The Mimic Men

by V. S. Naipaul

  I liked going with these groups to the bottling works, though it was a torment to me then to be anonymous. I longed to receive some sign of overlordship or even recognition from the employees, and had fantasies in which, during an emergency, I demonstrated my familiarity with the complex machinery of the great enterprise. It was easy enough for Cecil. He never stayed with the group but prowled around everywhere, Mister Cecil to everybody. He made stern comments about the clarity or consistency of the syrup – about which the Coca-Cola people were strict – and generally tried to hint that he had come not as a student but as a spy. This was what we sometimes did in the city together, frightening a shopkeeper who had at first taken us for simple schoolboys. Sometimes I tried to be a spy on my own. I was not always successful.

  Cecil was so awed by the wealth and importance of his family that anyone might have believed money had come to the family when Cecil was of an age to understand. This wasn’t so. But perhaps Cecil remembered, as I remembered, the older house of his family. There was a large covered area at the back of this house, and for a long time I saw there a rusting metal pole of sorts, which was said to have been the first piece of Bella Bella bottling equipment. I believe it had been used for capping bottles manually, one at a time. I also remembered a long wooden gallery in this house. It was divided into dark cubicles and it was possible to find on shelves in these cubicles bottles of coloured concentrates and little packets of powders, imported from England. The labels were oddly scientific and medical in appearance, black and white with fine printing, a contrast with the bright colours and the drawings of fruit on the labels of the drinks these concentrates went to make.

  In the new house, of course, there was no sign of home manufacture. I believe Cecil regretted this. He was Bella Bella and Coca-Cola. He didn’t like anyone to forget it and he didn’t like to forget it himself. He had all the facts and figures about Coca-Cola sales, being admitted even when very young to the family’s business secrets; and he was full of stories about Coca-Cola. It was Cecil who told me either that Coca-Cola was an aphrodisiac or that it was regarded as such in certain Eastern countries. And I believe it was Cecil who told me that, to prevent the Coca-Cola secret formula from perishing for all time in a single ghastly accident, the American directors never travelled together, even in an elevator; though this might be a later story, from a different person, about another company. Of Cecil himself it was told that once, going by launch to a children’s picnic on one of the islets near Isabella, he became so enraged by the sight of cases of Pepsi-Cola, destined for this very picnic, that he threw them all overboard before anyone realized what he was up to; and sought to justify his behaviour to his bemused hosts and their outraged guests by a prolonged show of temper at what he claimed was their discourtesy to his family. I heard the story many times; it acquired the nature of legend. Cecil himself told it often when he was a young man and already, sadly, looking back to his childhood as to his great days. As a child Cecil was licensed to a degree. He liked to think of himself as eccentric and violent, and in this he was encouraged by his family, who relished the resulting stories. He was naturally aggressive; I feel the passion for real-life story-making permanently unsettled him. He was the only person I knew who even as a child tried to be a ‘character’.

  My father hated Cecil. It was a lukewarm response to Cecil’s contempt; Cecil had no respect for age. My father often said, ‘That little brute is going to end up swinging on the gallows, you mark my words.’ Hating Cecil, he hated Coca-Cola, and made a vow, which I believe he kept, never to touch it. I reported the vow and the abstention to Cecil, who said, ‘It’s a young man’s drink.’ I reported this back to my father, who raged. But each was piqued by the other’s contempt; each wished to put down the other; and between the middle-aged man and the young boy I acted as go-between.

  ‘Nana,’ I said one day, referring in this way to Cecil’s father, ‘Nana went to America to buy a pipe.’

  ‘Do you really believe that? He probably bought a pipe when he was in America. He didn’t go to America to buy a pipe.’

  ‘It was what Cecil said.’

  ‘If you believe that you are a bigger damn fool than that damn big fool.’

  On another day, when my father heard that I was going on a tour of the Bella Bella works, he went to the mousetrap and brought out a dead mouse and with a worrying smile whispered into my ear, ‘I bet you six cents, a shilling, you wouldn’t drop this in the vat or whatever it is they use. I bet you you wouldn’t.’

  Part of the trouble was that my mother’s family had made their money five or six years too late. When my father married my mother the condescension had all been his. He was over thirty, had already made some mark in missionary circles, and was considered a rising man in the Education Department. The proof of this early glory was to be found in my father’s bookcase, in a slender old-fashioned volume called The Missionary Martyr of Isabella. It was one of a series of Missionary Martyrs: the decorated endpapers listed them all, some from places, like Thebaw, of which I had never heard. The martyrdom referred to in the Isabella book was not especially bloody: the missionary had died at an advanced age in bed, in his own country, but of malaria contracted in the tropics. The book was made up of extracts from the missionary’s diary, his wife’s diary, letters, sermons; and ended with the text of the oration over his grave. There were also many photographs which contrived to make Isabella look exceedingly wild. One of the photographs was of my father as a young man, almost a boy, standing in a group in front of a thatched wooden hut; the background was simple bush. The reproduction was poor, light and shadow ill-defined; and in the badly-fitting old-fashioned costume, which appeared to force his neck and chin out and up, my father looked faintly aboriginal and lost, at the end of the world, in a clearing in the forest. The impression was not altogether belied by the text, for in the diaries and letters of the missionary and his lady was a startling vision of the world. The centre of this world was their missionary activity; everything led outwards from this and led back to this. Isabella became an almost Biblical land, full of symbols and portents and marks of God’s glory, a land of stoic journeys through scoffing crowds, encounters with khaki-clad officials hostile to the work, and disputations with devious Brahmins in oriental robes seeking to undermine the work. It was not an island I recognized. Nor could I recognize my father from the descriptions in the diary of the missionary’s lady. It was she who had discovered my father. It was she who saw that, young as he was, he had the marks of grace. I read, incredulously, of the young boy, my father, ‘proclaiming the terrors of the law’ and urging ‘jeering crowds’ to ‘receive the Gospel of grace’. Again and again he came to the rescue of his patroness when she was ‘struggling unequally with a wily disputant’. ‘Let me speak,’ he said simply. Then she stood behind him; and ‘like a war-steed rejoicing in the din of battle he charged in where danger was greatest, and the antagonist was silenced’. One Sunday she was waiting for him at the mission house. He was late; she was getting impatient. Then she saw him in the distance cycling along the bumpy dirt road, and all thoughts of reproach went out of her head. She guessed he had had a puncture; she saw him ‘riding on his bicycle, as on an ass, to his Sabbath work’. He came slowly up, and then was cycling beside the tall hibiscus hedge of the grounds. All of him was hidden except for his white turban, which the sun caught and turned to dazzle; and she thought then she saw an angel flying in the midst of heaven, having the everlasting Gospel to preach unto them that dwell on the earth. I found this entry in the lady’s diary inexplicably moving. Always at this stage in the book I felt the need for a climax. But after this, in The Missionary Martyr of Isabella, there was no more of my father. The missionary’s lady, much younger than her husband and, from both their accounts, very frail, fell ill and was sent to her home; and after some years of solitary labour the missionary himself followed her. So that it had all led to nothing, so far as my father was concerned. When I read this book I used to get the feeling t
hat my father was a man who had been cut off from his real country, which in my imagination was as glorious as the Isabella described in the diary of the missionary’s lady: nowhere else would people see magic in a white turban, a hibiscus hedge, a bicycle and the Sunday-morning sun. I used to get the feeling that my father had in some storybook way been shipwrecked on the island and that over the years the hope of rescue had altogether faded. The book, of magic, was in his bookcase; but he never spoke of it; I never saw him reading it. Perhaps he too felt that it described another man.

  ‘Your mother and her family can get on their high horse,’ he used to say, when the talk turned to Coca-Cola or when I came back from a week-end with Cecil, ‘but I remember the time when your mother’s mother used to sell milk to my mother. Selling and carrying the cow. Milking the milk out – in a pan, in a bottle, in a bucket – and selling it on the spot, just like that, in the road. Carrying the cow with a rope. And I remember the time when your mother’s father, never mind the Legco and the Exco’ – my mother’s father was a nominated member of both the Legislative Council and the Executive Council – ‘I remember the time when your mother’s father used to full his bottles with a funnel.’

  This was far from lessening my admiration for them. In my imagination I saw my mother’s mother leading her cow through a scene of pure pastoral: calendar pictures of English gardens superimposed on our Isabellan villages of mud and grass: village lanes on cool mornings, the ditches green and grassy, the water crystal, the front gardens of thatched huts bright with delicate flowers of every hue. She was as brightly coloured a storybook figure as her husband. I imagined him sitting at a wooden table and by the light of an oil lamp scrupulously ‘fulling’ his bottles with a funnel, bringing to that labour a self-contained, almost religious, stillness, his inward eye fixed on a goal which transcended the frivolity of his present pursuit, the concoction of soft drinks, whose quality and measure yet remained of surpassing importance. The goal, when realized, would astonish the scoffing world. It would not astonish him. Nor would it astonish his wife who, as devoutly as himself, looked far beyond the flowery lanes through which, penitentially every morning, she led her milk-giving cow.

  It was, as might be imagined, a slow humiliation for my father to find that he, who had married the shopkeeper’s daughter, was forced over the years into the position of the underpaid schoolteacher with whom the family of the rich industrialist had imprudently formed a marriage alliance. And it didn’t help that my mother’s behaviour was that of someone who quietly accepted her own guilt. My mother had received little English education and so was separated as by a generation from her brother and sisters who came later, at the period of wealth. One result was that she exaggerated her age. She liked to think that she was old-fashioned and had more in common with her parents than with her sisters and brother. In this way she tried to resolve a difficult situation. I think she succeeded. Her old-fashioned upbringing, which prescribed acceptance without complaint, was a help to her. She accepted my father’s abuse; she accepted her family’s tacit – in Cecil, open – disapproval of my father. By a display of perpetual guilt she continued to show loyalty to both sides, even after my father had stopped going to her parents’ house.

  At an early age, then, I was made aware of the oddity of the arrangement whereby two human beings, who were in no way related, paired off. I suppose it is in this that I must look for an explanation of the scene which took place while I was still in a very junior class at school. We were, I remember, doing masculines and feminines from Nesfield’s Grammar. The master asked the masculines, the boys provided the feminines. Abbott, abbess; stag, roe; hart, hind; fox, vixen.

  ‘Husband?’

  It was my turn. I was mortified.

  ‘Husband, boy.’

  An answer was needed, and I knew. I got out of my desk and walked down the aisle to Mr Shepherd’s table. He looked puzzled. I went and stood in front of him. He bent down with concern and I whispered into his ear: ‘Wife.’

  More than thirty years later, the man agrees with the child: it is a terrible word.

  For Cecil childhood was the great time; he would never cease to regret its passing away. It was different with me. I could scarcely wait for my childhood to be over and done with. I have no especial hardship or deprivation to record. But childhood was for me a period of incompetence, bewilderment, solitude and shameful fantasies. It was a period of burdensome secrets – like the word ‘wife’, a discovery about the world which I was embarrassed to pass on to the world – and I longed for nothing so much as to walk in the clear air of adulthood and responsibility, where everything was comprehensible and I myself was as open as a book. I hated my secrets. A complying memory has obliterated many of them and edited my childhood down to a brief cinematic blur. Even this is quite sufficiently painful.

  My first memory of school is of taking an apple to the teacher. This puzzles me. We had no apples on Isabella. It must have been an orange; yet my memory insists on the apple. The editing is clearly at fault, but the edited version is all I have. This version contains a few lessons. One is about the coronation of the English king and the weight of his crown, so heavy he can wear it only a few seconds. I would like to know more; but the film jumps to another classroom and the terrors of arithmetic. Then, in this version, as in a dream where we wake before we fall – but not always: recently, doubtless as a result of the effort of memory and this very writing, I dreamt that in this city I was being carried helplessly down a swiftly flowing river, the Thames, that sloped, and could only break my fall by guiding my feet to the concrete pillars of the bridge that suddenly spanned the river, and in my dream I felt the impact and knew that I had broken my legs and lost their use forever – but as in a dream, I say, the terrors of arithmetic disappear. And I am in a new school. Cecil is also there. The first morning, the parade in the quadrangle. ‘Right tweel, left tweel. Boys in the quadrangle, right tweel. Boys on the platform, left tweel, right tweel, left tweel. To the hall, march! Right and left tweel.’ I tweel and tweel. I write what I hear: a tweel to me a very dashing and pointless school twirl. But school is such pointlessness. ‘Today,’ the teacher says, ‘while I full up this roll book, I want you boys to sit down quiet and write a letter to a prospective employer asking for a job after you leave school.’ He gives us details of the job and on the blackboard writes out the opening sentence and one or two others for us to copy. I know I am too young for employment, and I am bewildered. But no other boy is. I write: ‘Dear Sir, I humbly beg to apply for the vacant post of shipping clerk as advertised in this morning’s edition of the Isabella Inquirer. I am in the fourth standard of the Isabella Boys School and I study English, Arithmetic, Reading, Spelling and Geography. I trust that my qualifications will be found suitable. School overs at three and I have to be home by half past four. I think I can get to work at half past three but I will have to leave at four. I am nine years and seven months old. Trusting this application will receive your favourable attention, and assuring you at all times of my devoted service, I remain, my dear Sir, your very humble and obedient servant, R. R. K. Singh.’ The letter is read out to the class by the teacher, who has fulled up his roll book. The class dissolves in laughter. It is an absurd letter. I know; but I was asked for it. Then the letters of other boys like Browne and Deschampsneufs are read out, and I see. Absolute models. But how did they know? Who informs them about the ways of the world and school?

  Of Deschampsneufs, in fact, I already knew a little. Soon I was to know more. His distinction was vague but acknowledged by all. The teachers handled him with care. Uniformed servants, one male, one female, brought his lunch to school in a basket and spread it on a white tablecloth on his desk. He had taken me once to his house to see the grape-vine that grew on a trellis in his drive. He told me it was the only grape-vine that grew on the island and was very special and historical. He had also shown me his Meccano set. Grape-vine and Meccano sets were accordingly things which I at once put beyond ambition, j
ust as, until that moment, they had been outside knowledge; they were things that befell a boy like Deschampsneufs. It was also part of his developed ability to manage the world that he had views on the reigning king, preferring the last, whose portrait hung in our school hall; it was a judgement that coloured my view of both kings for years.

  Browne of course had no Meccano set and no grape-vine. But Browne too knew his way about the world; his speech to me was the very distillation of the wisdom of a hundred Negro backyards. Browne knew about the police and I believe even had connections with those black men. Browne knew about the current toughs and passed on gossip about sportsmen. Browne was also famous. He knew many funny songs and whenever a song was required at school he was asked to sing. At our concerts he wore a straw hat and a proper suit with a bowtie; people applauded as soon as he came on. His biggest hit was a song called ‘Oh, I’m a happy little nigger’; his miming during this song was so good that people jerked forward on their seats with laughter and often you couldn’t hear the words. I deeply envied Browne his fame and regard. For him the world was already charted.

  So it was too for the young in my own family. Cecil had not only lived for a hundred years but had a fantastic memory. He constantly referred to his past and already had the gift of seeing a pattern in events. And there was Cecil’s elder sister Sally. She was the most beautiful person in the world. I was in love with her but I felt I made no impact on her. She had a little court made up of young girls from other families; with her these girls were very grave and adult. Sally read American magazines for the fashions, which she discussed with these girls. They also discussed films in a way that was new to me. They were less interested in the stories than in the actors, about whom each girl appeared to possess an exclusive, ennobling knowledge. This knowledge disheartened me. Sally was especially interested in actors’ noses. This interest had never been mine, had never occurred to me. Was it Peter Lawford’s nose she approved of then? No; that came years later. This interest in noses referred us, her hearers, back to her own nose, which was classical Indo-Aryan, the nostrils, as Sally herself told us, being exactly the shape of a pea. How could I get anywhere with a girl like Sally?