clear.’ ”

She went and got their plastic-cased transistor and tuned it to the local station. Bringing Christ to the Nation ended. The announcer hurried through a commercial, identified his station; and the news from London was relayed. Reception was good. There was nothing on the headlines, nothing during the first half of the news. Then it came, after an item about Argentina.

“… still tense after two days of rioting. Earlier reports of police desertions and the resignation of the government have now been officially denied. Government sources now say that the police have returned in strength to most areas of the capital from which they had previously withdrawn, and that most services are working normally. There are no reports of casualties. The causes of the disturbance are still not clear. But a correspondent in the area says in a despatch to the BBC that speculation about a concerted anti-government rebellion can be discounted. It seems more likely, the correspondent adds, that the disturbances were sparked off by radical youth groups protesting against unemployment and what they see as continued foreign domination of the economy …”

Jane said, “I’m glad to know what it’s all about.”

Harry said, “You mean about the ‘foreign domination.’ But in the end, you know, that is what those guys down there would believe they were doing. Because what they’re doing is too crazy.”

“That’s how it will go down in the books,” Roche said. “That’s how it will be discussed. That’s what you can start believing yourself. And start acting on.”

Dazzle, like the dazzle of the sea, came to a part of the city: the new tin roofs of the shantytown redevelopment, catching the sun.

Harry said, “Police withdrawing from areas of the city? I am damn glad I didn’t know it was so bad.”

“Perhaps in a couple of days we’ll know how bad it is now,” Roche said.

They sat and watched the silent city. They began to feel the heat of the sun on their faces and legs. The wet Bermuda grass was drying out. In the light the old fires in the city hardly seemed to smoke.

Harry said, “We used to have a private security patrol up here. Ten dollars a month. Twenty-four hours. I bet you a lot of people now wish we still had it.”

Jane said, “Why did you stop?”

Harry made a theatrical sour face and hunched his shoulders up and down. “Some people say they didn’t like it, some people say it was too expensive. But mostly it was because in a situation like this people never cooperate. They always think they can buy peace for themselves when the time comes, and so they get picked off one by one. They much prefer doing what they’re doing now. You know Yvette, Jane? She is baking cakes for the police. And, my dear, icing them. As though is some kind of kiddies’ carnival going on in the station. And Joseph too. Making his nice little sandwiches. He even chopping off the crust.”

Jane said, “Ten dollars a month? Was that all they charged?”

Roche said, “It was cheap, wasn’t it, Jane?”

“Per house,” Harry said. “But they weren’t so hot, you know. Some smart guy came down from the States and decided to give the guards motorbikes and two-way radios, and to increase the charge to twenty dollars a month. And that was that. Those guys just went crazy about their bikes and radios. They start going so fast that if you stand outside your gate and shout ‘Help!’ you’d be damn lucky if they hear you.”

PRECISELY AT eight o’clock the helicopters arrived. A magnified mosquito hum at first, and then, very quickly, a roar and a clacking, destroying silence, making conversation impossible on the porch. They came from the right, from a source in a part of the bay hidden by the hills. The noise of one helicopter overrode the noise of the others. The house seemed to shake, and the brick-floored porch on its platform of packed earth felt unstable. (The porch, built on sloping land, had sunken in once before; the surface bricks had been taken up then, and there had been nothing below, a depression, the packed earth having subsided.) Noise engulfed the house; dust blew about. The pale shadow of the flying craft rippled down the sloping garden and then fell on the tops of the trees beyond the gully at the foot of the garden. The American markings on the helicopter were large; the men inside weren’t in uniform.

Other helicopters were flying over other areas of the hills. And, in the distance, helicopters of another type, seemingly broken-backed, were moving in staggered flights of three across the sea that was still smooth, across the gray-green mangrove and the brown plain to the airport, hovering close to the ground there, then rising and flying back the way they had come, black insects returning to their hidden nest.

Harry said, “Licks.”

Noise engulfed the house again: the patrol helicopter returning. It covered them with its shadow; the porch felt fragile. And the air was full of dust.

Away on the plain the helicopters continued to move in threes, coming down to the airport and almost settling, and then whirling away as if angered.

Harry said, “Peter, you have glasses? Binoculars, nuh.”

Roche shook his head. His face had gone blank.

Harry said, “I hope Joseph ain’t running out into the garden with my glasses. It’s just the kind of thing he would do. Foolish, nuh. But they would pick him off easy-easy from up there. I must say I feel naked like hell sitting out here. The Americans shoot everybody. They’re worse than the South Americans.”

Roche said, “We didn’t have to wait too long to find out how bad it is.”

Harry said, “And I was trying to hide a little revolver from Joseph. I was wondering when this was going to happen. The Americans are not going to let anybody here stop them lifting bauxite. You see, Jane? They don’t just read pornography.”