The Mimic Men

by V. S. Naipaul

  To everyone I sought, secretly, and from the height of my power, to transmit my sympathy and above all my admiration for a courage which I thought I could never myself have. So that in the very midst of power I came upon a centre of stillness within myself, a centre of detachment, which my behaviour in no way revealed; for the confident, flippant dandy that was my character in Mr Shylock’s house was the character I retained and promoted, almost without design now, as soon as I spoke. To encounters with people of all conditions I gave much; they exhausted me quickly; the effort of sympathy was so great. And yet, when the time came, I was accused of arrogance and aloofness.

  I remember one interview. It was at the time our bauxite royalties were about to be renegotiated. This was a personal triumph and I was, as the saying is, the man of the hour. It was with the eye of pure compassion that, while we spoke, I studied the reporter’s clothes, his shining tie, his young face fussy and tired with worry, his uncertain voice attempting bluntness, his slender weak hands. At the end, putting away his notebook, he became momentarily abstracted, a man with problems of his own. I thought he was going to speak about himself. I had found this to be the pressing need of those whose business it was merely to report the views of others; I never discouraged it. How startling it was, then, when without malice and as though seeking personal solace, he had asked: ‘And, sir, if all this were to come to an end tomorrow, what would you do?’ It was my technique instantly to begin a reply to any question. But now I hesitated. So many absurd pictures came to me. Relief: this was my first reaction, and it was a reaction to the man in front of me. Not in any unkind way, for with the word there came a picture of myself in some forest clearing, dressed as a knight, dressed as a penitent, in hermit’s rags, approaching a shrine on my knees, weeping, performing a private penance for the man in front of me, for myself, for all men, for whom in the end nothing could be done. Relief, solitude; penance, peace. Words and pictures came confusedly together. For a tremulous instant I felt a suffusing joy: to suffer for all men. Do not misunderstand; do not accuse me of presuming. Understand only that centre of stillness, that withdrawal, that compassion which was really fear. Understand my unsuitability for the role I had created for myself, as politician, as dandy, as celebrant. But it was in this role that, recovering quickly, I replied. Why, I said, I would return to my business affairs and the life I had led before, in the days of my marriage; it had been a pleasant enough life.

  And I spoke sincerely. As though, in the drama we had created, it was possible simply to step down and return to the order of the past! As though I hadn’t seen the point of the reporter’s question! What made the reporter ask, I wonder. Some personal insecurity, perhaps; the weak man’s wish to tease. Whatever it was, he has had his revenge. The doers come and go, the recorders go on. And my reporter now doubtless runs to interview others, while for my own views the world cares not at all. Be kind to those you meet on the way up, runs the saying; for they are the very people you are going to meet on the way down. Frivolous; and very safe; and very smug. The tragedy of power like mine is that there is no way down. There can only be extinction. Dust to dust; rags to rags; fear to fear.

  4

  IN the active period of my life, which I have described as a period in parenthesis, marriage was an episode; and it was the purest accident that I should have entered politics almost as soon as this marriage came to an end. Cause and effect, it seemed to many; but the obvious and plausible is often wrong. At the time my marriage and the circumstances of its break-up won me much sympathy; later these very things were to win me much abuse. It seemed a textbook example of the ill-advised mixed marriage. I was seen as the victim, the exploited, offering comfort and status to a woman who was denied these things in her own country. There is something in this, but it is not the whole story. I never thought of myself as the victim, and even now all I have against Sandra is her name which, whether pronounced with a short or long first vowel, never ceases to jar on me. Hostile comment would have it that, for reasons of glamour, I pursued her. Sympathetic comment makes her the pursuer. And in fact marriage was her idea.

  It was during the time of breakdown and mental distress when, as I have said, I travelled about England and the Continent with no purpose, not even pleasure. After each of these journeys I came back more exhausted than before, more oppressed by a feeling of waste and helplessness; and it was in such a mood that one afternoon in the last week of the vacation, having nothing to do, I drifted into the School and, discovering nothing to do there either, stood in front of the notice-board and dully read the last notices of the previous term. Those student associations! Playing at being students, playing at being questioning and iconoclastic, playing at being young and licensed, playing at being in preparation for the world! The dishonesty of the young! I belonged to none of their associations. The confession, I know, will surprise those who try to link my subsequent career with my membership of this celebrated School. Its reputation, I have since seen, lay especially heavily on those who were to sink without a trace into their respective societies.

  I read the badly typewritten notice of something called the Turkish League or Turkish Association: the Annual General Meeting was being indefinitely and apparently quite arbitrarily postponed. Below, scrawled right across the sheet in ink of a vivid blue, was P.S. Rigret Inconvinience! and under this exclamation was a flamboyant, extensive signature. The exuberant, defaulting Turk! I had reason to remember him, for it was while I was idly examining his notice for further absurdities that I was aware of Sandra coming down the corridor towards me. We exchanged glances but for some reason did not speak. She came and stood directly beside me. She looked at the Turk’s notice and pretended to be as absorbed in it as I was. Waiting to be greeted, she did not herself speak. It was I, after some seconds, who broke the silence.

  She seemed to be in a particularly bad temper. Perhaps it was exaggerated for my benefit; I believe I was the only person outside her family who noted and assessed her moods. In response to my question about the holidays she mentioned the serial quarrel with her father. The latest instalment had occurred only that morning; it had kept her seething and had at last driven her out of the house in the afternoon. ‘A father,’ she had said to me at our first meeting, ‘is one of nature’s handicaps.’ She had also said on that occasion that she wanted to be either a nun or a king’s mistress. I had been impressed by this and made to feel not a little inadequate; but awe had been converted into sympathy and something like affection when I came across the sentence in one of Bernard Shaw’s plays. To a similar source I attributed her remark about fathers, though I had never been able to trace it. She had another remark for me now, as we stood in front of the Turkish notice. ‘Do you know what I said to him this morning? I told him he was arguing like a crab. Do you like that? Arguing like a crab.’ I said I liked it. She said, turning away from the board, ‘I can’t stand the big-and-busy public-lavatory smell of this damned place.’ I said I had been told it had something to do with the type of disinfectant used. She asked me to give her tea. Snappy, inconsequential: the way she liked her lines; and I had acknowledged the two remarks she had made. But it did not dispel her gloomy irritation. We left the School and walked out into the Aldwych and down to Bush House, to the canteen of the British Broadcasting Corporation’s European Services. I had used this canteen so often that no one now stopped me.

  Sandra, I can see, will not be everyone’s idea of a beauty; few women are. But she overwhelmed me then; and she would overwhelm me now, I know: her looks were of the sort that improves with the strength and definition of maturity. She was tall; her bony face was longish and I liked the suggestion of thrust in her chin and lower lip. I liked her narrow forehead and her slightly ill-humoured eyes – perhaps she needed glasses. And there was a coarseness about her skin which enchanted me. I liked a quality of graining in the skin; it was to me a sign of a subtle sensuality. There was firmness and precision in her movements, and always a slight bite to her speech. Wome
n were continually provoked by her manner, which gave the impression of irony even when none was intended. She affected a very old and grubby khaki-coloured macintosh, which it was always a pleasure to help off, for below it, and always as a surprise, were soft, cool colours, and a body fresh and scrupulously cared for. Not even the macintosh could hide the fullness of her breasts, to which I had for some little time been admitted. They were not the self-supporting cut apples of the austere French ideal; but breasts curving and rounded with a weight just threatening pendent excess, which the viewer, recognizing the inadequacy and indeed crudity of the cupping gesture, instinctively stretches out a hand to support; breasts which in their free state alter their shape and contour with every shift in the posture of their possessor; breasts which in the end madden the viewer because, faced with such completeness of beauty, he does not know what to do. No one loved her breasts more than Sandra herself. She caressed them in moments of abstraction; and indeed it was this ritualistic, almost Pharaonic, attitude – right hand supporting and caressing left breast, left hand supporting right – which had first brought her to my startled if delighted attention in the dreary library one morning and had encouraged me to pen an invitation to coffee on one of the library’s borrowing slips and slide it towards her across the polished table that we shared. Pure joy it was later, at the assisted uncovering, to discover that she painted the nipples of her breasts. So absurd, so pathetic, so winning. I kissed, caressed, stroked with hand and cheek; inadequate speech was dragged out of me. ‘Lovely, lovely,’ I said. And Sandra had replied, ‘Thank you.’ A cooling thing to hear, as I lay between her breasts; and head and hands for an instant went still. But it was a revealing reply, in its humourlessness and confidence. The adoration of none could equal her own; and even at that first encounter I could feel her own sense of self-violation. Self-possessed at one moment, she became frantic at another that the fumbling should go no farther.

  Language is so important. Up to this time my relationships had been with women who knew little English and of whose language I frequently knew nothing. These affairs had been conducted in a type of pidgin; they were a strain; I could never assess the degree of complication we had arrived at after the sexual simplicities. Once this had been glamorous and had suited me; now it was like entering an imperfect world, some grotesque tunnel of love, where, as in a dream, at a critical moment one is denied the use of arms or legs and longs to cry out. With Sandra there was no such frustration; the mere fact of communication was a delight; to this extent I had changed. And for all the recurring checks that occurred in my rooms, our relationship developed. It was with surprise that I discovered that, though of the city, her position in it was like my own. She had no community, no group, and had rejected her family. She saw herself alone in the world and was determined to fight her way up. She hated the common – her own word – from which she nevertheless freely acknowledged herself to have sprung and about which she therefore claimed to speak with authority; no one knew ‘them’ as well as she. To the end she had a cruel eye for the common, and she passed on to me the word and the assessing skill. No family, two or three school friends, now scattered: it was easy to see how she felt imprisoned and fearful and how important it was to her to be free of the danger of that commonness which encircled her. The king’s mistress! I saw the magnitude of her ambition and the matching difficulties of her struggle, and sympathized, not yet knowing the part I would soon be called upon to play in their resolution.

  The war had also left its mark. No one was more sensitive to anything that savoured of the luxurious; no one had a greater capacity for creating occasions. A bottle of wine was an occasion, a meal in a restaurant, a seat in the dress circle. She took nothing for granted. Was I exploited? I never misunderstood her interest; but no one offered himself more readily. She was rapacious. It was in her social ambitions, in her diligent reading of approved contemporary authors and her pursuit of culture, for which at home she willingly – perhaps even gratuitously – carried the cross of being considered odd; it was in her walk, in the bite of her speech, even in the way she ate food which she considered expensive; in all these things, not least in the adoration of her body, there was a consuming self-love. But how could I resist her quick delight? Her very rapaciousness attracted me. To me, drifting about the big city that had reduced me to futility, she was all that was positive. She showed how much could be extracted so easily from the city; she showed how easy occasions were. Her delight strengthened me; often, in public, I pretended to be seeing her for the first time: those close-set, myopic, impatient eyes, that jutting lower lip. In those days in London, when a decision had to be made every morning to dress, to go through the day, when on numberless nights I could go to sleep only with the consoling thought of the Luger at my head or the thought of retreat on the following day, the degree and the School abandoned, in those days at the darkest moments I was strengthened by the thought of Sandra. I would say, ‘I am seeing her tomorrow. Let me delay decision and last until then.’ And the day would come; and we would create, out of the drabness that surrounded us both, an occasion. It was the perfect basis for a relationship.

  She was at her lowest that afternoon as we walked down into the basement canteen for tea, her grubby macintosh belted around her waist. The last few weeks at home had been difficult; she had had to put up with a good deal of mockery. She had failed a qualifying examination for the second time. That was the end of her government grant, the end of the School. No degree for her now; no escape by that route. And as we sat in the low, airless basement she out-lined a life so destitute of glamour or point, a life which now, with the failed examination, neither imprecise ambition nor the pursuit of culture could enhance, that my own disturbance was sharpened. She reflected my own mood exactly. Her despair worked on me; we acted and reacted on one another, there in the canteen of a radio service which, when picked up in remote countries, was the very voice of metropolitan authority and romance, bringing to mind images, from the cinema and magazines, of canyons of concrete, brick and glass, motorcars in streams, lines of lights, busyness, crowded theatre foyers, the world where everything was possible; there now, at the heart of that metropolis, we sat, at a plastic-topped table, before thick cups of cooling tea and plates with yellow crumbs, each drawing out the frenzy from the other. What awaited her? The secretarial course, the librarian’s course, the common employer. She went on, railing at her society, bitter at her lack of protection and patrons within it. A job in the bank; the typing pool; the Woolworth’s counter. She was working herself up to a pitch of hysteria. Tears of anger came to her eyes. Then suddenly, fixing those moist eyes on me, she said, almost ordered, with a look of total hatred: ‘Why don’t you propose, you fool?’

  I have gone over this moment more than once in my mind; I do not think my recollection of it is wrong. The tone of Sandra’s request, so odd considering its nature, seems to me to have come from a number of causes. The idea, I feel, had occurred to her on the spur of the moment, the one clear flash in dark panic; she was impatient with herself for not having thought of it before, impatient because she wished to see it instantly realized; and impatient because she had broken down and shown weakness. And I suppose that if the idea had been put to me as a plea rather than as an order, if there had been the slightest suggestion that it issued from uncertainty rather than firmness and lucidity, I might have reacted otherwise. But, and always my mood must be borne in mind, I had such confidence in her rapaciousness, such confidence in her as someone who could come to no harm – a superstitious reliance on her, which was part of the strength I drew from her – that in that moment it seemed to me that to attach myself to her was to acquire that protection which she offered, to share some of her quality of being marked, a quality which once was mine but which I had lost. So I did as she asked; and even added, strange to think of it now, an apology for not having done so before. Her anger vanished; just for an instant she looked a little abashed and apprehensive. We sat silent in the clatter
ing canteen. And it was a second or two before, for the first time since our talk had begun, I thought of her painted breasts.

  There were moments of stillness and awe later, of course. But Sandra gave me little time. Just two days later she moved in with me, to the delight of old Mrs Ellis, my landlady, whom by a display of exaggerated manners I had completely under my thumb. To Mrs Ellis, I discovered, Sandra had represented us as already married; and to Mrs Ellis, as to many others later, this marriage contained the elements of dark and stirring romance. Some little concern for my sake Mrs Ellis showed, however; she expressed the hope, with tears in her eyes, as she gave me a china dog, her wedding present, that I had made the right choice. The words struck me as odd in the circumstances. Sandra, on the other hand, spoke of the difficulties with her father, who argued like a crab; and for an instant, if only she knew, I was totally on his side. Apparently he too had been told that we were already married. I objected, but not as forthrightly as I might have done, contenting myself with wondering why, since nothing had happened as yet, she had told him anything at all. Even at that late stage I was still trying, feebly, to play for time. She said, ‘I haven’t got the patience either to give him a blow-by-blow account or to lie to him.’ This won me back; she had the gift of the phrase. She said that we would soon ‘regularize the position’ so far as Mrs Ellis was concerned. This was another aspect of her speech. She spoke of workmen as ‘operatives’; she often linked unconnected sentences with ‘with the net result that …’; my two-roomed flat became our ‘establishment’, for which there had to be ‘catering’. Perhaps it was the influence of the School.