V. Naipaul - Guerrillas

In this quiet night Marge I want to clear my heart and wipe the slate clean. You made me a man so late and I had to behave like a man. The others were jokers, you thought I didn’t know, but I knew they were joking with my manhood and pain, but I was joking with them too, they didn’t know and when they found out they didn’t like it, they sent me back here, to make me nothing again, I knew what they were up to, don’t think I don’t know, I played along. You shouldn’t have let me down Marjorie, you shouldn’t have sided with the others, I didn’t want to hate you like the others, you were my maker, you broke my heart, you made me and then you made me feel like dirt again, good only for dirt. But it’s funny how people always catch me out and let me down, so I am dying in anger Marge as you prophesied and isn’t that a terrible way to die .

You people sent me back here to be nothing but I picked myself up, I must have surprised you, you must have read about me in the papers, the people here knew who I was, they knew what I had done, they knew what I was offering them, the glory and pain of manhood, never mind the revolution, they knew that and that was why last week I could have burned this place down to the ground, until that dead boy’s mother refused to have me in her house and those crazy black people started shouting for Israel and Africa, and I was a lost man, but I was always lost, I knew that since I was a child, I knew I was fooling myself. But I am a man Marjorie, it is what you made me, the pain you brought me, and you see how it is ending. Sweetheart, sweetheart even as I write those words my nakedness rises and it makes me sad to think it’s useless, these things make sense only when there’s someone else who needs it, they get life from it, you know what they say, dead men come once .

The open pad lay before him, part of the paper debris on his desk. But he no longer saw what he had written. He had stopped writing, long ago, it seemed; he had returned to himself.

The room was full of shadows; only the desk lamp was on. The house was full of noises, the scattered metallic snaps of the corrugated-iron roof, the creaks of the rafters. At last, above these noises, he heard what he had been waiting for: a disturbance outside, no clear sound, more like a disturbance of the air.

He said, “Bryant?” and then, distinctly, through the open barred windows he heard footsteps outside, soft, rubber-soled, moving swiftly down the side of the house. He stood up and shouted, “Bryant!” The sound of the cutlass blade being dragged flat over the concrete steps outside the kitchen set his teeth on edge. He moved quickly about the room, putting on all the lights. He said, “Bryant, don’t try anything tonight. Do you hear? Don’t do it, boy.”

He went to the kitchen and stood against the door. He looked up at the ceiling and said, “You’re tired. You’re not well. Why don’t you eat, then go and rest? Go and rest, Bryant. We’ll talk tomorrow. I’ll come over to the Grange to see you. We’ll talk. It isn’t the end of the world. We’ll leave this place and go somewhere else. There’s nothing to be afraid of. You’ll get better. But you must go and rest.”

THE OLD truck ahead, its untrue double tires hissing on the soft tar, was carrying a load of river sand. The sand was wet and dripping, but the truck left no water trail on the road. The broken trickles of brownish water, whipped about by the truck’s speed, and evaporating in the afternoon heat, vanished as soon as they touched the asphalt.

Jane was in a taxi. The taxi was a large American car past its prime, its pieces no longer absolutely fitting together. In spite of its size it gave little protection against glare and heat. Hot air and exhaust fumes came through the windows, and the sun struck through on the driver’s side, scorching the plastic seat cover.

The truck went past the turning that led, through young sugar cane, to the airport. The taxi continued to follow the truck: the airport was not Jane’s destination. Presently, a bare and dusty black arm signaling, the truck turned off into a factory yard. Some miles later, the traffic less regular, the area of factories left behind, the taxi turned off the highway. And Jane saw the landscape she thought she would never see again: the rough narrow road, broken here and there, overgrown at the edges, the flattened scorched areas, the rows of brick pillars, still looking new, but stripped of their timber superstructures and hung with dried-out creepers, the distant wall of bush.

The taxi stopped at the house. Bougainvillaea and hibiscus were bright in the burnt garden.

Jane said to the driver, “Can you wait? I won’t be long.”

“How long?”

“Fifteen minutes, half an hour.”

“Better you telephone the office when you ready.”

She paid him and went through the open gate. He turned in the gateway, the big car dislodging a light rubble of stray pebbles, the tires crushing to ocher powder little clods of dry earth blown there by the wind; and he went back the way they had come.

No one had appeared at the sound of the car. The car port was empty, the oil stains on the concrete floor dry and dusted over. The front door was closed; Jane had remembered it open. The shallow terrazzo steps and the porch, already slanted with sunlight, were gritty, unswept.

Before she could knock, Jimmy opened the door. He held it open, and for a second or so he appeared not to see her: he was looking over her shoulder. He was as she had first seen him that day at Thrushcross Grange, when, after walking bare-chested down the aisle between the iron beds, he had put on the drab-colored Mao shirt. He was wearing that shirt now; his plump cheeks were as coarse from close shaving as they had been then, his full mouth as seemingly clamped shut below the mustache, his eyes as blank and assessing.

He said, after that little silence, “Jane. You made it, then?”

“Why do you sound so surprised?”

“I’m not surprised.”

She passed into the room, and he locked the door behind her. The room felt airless, though the barred windows were open. And she saw disorder: she saw he had not prepared the house for her visit. Disorder emphasized the cheapness of the furniture, its impermanence in that room: it no longer gave delight. There were newspapers on the furry upholstered chairs, and cups and plates and tins and sticky marks on the dining table. The electric-blue carpet, loose on the terrazzo, curled at the edges: the floor could easily be imagined without it. There was dust on the glass-topped table, and a confusion of papers, writing pads and blue air-letters on the desk.

She sat down in the upholstered chair next to the glass-topped table. The synthetic furry fabric was warm. She remembered to stroke it: it was as tickling smooth as she had remembered.

Jimmy said, “Make yourself at home. Can I get you anything? No rum punch. That’s your drink, isn’t it?”

“It’s too hot for that. I’ll just have a glass of water.”

He went out to the kitchen, and from that room, which she had seen once, he said, “Supplies are running low, Jane.”

Hot air came through the windows. The sky was pale blue.

He came out and handed her a glass of water, without ice. The glass was wet on the outside; his hand was wet. He sat at the desk.

“Well, Jane. What can I do for you?”

She was taking the wet glass to her lips. But she saw that it was stained, with dark brown trickles, and she just held the glass a little way from her mouth. She said, “I’m leaving.”

“You told me on the telephone. You’re going back to London. And massa?”

“I suppose Peter’s leaving too.” She put the glass down on the glass-topped table. “But I don’t know about him.”