V. Naipaul - The Mimic Men

I have spoken of the mood of celebration with which I left London and which for the next ten years I sought to maintain, never ceasing to savour each day the pleasure of the whole mind. I have also hinted at the uneasiness with which on the morning of arrival I saw through each porthole the blue, green and gold of the tropical island. So pure and fresh! And I knew it to be, horribly, man-made; to be exhausted, fraudulent, cruel and, above all, not mine. Yet I pretended that it was, and stood against the rail with the camera-clicking visitors who threw pennies into the clear water and watched the Negro boys dive for them, the pink soles of their feet like luminous fins. The boys also dived for oranges, apples, anything thrown into the water. The grey-green bay was still and in shadow; far away, in the early morning haze, fishing boats were going tinily about their tasks. Below us the diving boys rocked on their rafts; they giggled and laughed, all teeth; water glinted in beads on their seemingly dry heads; they invited us to throw more things for them to retrieve. Someone threw a rotten orange; the boys dived. It struck me as intolerable; it was one of the things I had stopped later. Not for long, needless to say. Distress can be shared only up to a point; to go beyond that point is to presume. In the recent tourist publicity for Isabella I see that the diving boys are again presented as a feature.

I linger now on this moment of arrival more than I did at the time. This return so soon to a landscape which I thought I had put out of my life for good was a failure and a humiliation. Yet this, together with all my unease, I buried away. I am no great believer in justice, but I think there is a moral balance in all human events; if only we look down deeply enough, we can spot the beginning of the misfortunes that eventually overtake us in just such a small suppression of the truth, in just such a tiny corruption. On that first morning I should have said, ‘This tainted island is not for me. I decided years ago that this landscape was not mine. Let us move on. Let us stay on the ship and be taken somewhere else.’

In my own mind I have the excuse of the mood of celebration, of the failure so recent and damaging. Also, it might have been that as a result of my marriage to Sandra I had begun to surrender the direction of my life, not simply to her, but to events. So dishonesty linked to dishonesty, unease to unease: to have examined my reactions more closely would have meant making myself open again to that feeling of drift and helplessness, the nightmare I had combated on so many evenings by the thought of the Luger at my head. I suppose it is also the excuse I must put forward for my behaviour in the subsequent years. And to me it is strange that it is only now, as I write, that I see, like the sympathetic historian of a revolution who detects the seed of disaster in some minor and unregarded action, it is only now I see that all the activity of these years, existing as I have said in my own mind in parenthesis, represented a type of withdrawal, and was part of the injury inflicted on me by the too solid three-dimensional city in which I could never feel myself as anything but spectral, disintegrating, pointless, fluid. The city made by man but passed out of his control: breakdown the negative reaction, activity the positive: opposite but equal aspects of an accommodation to a sense of place which, like memory, when grown acute, becomes a source of pain.

But for the moment I trusted to Sandra’s luck. It was soon tested. As we drew nearer the docks the island of the travel poster vanished. Hills, palms and fishing boats in the morning grey gave way to the international paraphernalia of a dockside; tall warehouses bounded and shadowed our view of cranes, asphalt and a small old locomotive. Here and there a near-naked Negro in spectacularly ragged khaki shorts lounged in a parked lorry. Thoroughly, tropically futile he might have seemed to a sight-hungry visitor; but I knew that his garments were his so-called working clothes, that he was a docker, and that he belonged to a particularly cantankerous trade union whose go-slows and general wilful inefficiency had been the subject of innumerable fruitless inquiries.

As yet, though, it was a scene of peace: cranes at rest, the violent dockers in attitudes of repose, everything awaiting the heat and dust of the rapidly approaching working day. But then, even before that came, there arose the most fearful clamour.

I hadn’t, I must confess, informed my mother of my marriage; nervousness had always been converted into fatigue whenever I sat down to write that letter. Sandra believed that my mother knew; and the mutual dismay of the two women — precipitated by my easy remark to Sandra: ‘Oh, look, there’s my mother’ — might easily be imagined. Yet not easily: we are a melodramatic race and do not let pass occasions for public display. Picture, then, Sandra in her carefully chosen disembarkation outfit coming face to face with a conventionally attired Hindu widow. Picture her mistaking the raised arms and the first wail for a ritual of welcome and, out of a determination to meet strange and ancient customs half-way, concealing whatever surprise and bewilderment she might have felt; then, with the wail broken only to be heightened, the gestures of distress converted explicitly into gestures of rejection, realizing the nature of her reception, hesitating in her already tentative approach to the frenzied figure of my mother, and finally standing still, the centre now of a scene which was beginning to draw a fair audience of dockworkers roused from their languor, passengers, visitors, officials, the crews of ships of various nations.

I was very calm myself. I paid no attention to my mother’s interjections that I had killed her and went about the business of looking after luggage, nodding to customs officials whom I recognized, exchanging words with the newspaper reporters who interviewed every returning student. Poor old Eden, whom I had known at Isabella Imperial College, was the Inquirer’s man. (He played: fair his story stated simply that my wife and I had been met at the docks by my mother.) I was calm because I felt that the situation was not important. The suspicion — later confirmed — had come early to me that with the steady traffic between London and Isabella my mother had some idea of my marriage and had prepared for the scene she was now so successfully making. It was a grand scene, perhaps the grandest that had been granted her, and was recompense of a sort for the ridicule I had exposed her to, particularly from those families with marriageable daughters by whom, during my absence, she must have been courted. I say it myself, but I was a catch! Not only one of the heirs to the Bella Bella Bottling Works fortune but also — unlike the common run of our business people — educated, degreed, travelled. In the circumstances I had given my mother a blow. But I also knew that silence and passivity on her part would have been the true danger signs. They would have betokened a lingering rebuke; and this might have taken the form of suicide by slow, secret starvation. This dockside scene, on the other hand, was pure self-indulgence; it augured well.

Complicated: Sandra could not have been expected to make my swift assessment, nor could it be transmitted to her in a few whispered words. She came and stood next to the gathered luggage. She looked quite bad-tempered, and I thought that this meant she was in control of herself and the situation; I expected nothing less of her. I told her that I thought it would be unwise if we went to my mother’s house. She said snappishly, in university jargon, ‘That’s an interesting approach to the subject. You don’t happen to have such a thing as a hotel on this damned island?’ I misinterpreted her mood; I thought she was being decisive. It was only later, when regret was valueless, that I saw that the greater callousness of my placidity that day was to Sandra rather than my mother. I relied on her forthrightness and what I thought was her vision; but to her this reliance must have seemed like abandonment at a moment when she was most insecure. I don’t think she ever forgave me or the island. Yet I acted from the finest feelings towards her! I remember with what affection I contemplated her as, exhausted by more than the warmth of our Isabella afternoon, she lay stretched out on the bed in the hotel room, in her clean white brassiere and chaste white cotton petticoat, below the electric ceiling fan. She wore the cheap, white-rimmed and I believe damaging sunglasses she had bought in the Azores. She smoked a cigarette, smoking in the factory-girl way, lips bunched wetly over the cigarette set in the centre of her mouth, inhaling deeply as though drawing urgently needed nourishment. It was a mannerism she had picked up in a government agricultural camp in Dorset where she had spent a month and where she had learned to smoke; it was a mannerism that attracted me greatly. The smoke eddied and thinned in the draught from the fan. I was exhausted myself, on the verge of self-pity; and considering the comic, intense, sunglassed figure on the bed, her skin just beginning to be moist, I thought that she was courageous to have come so far to a life of which she knew nothing. Until this journey she had never travelled or stayed in a hotel; and I felt that, catch though I might have been on the island of Isabella, I could not have provided better for a return to the island than by marriage to Sandra.