V. Naipaul - The Mimic Men

For the sake of appearances I was forced to go on expeditions with Cecil and his friends and be the wild young man with them. Their wildness could be overdone. Cecil never ceased to enjoy his money and never lost the desire to startle the poor by his money. On a country road he would stop with a squeal of brakes just inches from some poor old woman selling bananas or oranges from a tray. He would shout, ‘Get out! Go home, you ugly bitch! Leave that blasted tray this minute if you don’t want me to break it on your head.’ The terrified woman would make as if to obey; he would call her back angrily and give her ten dollars or twenty dollars, extravagant payment for the tray and oranges he didn’t want but still took. Cecil still behaved as though smoking and drinking were vices he had discovered and patented. He visited degraded Negro whores. Pleasure for him appeared to lie in an increase in self-violation; he was like a man testing his toleration of the unpleasant. I believed in his high spirits less and less. But he communicated these to some of his friends and he communicated them especially to a Negro man of about forty whom he had attached to himself as a bodyguard-companion-valet. He called this Negro Cecil. It might have been the man’s real name; it might just have been Cecil’s fancy. The Negro was illiterate and penniless and seemed to have no family. He depended entirely on Cecil and I got the impression that when they were together in public they liked playing a very dramatic master-and-servant, gangster-and-henchman game. I believe they both saw themselves acting out a film; the smallness of their activities must have been a continual frustration to them. I thought they were both unbalanced.

From these expeditions it was good to return to Sally. It was a big house, but on week-ends it was full of people. Discovery was inevitable. It was a visitor who found us. I had seen her around, somebody’s mother or aunt, very old, very frail, with glasses that grotesquely magnified her eyes. I was totally blank: no shame, no guilt, no anxiety. I hated as the deeper intrusion the cross-examination that followed. It was detailed and I thought pointless; it reduced everything to absurdity. But for all the threats, there was no sequel then. The visitor’s feebleness of sight and body seemed to be matched by the feebleness of her memory. When we next met at the house she had forgotten who I was.

At the house that Sunday was a young man I hadn’t seen before. He was introduced as Dalip. He was well dressed and showed no uneasiness at being in a house of strangers. Cecil proposed that the three of us should drive to the beach before lunch. Movement was one of Cecil’s ideas of fun; very often there was nothing to do when we got to a particular place. I was tired of these drives. But Cecil insisted, and Dalip was agreeable. We stopped in a side street not far away. Cecil sounded his horn and his valet came running out. He appeared to have been waiting; he always appeared to be waiting for Cecil. He had a bottle of whisky and a bottle of rum. He sat in the back with Dalip.

We were soon out in the country. We drove at great speed along narrow, curving roads. ‘They know me, they know me,’ Cecil said, as though this was going to keep us from an accident. He was pleased that I was uneasy. The valet grinned, hanging on to the strap. Dalip was relaxed. We came to an area of curves and hills. The car possessed the road right and left impartially, and once we came to a shocking halt before a bus that appeared round a bend. They celebrated by opening the bottles. I drank with them. The liquor was hateful. In the racing car it was not easy to pour or to drink. Rum and whisky were spilt. The car smelled of rum.

Cecil said, ‘Open that glove compartment for me a little.’

I obeyed. Among yellow cloths and grimy glossy booklets and pads I saw two pistols. One small, with an ivory butt; one big, of pure metal. I had never seen a pistol before.

‘Take the big fellow out.’

I took out the big pistol. The car shot over the brow of a hill on the wrong side of the road. I had never held a pistol. I had thought it was all metal, but now I saw that the butt had wood facings, finely cross-hatched. I was astonished at the weight, astonished at the colour of the metal, the precision of the moulding. This precision was like beauty. I passed my fingers along the edges.

‘A Luger,’ Cecil said. ‘Heavy, eh?’

In the back seat Dalip and the Negro grinned like men in a secret, who also knew about Lugers.

Cecil, staring ahead, one hand on the wheel, dipped into his shirt pocket with that elegant left-handed gesture, all flexible wrist, with which he usually fished out his packet of cigarettes. He pulled out a bullet. He said, ‘This goes with that.’

I put the Luger back. I took out the smaller gun. It was old and smooth.

‘Nice little thing,’ Cecil said. ‘It’s Belgian. A revolver for ladies. You can cover it in the palm of your hand. Try and see.’

I said, ‘I prefer the Luger.’

I put the revolver back and closed the glove compartment. It was their idea of fun. The cigarettes, the drinks, the fast car going nowhere, the throwing away of money on frightened peasants. And now the guns.

An early Sunday morning, and the beach was deserted. From the cocoteraie brackish streams ran under fallen trees into the sand. The sky was grey. It wasn’t going to be a day of sunshine. We stripped. Dalip was plump and would soon be fat. Cecil was thin and stringy and strong as he had always been.

The Negro had the physique of a weightlifter. We stripped but did not go into the water. Cecil began to idle about and we idled with him. How well I knew this idling about of Cecil’s! It was out of such idling that he fashioned his stories of wonderful times. He kicked sand and did foolish things with coconut branches. The Negro did what he did. Dalip picked up shells and sea eggs. But above all they drank. Soon they were talking with a sort of childlike philosophy about the sea. The sea. Not my element. Yet it entered so many of my memories of the island.

Suddenly, kicking his big toe hard into the sand, and looking up from the spattering sand to me, Cecil said: ‘You never met Dalip before? You know who he is?’

I looked at Dalip. His easy-going face had altered. His expression was of pure hate.

Cecil roared with laughter in that breath-holding, neighing way he had — the nostrils that were so fine in his sister were on him slightly flared — and he said, slapping his thigh, ‘Your brother, you damn fool!’

I knew at once what he meant. It was not pleasant. This Dalip was the son of the widow who had been living with my father after he had become Gurudeva and taken to the hills. I had hoped never to see her or the son of whom I had heard. But such a meeting had to come; the wonder was that it had not come before. We were a small community, our upper element crisscrossed with marriages, inbred already. There could be no hiding, no secrets. But now, looking at Dalip, soft and very pale, I again had that sense of being forced to eat raw flesh and drink tainted oil; and that sense of the obscene obliterated shame.

Dalip said, ‘The son of Guru, eh?’

The Negro laughed.

Cecil leaned against the bleached trunk of a tree that had collapsed on some other island or continent and had been washed ashore here and anchored in sand. He set his mouth and looked hard at me. I understood. He held a bottle of Coca-Cola by the waist. The wrist-watch on his left wrist adorned his naked body.

My mind raced. It fixed on a word. I thought of the Luger and the single bullet, the Belgian ladies’ revolver. It was so early in the morning. I thought of one word. Execution. It had occurred before. We were a small community and in a very deep sense we did not recognize the law of the desert island. Our code remained private and whole. Execution, then, on the hot sand on a Sunday morning. A family affair: it could be concealed: such things had been done before. A disappearance; a gutted body sinking to the bottom of the sea beyond the reach of a fisherman’s seine. Yet I couldn’t believe in it. It would be foolish to behave as though this was about to happen. Nothing had been announced. I asked for a drink. They gave me rum. I would have preferred whisky. But I drank the rum. It was raw and sickening. I found, to my alarm, that I was passive. I was like the mouse or lizard mesmerized by the cat. I accepted. I was prepared to do what was expected of me.