V. Naipaul - The Mimic Men

‘I hear that you are going to England,’ Mrs Deschampsneufs said. ‘I wonder how you’ll like it.’ She had been flattening out her accent; now she sounded like a woman of the people. I thought she was going to make some remark about the rain or the cold. But what she said, making a face, was, ‘Whitey-pokey.’

Her husband raised a hand in tolerant reproof.

I was mortified. This was the term used by Negroes of the street to describe white people. To me it was as obscene in connotation as it sounded. I wondered whether I had always misunderstood the word or whether Mrs Deschampsneufs, attempting vulgarity, hadn’t gone farther than she knew. By the judgement of the street she was whitey-pokey herself, very much so. But she appeared pleased with the word. She used it again. It occurred to me that this might be her attempt at the common touch: her statement, to the man she judged political and nationalist, that she belonged to the island as much as and perhaps more than anyone else. Her next sentence confirmed this.

‘It might be, of course, because I’m French. But I don’t think anyone from Isabella can get on with those people. We are different. This place is a paradise, boy. You’ll find that out for yourself.’

Mr Deschampsneufs asked me, ‘Do you like music?’

I made a noise which left the issue open.

He got up from his chair and, with Wendy clinging to his legs and impeding his passage, went to the bookcase. He opened the glass door and took two cards from a shelf.

‘Here are some tickets for the concert at the Town Hall. We can’t go. Champ doesn’t like music, and I don’t think they should be wasted. It isn’t as if we get these things every day.’

‘Roger is always being sent things like that,’ Mrs Deschampsneufs said.

‘Take them,’ her husband insisted.

‘Otherwise no one will use them,’ she said.

Well, I took the tickets.

Mrs Deschampsneufs asked me what I intended to do in London. I told her about the School. But she was interested in smaller things. She wanted to know how I thought I would spend a Sunday, for instance. I didn’t know what she expected. She pressed me. But I wasn’t going to betray myself by fantasy.

She said, ‘I imagine you’ll be coming back with a whitey-pokey bride.’

Her husband said, ‘But why do you want to arrange everybody’s life?’

‘Let me tell you, boy. Take a tip from somebody who has seen the world, eh. Don’t.’

With that she left the room.

Mr Deschampsneufs said, ‘What do you think you will do when you come back? I don’t see much scope here for what you intend to do there.’

But I was still thinking about Mrs Deschampsneufs. She had been a little too aggressive, and I thought: goodness, she was aggressive because to her I was someone who was already abroad, no longer subject to the rules of the island.

Champ said, ‘Who is arranging everybody’s life? Why do you think everybody must pine so to come back?’

His father said, ‘Oh, yes, we all want to get away and so on. But where you are born is a funny thing. My greatgrandfather and even my grandfather, they always talked about going back for good. They went. But they came back. You know, you are born in a place and you grow up there. You get to know the trees and the plants. You will never know any other trees and plants like that. You grow up watching a guava tree, say. You know that browny-green bark peeling like old paint. You try to climb that tree. You know that after you climb it a few times the bark gets smooth-smooth and so slippery you can’t get a grip on it. You get that ticklish feeling in your foot. Nobody has to teach you what the guava is. You go away. You ask, “What is that tree?” Somebody will tell you, “An elm.” You see another tree. Somebody will tell you, “That is an oak.” Good; you know them. But it isn’t the same. Here you wait for the poui to flower one week in the year and you don’t even know you are waiting. All right, you go away. But you will come back. Where you born, man, you born. And this island is a paradise, you will discover.’

I said, feeling that he was seeking to drag me back into his world, where he walked with security, ‘I am not coming back.’

He wasn’t put out. ‘It’s what I always say. You fellows from the Orient and so on, ancient civilization etcetera, you are the long-visioned types. You give up too easily. Just the opposite of our Afric brethren. Short-visioned. Can’t look ahead, and nothing to look back to. That is why I am sorry to say I can’t see our Afric friends coming to much. Lot of noise and so on, but short-visioned. I’ll tell you. You know those fellows in the South American bush, when they kill something, say a deer or something like that, you know they just sit down and eat out the whole damn thing, man. They not putting aside any for the morrow, you know.’ He gave a little laugh as he broke into the popular accent.

I said, ‘You mean the bush-Negroes?’

‘Indians.’ He gave another laugh. ‘Amerindians. Bucks, you know. But a similar short-visioned type.’

He was launched on what was clearly a favourite theory. The example he had given, of the South-American deer-feast, had that feel, of a fact polished to myth by its frequent use in argument. In his own way he was a racial expert. His knowledge ranged wide and in some places touched my own, which I had thought personal and sufficiently recondite. The names of books he mentioned revealed him as an addict of racial theory. He rejected simple racial divisions as a crudity. Instead he divided nations into the short-visioned, like the Africans, who remained in a state of nature; the long-visioned like Indians and Chinese, obsessed with thoughts of eternity; and the medium-visioned, like himself. The medium-visioned were the doers, the survivors.

‘No great philosophy and so on, but we’ve survived. Goodness, how many revolutions?’ He pretended to count. ‘The French Revolution, for one. What happened? We came over to this part of the world, to Santo Domingo. And then there was that revolution there. Let’s not talk about Haiti. Ten glorious years of revolution etcetera etcetera, but never mention the hundred and thirty, forty, years afterwards. Let’s not talk about Haiti. Anyway, then we came here. Tonnerre! No sooner here than our friends the English take over. Look at the result. Listen to me talking English in my low Isabella accent. Champ here can scarcely talk French.’

It was true. Champ’s French was dreadful.

‘But we’re still around. That lady you see there’ — he pointed to the shiny and terrible oil portrait — ‘was an ancestor of this boy.’

‘Not of yours,’ Champ said. It seemed a family joke.

‘She was born in Santo Domingo. It wasn’t too bad with old Toussaint in the beginning. Then of course we all came here. She was still a child. When she was about fifteen she went to Paris. To be educated, to get to know people. You know. She was very pretty, as you can see. She was a little bit wild too. I think you can see that too. Very popular and sought after and so on. She used to stay in the house of a woman called Clémentine Curial.’

I didn’t know the name.

‘Her husband was a general, a count. What I call Napoleon brand. There was a man who was in and out of the house. Ugly little fellow, full of talk. And not too well off either. He was about forty, and writing a lot of rubbish nobody wanted to read. Biographies and travel books and so on. Fat little fellow. And you know what? She’ — he pointed to the portrait — ‘fell for him. His name was Henri Beyle.’

I gave a start.

Mr Deschampsneufs lifted the palm of his hand, applauding my knowledge but asking to be allowed to go on. ‘When she came back to Isabella she had a stack of letters from Henri Beyle. Of course nothing had happened. The trouble with that fellow Beyle was that he was better at talking love than making it. One day, I think it was in 1831, nothing like Abolition or anything like that yet, she got a book from Paris. It was called Le Rouge et le Noir. On the fly-leaf Beyle had written the number of a page. She turned to this page and saw that two short paragraphs had been marked. When she read the paragraphs she tore up all Henri Beyle’s letters and destroyed the book.’