V. Naipaul - The Mimic Men

But, monstrous, she was in despair. The smile, of hysteria, was replaced by tears; she reproached herself for my failure. I comforted her; at that moment I was genuine. Fat, fat, she said, lifting her breasts, lifting her belly; and I said No, no. She began to smile again; she rinsed out her mouth, made up her face, rearranged her hair. We talked, imperfectly, in her language. She misunderstood something I said. She said, as though replying to a question, ‘During those moments I never open my eyes. I never think.’ I was too moved to speak. I watched her re-erect her body for the café, without disdain or judgement; it was all I could offer her. I walked her back to the revolving door. Less than an hour had passed.

In the hotel that night I was awakened by a sensation of sickness. As soon as I was in the bathroom I was sick: all the undigested food and drink of the previous day. My stomach felt strained; I was in some distress. On the plastic bell-push the chambermaid still stared and the waiter still raced. But it was just past three; the hotel was still. I began to wait for morning. I had not slept well. In a serial dream I had found myself on my back, on my belly, in a London street or tunnel through which red underground trains careered on crisscrossing tracks. Beyond the trains I could see Sally, Sandra, my father, Lord Stockwell, anxious to come to me, who could not move towards them. As I slept and awakened, waiting for the light to come to the fantasy city, known and unknown, memory and the dream flowed together. When the light came I was weak and ill. The stopover was at an end. It was necessary to rise and prepare for another departure.

MY arrival was quiet. I was not expected. My stopover arrangements of the previous day had given rise to the rumour that I had disappeared or fled. It was as a private person, then, that I took a taxi to the Roman house. I required sleep. The drive was swift; it was later represented, not unjustly, as furtive. Indeed it astonished me that, on an island where I had needed notice and drama to sustain me, I should now relish privacy. For a little I played with the idea of the impossible, of prolonging this enjoyment by resignation and silence. It was impossible, of course, in the nature of our political life.

I was not allowed to be a private person for long. News of my return quickly spread. In the morning there was a police guard outside my house. The guard was needed. My stopover had frustrated a demonstration that had been arranged to meet me at the airport; public feeling was aggravated. I learned that at this airport demonstration I would have been allowed to make a statement and answer questions; it would have been part of the show. But I was not allowed to speak at the meeting which was now hurriedly called. I was not even invited to attend.

At this meeting a massive, contradictory but satisfying case was made against me. My private life — my methodical making of money, the racial exclusiveness of my development at Crippleville, my marriage to Sandra, my relationship with Wendy, my escapade with Stella — all this was used to heighten the picture of my public imposture. I had sold out on the nationalization issue; it was my playboy attitude to distress. At the same time my steady advocacy of nationalization, of benefit mainly to Asiatics, had been an attempt to create racial divisions to ensure my own continued power. My attitude to distress had always been equivocal. I had joined the movement, had helped to create it, only to destroy what it stood for. I had even tried to gain control of the police and had secretly recommended that it should remain under British control. It was a massive charge, as I say. In the hysteria of a public meeting it must have been overwhelming. It could not be answered reasonably, and from a position of weakness, because it contained too many points of truth. It could be answered only with a challenge, and from a position of strength.

But no one was interested in my answer. In a month I had thrown away my power. In a month I had been discredited. The newspapers were free, but no one spoke up for me. No restriction of any sort had been placed on me, but no one came to the Roman house and I never left it. We had created drama, an awareness of strength and vulnerability; we had created an unwillingness to offend. My mother came to see me, and my sisters and their children. We splashed about in the swimming-pool. Strange this privacy that had been granted me, whose misdemeanours filled the newspapers. I read them every morning like any other private citizen. I soon ceased to react to the sight of my name; it was no longer something I could attach to myself. I followed the fortunes of others. I read the announcement of Wendy’s engagement in Montreal to someone with a French name. A photograph, affectionately captioned. The medium-visioned, the surviving!

I had written to Browne. He had not replied; and now, reading the newspapers, I felt I had not paid sufficient attention to his silences. He had not been at the public meeting which condemned me. It presently came out that he had not been asked; there were vague suggestions that we were too close. Then I saw that my return to Isabella was not only unnecessary, it was even more irresponsible than my departure had been.

I had already seen Browne, as black folk-leader, incapable of breaking out of that sterile fate, in competition with the faceless men we had made. Whether I had returned or not, that competition would have continued, and at that level. In our movement power was to be redefined, and its true possessors revealed. I was out of the running, for all the newspaper space I occupied. But by returning, by putting myself at the passive centre of events, by being the dandy, the picturesque Asiatic, I gave direction of a sort to the struggle. My presence made the struggle more plausible, made it more than one of personalities. It dictated the terms in which that struggle, irrelevant to myself, was to be fought out; it suggested the way in which faceless men, by creating disorder, might demonstrate their power. And the foreign press, always conventionally sympathetic to proclamations of distress, was approving! What could I do? I had my police guard. I stayed in the Roman house.

For the calamity that came — there is no other word for open racial conflict in a small territory — I must bear much of the responsibility. It was a responsibility that began with that moment of return to the slave island, that moment of morning stillness; it continued to the moment of my final departure. Do not think, the acceptance of guilt being easier than action and in some ways more satisfying, that I seek simply to heap guilt on myself. The faceless men, who out of disorder of this sort rise to the top and are briefly glorious, are never guilty. They play with incurable distress from within. They are made by distress and are part of it. The same will be true of their successors.

Do not yet think that I speak calmly from the position of the secure, the physically safe, the man who has found refuge thousands of miles away in this suburban hotel, where every evening I dine below the portraits of the man and woman whom we here regard as our protecting lord and lady. My inactivity and folly amounted to cruelty. But I was a helpless spectator of this cruelty. Helpless; yet I cannot say that at the time I felt guilt. I lived; I passed the days. Everything in the Roman house continued to work. The water in the swimming-pool continuously changed, continuously passed through the filter. If the machine had failed for thirty-six hours that blue pool, restlessly webbed with light throughout its depth, would have become as still and milky green and opaque with minute vegetation as a pool in the jungle. So the water-jets splashed; and every morning, beside them, I sat in the shade at my breakfast table — avocadoes, fried plantains, cinnamon-scented chocolate, white tablecloth, ironed white napkin, a small bowl of fresh flowers — and read the newspapers.