V. Naipaul - Miguel Street

One day he called me and said, ‘You go be seeing Hat this evening?’

I said, ‘Yes.’

‘You did see him yesterday?’

‘Yes.’

‘How he is?’

‘How?’

‘Well, I mean, how he looking? He looking well? Happy?’

I said, ‘He looking damn vex.’

Sergeant Charles said, ‘Oh.’

I said, ‘All right.’

‘Look, before you go away ’

‘What?’

‘Nothing. No, no. Wait before you go. Tell Hat how for me, you hear.’

I told Hat, ‘Sergeant Charles call me to his house today and begin one crying and begging. He keep on asking me to tell you that he not vex with you, that it wasn’t he who tell the police about the milk and the water.’

Hat said, ‘ Which water in which milk? ’

I didn’t know what to say.

Hat said, ‘You see the sort of place Trinidad coming now. Somebody say it had water in my milk. Nobody see me put water in the milk, but everybody talking now as if they see me. Everybody talking about the water in the milk.’

Hat, I saw, was enjoying even this.

I always looked upon Hat as a man of settled habits, and it was hard to think of him looking otherwise than he did. I suppose he was thirty-five when he took me to that cricket-match, and forty-three when he went to jail. Yet he always looked the same to me.

In appearance, as I have said, he was dark-brown in complexion, of medium height and medium build. He had a slightly bow-legged walk and he had flat feet.

I was prepared to see him do the same things for the rest of his life. Cricket, football, horse-racing; read the paper in the mornings and afternoons; sit on the pavement and talk; get noisily drunk on Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve.

He didn’t appear to need anything else. He was self-sufficient, and I didn’t believe he even needed women. I knew, of course, that he visited certain places in the city from time to time, but I thought he did this more for the vicious thrill than for the women.

And then this thing happened. It broke up the Miguel Street Club, and Hat himself was never the same afterwards.

In a way, I suppose, it was Edward’s fault. I don’t think any of us realised how much Hat loved Edward and how heartbroken he was when Edward got married. He couldn’t hide his delight when Edward’s wife ran away with the American soldier, and he was greatly disappointed when Edward went to Aruba.

Once he said, ‘Everybody growing up or they leaving.’

Another time he said, ‘I think I was a damn fool not go and work with the Americans, like Edward and so much other people.’

Eddoes said, ‘Hat going to town a lot these nights.’

Boyee said, ‘Well, he is a big man. Why he shouldn’t do what he want to do? ’

Eddoes said, ‘It have some men like that. As a matter of fact, it does happen to all man. They getting old and they get frighten and they want to remain young.’

I got angry with Eddoes because I didn’t want to think of Hat in that way and the worst thing was that I was ashamed because I felt Eddoes was right.

I said, ‘Eddoes, why you don’t take your dirty mind somewhere else, eh? Why you don’t leave all your dirtiness in the rubbish-dump?’

And then one day Hat brought home a woman.

I felt a little uneasy now in Hat’s company. He had become a man with responsibility and obligations, and he could no longer give us all his time and attention. To make matters worse, everybody pretended that the woman wasn’t there. Even Hat. He never spoke about her and he behaved as though he wanted us to believe that everything was just the same.

She was a pale-brown woman, about thirty, somewhat plump, and her favourite colour was blue. She called herself Dolly. We used to see her looking blankly out of the windows of Hat’s house. She never spoke to any of us. In fact, I hardly heard her speak at all, except to call Hat inside.

But Boyee and Edward were pleased with the changes she brought.

Boyee said, ‘Is the first time I remember living with a woman in the house, and it make a lot of difference. Is hard to explain, but I find it nicer.’

My mother said, ‘You see how man stupid. Hat see what happen to Edward and you mean to say that Hat still get hisself mix up with this woman?’

Mrs Morgan and Mrs Bhakcu saw so little of Dolly they had little to dislike in her, but they agreed that she was a lazy good-for-nothing.

Mrs Morgan said, ‘This Dolly look like a old madame to me, you hear.’

It was easy enough for us to forget that Dolly was there, because Hat continued living as before. We still went to all the sports and we still sat on the pavement and talked.

Whenever Dolly piped, ‘Hat, you coming?’ Hat wouldn’t reply.

About half an hour later Dolly would say, ‘Hat, you coming or you ain’t coming?’

And Hat would say then, ‘I coming.’

I wondered what life was like for Dolly. She was nearly always inside the house and Hat was nearly always outside. She seemed to spend a great deal of her time at the front window looking out.

They were really the queerest couple in the street. They never went out together. We never heard them laughing. They never even quarrelled.

Eddoes said, ‘They like two strangers.’

Errol said, ‘Don’t mind that, you hear. All you seeing Hat sitting quiet quiet here, but is different when he get inside. He ain’t the same man when he talking with Dolly. He buy she a lot of joolry, you know.’

Eddoes said, ‘I have a feeling she a little bit like Matilda. You know, the woman in the calypso:

“Matilda, Matilda,

Matilda, you thief my money

And gone Venezuela.”

Buying joolry! But what happening to Hat? He behaving as though he is a old man. Woman don’t want joolry from a man like Hat, they want something else.’

Looking on from the outside, though, one could see only two changes in Hat’s household. All the birds were caged, and the Alsatian was chained and miserable.

But no one spoke about Dolly to Hat. I suppose the whole business had come as too much of a surprise.

What followed was an even bigger surprise, and it was some time before we could get all the details. At first I noticed Hat was missing, and then I heard rumours.

This was the story, as it later came out in court. Dolly had run away from Hat, taking all his gifts, of course. Hat had chased her and found her with another man. There was a great quarrel, the man had fled, and Hat had taken it out on Dolly. Afterwards, the police statement said, he had gone, in tears, to the police station to give himself up. He said, ‘I kill a woman.’

But Dolly wasn’t dead.

We received the news as though it was news of a death. We couldn’t believe it for a day or two.

And then a great hush fell on Miguel Street. No boys and men gathered under the lamp-post outside Hat’s house, talking about this and that and the other. No one played cricket and disturbed people taking afternoon naps. The Club was dead.

Cruelly, we forgot all about Dolly and thought only about Hat. We couldn’t find it in our hearts to find fault with him. We suffered with him.

We saw a changed man in court. He had grown older, and when he smiled at us he smiled only with his mouth. Still, he put on a show for us and even while we laughed we were ready to cry.

The prosecutor asked Hat, ‘Was it a dark night?’

Hat said, ‘All night dark.’

Hat’s lawyer was a short fat man called Chittaranjan who wore a smelly brown suit.

Chittaranjan began reeling off Portia’s speech about mercy, and he would have gone on to the end if the judge hadn’t said, ‘All this is interesting and some of it even true but, Mr Chittaranjan, you are wasting the court’s time.’