V. Naipaul - Guerrillas

“That was what we wrote,” Meredith said. “We would write fifty of those, or a hundred, even two hundred. Some boys sold lines. And that to me is the message of your book. You transgressed; you were punished; the world goes on.”

“That’s how it’s turned out. If you want to put it like that.”

“It’s the message of your book. You’ve endured terrible things — you’ve got to try to come to terms with it, and I can see how that attitude can give you a kind of personal peace. But it’s a dead end. It doesn’t do anything for the rest of us. It doesn’t hold out hope for the rest of us.”

“Perhaps it’s a dead end for me. But I don’t know why you should want me to hold out hope.”

“We look up to people like you. I’ve told you. I’m trying to determine what you have to offer us. No bitterness, Peter. No anger. Don’t you think you’ve allowed yourself to become the conscience of your society?”

“I don’t know what people mean when they talk like that.”

“But you do. It’s nice to have someone in the background wringing their hands for you, averting the evil eye — what we call over here mal-yeux . You’ve heard the word? People are perfectly willing for you to be their conscience and to suffer, while they get on with the business of aggressing, and the thugs and psychopaths get on with their work in the torture chambers.”

“They’re not thugs. They’re perfectly ordinary people. They wear suits. They live in nice houses with gardens. They like going to good restaurants. They send their grown-up daughters to Europe for a year.”

“And people like you make it all right for them. Your society needs people like you. You belong to your society. I can understand why you say you are a stranger and feel a little bit at sea among us.”

“I came here to do a job of work.”

“We’ve been through that before. I don’t want to embarrass you, Peter. But you’ll understand that we look at things from different angles. Have you really come to terms with your experience? Do you really think the effort has gone to waste?”

“I haven’t come to terms with it. All my life I’ve been frightened of pain. Of being in a position where pain could be inflicted on me.”

Meredith crumpled the white handkerchief on the table. “You talk about that as though it was something that had to happen.”

“I know. I used to wonder about that. And it used to frighten me.”

“This obsession with pain. It’s something we all share to some degree. In your book — we’ve talked about this — in that chapter about your early life you talk about the German camps.”

“The publisher asked me to write in that chapter.”

“In that chapter you talk about the extermination camps. You say it was the most formative experience of your adolescence.”

“I’m forty-five. I imagine most people of my generation were affected.”

“It made you sympathetic to the Jews?”

“What I felt had nothing to do with the Jews.”

“Did you want to revenge the people who had suffered?”

“I wanted to honor them. In my mind. Not to dishonor them.”

“No anger?”

“What I felt wasn’t anger.”

“What did you feel, Peter?”

“I was ashamed.” Roche touched his left arm and felt his own warm sweat. “I was ashamed for this.” He let his hand rest on the wet arm. “I was ashamed that the body I had could be treated in that way.”

“And the test came. You made your gesture. You cut your railway line, you blew up your power station. The gesture was important. And you were prepared for the consequences. The psychology of bravery. It’s a very humbling thing. But now you’re at peace with the world. No bitterness, no anger. This obsession with pain and human suffering is in the past.”

“No, it’s much worse now.”

Meredith, crumpling the handkerchief, looking at the studio clock, appeared not to hear. “I feel we’ve gone a long way from the problems of white aggression in Southern Africa. Anyway, here we are, I can’t say at home, but at the end of your personal odyssey. You’re a stranger, you don’t feel involved. You’re involved with an agricultural commune which you consider antihistorical and which you don’t think can succeed. But for you it’s an opportunity for creative work. The human need, as you say. For you work is important. You aren’t too concerned about results. Peter, our time is almost up, and I must ask you a plain question. And I must ask you to answer it, because it is important for those of us who have to live here. Didn’t you think, didn’t it ever occur to you, that the Thrushcross Grange commune was a cover for the guerrillas?”

“It occurred to me once or twice, but I dismissed it.”

“You were wrong. But why did it occur to you, and why did you dismiss it?”

“It occurred to be because I’d read about guerrillas in the papers. But it seemed to me farfetched. I didn’t believe in the guerrillas.”

“What did you believe in?”

“I believed in the gangs.”

Meredith raised his face and for some seconds he fixed a smile on Roche, looking at him above the microphone. Then he turned to the studio manager’s cubicle, pushed back his chair carelessly, and said, “It’s finished. It was marvelous. Let’s get out and breathe.”

Meredith stood up. Roche remained sitting. Meredith’s shirt was wet all the way down: Roche could see the bump of Meredith’s navel below his vest. It was like noticing a secret. Headachy, temples throbbing, not sure why he was focusing on Meredith’s navel, Roche thought: Yes, that was my mistake. I should have looked for that first. That, and the waistband.

In the studio was the amber light of late afternoon. Just beyond the double doors was dim electric light that emphasized the darkness. And it was very cold. The refrigerated air struck through Roche’s wet shirt, seconds before so hot, and chilled him instantly into goose flesh.

The studio manager, in his white shirt and striped tie, was as cool and calm as he had always seemed. The old-fashioned respectability of his white shirt and tie, the smoothness of his very black, hairless skin, the fullness of his pure African features, his heavy broad shoulders, the languor of his manner as he filled the duplicated form pinned to his writing board, the unhurried civility with which he turned to look at Roche and Meredith, marked him as a man from the deep country, perhaps the first of his family to be educated, the first to hold a respectable job in the city. He raised himself in his chair and smiled briefly at Roche and Meredith.

In his soft singsong voice he said to Meredith, “Twenty-two t’irty-five.”

Meredith said, “With the intro we’ll make it twenty-five minutes. We won’t have to hack it about.”

Meredith’s step was springy in the dim, chill corridor.

“It was very good, Peter.”

“Are you going to take out the interruptions?”

“Yes, those will go. You sound worried. I have an editing session tomorrow. The intro will be recorded then. You have nothing to worry about. It was better than you think. In these matters I’m a better judge than you.” His talk was as springy as his walk.

Roche said, “The studio manager seemed pretty cool.”

“Those people hear nothing. They only hear sound and level. They can read a book or write a letter while they’re listening.”

When they were getting into the elevator, which hissed and felt very cold, Roche said, “I’m sorry I said that about the gangs. Can that be taken out?”

“Why? I thought that was very good.”

“I was thinking about that boy’s mother.”

“But it’s true. She knows it’s true. And it’s what people here need to be told.”