V. Naipaul - The Mimic Men

At last we cleared the town and on the open road the lorry pulled away. Our driver made no attempt to keep up. When the lorry was out of sight Cecil’s father broke down. As he spoke he lost control of himself. He clenched and unclenched his fists, struck his palms and struck the back of the driver’s seat. The driver, out of sympathy and perhaps also because he feared assault, pulled up on the verge and, with his hands on the steering wheel, looked ahead past the clicking windscreen wipers.

‘Why you make me suffer like this?’ Cecil’s father asked the driver. ‘Why you make me suffer?’

‘I got his number, boss.’

‘You got his number, you got his number. What good that will do? You put me in the position of listening to all that.’

‘Telephone Mr Mitchell, boss. They will find out about the loaders and fix them up.’

‘Telephone Mr Mitchell, telephone Mr Mitchell. Hello, Mr Mitchell, some damn illiterate people insult me for ten minutes on the road this morning, and my own driver was in the wrong.’ He went wild. He was Cecil’s father and subject to the same somewhat unbalanced rages.

I tried to calm him down. ‘They were only loaders, Nana.’

This excited him more than ever. He howled and slapped his forehead. ‘They make me shame. They make me shame. Oh, my God!’ And in the parked car, close with the windows up, he behaved as though he had just been told he had lost a fortune. The bottler of Coca-Cola, the Isabella millionaire, the nominated Member of the Council.

At first, during that drive, I had felt endangered. Now I thought I saw how easy it was to destroy. A man was only what he saw of himself in others, and an intimation came to me of chieftainship in that island. This was my political awakening. This might be said to have been my first political lesson. A leader of my people? A biter of the hand that fed me? Or simply a Singh, avenging a personal shipwreck? Whatever the impulse, that lesson, so easily learned, so easily carried out when the time came, was an exceedingly simple and foolish one.

CECIL sometimes came home with me after school. I was always pleased when he did. I liked Cecil. He was the opposite of Hok but in his own way just as attractive. I liked his confidence and his wildness. I liked his lefthander’s gestures, that lift of the shoulder when he walked. He was impulsively generous; his father used to say, with greater truth than any of us then knew, that Cecil was born to give away. I liked to give Cecil things too. But I had little to give him. The only interesting thing our house had was paper, headed or plain, from the Education Department. My father brought home quantities; he said that the stealing of paper was not really stealing. I used to give Cecil some of this paper. His delight puzzled me; I never knew what he used the paper for.

We were going through my father’s desk one day, both Cecil and I looking for something I could give Cecil, when we came upon a worn little booklet with photographs of naked women, blurred or depilated in patches. Plump little bodies in foolish attitudes: the weak enticing the weak. I was astonished and as ashamed as when I heard the loaders’ obscenities in Cecil’s father’s car. I told Cecil that the photographs were mine, partly to ease the shame and partly to suggest to him that I had resources of vice he had not suspected. I said he could have them. I had ‘used’ them — I don’t know how the word came to me — and I no longer needed them. He was greatly excited, so excited that he forgot to carry out the threat of nailing a Coca-Cola cap to my father’s desk.

He took the booklet to school next day. It created a sensation. It caught the attention of the teachers as well and was passed among them from hand to hand until it rested on the headmaster’s desk. Cecil said the book was mine and when I was asked I said this was so. I was not flogged. Instead I was regarded with awe, especially after I had repeated the sentence about not needing the pictures since I had ‘used’ them. A letter was written to my father, which I delivered. He came to the school and we had a confrontation in the headmaster’s room below the neat time-table that was never followed and the board that contained the names of brilliant past scholars. The booklet lay isolated on the headmaster’s desk like a thing that could not be of interest to any of the three of us. The headmaster looked from my father to me. My father did not look at me and I did not look at him. I wished all the time to transmit to him the message that I did not think less of him for being interested in these pictures: he after all had a ‘wife’ and was only yielding to a widespread weakness. My father suffered. He was an honest man. The headmaster pressed him but he could not bring himself to condemn me. ‘I will talk to him. I will talk to him,’ he kept on saying.

He never did. It was only on that Friday, library day for me, that there was something like a sequel. I was in our back gallery reading The Aryan Peoples and Their Migrations. It was an old book with an old smell; every time I opened it the spine cracked; I believe I was the first person to take it out of the library. It was not an easy book to read.

My father came in, his bicycle clips still on, his sharkskin jacket sagging and dirty at the pockets, his face tired, his eyes watery behind his glasses.

‘What are you reading today?’

I showed him.

‘You can go and impress your mother’s family with that. They can’t read without moving their lips or turn a page without licking their finger. But don’t try to fool me, you hear. You understanding what you read?’

‘But of course.’

‘You are a damned liar. Aryan-waryan, what the hell do you know about that?’

I remembered how at school Browne, being seen with a Tarzan book, explained in his clowning way to the master, ‘I only read books of commonsense, sir.’ So now I said, ‘I only read books of commonsense.’

I really believed he was going to hit me. And when he pulled the book out of my hands, so roughly that he tore the brittle cover from its binding, I thought he was going to hit me with that. But he merely opened the book at random and asked, ‘What is the meaning of homogeneous?’

We underestimate our strength and throw away our hand. Up till that moment the advantage had been mine; but now, faced with the home version of The Coca-Cola Quiz, I panicked and said, ‘I didn’t bring the book home for me. I brought it for you.’

‘Damned liar.’

‘I won’t listen to this. You know that cricket bat you gave me for Christmas? I am going to give it to Cecil. I don’t want to touch it now.’

‘Give it to Cecil. The poor always give to the rich.’

I brought Cecil home on Monday and showed him the bat. I had left it in the front veranda with a formal note that I no longer wished to make use of this present from my father. In a way this was true, for I had given up as commonplace the fantasy in which, going to the cricket ground during an international match, I had been discovered with this bat, had been instantly picked — one of the batsmen’s bats being broken and the batsman discarded with his bat — and had saved the side. I asked Cecil whether he wanted the bat. He read the note and it upset me that he didn’t, like my mother, coax me to keep the bat. He simply tore the note off, crumpled it up and threw it into the garden. He said that legally the bat was now his and I was not to touch it without his permission. He was a strange boy, Cecil. I was miserable afterwards.

My father broke a few things when he got home and found I had given the bat away. He went to his room and I heard him talking to himself. Late in the evening he went out. He stopped at the parlour at the corner for a soft drink. Something must have happened there to irritate him, because without any provocation he began to break the place up. It was a simple breaking-up at first, but soon my father began to concentrate on Coca-Cola. He broke bottle after bottle; and, being continually armed with jagged Coca-Cola necks, he terrified the poor shopkeeper. He broke ninety-six bottles in all, four full cases, breaking one bottle after another, methodically, as though he had been paid to do it; he didn’t just lift a Coca-Cola case and smash it on the floor. My mother ran out when a neighbour brought the news. The police had also been called, and the police in this case was a young policeman whom my father had often summoned in the past to quell disturbances in the street: the unlicensed butchering of animals in backyards, the playing of games on the pavement and so on. The matter fortunately didn’t get into the courts or the newspapers. We compensated everyone generously.