V. Naipaul - The Mimic Men

So our first and last Sunday family outing ended; and so our Sunday lunches ended as well. My father withdrew once more. The baby Austin ceased to be comic and became to us a symbol of indefinable terror. We were happier when it was garaged with some defect. Since then, I might add here, I have looked upon the little-man type in his little car with feelings which, to say the least, are mixed. My sisters and I began spending our week-ends freely again with my mother’s family. The suspicion came to me that between Cecil and one of my sisters there existed an incestuous relationship. I had nothing to go by, but with these things one just suddenly knows.

I was walking home from school one rainy afternoon. They were laying cables and the roads were dug up. The bright red clay ran like paint in the gutters. Here and there on the pavement were enormous cable bobbins. The cables were dusted with a white powder and looked like mass-manufactured pastry, a type of strudel, produced in enormous lengths and conveyed in this way — on the bobbins, pushed through the streets by straining barebacked men — to the retailers, who would chop it into small pieces. I heard a fresh shower of rain coming and I began to run. At a corner, as though he had been there a long time, expecting me, was my father. He was sitting on his bicycle with one foot on the pavement; the Austin was in some mechanic’s garage.

‘Hop on,’ he said. ‘I think we can take a chance.’

To me towing on bicycles was one of the deep, tempting illegalities. It ranked with cycling at night without a light or riding an unlicensed bicycle; it ranked, in illegality if not yet in temptation, with driving an uninsured motorcar or driving without a permit. It astonished me that my father, a government servant, should choose on a main road so openly to break the law. But his arm was outstretched in invitation, and it was raining.

I sat on the crossbar. I felt the awkwardness of my protruding limbs and the burden of my weight. His arms imprisoned me. We went off shakily. I could hear his tremulous breathing and was aware of the difficulty of every manœuvre on the muddy, slippery asphalt. I concentrated on the road. The rain was heavy and stinging; we were soon both soaked. People sheltering under the eaves of shops — as still and as meditative as people in the tropics appear when they shelter from a downpour — stared at us. We didn’t take shelter ourselves. We didn’t say a word to one another. We went on, concentrating on the road and its difficulties. The gutters were full and racing. We sank some inches in water once when the flooded road dipped without warning. We slipped and had little skids. But no accident befell us. When we got home my hair was dripping, my nose was dripping, my books were a pulpy mess, and my shirt was ticklingly stuck in patches to my chest and back. My father’s suit was ruined. But still we said nothing; and in silence we separated, to dry ourselves.

I wonder if I would have said anything, if I would have made some statement of gratitude or sympathy, if I had known that that was to be our last contact, that afterwards we were both to follow our separate destinies and that mine, for all my unwillingness, was to be linked to his.

My mother had a theory about the lower classes. She needed one because on our street we were surrounded by them. Apart from one or two very rich areas and three or four very poor areas, all our city was like this, with the slum shack in the unfenced lot next to the two-storeyed mansion. The system or lack of system had its points. Since for most of us there was nothing like a good address or a bad address, everyone submitted to an individual assessment, and this was invariably fair. Everyone received his due and there was harmony. My mother’s theory was that the lower classes respected only those who respected themselves. She used to tell the story of a middle-aged white woman who had lived on the street for years, respected by all; but had then so enraged the lower classes by briefly taking one of their number as a lover that she had had to move. Her house was stoned and broken into; when she walked down the street she was insulted by the very people who before would have been delighted to help with the garden or with a heavy box or suitcase. And now, without warning, we found ourselves in the position of that woman. We were not stoned or abused. But we fell definitely into the category of those who had ceased to respect themselves.

Not long after that cycle ride through the rain, my father failed to return home one afternoon. We kept the news to ourselves. The next day he wasn’t at the Education Department. We continued to keep the news to ourselves. It was only at the end of the week that we discovered that what was unknown to us and had become our secret was known to a large section of the island. We were waiting anxiously at home; we went out and found we had become notorious. It was like that. We went out and found that my father, so far from disappearing quietly, had become a figure of sorts. He was in the hills, a preacher, a leader, with a growing frenzied following.

We read about people leaving their homes ‘one day’. This is the fact, and beyond this we can seldom go. The literal side of my mind has tried a hundred times to work out satisfactorily the events of that day and that week; and a hundred times I am left with the facts minutely established, and their mystery. My father obviously intended to return home when he left for the Education Department that morning. Some of the department files he had brought home were on his desk; his clothes were in the wardrobe; his bankbook was in his drawer. What happened? A fit at the office, a rage, a storming out of the building? Or was it in a lower key? Did he leave the Austin behind because he thought of the city centre, and remembered the traffic congestion there? He was unbalanced, in a temper; he walked. He walked to the city centre, to Waterloo Square. He found himself among the idle and the unemployed. He found himself among the striking dockworkers. They talked among themselves. He broke in and told his own story. He told of his early life, of the missionary and his lady and the aboriginal young man in a clearing in the forest. He told of the years of darkness that followed his abandonment. He told of his marriage and his service with the government. He had never spoken of these things before; he held his audience. He told these men as despairing as himself of his decision, perhaps made even as he was speaking, to turn his back on this darkness. He was aware of his audience: the sons of slaves. Once, he told them, after the abolition of slavery, the ex-slaves had abandoned the foreign city and withdrawn to the forests to rediscover glory and a way of looking at the world. They were not afraid — fear lay not in the forests but in the regulated city and plantations — and these men had survived. Couldn’t the same be done again? His speech would have improved as he spoke. He saw, and his words were vivid. Then they started walking in procession. They went past the docks, where daily for a week there had been scuffles between the locked-out dockers and the equally depressed Volunteers’ who had replaced them. And the procession, taking both dockers and volunteers along with it, had left the area around the dock-gates deserted except for policemen, and in peace. Success is success; once it occurs it explains itself. On the march to the hills food and shelter must have been provided by the poor. Every morning the numbers increased. Witness my father, then, at the end of the week, camping with his followers on crown lands, ‘the forests of glory’, proclaiming the withdrawal of his flock and asking only that they be left alone.

It was an eccentric lower-class movement, and there were always eccentric movements among the lower classes. On any Sunday in our city you could have found twenty bizarre processions all dedicated to God and glory. In that first week the newspapers spoke only of the silence on the docks. They ignored the beginnings of a movement about which monographs have since been published by the universities of Porto Rico and Jamaica. The monographs tell accurately enough of the rise and withering-away of the movement; they describe its occasionally frightening ritual. But like so many sociological studies, they leave the mystery as mystery; they explain nothing. Twenty people say a thing and they are twenty madmen. But the twenty-first comes along, and he is a hero, a chieftain, a saint. A quality in the man, or a quality of the time? The message, or the fine tuning of responsive despair? A dock strike was being cruelly broken. Who ever believes in the totality of his defeat? Who, seeing this defeat coming and unable to comprehend its horror, does not believe he will in some way be protected or revenged? Today we can see this exodus from our city as a small part of the unrest in the colonies and poorer territories of the Americas just before the war. Each territory produced its own symptoms of disease, its own fantastic growths. We lived with disease; we had ceased to notice. Every day, if you looked, you could find some crazed preacher under a shop awning singing with his little band of the destruction to come. I see these religious excesses, still an aspect of the tourist quaintness of the islands, as an attempt to deny the general shipwreck. Movements like my father’s — without that purpose which might have turned them into true revolutions — expressed despair but were at the same time positive. They generated anger in people who thought they were too dispirited even for that; they generated comradeship. Above all, they generated disorder where previously everyone had deluded himself there was order. Disorder was drama, and drama was discovered to be a necessary human nutriment.