V. Naipaul - The Mimic Men

I WAS relieved when the war came and my father was interned under some wartime regulation. In this internment he was fortunate. He disappeared almost as soon as he had made his mark. He left behind a reputation which memory could heighten; he was spared the slow neglect, leading to derision, which would certainly have come. With the war, with the arrival of the Americans in Isabella, the building of bases, with the money and prosperity and the urgency it created, with that new sense of nearness to great events, my father’s movement would have died of its own futility. When he was released after the war he was no longer required. He was like a man who had been dead six years. This suited him. He wished to be alone; and after a week or so of mainly newspaper fuss he was allowed to live in quiet retirement. But he bequeathed me certain relationships.

With Deschampsneufs, in the first place. We had never been close. I remembered him on the beach pulling in the seine with the three corpses; I had tried then, for a reason I could never give, to hide from him. At Isabella Imperial there had not been anything like the belching competitions we used to have in our earlier school; the invitation to see his vine and Meccano set had not been repeated and possibly now lived in my memory alone. Our fight had only been an untidy scramble in a cleared space between desks; all I remembered of it was a confusion of limbs, the look of surprise on Deschampsneufs’s face when he found himself on his back, and the dustiness of the oiled floor. But the cliché occurred: we were more friendly afterwards. He became less flippant with me. He told me some of his secrets. He too wished to leave Isabella. He intended to go to Quebec and paint. That he painted was news to me. He said he thought it was an interest which would be considered effeminate in Isabella; in Quebec, which was French and marvellous, they would understand. He also wished to get married, the sooner the better; he wanted to have ten children, so that he could ‘sit down and watch those buggers eat’. I suspected this ambition: I heard the words coming from an older and more foolish person, some harassed poor relation at a Sunday lunch. I entered Deschampsneufs’s world tremulously. I was not interested and I did not wish to offend. I felt I had little to offer in return. After all that had happened, his friendship embarrassed me; or perhaps I was embarrassed by what, on Isabella, his offering of friendship implied.

Browne offered me friendship of a different sort. He too had his secrets. His past as a clown and singer of coon songs tormented him, and he used me as his confessor. But I could not wash him clean. I remembered his great success too well. I remembered his delight — the delight of the dancing boy in a toy suit with a bowtie and straw hat and cane and painted red lips — and I remembered his parents’ delight, and my envy of his fame.

I like cake, I like honey,

I am not the boy to refuse any money.

I can sleep on a cotton bale

Or roost up a tree.

Tell you what it is, boys:

Nothing hurts me.

He blamed his parents — I remembered his father, in a heavy brown suit, leaning forward in his folding chair, and giving his cackling, squelchy, feminine Negro laugh, like a man about to spit — but he ought to have blamed our innocence. I wasn’t sure what Browne required of me. Did he require my sympathy and anger? He insisted on the past and humiliation, but he appeared oddly indifferent to my response. And I didn’t know what to say. Sympathy wasn’t what I felt. It was more the nausea that came to me when I thought of what had overtaken our family. And just as I entered Deschampsneufs’s privacy unwillingly, so I feared to hear more of Browne’s interior life. It was not my past. It was not my personality. I lacked the equipment the Brownes carried, that innocence which, with the side of himself he now presented to me, he was trying to suppress.

I would look at our eastern hills, inescapable from the city, and I would imagine them the object of the gaze of those thousands who, from their fields, could look forward to nothing but servitude and days in the sun. But this had to be stopped! This was not the way I wished to look at the island during the time on it that remained to me. I grew to fear Browne’s fellowship. I grew to hate the very hills. It might have been the raw nerves of adolescence. How easily we forget the messiness of that process! There were days at this time when the sight of an automobile accident would make me want to fast out of sympathy for those who had suffered. And now through Browne I saw distress everywhere. See how I deal in paradoxes. See how, though rejecting my father’s movement, I began to be contaminated by the attitudes he released in his followers.

Withdrawal: it became urgent now for me. Before it had been part of fantasy, part of the urge to escape shipwreck and to return to lands I had fashioned in my imagination, lands of horsemen, high plains, mountains and snow; and time had been as unreal as place. Now I felt the need only to get away, to a place unknown, among people whose lives and even language I need never enter. I transferred my urgency to others. There was a master whom I had startled in my first year at Isabella Imperial by going up to him at the beginning of a class and asking, ‘Are you really a B.A.?’ I had seen the tremendous fact recorded in the school magazine. He saw irony where I had intended only reverence and he chased me back to my desk; he was, in fact, sensitive about his university, which was Canadian and obscure. Now I startled him again by asking, during a relaxed period, ‘How do you feel, sir, about living in Isabella?’ He saw it as a political question. I had to explain. ‘I mean you have lived in famous countries and seen famous cities. Don’t you think you would prefer to live there?’ He said, ‘I’ve never thought about it. I used to go to England and the Continent before the war on leave. It was all right. I did the usual things. But I always felt that my work was here. I’ve never thought about it, really.’ I didn’t believe him. I remembered how one day he began to talk about the varieties of Canadian apples. I remembered him saying another time, ‘You can go skiing in the Laurentians.’ And then, as though talking to himself, as though seeing the white-and-blue landscape again, he had added, ‘Mind you don’t break your leg, though’; and the moment and the imagined landscape had been fixed in my mind forever. The Laurentians! Beautiful name for slopes of white, uninhabited snow! I longed in that barrenness to go skiing, even at the risk of breaking my leg. My element, and I feared I would be denied it. And there was the Belgian, of execrable accent, French and English, and almost no memories: a neat, bored and boring man in goldrimmed glasses. Even he had gone off one afternoon into chuckling, glazed-eye reminiscence: the subject, la circulation, not circulation but traffic: and suddenly we were with him in a taxi in a traffic jam, the meter ticking, the taxi-driver pulling his cap over his eyes, disclaiming all responsibility for his active meter. There, in Liège in a traffic jam, on the snow slopes of the Laurentians, was the true, pure world. We, here on our island, handling books printed in this world, and using its goods, had been abandoned and forgotten. We pretended to be real, to be learning, to be preparing ourselves for life, we mimic men of the New World, one unknown corner of it, with all its reminders of the corruption that came so quickly to the new.

My obsession took an odd turn. I developed the fear that our old timber house was unsafe. It was not uncommon in our city for houses to tumble down; during the rainy season our newspapers were full of such tragedies. I began to look for these reports, and every report added to my fear. As soon as I lay down on my bed my heart beat faster, and I mistook its throbbing for the shaking of the house. At times my head swam; ceiling and walls seemed about to cave in on me; I felt my bed tilt and I held on in a cold sweat until the disturbance passed. I was safe and lucid only when I was out of the house. So more and more I found myself abroad in that island whose secrets Browne was bent on revealing to me.