V. Naipaul - The Mimic Men

I had been able at certain moments to think of Isabella as deserted and awaiting discovery. Browne showed me that its tropical appearance was contrived; there was history in the vegetation we considered most natural and characteristic. About the bread-fruit and Captain Bligh we all knew. He told me about the coconut, which fringed our beaches, about the sugarcane, the bamboo and mango. He told me about our flowers, whose colours we saw afresh in the postcards which were beginning to appear in our shops. The war was bringing us visitors, who saw more clearly than we did; we learned to see with them, and we were seeing only like visitors. In the heart of the city he showed me a clump of old fruit trees: the site of a slave provision ground. From this point look above the roofs of the city, and imagine! Our landscape was as manufactured as that of any great French or English park. But we walked in a garden of hell, among trees, some still without popular names, whose seeds had sometimes been brought to our island in the intestines of slaves.

This was what Browne taught. This was the subject of his own secret reading. I thought his passion would resolve itself in a definition of a purpose or even an attitude. I was patient. But no definition came. He appeared to pursue the subject for its own sake. His friendship became a burden.

He cycled up to our house one Saturday morning and rang his bicycle bell from the street. Neither he nor any other boy from the school, except Cecil, had come to our house before. The visit showed to what extent we had abolished the private hemisphere of school, and I feel sure it was intended as a gesture. I was not in. My mother had not seen Browne before. She saw only an urchin of the people sitting on his bicycle saddle, ringing his bell and smiling. It was an unfortunate characteristic of Browne’s — until in his thirties he grew a beard — that he always appeared to be smiling nervously. The skin from his lower lip to the tip of his chin was curiously taut and corrugated; it was as though he was holding back a laugh. At the very tip of this chin, accentuating the smile that wasn’t a smile, was a wart; from a distance this looked like a drop of water and suggested that Browne had just washed his face and not bothered to dry it. All this gave him the comedian’s appearance which his parents had exploited. My mother looked out from between the ferns on our veranda and asked what he wanted. He said he wanted to see me. But he used my last name. My mother thought he was another mocker of her husband and herself and drove him away as she would have driven away a street arab.

I was appalled when I heard. I knew where he lived and I went straight there. His house was as old as ours and of similar style. But it was on one of the busy streets of the city; it had no veranda and rose almost directly from the pavement, with a jalousied top half. A genuine old-time Negro, grey-headed and pipe-smoking, was leaning out of a window and vacantly regarding the crowded street. He wore a grimy flannel vest. A flannel vest was proletarian wear — flannel the favoured material of Negroes enfeebled by illness or old age — and I wished I had not seen it on Browne’s father. Next to the house was a Negro barbershop called The Kremlin — Negro barber-shops liked to attach such remote drama to themselves — with a caged parrot in the doorway.

I greeted the Negro in the flannel vest and, remembering Browne’s misadventure at my house, hurriedly identified myself as a colleague of Browne’s at Isabella Imperial. I also took care to ask whether ‘Ethelbert’ was at home. It embarrassed me to use the name. I never had before and as I spoke it I remembered what Browne himself had told me: that slaves were frequently given the names of Anglo-Saxon kings or Roman generals. Browne’s father, he who had dressed up his son years before and taught him the words of the coon song, was at once attention. He grunted through his pipe, hurried to open the front door, and then was anxious for me to sit down. It was an honour not to me but to Isabella Imperial, the famous school, where a poor boy who behaved well and was attentive to his books could win a scholarship: this meant studies abroad, a profession, independence, the past wiped out.

There were two bentwood rockers in the front part of the room. He made me sit on one, called out ‘Bertie!’ and sat on the other, sucking at his pipe in old-time Negro fashion and staring at me while he rocked. Bertie! The home name! It was like opening a private letter. I felt that Browne wouldn’t care for this visit, for the revelation of his father in his flannel vest, which was grimy with little rolls of dirt. It was a narrow room, bounded by a maroon curtain whose reflection darkened the stained and polished floor. Beyond the rockers on which we sat four upright cane-bottomed chairs were arranged around a marble-topped centre table on three legs. The marble was covered with a white lacy material. On it was a brass tray with a stunted but still top-heavy palm in a tin wrapped around with crepe paper. At the top of the tin the crepe paper was finely fringed, almost minced, and fluffed out. On one wall, ochre-coloured with white facings, there were framed pictures of Joe Louis, Jesse Owens, Haile Selassie, and Jesus. Against the opposite wall was a glass-doored cabinet with coloured tumblers, cherubs and pink-and-white ladies in glazed clay, three drunk top-hatted men in battered evening dress under a lamp standard, and a bouquet of paper flowers. Above this cabinet was a large photograph of a Negro man and woman, a girl, and a much bedecked boy whose tight chin with water-drop wart revealed him as Browne the comic singer, all standing before a painted backdrop of a ruined Greek temple. Browne’s father followed my eyes. He was past pride; but in his look there was that satisfaction which comes to the old and foolish who feel they have done a lot by living long.

He called out again in his strangled voice: ‘Bertie!’ And presently Browne pushed through the maroon curtain. He was wearing washed-out and frayed khaki shorts; he was barefooted; his eyes were red. He had been having a Saturday afternoon nap. He didn’t look pleased to see me. His father rocked, settling down to enjoy the dialogue between two scholars of Isabella Imperial. Browne barely greeted me and instantly pushed through the maroon curtain again. I had a glimpse of a small oval cyp dining table and some heavy polished chairs. I heard voices. Browne’s was raised in irritation; I heard him say something about that black jackass. Then to him who had shouted ‘Bertie!’ there came a female call, pretending to be less than a shout, of ‘Caesar!’ and ‘Caesar!’ again; and Caesar Browne got up and padded carefully over the polished floor in his slippers, cut-down canvas shoes, towards the maroon curtain, from behind which he was given an invisible tug, so that he appeared suddenly to have lost control of his limbs; and so, swiftly, he vanished.

Browne himself, when he reappeared, had a shirt over his flannel vest. The tropics do impose on their inhabitants this recurring indignity of undress, which only above a certain level turns to style. He sat in the rocker left empty by his father and yawned and passed his hands over his legs. He aimed at casualness, but he was glum and less than welcoming. I said I had come to borrow his copy of Peñas Arriba. He wasn’t fooled. But it gave him something to do. He went and got the book. It was the book of the careful student. Its covers were wrapped in brown shop-paper and were dark, furred and almost worn through at the edges where the palm had closed over them on those sweaty journeys to school. I thought it had a peculiar smell. I had nothing more to say. Then Browne’s sister came in with her boy-friend, from the Police. The tiny room was suddenly alive. For a minute or so, with indefinable unease, I witnessed actions and listened to talk. Then I left.