V. Naipaul - Guerrillas

A triangle of white light was advancing from the porch into the sitting room, over the curling edge of the electric-blue carpet, which lay untacked on the terrazzo floor. Glare picked out fine dust on the smoked glass top of the oval center table. On this table Jane saw, as though laid out for inspection, airmail letters with English stamps.

She said, “You must miss England?”

She saw him hesitate: it was as though she had asked him a trap question.

Roche said, with that weary tone that had once set her looking for deeper meanings in his words, “England is in the eye of the storm. It’s part of their great luck.”

Turning half-coy from Jimmy, her complexion so fresh, so well cared for, she said, irritation coming quickly to her eyes, “Is it lucky to be half dead?”

It was what he had taught her, what she had picked up from him and incorporated, as words, as a passing attitude, into the chaos of words and attitudes she possessed: words that she might shed at any time, as easily as she had picked them up, and forget she had ever spoken them, she who had once been married to a young politician and had without effort incarnated an ordinary correctness, and who might easily return to such a role. She was without memory: Roche had decided that some time ago. She was without consistency or even coherence. She knew only what she was and what she had been born to; to this knowledge she was tethered; it was her stability, enabling her to adventure in security. Adventuring, she was indifferent, perhaps blind, to the contradiction between what she said and what she was so secure of being; and this indifference or blindness, this absence of the sense of the absurd, was part of her unassailability.

Jimmy said at last: “I miss my children.”

He offered soft drinks. He was a Muslim, he said, and drank no alcohol. After he had served them he sat down in one of the furry chairs. With two small, deft movements he hitched up his trousers, holding each crease between a thumb and forefinger. He rested his bare arms flat on the arms of the chair, and began very gently to rub his palms over the thick synthetic fur. Jane noted the rubbing gesture and stroked the fur on her own chair. It was smooth and felt almost oiled; her palms tickled and her teeth were set on edge. He was so neat, with his tight, creased trousers; his gestures were so small and precise. His full lower lip was moist and very pink in the middle, it seemed to Jane it had been worn down to this color by the constant little licks he gave with the tip of his tongue. He shaved very close; the stiff hair was embedded deep in his coarse skin, and his cheeks and chin were bumpy from the razor, with a whitish bloom on the bumps.

The soft drink he had offered was disagreeable. It had the tainted-water taste of the pale fluid at the top of an unshaken bottle of orange juice; and the frosted tumblers, more or less full, running with wet on the outside, remained on their wooden coasters on the glass-topped table.

Roche had withdrawn from the conversation. His brow had puckered; his irritation showed. Jane was calm.

Jimmy said, “England isn’t real.”

“What do you mean, it isn’t real?” Roche said. “Do you know what you mean?”

Jane said, “I know what he means.”

Jimmy gave a little lick to his lips. His hands went still, fingers spread on the arms of his chair, and he held his back flat against the back of his chair. “The problems aren’t going to be solved there. You know what happens in England. Everybody goes to the demo and the meeting and then they leave you and go home to tea.”

Roche said, “Do they still go home to tea in England?”

Jimmy looked at Jane. She was interested, smiling, coy, very pink. He said, “I got away in time. I was lucky. Over there the black man can become”—he fumbled for the word—“like a playboy. They make you like a playboy in England.”

It was the wrong word. Jane, fumbling after him, worked out what he meant: plaything.

She said, “Playboy. That was the impression the papers gave.”

So, in London, she had heard of him. He said: “Hmm.”

Roche said, “I didn’t see Stephens. What’s happened to him?”

“I suppose he’s run out on us, massa.”

Jane said, “I want to hear more about England.”

Roche said, “I’m asking him about Stephens.”

Jane smiled and crossed her legs.

“These people want overnight results, massa. Stephens was the wild one. You thought you were sending me a worker. You didn’t know you were sending me a little boy who wanted to kill me dead. He thought he should be here.” He waved his hand about the room. “Everybody wants to be a leader.”

Roche said, “So Stephens has left?”

“I don’t know, massa.”

Jane said, “It must be a hard life, here.”

“I don’t know about a hard life,” Jimmy said. “To me it’s life. It’s work. I’m a worker. I was born in the back room of a Chinese grocery. I’m a hakwai Chinee. You know what a hakwai is? It’s the Chinese for nigger. They have a word for it too. And that’s what they thought I was going to be when I got back here. ‘Oh, he’s a big shot in England and so on, but over here he’s just going to be a hakwai . Let him start up his movement. Let him take on the niggers. Let him see how far he’ll get. This isn’t England.’ They thought they were trapping me. Now they see they’ve trapped themselves. Eh, massa? They’ve got to support me, massa. Sablich’s and everybody else. They’ve got to make me bigger. Because, if I fail — hmm. I’m the only man that stands between them and revolution, and they know it now, massa. That’s why I’m the only man they’re afraid of. They know that all I want in my hand is a megaphone, and the whole pack of cards will come tumbling down. I’m not like the others. I’m not a street-corner politician. I don’t make any speeches. Nobody’s going to throw me in jail because I’m subversive. I’m not subversive. I’m the friend of every capitalist in the country. Everybody is my friend. I’m not going out on the streets to change the government. Nobody is going to shoot me down. I am here, and I stay here. If they want to kill me they have to come here. I carry no gun.” He raised his bare arms off the chair and held them up, showing the palms. The short sleeves of the drab-colored tunic rode down his pale, firm biceps and revealed the springs of hair in his armpits. “I have no gun. I’m no guerrilla.”

He stopped abruptly and lowered his arms. The words had carried him away; he had spoken too quickly and hadn’t ordered his thoughts. He hadn’t said the right things; he had mixed too many things together. His eyes went hooded; his lower lip jutted. His hands lay flat on the arms of the chair, fingers stiffly together.

Jane said, “Was your wife English?”

Jimmy stood up. His eyes were more hooded; his lower lip had begun to curl. On his smooth forehead creases appeared, and the skin below his eyes darkened. He said, “Yes, yes.”

Roche saw that it was time to go.

“EVERY TIME I meet Jimmy,” Roche said, as they drove away, “I make it a point to lose my temper with him at least once, to bring him back to earth. He was unusually excited today. I suppose it was because of you.”

“He was showing off a lot.”

“There’s always a little truth in everything he says. That’s the odd thing.”

“That ghastly shed. Those moronic-looking boys. All that shit in the field.”

“Did you give that boy any money?”

“No.”

“Once you allow them to blackmail you it’s hard to have any authority with them.”

Jane said, “Harry de Tunja was saying that Jimmy was sinister. I found those boys infinitely more worrying.”