V. Naipaul - The Mimic Men

I ought not to have gone. I should have ignored Browne’s misadventure; I should never have let him know that I knew. We never forgive those who catch us in postures of indignity. That Saturday, with its two gestures, its two visits, its two failures, marked the end of the special intensity of our relationship. I cannot deny that I was relieved. I had been choked in that interior, and not only by its smallness. Joe Louis and Haile Selassie on the wall, the flannel vest, the family photograph, that black jackass: it was more than an interior I had entered. I felt I had had a glimpse of the prison of the spirit in which Browne lived, to which he awakened every day. In those rooms he collected his facts, out of which he could make no pattern. I doubted whether he knew why he passed on those facts to me. He wanted me to share distress. But, irritatingly, he stopped at distress. And as I left the house it occurred to me that distress was part of his reality, was nothing more, could lead to nothing. Into that private horror I did not want to be drawn again. Put Eden in those rooms, and it would have been fitting and comic. But Browne’s nerves denied comedy. In that interior all the attributes of his race and class were like secrets no friend ought to have gazed upon.

Our relationship ended. It had been unproductive; it left no rancour. Yet its poison remained with me. It was with me at school. Eden said he wished to join the Japanese army: the reports of their rapes were so exciting. He elaborated the idea crudely and often; it ceased to be a joke. He recognized this; in his conversation he sublimated the wish to rape foreign women into a wish to travel. Deschampsneufs said: ‘To see, or to be seen?’ He drew a grotesque picture of Eden with cloth cap, dark glasses, camera and white suit leaning over the rails of a ship, while sarong-clad Asiatics and Polynesians, abandoning their dances, rushed to the water’s edge to look at the strange tourist. For Eden had fixed on Asia as the continent he wished to travel in; he had been stirred by Lord Jim. His deepest wish was for the Negro race to be abolished; his intermediate dream was of a remote land where he, the solitary Negro among an alien pretty people, ruled as a sort of sexual king. Lord Jim, Lord Eden. Poor Eden. But, also, poor Browne. How could anyone, wishing only to abolish himself, go beyond a statement of distress?

At every reminder of our wide world I returned to that front room, his security, which he yet hated, where his shop-assistant sister brought in her young man, from the Police, and for a minute or so — unease later defining itself — were like cartoon characters, exaggerating their roles: Browne the younger brother, someone to be bribed and handled flatteringly, the young man modest and aggressive and slightly ridiculous, the sister herself brisk and decisive and standing no nonsense in her home. Perhaps I exaggerated. It was my tendency at the time, part of my anxiety to put myself in the place of those I thought were distressed; and perhaps, like those misguided reformers who believe that for rich and poor there is no reality but money, I failed to see much. I minimized the innocence; I minimized the quality of personality. But so it is when we seek to forget ourselves by taking on the burden of others. Was it only for Browne that I was concerned?

I had begun to spend much time in the cinema. It was my own refuge. On weekdays I went either to the late afternoon show or the evening show. On Saturdays I went to the one-thirty afternoon show which some of the cheaper cinemas put on. It was the hottest time of day, but these shows were packed out by the young, attracted like myself by the atmosphere of holiday and licence. It was shockingly bright when we came out at about four; this was as dramatic and pleasing as the shock of true heat after an air-conditioned room.

I was at a one-thirty show one Saturday. It was very hot. Some of the rowdier college boys, mainly white and brown, took off their shirts. It began to rain. One or two groups continued shirtless, but they were noticeably quieter. The rain drummed on the corrugated-iron roof: that sound, comforting to us in the tropics, which people from other zones detest. Above the rain and the drumming came the sound of thunder, obliterating the soundtrack. The heavy curtains over the open exits flapped and the rain spattered in. The rain went on, gust upon heavy gust crashing from one end of the roof to the other. Soon the floor of the cinema was running wet. We willingly gave up the film. Our tropical days were even; we enjoyed it when they were dramatized. But then I thought of our house and the dangers of rain. On the screen the film ran on, but the exit curtains had been pulled back by those who preferred to watch the rain, and the picture was faint. The soundtrack was inaudible. The diminished, pointless gestures of the actors gave pleasure to a rowdy few.

I went out and stood in the tiled lobby among the boards which displayed the posters, tacky in the damp, for the afternoon and the evening shows. It thundered; lightning was fluorescent; the trees in the park before us rocked in the wind, which fell and rose. The gutters were already full and, even as I watched, the pavements were covered. A cyclist went by. He was going nowhere in particular. He was simply cycling in water for the fun. More boys and girls came out and stood in the lobby to watch. We loved our bad weather. I thought of our house again, more urgently now; and, above drama, I felt alarm. A tree in the park groaned in a series of accelerating snaps and then slowly collapsed, rocking to rest on its branches. It was a great tree, one of those with a history. Its leaves were green and shining with wet, its shallow, lateral roots shaggy with earth.

I went out into the rain. The flooded pavement was indistinguishable from the road. Rain obscured our eastern hills and blurred all nearer outlines. Under shop eaves there were damp contemplative little groups. My mind played with images of disaster. It created a house reduced to rubble, embedded in rippled mud, like those tree trunks washed up on our coast. It created wet, isolated planks, crusted with old paint on one side, raw where newly exposed, twisted corrugated-iron sheets, death, the discovery later of little intimate things. Walking in the rain, I knew the panic I sometimes felt when I lay down to sleep.

The rain slackened. I felt the wetness of my clothes and the coldness of the coins in my pockets. And when I got to our street I found only calm. Through some engineer’s skill this section of our city, though below sea-level, was especially well drained. There was no flooding here. The gutters were racing, but everything still stood, washed and shining with that newness which came to our roofs and roads and vegetation after rain. My mother was sewing. For her the rain had only been a Saturday afternoon drama, a cause for pleasant little shiverings in the cool. I was relieved. At least the discomfort and ridicule of disaster had been spared us. But, equally, I could not keep down disappointment: the disappointment of someone who had been denied the chance of making a fresh start, alone.

THE house of my mother’s family was solid. I tested it whenever I went there for the week-end. I jumped on the floors when I thought no one was looking; and sometimes I lay flat on them to gauge their level. I leaned against walls to assess their straightness. These precautions made me feel safe and sent me to bed without fear. I did not like returning to the physical dangers of my own house, about which I could talk to no one, and I longed for the time when I would not have to make that particular journey. I thought that this absurd disorder, of placelessness, was part of youth and my general unease and that it would go as soon as I left Isabella. But certain emotions bridge the years. It was unease of just this sort which came to me when I began this book. There was then no fear of the collapse of either the hotel or the public house between which I divided my time — as I still divide it — but I sickeningly recognized that sense of captivity and lurking external threat, that pain of a rich world destroyed and rendered null. Perhaps it was the effort of writing. The houses by which I was surrounded — like those in a photograph I had studied in a Kensington High Street attic during a snowfall and sought in imagination to enter, to re-create that order which, as I thought, expressed its sweetness in young girls and especially in one in a jumper in a sunny back garden — the red brick houses became interchangeable with those others in our tropical street, of corrugated iron and fretted white gables, which I had also once hoped never to see again. Certain emotions bridge the years and link unlikely places. Sometimes by this linking the sense of place is destroyed, and we are ourselves alone: the young man, the boy, the child. The physical world, which we yet continue to prove, is then like a private fabrication we have always known.