V. Naipaul - The Mimic Men

We had studied Le Rouge et le Noir in the sixth form. I hadn’t liked it. The language seemed to me crude, and I thought the story was simple and unreal, more like a fairytale than a story about real people. I said this to Mr Deschampsneufs.

‘Well, it must seem like that to us out here. We don’t have people like marquises and so on here or anything like their society. And we can’t see the point of a man like Julien or the Marquis de la Mole. But still, they tell me it’s a great book.’

‘I know. I had to write essays about it. What were the paragraphs Stendhal marked?’

‘The paragraphs. You know the story well? You remember when Julien climbs into Mlle de la Mole’s room at night?’ He went to the bookcase and took out a book. It opened easily at the place he required. ‘Julien has just thrown the ladder and the rope down on the flowerbeds. You remember?’

‘That was the sort of fairytale thing I couldn’t appreciate.’

‘Yes, yes.’ He began to read from the book: ‘Et comment moi m’en aller? dit Julien d’un ton plaisant, et en affectant le langage créole.’ Mr Deschampsneufs’s accent was suitably broad. ‘Suddenly, you see, that fellow Beyle throws in a reference to creole French. For no reason at all. It’s a big moment in his story, and he goes and does a thing like that. And then he puts in, in brackets, mark you: Une des femmes de la maison était née à Saint-Domingue. — Vous, vous en aller par la porte, dit Mathilde, ravie de cette idée. For no reason at all. That bit of dialogue in creole French. Just for a private joke. And the joke was that he had exchanged those very words in the house of Clémentine Curial with that woman whose picture you see there.’

I was deeply impressed. I felt that Mr Deschampsneufs’s story had brought the past close. It was possible to believe in the link between our island and the great world. My own dreams were rendered absurd. The outside world was stripped of its quality of legend and reduced to the comprehensible. Grand figures came near. A writer accounted great had been turned into a simple man, fat and middle-aged and ironic. And nearness exalted; it did not diminish.

‘A whole life. And that is all that remains. A little aside in a novel, a sentence in brackets. A little affectionate, a little mocking. Femme de la maison. Not true, not nice. What do you think? I don’t know about you, but I feel it’s more than I’m going to leave behind. This immortality is a funny thing. You can never tell who is going to get it. How many people who read that book would stop and think about what I’ve just told you, you think? She tore up all the letters. Do you think she was right to feel insulted?’

Another familiar topic, clearly. And, as with the first, I took no part. Shortly afterwards I left. Champ walked part of the way with me. I asked him whether it was true about his ancestor and Stendhal. He said, ‘My father would kill himself if it wasn’t true. I believe Le Rouge is the only novel he’s read.’

It was the end of another of our Isabella days, the sun gone, the wind cool, the sky ablaze in the west with red-tinted clouds, and against this swiftly passing splendour the tall palmistes and branching saman were black, but with a suggestion of deeper, warmer tints. With Stendhal and the ancestor and the creole language of Santo Domingo in my head, I saw the scene as though I had already been removed from it and it was occurring in memory, in a book.

‘The painting of the lady, is that old?’

‘Don’t try to be too polite with me. It was done by a man in Florida or Minnesota or some such place. He paints from photographs and my father sent him a sketch of some sort. There is another one, if you want to know, in my parents’ bedroom. I made them put it there. Done on a dish, and glazed.’

I was carrying away more than a story of Stendhal and the lady. I was carrying away a memory of the absurdity with which the meeting had ended. Did old Deschampsneufs genuinely not see when I attempted to shake hands? I attempted twice, and when he did give me his hand it was only two fingers. The pointlessness of the insult had taken me by surprise. It was as if an unknown, unnoticed man whom I was passing on the pavement had suddenly attacked me and walked on. So private! So much a thing to keep! And walking back through this horribly man-made landscape of which Browne had spoken, I thought, above Champ’s talk: You do not care for what they stand or what they are and they have nothing to offer you. You are about to leave, you have left: the mother saw that. Why, recognizing the enemy, did you not kill him swiftly?

We underestimate or overestimate our strength always. We refuse to wound and thereby throw away our hand. We create problems for the future. Le Rouge. Our attention in class had been drawn to Stendhal’s cleverness in making Julien, right at the beginning of the book, mistake water on a church floor for blood. This had seemed to me crude. But now, full of the closeness of Stendhal, I looked at the red sky and saw blood. And yet was glad I was leaving. Do not dismiss melodrama and style: they are human needs. How easy it is to turn that landscape, which we make ordinary by living in it and becoming part of it, into the landscape of the battlefield.

One journey had to be made before I left. It was to my father. Some months after the end of the war he had been released. For a few days the newspapers were interested. So too were some of our new-style politicians the Royal Commission had brought into being, businessmen and contractors who saw in politics a potentially rewarding extension of their private affairs. These men thought my father’s approval was still important. But my father had not responded and they had gone away. My father did not go back to his camp in the eastern hills. He selected a wooded site in the southwest, near the sea. This was also on crown lands. But the government, I was glad to see, did not molest him.

I went with money in my pocket. I had a debt to repay. His camp was in a clearing off a track. It was an ugly clearing, a disfiguring of the woods. He, or the disciples he still had with him, had turned the ground between the tree stumps into mud; and on the mud they had laid passageways of planks and coconut trunks. The land was not cleared all the way down to the sea. A thin screen of woods hid the sea, as though that was a tainted view. At one end of the clearing was his hut, with mud walls and a thatch of carat palms. On a tree stump on a mound was what looked like a toy replica of this hut. The mound had been scraped clean of weeds and grass and had been plastered. The toy hut was obviously a shrine of some sort. Such childishness was not what I had expected from Gurudeva. Better the leader of the mob than this wasted, scruffily bearded man in a yellow robe who now, ignoring me, went to his shrine and rearranged his little bits and pieces, his stones and shells and leaves and roots and his coconut. The coconut seemed especially important. He had invented so much. His inventions had been so brilliant. Had the gift now been withdrawn?

I went to the larger hut. A woman dressed in white greeted me. She recognized me and I knew who she was. The embarrassment was mine alone. I said, ‘I am leaving the island for good. I have come to see him before I go.’ She spoke to me in Hindi: ‘Have you come then for a sight of him?’ She used a word with strong religious associations: darshan. I did not wish to lie. I said nothing, surrendering, as I had surrendered at the Deschampsneufs’, to the woman’s idea of herself, her concept of the holiness of her charge and the holiness of the ground. She was beyond the reproach of sex: this was the reproach I had feared to sense. She said: ‘It is his day of silence. He has given up the world. He has become a true sanyasi.’