V. Naipaul - The Mimic Men

Amid the laughter Browne’s desk lid banged again. He rose and walked out of the classroom without a word. Major Grant went red. He fitted his monocle carefully into his eye and looked down at his Vergil.

It was then that I saw that what I had thought of as my betrayal was no longer a betrayal. School had ceased to be a private hemisphere. The outside world, which we had denied for so long, had begun to invade it; and after Browne’s widely reported gesture there was no need for me to fear ridicule. To many I became what I already was on our street: the son of the leader suddenly found. But I continued, as they say, to play both sides. With some boys I was as detached as before about my father’s movement, though their criticism still pained me. And then I could not reject the conspiratorial devotion of the others. With them I was conspiratorial myself and behaved as though I knew of even greater things to come. For a time it did seem that greater things might be coming. The newspapers spoke about police reinforcements being ‘rushed’ to the hills; and there was a photograph of the Police Commissioner, pistol in hand, leading his apprehensive-looking men in a search of some building. It was strange how drama overtook certain areas, to which no one would have attributed romance or the possibility of adventure, and transformed them, so that even their names acquired a different flavour. Policemen watched our house; the fact was reported in the newspapers; I became a minor figure of drama myself.

It wearied and nauseated me, to tell the truth: the foolish drama, the foolish devotion so many offered me. If I try concretely to describe my reaction to what had overtaken our family — and at times, in lightheaded moods of withdrawal and shock, it was possible as after an accident to see the whole horror afresh, to compare past with present — I would say that the episode gave me a sensation of rawness and violation. It was as though I was chewing rubbery raw flesh and being made to swallow tainted oil. I had made my decision to abandon Isabella, to eschew my shipwreck on the tropical desert island. But the island had been the island of The Black Swan, the fresh green island sighted at dawn, to music Now it felt corrupted and corrupting. It was this corruption which I now wished to flee. I wished to make a fresh start in my own element; to rid myself of those relationships which it had solaced me to think of as temporary and unimportant, but which I now felt to be tainting.

Yet time, our life, passes. We cannot keep ourselves back for some tract of life ahead. We are made by everything, by action, by withdrawal; and those relationships, begun in corruption, which I thought I could shrug off when the time came, turned out in the end to be able to imprison. They grew on me; I did not look for them. But my failure was my silence. I was silent, to give just one example, in the geography class. It was a drowsy afternoon class. The master was reading from a dull book about the manufacture of sugar. At the beginning of the year, he read out, the ripened canes were cut. He had come to the end of a sentence; he sighed and added, still reading from the book, but it was like a personal interjection, that the cutters were paid by the root. ‘Paid? Less than a cent a root!’ It was Browne who had spoken. His voice was loud and precise; it silenced the drone and mutter of the master, who continued to look down at his book. In the silence many of the boys looked at me, as though I was campaigning for an increase in cutters’ pay. The true embarrassment, I could see, was my presence in the class. I stared into space, giving away nothing. It was hideous and diminishing, this devotion, this assumption that I was one of them. I felt threatened. My chieftaincy lay elsewhere. But I was silent.

A movement like my father’s could not endure. It was, as I have said, no more than a gesture of mass protest, a statement of despair, without a philosophy or cause. And the administration remained calm. A rash governor might have attempted to evict my father and his followers from their camp on crown lands; and then there might have been bloodshed and bitterness. As it was, certain necessary precautions were taken to prevent looting and arson in surrounding areas; the camp was guarded without being in any way harassed; and the frenzy was allowed to subside. Some acres of forest reserve were burned and some half-hearted planting of crops occurred. But the forests of glory did not yield food in four weeks or six weeks. People wearied of taking offerings to the camp and getting little in return; they wearied of idleness and the absence of drama. A drift began back to the city. It became marked when the dock strike was settled and the Volunteers’ were withdrawn. The union thus established plagued us ever after.

The camp in the hills became another fact of our island life. For two or three days at a time the newspapers made no reference to it. At school we — if I might detach myself once more — gave it up as a source of drama. It was frustrating both to those who had hoped for some vague social upheaval and to those, like Deschampsneufs, who relished the excitement. But we were not surprised. We accepted that on Isabella we were a people of mainly domestic interests, incapable of supporting large events. Our attention turned rapidly to other things. It turned, more characteristically, to a slogan competition.

The slogan was for a brand of rum. The first prize was the unheard-of sum of five thousand dollars, and the winner was to be announced soon. Cecil had been ceaselessly inventive. Thousands and thousands of the coloured entry forms had been showered on the city and our towns and villages — you could see the pink, blue or green forms even in the gutters — but Cecil was convinced that the prize was going to be his. He said, impressively, that he ‘needed’ the money: The name of the rum was Isabella Rum and Cecil’s final prize-winning slogan, which he publicized as soon as he had sent it in, hoping no doubt to reduce the rest of us to despair, was At my parties I fly high with Isabella. We had all assumed that a reference to parties was the ‘trick’ requirement of the slogan judges: the drawing on the entry form was of a party scene in a country of the North. I now believe the drawing to have been an imported multi-purpose block. It could have been used to advertise a dance or dancing school, a gala night at a restaurant or hotel, a tailoring establishment. But in all our slogans we assumed the role of metropolitan party-givers. We did so easily; at Isabella Imperial we were natural impersonators.

The slogan excitement, alas, ended as limply as many of our other excitements. The result dismayed the school. Many secret slogan-coiners came out into the open and were as noisy as Cecil had been. We didn’t think the judging had been fair. For one thing the result came too soon after the closing date of the competition. And we didn’t think much of the winning slogan. It was Don’t thank me, thank Isabella. The drawing that went with it showed a man in evening garb of some sort showing his guests to the door on a night which, to go by the furs of the tall ladies, was wintry. He was speaking the words to his guests; and in a further balloon, attached to his head by a line of diminishing circles, to indicate unspoken thought, were the words ‘Is a rum, Isabella!’ For a week or so the newspapers carried the photograph of the very happy slogan-deviser. He was an old Negro labourer, one of those who worked on his own plot of chives or on a citrus plantation. He sat on a bentwood chair in front of his weather-beaten shack; before him was a table with bottles of Isabella Rum and tumblers on an embroidered tablecloth.

‘I am not going to touch Isabella Rum from now on,’ Cecil said. ‘Let them drink their own rum. “Is a rum, Isabella.” I don’t call that a slogan.’