V. Naipaul - The Mimic Men

In the village shadows had contracted to edgings around huts and to faint glare-shot patterns below trees. On the beach, which I had left empty, there was now a sprinkling of people and activity of a sort. The sand was not fresh. What had been level and shining clean now had the look of something sullied. It had been scuffed and scored, abraded in irregular patches, and littered with red and pale blue entrails already gone flat and lacklustre. Pariah dogs, ribby and of nondescript colour, fawn or pale yellow, wandered about with their long tails between their legs. The heat of the sand penetrated the soles of my canvas shoes. More people appeared on the beach. But being by now part of the activity I had noticed from a distance, it struck me that the activity was curiously muted, without a centre. Some people looked at the sea. Many more stood idly on the sand. Some stood beside the fishermen, who sat mending their nets in the no-shade under coconut trees next to their rough but brightly painted boats. The mixed Carib and African descent of these fishermen showed in their expressionless faces, burnt by sun and salt and wind to a blackness so pure it had ceased to be a noticeable colour. About me on the beach movement was continuous, but unhurried and undefined. From the refreshment shack where I had earlier had the Pepsi-Cola and the turnover came the gramophone. I remember the song it played. It was Bésame Mucho. Words and music rose above the wind and surf and went out ragged over that ragged crowded beach. Then I heard. People were drowning. There in that infernal devouring element people were drowning. The fishermen were being begged to go out and save them. The fishermen sat on the roots of coconut trees and mended their nets and stripped lengths of canes for their fishpots. Their lean Carib-black faces were like masks. I imagined myself drowning. And in this imagining I became detached; feeling no anger against the fishermen who, as I could hear now, were talking among themselves in their patois; feeling only the feebleness and absurdity of any attempt to rescue those persons, already bodies, hidden in that turquoise water beyond the breakers. The visitors, the people on holiday, were frightened; the locals were as calm as the fishermen. To me, standing in my detachment, my overwhelming fear of death, the story came in snatches. A brother had swum out to save his drowning sisters and had himself disappeared. The tide was ebbing fast: they would all be carried far out. So many versions in a short time I heard of that rescue effort by the brother. He had been frantic and foolish and had exhausted himself too soon. He had tried to fight through the breakers and had not swum under them; he had been dashed and twisted and broken on the sea bed. He was a townsman, he couldn’t swim. So many stories.

In my fear I turned away and walked back to the beach house. So private a fear it was, so private a sensation of the weakness of the flesh — these poor arms, these poor feet, this vulnerable head — it was shame for the weakness of the flesh that kept me from telling the story to the women. They took my silence for distress at the incident of the early morning and were kind. I accepted their kindness; as though I had taken on for all mankind the weight of the tragedy of flesh and the body I had just witnessed; and this comforting, this service at the hands of women, was fitting.

So it was Cecil who brought the news, and I pretended to hear it for the first time. Then we all ran out, the girls in their bathing suits tripping along the beach, now at low tide very wide, Cecil running far from us through the edge of the foaming water, taking high, splashing steps, an odd celebratory figure. The sand was like the sand of a tainted arena. The fishermen had disappeared. Their boats were out. The cork floats of the seine were in a wide arc on the sea beyond the breakers. Two boats were coming through the breakers in a confusion of white water; suddenly they were clear and driven down and up almost to the limit of the sea; they were being beached. The crowd split and ran to the two boats to take hold of the rope to pull in the seine. The story of the drownings came to us again. It was just before two, the period of stillness between morning and afternoon. The fishermen pulled in their measured way; the visitors and townspeople, already recognizable by their clothes, pulled frantically, as in a tug-of-war contest. And that record still played in the café. Still those words rode over wind and coconut branches. Bésame mucho, como si fuera la última vez. The absurd words of popular songs I Then I recognized Deschampsneufs and perhaps members of his family among the frantic pullers. I did not want to be observed. I stood aside. Until then the whole extended incident had been a private moment; now I became an observer.

The arc of the cork floats steadily contracted. It came in closer and closer. It cleared the breakers. Net appeared. Then came shouts. The dragging of the sea! Such an endeavour, so futile, like something in The Heroes. Yet it had produced results. The first body appeared, the second, the third. They had all died together, the rolling, drifting bodies, mingled now, as the seine came in to the shore, with fish, alive and silver. There were the fish we called the dogfish, attracted by death, people said. And there were thousands of little fish. And soon everything lay strained and dry on the dirty beach. The fish lay flapping on the sand, curving in brief spasms. The dogfish, threats until a minute ago, lay expiring, and people went among them as though animated by personal revenge and mangled their heads.

The bodies were laid out side by side on the sand in the sun, the bathing costumes still like living parts of them, wet as my own costume would have been if I had been swimming. Away from the group around the stretched-out bodies little arguments had started between the fishermen and some of the people who had helped to pull the seine. The people wanted the fish; the fishermen wanted money for the fish; the people said the fishermen had already been paid, and just for casting the seine. One toothless fisherman continually spoke obscenities. Eventually it was settled. I believe the fisherman got their money. The bodies were taken away; and on the low-tide beach, shining everywhere else, there remained matt marks where the bodies had lain, scrapings and scratchings and scuffed sand to show, just for a few more hours, what had happened. The beach was strewn with small fish, so recently whole and now so dull, so like garbage, silver turning to dark grey. The pariah dogs prowled nervously. The vultures watched from the coconut trees. The stingray, on its brown back, its underside bluish-white, showed a bloody stump where its tail had been hacked off.

The beach in this section of our island stretched for more than twenty miles, broken at intervals by the neat channels of streams, fresh but brackish, that flowed into the ocean from the cocoteraie. Coconut trees and beach and the white of breakers seemed to meet at a point in the distance. It was not possible to see where coconut turned to mangrove and swampland. Here and there, interrupting the straight line of beach, were the trunks of trees washed up by the sea. I set myself to walk to one tree, then to the other. I was soon far away from the village and from people, and was alone on the beach, smooth and shining silver in the dying light. No coconut now, but mangrove, tall on the black cages of their roots. From the mangrove swamps channels ran to the ocean between sand banks that were daily made and broken off, as neatly as if cut by machines, shallow channels of clear water touched with the amber of dead leaves, cool to the feet, different from the warm sea. On the beach itself the banks of these channels, the tide now rising, were continually undermined, fell off in vertical sections; and then the process of rounding and undermining began again: a geography lesson in miniature, with time speeded up. Here lay the tree, fast in the sand which was deep and level around it; impossible now to shift, what once had floated lightly on the waters, coming to the end of its journey at a particular moment; the home now of scores of alien creatures, which scattered at my approach. Here the island was like a place still awaiting Columbus and discovery.