Literary Occasions

by V. S. Naipaul

  It was in a setting like that, on the island of Margarita, in a setting close to what he had known in Trinidad, when I had painted the sign for him at Carenage, that I found Bogart.

  Columbus had given Margarita its name, “the pearl.” It was across the sea from Araya, and early maps magnified its size. Pearl diving had used up the Indians fast; and there were no pearls now. Margarita lived as a resort island and a duty-free zone: Venezuelans flew over from the mainland to shop. Half the island was desert, as red as Araya; half was green.

  Bogart was in the green part. I had imagined, because I had understood he was in the import-export business, that he would be in one of the little towns. He was in a village, far from town or beach. It took some finding—and then suddenly in mid-afternoon, a glaring, shadowless time, in a dusty rural lane, very local, with no sign of resort life or duty-free activity, I was there: little houses, corrugated-iron shacks, open yards, fruit trees growing out of blackened, trampled earth, their promise of a little bounty adding (to me, who had known such places as a child) to the feeling of dirt and poverty and empty days.

  Bogart’s shop was a little concrete-walled building. Without the big sign painted on the wall I might have missed it. The two brown doors of the shop were closed. The side gate to the yard was closed. In the open yard to one side, in an unwalled shed attached as extra living space to an old, two-roomed wooden house, a bent old woman, not white, not brown, was taking her ease on a wooden bench: kerchiefed, long-skirted, too old now for a siesta, existing at that moment only in a daze of heat, dullness and old age: pans and plates on a table beside her, potted plants on the ground.

  I banged for a long time on Bogart’s side gate. At last it opened: a mulatto girl of fifteen or sixteen or seventeen held it open. The old woman next door was swaddled in her long skirt; the light, loose frock of this girl was like the merest covering over her hard little body, and she was in slippers, someone at ease, someone at home. She was pale brown, well-fed, with an oval face.

  The questioning in her eyes vanished when she saw the taxi in the road. Her demeanour moderated, but only slightly, into that of the servant. She let me in without a word and then seemed to stand behind me. So that any idea that she might be Bogart’s daughter left me, and I thought of her as one of the un-needed, one of the many thousands littered in peasant yards and cast out into the wilderness of Venezuela.

  The dirt yard over which the girl had walked in slippers was smooth and swept. At the back of the shop, and at a right angle to it, was a row of two or three rooms with a wide verandah all the way down. From one of these rooms Bogart soon appeared, dressing fast: I had interrupted his siesta. So that, though he was now a man of sixty or more, he was as I had remembered him: heavy-lidded, sleepy. He used to have a smoothness of skin and softness of body that suggested he might become fat. He still had the skin and the softness, but he hadn’t grown any fatter.

  He called me by the name used by my family. I had trouble with his. I had grown up calling him by the Hindi word for a maternal uncle. That didn’t seem suitable now; but I couldn’t call him by his name either. In that moment of greeting and mutual embarrassment the girl disappeared.

  He had got my telegram, he said; and he had sent a telegram in reply—but I hadn’t got that. He didn’t ask me into any of the back rooms or even the verandah. He opened up the back door of the shop. He seated me facing the dark shop—stocked mainly with cloth. He sat facing the bright yard. Even after twenty-seven years, I clearly wasn’t to stay long.

  His voice was gruffer, but there was no trace of Venezuela in his English accent. The light from the yard showed his puffy, sagging cheeks and the black interstices of his teeth. That mouthful of apparently rotten teeth weakened his whole face and gave a touch of inanity to his smile.

  His subject, after routine family inquiries, was himself. He never asked what I had done with my life, or even what I was doing in Venezuela. Like many people who live in small or retarded communities, he had little curiosity. His own life was his only story. But that was what I wanted to hear.

  When he was a young man, during the war, he said, he had made a trip to Venezuela. He had become involved with a local woman. To his great alarm, she had had a child for him.

  Bogart said, “But you knew that.”

  I didn’t know it. Nothing had been said about Bogart’s misadventure. Our family kept its secrets well.

  For some years after that he had divided his time between Trinidad and Venezuela, freedom and the woman. Finally—since there was no job for him in Trinidad—he had settled in Venezuela. He had got a job with an oil company, and there he had stayed. That was the let-down for me: that Bogart, the adventurer, with his own idea of the Spanish Main, should have lived a life of routine for twenty-five years. He would still have been in that job, he said, if it hadn’t been for a malevolent negro. The negro, raised to a little authority and rendered vicious, tormented him. In the end Bogart left the job, with a reduced gratuity. He was glad to leave. That life hadn’t really been satisfactory, he said. The woman hadn’t been satisfactory. His children had been a disappointment; they were not bright.

  Not bright! This judgment, from Bogart! It was astonishing that he could go back to an old way of thinking, that he could create this picture of his Venezuelan family as mulatto nondescripts. But he was also saying, obliquely, that he had left his wife and children on the mainland and had come to the island to make a fresh start. That explained the confusion about the two addresses. It also explained the demeanour of the mulatto girl, who wasn’t allowed to appear again.

  He had been part of my luck as a writer; his simplicity had been part of that luck. Even as a child, I had divined his impulses. He wasn’t a bigamist, as I had made him in my story. But he had been caught by the senses; and now in old age he was seeking again the liberation he had been looking for when he had come to our street in Port of Spain.

  But he was old now. He had begun to have some sense of life as an illusion, and his thoughts were turning to higher things—they had begun to turn that way when he was having trouble with the negro. He didn’t know how to pray, he said. He had never paid attention to the pundits—he spoke apologetically, addressing me as someone whose family was full of pundits. But every morning, before he ate, he bathed and sat cross-legged and for half an hour he took the name of Rama—Rama, the Indo-Aryan epic hero, the embodiment of virtue, God himself, the name Gandhi had spoken twice, after he had been shot.

  After telling his story, old family graces seemed to return to Bogart. He hadn’t offered hospitality; now he offered anything in his shop. Shoddy goods, for the local market. I took a scarf, synthetic, lightweight material. And then it was close to opening time, and time for me to go.

  Outside, I studied the lettering on the shop wall. The paint was new; the sign-writer’s rules and pencil outlines were still visible. Perhaps the sign I had done for him twenty-seven or twenty-eight years before had given him the taste for signs. This one was very big. Grandes Rebajas! Aprovéchese! “Big Reductions! Don’t Miss Them!” The Spanish language: no romance in these workaday words now.

  He had lived the life of freedom, and it had taken him back almost to where he had been in the beginning. But though he appeared not to know it, the Hindu family life he had wanted to escape from—the life of our extended family, our clan—had disintegrated in Trinidad. The family Bogart had known in my grandmother’s house in Port of Spain—neutered men, oppressed and cantankerous women, uneducated children—had scattered, and changed. To everyone there had come the wish to break away; and the disintegration of our private Hindu world—in all, we were fifty cousins—had released energy in people who might otherwise have remained passive. Many of my cousins, starting late, acquired professions, wealth; some migrated to more demanding lands.

  For all its physical wretchedness and internal tensions, the life of the clan had given us all a start. It had given us a caste certainty, a high sense of the self. Bogart had escaped too soon; s
till passive, he had settled for nullity. Now, discovering his desolation, he was turning to religion, something that he thought was truly his own. He had only memories to guide him. His memories were not of sacred books and texts, but rituals, forms. So he could think only of bathing in the mornings, sitting in a certain posture, and speaking the name of Rama. It was less a wish for religion and old ritual, less a wish for the old life than a wish, in the emptiness of his Venezuela, for the consolation of hallowed ways.

  Thinking of him, I remembered something I had seen eight years before in Belize, south of Yucatán, near the great ancient Mayan site of Altun Ha. The site, a complex of temples spread over four square miles, had been abandoned some centuries before the coming of the Spaniards. The steep-stepped temples had become forested hills; and in the forest beside the main road there were still many unexcavated small hills, hard to see unless you were looking for them.

  The priests of Altun Ha had been killed perhaps a thousand years before; there might have been a peasant uprising. That was the theory of the Canadian archaeologist who was living on the site in a tent marked with the name of his university. Not far away, on the edge of a government camp beside a stream, a Mayan peasant was building a hut. He had put up the pillars—trimmed tree-branches—and the roof-frame. Now he was marking out the boundary of his plot. It was an act that called for some ritual, and the man was walking along the boundary, swinging smoking copal in a wicker censer, and muttering. He was making up his own incantation. The words were gibberish.

  When I got back to Caracas I found the telegram Bogart said he had sent me. Sorry but your visit not possible now Am in and out all the time these days It’s me alone here in Margarita.

  4

  THE LOCAL history I studied at school was not interesting. It offered so little. It was like the maps in the geography books that stressed the islands and virtually did away with the continent. We were a small part of somebody else’s “overview”: we were part first of the Spanish story, then of the British story. Perhaps the school histories could be written in no other way. We were, after all, a small agricultural colony; and we couldn’t say we had done much. (The current “revolutionary” or Africanist overview is not an improvement: it is no more than the old imperialist attitude turned inside out.) To discover the wonder of our situation as children of the New World we had to look into ourselves; and to someone from my kind of Hindu background that wasn’t easy.

  I grew up with two ideas of history, almost two ideas of time. There was history with dates. That kind of history affected people and places abroad, and my range was wide: ancient Rome (the study of which, during my last two years at Queen’s Royal College in Port of Spain, was the most awakening part of my formal education); nineteenth-century England; the nationalist movement in India.

  But Chaguanas, where I was born, in an Indian-style house my grandfather had built, had no dates. If I read in a book that Gandhi had made his first call for civil disobedience in India in 1919, that date seemed recent. But 1919, in Chaguanas, in the life of the Indian community, was almost unimaginable. It was a time beyond recall, mythical. About our family, the migration of our ancestors from India, I knew only what I knew or what I was told. Beyond (and sometimes even within) people’s memories was undated time, historical darkness. Out of that darkness (extending to place as well as to time) we had all come. The India where Gandhi and Nehru and the others operated was historical and real. The India from which we had come was impossibly remote, almost as imaginary as the land of the Ramayana, our Hindu epic. I lived easily with that darkness, that lack of knowledge. I never thought to inquire further.

  My mother’s father had built a big house in Chaguanas. I didn’t know when. (It was in 1920; I was given that date in 1972.) He had gone back to India and died—in the life of our family, a mythical event. (It occurred in 1926.) Little by little I understood that this grandfather still had relations in India, that there was a village, with an actual address. My mother, giving me this address in 1961, recited it like poetry: district, sub-district, village.

  In 1962, at the end of a year of travel in India, I went to that village. I wasn’t prepared for the disturbance I felt, turning off from the India where I had been a traveller, and driving in a government jeep along a straight, dusty road to another, very private world. Two ideas of history came together during that short drive, two ways of thinking about myself.

  And there I discovered that to my grandfather this village—the pond, the big trees he would have remembered, the brick dwellings with their enclosed courtyards (unlike the adobe and thatch of Trinidad Indian villages), the fields in the flat land, the immense sky, the white shrines—this village was the real place. Trinidad was the interlude, the illusion.

  My grandfather had done well in Trinidad. He had bought much land—I continue to discover “pieces” he had bought; he had bought properties in Port of Spain; he had established a very large family and in our community he had a name. But he was willing, while he was still an active man, to turn his back on this and return home, to the real place. He hadn’t gone alone—a family secret suddenly revealed: he had taken another woman with him. But my grandfather hadn’t seen his village again; he had died on the train from Calcutta. The woman with him had made her way to the village (no doubt reciting the address I had heard my mother recite). And there for all these years, in the house of my grandfather’s brother, she had stayed.

  She was very old when I saw her. Her skin had cracked; her eyes had filmed over; she moved about the courtyard on her haunches. She still had a few words of English. She had photographs of our family—things of Trinidad—to show; there remained to her the curious vanity that she knew us all very well.

  She had had a great adventure. But her India had remained intact; her idea of the world had remained whole; no other idea of reality had broken through. It was different for thousands of others. In July and August 1932, during my father’s first spell on the Trinidad Guardian (and around the time I was born), one of the big running stories in the paper was the repatriation of Indian immigrants on the S.S. Ganges.

  Indian immigrants, at the end of their contract, were entitled to a small grant of land or to a free trip back to India with their families. The promise hadn’t always been kept. Many Indians, after they had served out their indenture, had found themselves destitute and homeless. Such people, even within my memory, slept at night in the Port of Spain squares. Then in 1931 the Ganges had come, and taken away more than a thousand. Only “paupers” were taken free; everyone else had to pay a small fare. The news, in 1932, that the Ganges was going to come again created frenzy in those who had been left behind the previous year. They saw this second coming of the Ganges as their last chance to go home, to be released from Trinidad. Many more wanted to go than could be taken on. A thousand left; a quarter were officially “paupers.” Seven weeks later the Ganges reached Calcutta. And there, to the terror of the passengers, the Ganges was stormed by hundreds of derelicts, previously repatriated, who wanted now to be taken back to the other place. India for these people had been a dream of home, a dream of continuity after the illusion of Trinidad. All the India they had found was the area around the Calcutta docks.

  Our own past was, like our idea of India, a dream. Of my mother’s father, so important to our family, I grew up knowing very little. Of my father’s family and my father’s childhood I knew almost nothing. My father’s father had died when my father was a baby. My father knew only his mother’s stories of this man: a miserly and cruel man who counted every biscuit in the tin, made her walk five miles in the hot sun to save a penny fare, and, days before my father was born, drove her out of the house. My father never forgave his father. He forgave him only in a story he wrote, one of his stories of Indian village life, in which his mother’s humiliation is made good by the ritual celebration of the birth of her son.

  Another incident I knew about—and my father told this as a joke—was that at one time he had almost gone back to
India on an immigrant ship. The family had been “passed” for repatriation; they had gone to the immigration depot on Nelson Island. There my father had panicked, had decided that he didn’t want to go back to India. He hid in one of the latrines overhanging the sea, and he stayed there until his mother changed her mind about the trip back to India.

  This was what my father passed on to me about his family and his childhood. The events were as dateless as the home events of my own confused childhood. His early life seemed an extension back in time of my own; and I did not think to ask until much later for a more connected narrative. When I was at Oxford I pressed him in letters to write an autobiography. This was to encourage him as a writer, to point him to material he had never used. But some deep hurt or shame, something still raw and unresolved in his experience, kept my father from attempting any autobiographical writing. He wrote about other members of his family. He never wrote about himself.

  It wasn’t until 1972, when I was forty, and nearly twenty years after my father’s death, that I got a connected idea of his ancestry and early life.

  I was in Trinidad. In a Port of Spain shop one day the Indian boy who sold me a paper said he was related to me. I was interested, and asked him how—the succeeding generations, spreading through our small community, had added so many relations to those I had known. He said, quickly and precisely, that he was the grandson of my father’s sister. The old lady was dying, he said. I should try to see her soon. I went the next morning.