A Bend in the River

by V. S. Naipaul

  Indar said, “This lovely lady is our hostess. Her name is Yvette.”

  He bent over her and appeared to hold her in an embrace. It was a piece of pantomime. She playfully arched her back to receive his embrace, but his cheek barely brushed hers, he never touched her breast, and only the tips of his fingers rested on her back, on the silk blouse.

  It was a house of the Domain, like Indar’s. But all the upholstered furniture had been cleared out of the sitting room and had been replaced by cushions and bolsters and African mats. Two or three reading lamps had been put on the floor, so that parts of the room were in darkness.

  Yvette said, referring to the furniture, “The President has an exaggerated idea of the needs of Europeans. I’ve dumped all that velvety stuff in one of the bedrooms.”

  Remembering what Indar had told me, I ignored the irony in her voice, and felt that she was speaking with privilege, the privilege of someone close to the President.

  A number of people were already there. Indar followed Yvette deeper into the room, and I followed Indar.

  Indar said, “How’s Raymond?”

  Yvette said, “He’s working. He’ll look in later.”

  We sat down all three next to a bookcase. Indar lounged against a bolster, a man at ease. I concentrated on the music. As so often when I was with Indar on the Domain, I was prepared only to watch and listen. And this was all new to me. I hadn’t been to a Domain party like this. And the atmosphere itself in that room was something I had never experienced before.

  Two or three couples were dancing; I had visions of women’s legs. I had a vision especially of a girl in a green dress who sat on a straight-backed dining chair (one of the house set of twelve). I studied her knees, her legs, her ankles, her shoes. They were not particularly well made legs, but they had an effect on me. All my adult life I had looked for release in the bars of the town. I knew only women who had to be paid for. The other side of the life of passion, of embraces freely given and received, I knew nothing of, and had begun to consider alien, something not for me. And so my satisfactions had only been brothel satisfactions, which hadn’t been satisfactions at all. I felt they had taken me further and further away from the true life of the senses and I feared they had made me incapable of that life.

  I had never been in a room where men and women danced for mutual pleasure, and out of pleasure in one another’s company. Trembling expectation was in that girl’s heavy legs, the girl in the green dress. It was a new dress, loosely hemmed, not ironed into a crease, still suggesting the material as it had been measured out and bought. Later I saw her dancing, watched the movements of her legs, her shoes; and such a sweetness was released in me that I felt I had recovered a part of myself I had lost. I never looked at the girl’s face, and it was easy in the semi-gloom to let that remain unknown. I wanted to sink into the sweetness; I didn’t want anything to spoil the mood.

  And the mood became sweeter. The music that was being played came to an end, and in the wonderfully lit room, blurred circles of light thrown onto the ceiling from the lamps on the floor, people stopped dancing. What next came on went straight to my heart—sad guitars, words, a song, an American girl singing “Barbara Allen.”

  That voice! It needed no music; it hardly needed words. By itself it created the line of the melody; by itself it created a whole world of feeling. It is what people of our background look for in music and singing: feeling. It is what makes us shout “Wa-wa! Bravo!” and throw bank notes and gold at the feet of a singer. Listening to that voice, I felt the deepest part of myself awakening, the part that knew loss, homesickness, grief, and longed for love. And in that voice was the promise of a flowering for everyone who listened.

  I said to Indar, “Who is the singer?”

  He said, “Joan Baez. She’s very famous in the States.”

  “And a millionaire,” Yvette said.

  I was beginning to recognize her irony. It made her appear to be saying something when she had said very little—and she was, after all, playing the record in her house. She was smiling at me, perhaps smiling at what she had said, or perhaps smiling at me as Indar’s friend, or smiling because she believed it became her.

  Her left leg was drawn up; her right leg, bent at the knee, lay flat on the cushion on which she sat, so that her right heel lay almost against her left ankle. Beautiful feet, and their whiteness was wonderful against the black of her slacks. Her provocative posture, her smile—they became part of the mood of the song, too much to contemplate.

  Indar said, “Salim comes from one of our old coast families. Their history is interesting.”

  Yvette’s hand lay white on her right thigh.

  Indar said, “Let me show you something.”

  He leaned across my legs and reached up to the bookcase. He took out a book, opened it and showed me where I was to read. I held the book down to the floor, to catch the light from the reading lamp, and saw, among a list of names, the names of Yvette and Raymond, acknowledged by the writer of the book as “most generous of hosts” at some recent time in the capital.

  Yvette continued to smile. No embarrassment or playing it down, though; no irony now. Her name in the book mattered to her.

  I gave the book back to Indar, looked away from Yvette and him, and returned to the voice. Not all the songs were like “Barbara Allen.” Some were modern, about war and injustice and oppression and nuclear destruction. But always in between there were the older, sweeter melodies. These were the ones I waited for, but in the end the voice linked the two kinds of song, linked the maidens and lovers and sad deaths of bygone times with the people of today who were oppressed and about to die.

  It was make-believe—I never doubted that. You couldn’t listen to sweet songs about injustice unless you expected justice and received it much of the time. You couldn’t sing songs about the end of the world unless—like the other people in that room, so beautiful with such simple things: African mats on the floor and African hangings on the wall and spears and masks—you felt that the world was going on and you were safe in it. How easy it was, in that room, to make those assumptions!

  It was different outside, and Mahesh would have scoffed. He had said, “It isn’t that there’s no right and wrong here. There’s no right.” But Mahesh felt far away. The aridity of that life, which had also been mine! It was better to pretend, as I could pretend now. It was better to share the companionship of that pretence, to feel that in that room we all lived beautifully and bravely with injustice and imminent death and consoled ourselves with love. Even before the songs ended I felt I had found the kind of life I wanted; I never wanted to be ordinary again. I felt that by some piece of luck I had stumbled on the equivalent of what years before Nazruddin had found right here.

  It was late when Raymond came in. I had, at Indar’s insistence, even danced with Yvette and felt her skin below the silk of her blouse; and when I saw Raymond my thoughts—leaping at this stage of the evening from possibility to possibility—were at first only about the difference in their ages. There must have been thirty years between Yvette and her husband; Raymond was a man in his late fifties.

  But I felt possibilities fade, felt them as dreams, when I saw the immediate look of concern on Yvétte’s face—or rather in her eyes, for her smile was still on, a trick of her face; when I saw the security of Raymond’s manner, remembered his job and position, and took in the distinction of his appearance. It was the distinction of intelligence and intellectual labours. He looked as though he had just taken off his glasses, and his gentle eyes were attractively tired. He was wearing a long-sleeved safari jacket; and it came to me that the style—long sleeves rather than short—had been suggested to him by Yvette.

  After that look of concern at her husband, Yvette relaxed again, with her fixed smile. Indar got up and began fetching a dining chair from against the opposite wall. Raymond motioned to us to stay where we were; he rejected the chance of sitting next to Yvette, and when Indar returned with the dining chair, s
at on that.

  Yvette said, without moving, “Would you like a drink, Raymond?”

  He said, “It will spoil it for me, Evie. I’ll be going back to my room in a minute.”

  Raymond’s presence in the room had been noted. A young man and a girl had begun to hover around our group. One or two other people came up. There were greetings.

  Indar said, “I hope we haven’t disturbed you.”

  Raymond said, “It made a pleasant background. If I look a little troubled, it is because just now, in that room, I became very dejected. I began to wonder, as I’ve often wondered, whether the truth ever gets known. The idea isn’t new, but there are times when it becomes especially painful. I feel that everything one does is just going to waste.”

  Indar said, “You are talking nonsense, Raymond. Of course it takes time for someone like yourself to be recognized, but it happens in the end. You are not working in a popular field.”

  Yvette said, “You tell him that for me, please.”

  One of the men standing around said, “New discoveries are constantly making us revise our ideas about the past. The truth is always there. It can be got at. The work has to be done, that’s all.”

  Raymond said, “Time, the discoverer of truth. I know. It’s the classical idea, the religious idea. But there are times when you begin to wonder. Do we really know the history of the Roman Empire? Do we really know what went on during the conquest of Gaul? I was sitting in my room and thinking with sadness about all the things that have gone unrecorded. Do you think we will ever get to know the truth about what has happened in Africa in the last hundred or even fifty years? All the wars, all the rebellions, all the leaders, all the defeats?”

  There was a silence. We looked at Raymond, who had introduced this element of discussion into our evening. Yet the mood was only like an extension of the mood of the Joan Baez songs. And for a little while, but without the help of music, we contemplated the sadness of the continent.

  Indar said, “Have you read Muller’s article?”

  Raymond said, “About the Bapende rebellion? He sent me a proof. It’s had a great success, I hear.”

  The young man with the girl said, “I hear they’re inviting him to Texas to teach for a term.”

  Indar said, “I thought it was a lot of rubbish. Every kind of cliché parading as new wisdom. The Azande, that’s a tribal uprising. The Bapende, that’s just economic oppression, rubber business. They’re to be lumped with the Budja and the Babwa. And you do that by playing down the religious side. Which is what makes the Bapende dust-up so wonderful. It’s just the kind of thing that happens when people turn to Africa to make the fast academic buck.”

  Raymond said, “He came to see me. I answered all his questions and showed him all my papers.”

  The young man said, “Muller’s a bit of whiz kid, I think.”

  Raymond said, “I liked him.”

  Yvette said, “He came to lunch. As soon as Raymond left the table, he forgot all about the Bapende and said to me, ‘Do you want to come out with me?’ Just like that. The minute Raymond’s back was turned.”

  Raymond smiled.

  Indar said, “I was telling Salim, Raymond, that you are the only man the President reads.”

  Raymond said, “I don’t think he has much time for reading these days.”

  The young man, his girl now close to him, said, “How did you meet him?”

  “It is a story at once simple and extraordinary,” Raymond said. “But I don’t think we have time for that now.” He looked at Yvette.

  She said, “I don’t think anybody is rushing off anywhere right at this minute.”

  “It was long ago,” Raymond said. “In colonial times. I was teaching at a college in the capital. I was doing my historical work. But of course in those days there was no question of publishing. There was the censorship that people pretended didn’t exist, in spite of the celebrated decree of 1922. And of course in those days Africa wasn’t a subject. But I never made any secret of what I felt or where I stood, and I suppose the word must have got around. One day at the college I was told that an old African woman had come to see me. It was one of the African servants who brought me the message, and he wasn’t too impressed by my visitor.

  “I asked him to bring her to me. She was middle-aged rather than old. She worked as a maid in the big hotel in the capital, and she had come to see me about her son. She belonged to one of the smaller tribes, people with no say in anything, and I suppose she had no one of her own kind to turn to. The boy had left school. He had joined some political club and had done various odd jobs. But he had given up all that. He was doing nothing at all. He was just staying in the house. He didn’t go out to see anybody. He suffered from headaches, but he wasn’t ill. I thought she was going to ask me to get the boy a job. But no. All she wanted me to do was to see the boy and talk to him.

  “She impressed me a great deal. Yes, the dignity of that hotel maid was quite remarkable. Another woman would have thought that her son was bewitched, and taken appropriate measures. She, in her simple way, saw that her son’s disease had been brought on by his education. That was why she had come to me, the teacher at the college.

  “I asked her to send the boy to me. He didn’t like the idea of his mother talking to me about him, but he came. He was as nervous as a kitten. What made him unusual—I would even say extraordinary—was the quality of his despair. It wasn’t just a matter of poverty and the lack of opportunity. It went much deeper. And, indeed, to try to look at the world from his point of view was to begin to get a headache yourself. He couldn’t face the world in which his mother, a poor woman of Africa, had endured such humiliation. Nothing could undo that. Nothing could give him a better world.

  “I said to him, ‘I’ve listened to you, and I know that one day the mood of despair will go and you will want to act. What you mustn’t do then is to become involved in politics as they exist. Those clubs and associations are talking shops, debating societies, where Africans posture for Europeans and hope to pass as evolved. They will eat up your passion and destroy your gifts. What I am going to tell you now will sound strange, coming from me. You must join the Defence Force. You won’t rise high, but you will learn a real skill. You will learn about weapons and transport, and you will also learn about men. Once you understand what holds the Defence Force together, you will understand what holds the country together. You might say to me, “But isn’t it better for me to be a lawyer and be called maître?” I will say, “No. It is better for you to be a private and call the sergeant sir.” This isn’t advice I will want to give to anybody else. But I give it to you.’ ”

  Raymond had held us all. When he stopped speaking we allowed the silence to last, while we continued to look at him as he sat on the dining chair in his safari jacket, distinguished, his hair combed back, his eyes tired, a bit of a dandy in his way.

  In a more conversational voice, as though he was commenting on his own story, Raymond said at last, breaking the silence, “He’s a truly remarkable man. I don’t think we give him enough credit for what he’s done. We take it for granted. He’s disciplined the army and brought peace to this land of many peoples. It is possible once again to traverse the country from one end to the other—something the colonial power thought it alone had brought about. And what is most remarkable is that it’s been done without coercion, and entirely with the consent of the people. You don’t see policemen in the streets. You don’t see guns. You don’t see the army.”

  Indar, sitting next to Yvette, who was still smiling, seemed about to change the position of his legs prior to saying something. But Raymond raised his hand, and Indar didn’t move.

  “And there’s the freedom,” Raymond said. “There’s the remarkable welcome given to every kind of idea from every kind of system. I don’t think,” he said, addressing Indar directly, as though making up to him for keeping him quiet, “that anyone has even hinted to you that there are certain things you have to say and certain
things you mustn’t say.”

  Indar said, “We’ve had an easy ride here.”

  “I don’t think it would have occurred to him to try to censor you. He feels that all ideas can be made to serve the cause. You might say that with him there’s an absolute hunger for ideas. He uses them all in his own way.”

  Yvette said, “I wish he would change the boys’ uniforms. The good old colonial style of short trousers and a long white apron. Or long trousers and a jacket. But not that carnival costume of short trousers and jacket.”

  We all laughed, even Raymond, as though we were glad to stop being solemn. And Yvette’s boldness was also like proof of the freedom Raymond had been talking about.

  Raymond said, “Yvette goes on about the boys’ uniforms. But that’s the army background, and the mother’s hotel background. The mother wore a colonial maid’s uniform all her working life. The boys in the Domain have to wear theirs. And it isn’t a colonial uniform—that’s the point. In fact, everybody nowadays who wears a uniform has to understand that. Everyone in uniform has to feel that he has a personal contract with the President. And try to get the boys out of that uniform. You won’t succeed. Yvette has tried. They want to wear that uniform, however absurd it is to our eyes. That’s the amazing thing about this man of Africa—this flair, this knowledge of what the people need, and when.

  “We have all these photographs of him in African costume nowadays. I must confess I was disturbed when they began to appear in such number. I raised the issue with him one day in the capital. I was shattered by the penetration of his answer. He said, ‘Five years ago, Raymond, I would have agreed with you. Five years ago our African people, with that cruel humour which is theirs, would have laughed, and that ridicule would have destroyed our country, with its still frail bonds. But times have changed. The people now have peace. They want something else. So they no longer see a photograph of a soldier. They see a photograph of an African. And that isn’t a picture of me, Raymond. It is a picture of all Africans.’ ”