V. Naipaul - Guerrillas

She felt the pressure of his hands on her shoulders, and suddenly she was turned over on her belly and he was squatting on her, her hips and legs squeezed between his knees, thighs, and feet. He said, “It’s going to be different today, Jane. We’re doing it the other way.” She made as if to rise, but he held her down between the shoulder blades with his left hand, and opened her up with his right. She began to beat her hands on the bed. As soon as, moving down from the base of her spine he touched her where she was smaller, she cried out, “No!” And when he entered, squatting on her, driving in, his ankles pressed against her hips, she began to wail, a dry, scraping, deliberate sound. He said, as though speaking to a child, “But you’re a virgin, Jane. Isn’t it a good thing you came to see me today?” She shouted with real pain, “Take it out, take it out.” She began to wail again. He said, “A big girl like you, and a virgin, Jane? It’s hard. I know it’s hard. But you didn’t bring your Vaseline, you see. A big girl like you should always take her own Vaseline when she goes visiting.” She said, “Oh my God, oh my God.” He said, “It’s better like this, Jane. You didn’t know that? You mean they never told you it was better with your legs closed? Aren’t you glad you came? It’s always better with your legs closed, whatever way you do it.” He drove deeper and deeper, until he was almost sitting upright on her. He said, “We’re breaking you in today, Jane.” He began to withdraw; sweat from his face and chest dripped on her back; she sighed; but he drove in hard and she shrieked. Her hands stopped beating on the bed; her inflamed face was pressed on one side on the pillow. She stopped wailing; she took her right hand to her mouth and began to bite on her thumb; real tears came. Sobbing, biting her thumb, she began to plead, now with a suppressed scream, now with a whisper, “Take it out, take it out.” Her body went soft; she was sweating all over. He withdrew and said, “There now.” She said, “Have you taken it out?” He said, “Yes, Jane. You’ve lost your virginity.”

She remained just as he had left her, her face on the pillow, the tears running down her nose; her untanned buttocks together, spreading slightly, wet with sweat where he had been sitting on her, the fine hairs there flattened in the sweat and showing more clearly. She sobbed and snuffled.

When he was off her, and beside her, not touching her, she said, like a child, “You made me cry! You made me cry!” Her face was red and wet with tears; but she was oddly calm.

He said, “I knew this about you as soon as I saw you that day. As soon as I saw your eyes and the shape of your mouth.”

“My ‘bedroom eyes.’ ”

He said, very softly, “You are rotten meat.”

It was his tone, rather than the words, that alarmed her. When she turned over to look at him she saw that his eyes were very bright and appeared sightless, the pupils mere points of glitter. He was still erect and looked very big.

He put his hand lightly on her shoulder and said, “You look frightened, Jane.”

“I’m thinking I have to go back.”

She swung her legs over the edge of the bed, he allowed his hand to slip off her shoulder, and she stood up.

“But I haven’t come, Jane.”

His eyes were on her. She bent down to pick up her pants, heedless of the hairiness and open flesh, her secret once again, that she was exposing. And, bending down, straightening up, she had in one movement pulled her pants on, covering herself where she was untanned and naked.

He said, “Your mouth, Jane. You have a sweet-mouth too. As soon as I saw you I knew you had a sweet-mouth. We must christen it.”

He continued to look at her. She pulled on her trousers; stepped into her shoes; buttoned her blouse, put on the Moroccan necklaces, and shook her hair into place.

She said, “I think I have to go.”

He sat on the edge of the bed; his erection was subsiding. He said, “You have to go. But you know what you are now. You’ll come again for more.”

“I’ll ring for a taxi.”

“You’ll be lucky if you get one to come here. But you don’t have anything to worry about. Massa is coming for you. Massa isn’t going to let you go.” He stood up; he had shrunken. “We’ll walk across to the Grange and meet massa.”

The telephone was on the chest of drawers but she didn’t lift it. She didn’t leave the room. She stood where she was, between the chest of drawers and the door, and waited for him to dress. The pillow was as she had left it, pressed down and damp; the stained sheet had patches of damp. He dressed slowly. When, lifting his chin, he did the top button of his Mao shirt, he said, “The shirt you don’t like.” She responded in no way.

When they went out into the living room, the cigarette in the blue-tinted ash tray had almost burnt itself out, a disintegrating cylinder of ash. The glass of water on the glass-topped table was where she had put it down. She picked up her lighter and bag and followed him out to the porch. The sunlight on the terrazzo was dazzling. He didn’t shut the front door.

They walked out into the heat and the openness. No trees grew between the house and the wall of bush. The road was lightly rubbled: stray pebbles, loosened bits of tarred gravel, clods of earth. The road ended abruptly, cracked asphalt giving way to a dirt path through a dried-up field, overgrown and then flattened by the drought. The path led to the wall of bush.

Jimmy said, “Massa will be waiting for you. A short walk. Ten minutes.”

She didn’t speak.

He said, “We’ll also meet Bryant. You remember Bryant?”

“I don’t want to see Bryant.”

“But he has something for you. Bryant has something for you.”

The green wall of bush, which from a distance had seemed solid, threaded with the slender white trunks and branches of softwood trees, became more pierced and open as they got closer to it.

Jimmy said, “Bryant and I are not friends now, Jane. You’ll help to make us friends.”

It was cooler in the bush. The ground was dry, covered with dead leaves, and spotted with big patches of sunlight. There seemed at first to be no path, just an intermittent disturbance in the dead leaves; and for the first time since she had followed him out of the bedroom she hesitated. He touched the top of her arm and moved the tips of his fingers down the short sleeve of her cotton blouse. Lightly, then, he held her arm and led her on. Ants’ nests, of dried mud, were like black veins on the white trunks of softwood trees. The wild banana was in flower: a solid spray of spearheads of orange and yellow that never turned to fruit, emerging sticky with mauve gum and slime from the heart of the tree.

Jimmy said, “They say there’s always a snake at the bottom of that tree. So be careful. See but never touch. It’s the golden rule of the bush.”

They were now in the middle of the bush, no light and openness behind them, trees and trees ahead of them.

“So you’re leaving us, Jane. That was why you came. Because you’re leaving. Do you have a nice house in London?”

“I’m used to it.”

“Everything nicely put away, I bet. Is it near Wimbledon?”

“No. It isn’t near Wimbledon.”

“Suppose it burns down while you’re away?”

“It’s insured.”

“You’ll just build another?”

“I suppose so.”

He suddenly squeezed her arm and said, “Smell it, Jane!”

She stopped and looked about her.

He said, “You can smell it?”

“What?”

“Snake.”

“I can’t smell anything.”

“It smells of sex, Jane. Bad, stale sex. It smells of a dirty cunt.”

He released her arm. The bush was becoming brighter; they were approaching openness. And soon, through the trees, the clearing on which the Grange stood could be seen: an expanse of brown in a hard white light. There was a latrine smell, which became sharper. The latrine, with corrugated-iron walls and roof and a sagging, open corrugated-iron door, stood on a rough concrete foundation just outside the bush, in direct sunlight. Brilliant green flies buzzed about it and within it, striking the corrugated iron.