V. Naipaul - The Mimic Men

Yet if I was embarrassed, in a way I couldn’t explain, Sandra was at once taken; and between the two women there instantly grew up an intense relationship. They saw each other for hours every day; they went out together, for the day, for week-ends; doubtless they arranged adventures. In those last days I often had the absurd feeling that I was responsible for two alien women. What was the basis of the attraction between them? Was it the attraction between the ugly woman and the attractive? It might have been; though in such a relationship Wendy would have had the counterweight of her name. Was it that Wendy recognized in Sandra someone who was about to leave and was therefore in no way a danger? Was it that, starting from opposite ends, they had come to share the same social attitudes? A little of all this, I feel sure. A little, too, of enthusiasm: for in these last days Sandra wonderfully revived. In our island myth this was the prescribed end of marriages like mine: the wife goes off with someone from the Cercle Sportif, outside whose gates at night the willingly betrayed husband waits in his motorcar. The circumstances were slightly different, it is true. I couldn’t believe the story, put about by the women of our group, that Sandra had begun, under Wendy’s influence, to frequent the Cercle. To these women, with their metropolitan backgrounds, their new money, their wine-basket pretensions, their talk of interior decoration and the books reviewed in the last issue of Time, the Cercle would have been shabby and a comedown; and I could not think of Sandra, with her gift of the phrase and her attitude to the common, lasting long among the salesmen and bank employees and estate overseers.

The end came, of course. The week-ends, the morning coffee with Wendy in our air-conditioned bars and cafés, the trips to the beach, and doubtless the adventures, they came to an end. And it was announced as usual by Sandra wandering about the house in petticoat and brassiere. Once, through the open door of her room, I caught sight of her, late in the afternoon, lying on the bed, her feet together, the toes nervously twitching; I was greatly moved.

There remained a restaurant to do. We went on a Saturday. We were given a table at the front, just a few feet from the platform on which the band and the master of ceremonies stood. From time to time someone went up to the master of ceremonies, whispered into his ear or handed him a bit of paper; a minute or two later a spotlight would play on a table and the whisperer would stand while the band played and would either clown or look offended, as one whose privacy had been disturbed. Sandra and I agreed that the restaurant was not likely to last. There was much coming and going in the area between our table and the dance band, and it was with surprise that we saw that Wendy Deschampsneufs was with a small party three tables away.

I could see that Sandra was drawn. I could see that she was, disastrously, yielding. The music ended. She got up and walked over. And Wendy did not see her. No anger on Wendy’s face, no drumming of feet or hands, no humming and slow nodding, no staring ahead or through. Wendy simply did not see. It was as though she had been born and trained for this perfect moment of non-seeing. It was seconds before Sandra began to walk back. Walking back, she became a little more composed. She took her bag from a chair at our table and said, very precisely in the small room:

‘The Niger is a tributary of that Seine.’

The island phrase! The cry of the defeated in the war between master and slave! I was sickened. The sentence that had come to me during that afternoon tea at the Deschamps neufs’, when Wendy had climbed over my chair and rubbed against me like a cat, now came back, whole: Why, recognising the enemy, did you not kill him swiftly? These emotions of weakness, when we try to frighten no one so much as ourselves with our ability to hurt! So differently it was to turn out. As, even then, it was already too late for action or for speech: going down, past the brand-new ‘tropical’ decorations on the steps, from the grotesque air-conditioned restaurant into the warm, smelly street.

MY first instinct was towards the writing of history, as I have said. It was an urge that surprised me in the midst of activity, during those moments of stillness and withdrawal which came to me in the days of power, when with compassion for others there also came an awareness of myself not as an individual but as a performer, in that child’s game where every action of the victim is deemed to have been done at the command of his tormentor, and where even refusal is useless, for that too can be deemed to have been commanded, and the only end is tears and walking away. It was the shock of the first historian’s vision, a religious moment if you will, humbling, a vision of a disorder that was beyond any one man to control yet which, I felt, if I could pin down, might bring me calm. It is the vision that is with me now. This man, this room, this city; this story, this language, this form. It is a moment that dies, but a moment my ideal narrative would extend. It is a moment that comes to me fleetingly when I go out to the centre of this city, this dying mechanized city, and in the window of a print shop I see a picture of the city of other times: sheep, say, in Soho Square. Just for an instant I long to be transported into that scene, and at the same time I am overwhelmed by the absurdity of the wish and all the loss that it implies; and in the middle of a street so real, in the middle of an assessment of my situation that is so practical and realistic, I am like that child outside a hut at dusk, to whom the world is so big and unknown and time so limitless; and I have visions of Central Asian horsemen, among whom I am one, riding below a sky threatening snow to the very end of an empty world.

ON Isabella when I was a child it was a disgrace to be poor. It is, alas, no longer so. And it astonished me when I first came to England to find that it wasn’t so here either. I arrived at a time of reform. Politicians proclaimed the meanness of their birth and the poverty of their upbringing and described themselves with virtuous rage as barefoot boys. On Isabella, where we had the genuine article in abundance, this was a common term of schoolboy abuse; and I was embarrassed on behalf of these great men. To be descended from generations of idlers and failures, an unbroken line of the unimaginative, unenterprising and oppressed, had always seemed to me to be a cause for deep, silent shame. Sandra’s attitude, of contempt for her origins, seemed to me healthier and more liberal, being more quickening of endeavour; though it puzzled me that she too made no attempt to hide her origins.

It was my ambiguous New World background, no doubt. My father was a schoolteacher and poor. I never saw his family and naturally suspected the worst; and though it was through my father that I was later to be dragged into public life, as a boy I did what I could to suppress the connection. I preferred to lay claim to my mother’s family. They were among the richest in the island and belonged to that small group known as ‘Isabella millionaires’. It gave me great pleasure at school to have Cecil, my mother’s brother, roughly my own age, say that we were related. Cecil was a tyrant; he offered and withdrew his patronage whimsically. But I never wavered in my claim.

My mother’s family owned the Bella Bella Bottling Works and were among other things the local bottlers of Coca-Cola. In Coca-Cola therefore I at an early age took an almost proprietorial interest. I welcomed gibes at its expense and liked to pretend they were aimed at me personally, though I could not find it in myself to go as far as Cecil, who offered to fight any boy who spoke disrespectfully of his family’s product. Though he perhaps never knew the word, my mother’s father managed his public relations with skill; there was no one on Isabella, I am sure, who did not know of Bella Bella. We — or they — sponsored two programmes on the local radio station: one, Songs of Yesteryear, a request programme, rather dreary, for Bella Bella in general; the other, extremely popular, for Coca-Cola, The Coca-Cola Quiz, which offered prizes. Tickets for this ‘show’ were allotted to schools throughout the island; there was always a rush for them. Two or three afternoons a week groups of schoolchildren were taken round the Bella Bella works. My grandfather had put it to the education authorities that such tours of modern industrial plant were educational; and in spite of the passionate but unimportant opposition of my father the authorities agreed. The visits took place during school hours; at the end each child was given a free drink; and again, as for The Coca-Cola Quiz, numbers had to be fiercely controlled.