The Mimic Men

by V. S. Naipaul

  He never did. It was only on that Friday, library day for me, that there was something like a sequel. I was in our back gallery reading The Aryan Peoples and Their Migrations. It was an old book with an old smell; every time I opened it the spine cracked; I believe I was the first person to take it out of the library. It was not an easy book to read.

  My father came in, his bicycle clips still on, his sharkskin jacket sagging and dirty at the pockets, his face tired, his eyes watery behind his glasses.

  ‘What are you reading today?’

  I showed him.

  ‘You can go and impress your mother’s family with that. They can’t read without moving their lips or turn a page without licking their finger. But don’t try to fool me, you hear. You understanding what you read?’

  ‘But of course.’

  ‘You are a damned liar. Aryan-waryan, what the hell do you know about that?’

  I remembered how at school Browne, being seen with a Tarzan book, explained in his clowning way to the master, ‘I only read books of commonsense, sir.’ So now I said, ‘I only read books of commonsense.’

  I really believed he was going to hit me. And when he pulled the book out of my hands, so roughly that he tore the brittle cover from its binding, I thought he was going to hit me with that. But he merely opened the book at random and asked, ‘What is the meaning of homogeneous?’

  We underestimate our strength and throw away our hand. Up till that moment the advantage had been mine; but now, faced with the home version of The Coca-Cola Quiz, I panicked and said, ‘I didn’t bring the book home for me. I brought it for you.’

  ‘Damned liar.’

  ‘I won’t listen to this. You know that cricket bat you gave me for Christmas? I am going to give it to Cecil. I don’t want to touch it now.’

  ‘Give it to Cecil. The poor always give to the rich.’

  I brought Cecil home on Monday and showed him the bat. I had left it in the front veranda with a formal note that I no longer wished to make use of this present from my father. In a way this was true, for I had given up as commonplace the fantasy in which, going to the cricket ground during an international match, I had been discovered with this bat, had been instantly picked – one of the batsmen’s bats being broken and the batsman discarded with his bat – and had saved the side. I asked Cecil whether he wanted the bat. He read the note and it upset me that he didn’t, like my mother, coax me to keep the bat. He simply tore the note off, crumpled it up and threw it into the garden. He said that legally the bat was now his and I was not to touch it without his permission. He was a strange boy, Cecil. I was miserable afterwards.

  My father broke a few things when he got home and found I had given the bat away. He went to his room and I heard him talking to himself. Late in the evening he went out. He stopped at the parlour at the corner for a soft drink. Something must have happened there to irritate him, because without any provocation he began to break the place up. It was a simple breaking-up at first, but soon my father began to concentrate on Coca-Cola. He broke bottle after bottle; and, being continually armed with jagged Coca-Cola necks, he terrified the poor shopkeeper. He broke ninety-six bottles in all, four full cases, breaking one bottle after another, methodically, as though he had been paid to do it; he didn’t just lift a Coca-Cola case and smash it on the floor. My mother ran out when a neighbour brought the news. The police had also been called, and the police in this case was a young policeman whom my father had often summoned in the past to quell disturbances in the street: the unlicensed butchering of animals in backyards, the playing of games on the pavement and so on. The matter fortunately didn’t get into the courts or the newspapers. We compensated everyone generously.

  The incident brought my father considerable local renown and not a little respect among the idlers of the neighbourhood. It was the loaders’ cursing of Cecil’s father all over again. No one had anything against the shopkeeper, who was always ready to give trust and didn’t charge interest; he would give you a glass of water if you asked for it, even if you bought nothing. It was only that the shopkeeper was rich and the idlers were poor and were glad to see how easily the rich could be made ridiculous. But what was most unsettling about this unhappy incident was its effect on my father. He behaved as though he had had an access of madness and couldn’t be held responsible for what he had done that Monday evening. But it was clear he enjoyed the new renown. He sported his bandages and plaster with quiet pride – his hands had been badly cut about, and there were also cuts on his face and chest – during the fortnight’s sick leave he got from the Education Department. He began to presume on the affection of people on the street. He, who before had kept himself to himself, now had no hesitation in asking a street idler to help him mend a bicycle puncture or dig the garden. It was astonishing how readily he got the help he asked for. Madness, but there was method in it, even if the method came afterwards.

  My sisters and I spent more of our time with my mother’s family. We went there every week-end and soon our clothes and other possessions were divided between the two houses. My sisters joined Sally’s court and so became even more removed from me. This was no loss. They were good-looking girls, but their looks were a source of mortification to me. It was the tradition among schoolboys in Isabella, as perhaps elsewhere, that the brothers of beautiful girls were in some way effeminate, and were to be ridiculed on that account. As much as I suppressed my father, then, I suppressed my sisters. They grew away from me as a result; they never again became close. I thought their attitude to my father extreme. They said to Sally and the others that they were not responsible for him and were generally more severe than Cecil even, who saw some humour in the parlour incident.

  Cecil’s father built a beach house and decreed a long holiday there. He was one of the first in Isabella to build a beach house. Today of course the beaches of tropical islands have been turned into suburbs and have the same regulated meanness of population and aspect. I have no doubt they will fall into the same disrepute; but by then the work of destruction will have been complete. At the time of which I write, however, it was still held that beaches were to be wild and uninhabited and without even a shed for changing. You took care to put two or three hundred yards between yourself and the next bathing party; and if that was impossible you said that the beach was crowded and went home, hoping for better luck next time. At that time a beach house was a novelty, and throughout the school term we had heard talk about it from Cecil and Sally.

  But there was an awkwardness. My sisters and I had not been invited. About a trip to the beach, wild and uninhabited, there was still, among us, an element of venture-someness, as about a voyage itself; and no one was willing to take the responsibility for us during a beach holiday of some weeks. Neither Cecil’s parents nor my mother wished to ask my father for his permission, for fear of underlining our separation from him; and we were unwilling to ask ourselves, for fear of being refused. Accordingly, exercising our rights of dual residence, we did nothing. Cecil’s parents’ house was going to be shut up; we doubted that we would be shut up with it or ordered back to our own house. My mother encouraged us by her silence. The day of departure found us packed with the others and, still without invitation, waiting to go. Of course we went.

  The sea broke on us almost without warning. Only a height of sky and a quality of openness behind the tops of trees suggested that a little way beyond there was no more land. And then, at the end of an avenue of coconut trees, was the living, destroying element, almost colourless at this distance. The trees swayed and rustled and crackled. The white surf crashed and hissed on the wide beach. Among the trees, the two-storeyed timber house. No garden, no yard, no fence: just sand and the unnatural plants and vines, glittering green, that grew in hot salt sand. Not my element. I preferred land; I preferred mountains and snow.

  Night came, moonlit or black, spectral or empty; and nothing could be heard except the wind and the trees. Beach houses were not for me. Not for me this fee
ling of abandonment at the end of the empty world. Even Cecil appeared chastened. The girls gathered around an oil-lamp and, in all the sea din, spoke in whispers. At the end, when it was not really very late, we played draughts. I was good at draughts and with every game got better. I played Cecil. He said ‘Aah!’ and scrambled the counters when he saw he was losing. I played my sisters and beat them. I beat Sally. She offered to play me again. I beat her again and she cried. She stamped up to bed, shouting that I was conceited.

  It was a relief to find in the morning that the world was still there. As soon as I could I went outside. There was dew on the vines and the coconut husks. The tide was ebbing; there was a new tidewrack of wet litter; the wind was fresh. Far away on the beach I could see the stripped remains of a great tree, washed up, I had been told, months before, coming from heaven knows what island or continent, drifting on the ocean night and day for weeks, for months, for a year, until stranded on our island, on this desolate beach. I had thoughts, too alarming to pursue, about things existing only when seen. I went back to the house and found them getting ready for breakfast. Above the salt of the wind was the smell of simmering chocolate and fried plantains.

  Then Sally came stamping down the stairs in her yellow seersucker housecoat. Both the garment and the material had come to Isabella at the same time and had become the rage; even my sisters wandered about after school in wide-lapelled seersucker housecoats, showing little bits of slip as they walked. In her yellow seersucker housecoat, then, Sally came stamping down the stairs. She was as distressed as she had been when she went up the previous night. ‘Somebody used my toothbrush!’ she sobbed, and waved the tainted instrument.

  The older women were at once concerned – Sally the beautiful, the delicate – and they hurried to console the melodramatically outraged daughter of that melodramatic family. Their concern did not exceed mine. As soon as Sally spoke I knew it was I who had used her toothbrush. I could taste the toothpaste again. I felt dreadfully unclean. I ran up the steps past her to rinse my mouth out. ‘It’s him! It’s him!’ Sally shouted. Her tears vanished even while she stamped. She giggled; she laughed. At breakfast she didn’t let me forget.

  Afterwards I walked by myself along the shining desolate beach. I observed vines and shells and weed and sand-crabs and the almost transparent small fish that each roller brought right in and very nearly stranded. I wondered whether I shouldn’t take the bus back to the city. I walked towards the village. It was grey, rusty and rotting: the rust of old tin, the grey of rotting wood. In a café shack I had a Pepsi-Cola and a turnover cake with hot sugared coconut inside. I walked along the bumpy asphalted road out of the village, away from the sea. I got queer looks from people behind their hibiscus hedges, people to whom this part of the island was the world, people who, I had been told, all their lives never travelled five miles beyond their birthplace. It was the looks that after an hour or so turned me back towards the village. It was hot. The leaves were still and appeared about to quail. The asphalt, laid on in pure, rippled pats, was already soft underfoot. Here, away from the sea, the freshness of the day had already been burnt off.

  In the village shadows had contracted to edgings around huts and to faint glare-shot patterns below trees. On the beach, which I had left empty, there was now a sprinkling of people and activity of a sort. The sand was not fresh. What had been level and shining clean now had the look of something sullied. It had been scuffed and scored, abraded in irregular patches, and littered with red and pale blue entrails already gone flat and lacklustre. Pariah dogs, ribby and of nondescript colour, fawn or pale yellow, wandered about with their long tails between their legs. The heat of the sand penetrated the soles of my canvas shoes. More people appeared on the beach. But being by now part of the activity I had noticed from a distance, it struck me that the activity was curiously muted, without a centre. Some people looked at the sea. Many more stood idly on the sand. Some stood beside the fishermen, who sat mending their nets in the no-shade under coconut trees next to their rough but brightly painted boats. The mixed Carib and African descent of these fishermen showed in their expressionless faces, burnt by sun and salt and wind to a blackness so pure it had ceased to be a noticeable colour. About me on the beach movement was continuous, but unhurried and undefined. From the refreshment shack where I had earlier had the Pepsi-Cola and the turnover came the gramophone. I remember the song it played. It was Bésame Mucho. Words and music rose above the wind and surf and went out ragged over that ragged crowded beach. Then I heard. People were drowning. There in that infernal devouring element people were drowning. The fishermen were being begged to go out and save them. The fishermen sat on the roots of coconut trees and mended their nets and stripped lengths of canes for their fishpots. Their lean Carib-black faces were like masks. I imagined myself drowning. And in this imagining I became detached; feeling no anger against the fishermen who, as I could hear now, were talking among themselves in their patois; feeling only the feebleness and absurdity of any attempt to rescue those persons, already bodies, hidden in that turquoise water beyond the breakers. The visitors, the people on holiday, were frightened; the locals were as calm as the fishermen. To me, standing in my detachment, my overwhelming fear of death, the story came in snatches. A brother had swum out to save his drowning sisters and had himself disappeared. The tide was ebbing fast: they would all be carried far out. So many versions in a short time I heard of that rescue effort by the brother. He had been frantic and foolish and had exhausted himself too soon. He had tried to fight through the breakers and had not swum under them; he had been dashed and twisted and broken on the sea bed. He was a townsman, he couldn’t swim. So many stories.

  In my fear I turned away and walked back to the beach house. So private a fear it was, so private a sensation of the weakness of the flesh – these poor arms, these poor feet, this vulnerable head – it was shame for the weakness of the flesh that kept me from telling the story to the women. They took my silence for distress at the incident of the early morning and were kind. I accepted their kindness; as though I had taken on for all mankind the weight of the tragedy of flesh and the body I had just witnessed; and this comforting, this service at the hands of women, was fitting.

  So it was Cecil who brought the news, and I pretended to hear it for the first time. Then we all ran out, the girls in their bathing suits tripping along the beach, now at low tide very wide, Cecil running far from us through the edge of the foaming water, taking high, splashing steps, an odd celebratory figure. The sand was like the sand of a tainted arena. The fishermen had disappeared. Their boats were out. The cork floats of the seine were in a wide arc on the sea beyond the breakers. Two boats were coming through the breakers in a confusion of white water; suddenly they were clear and driven down and up almost to the limit of the sea; they were being beached. The crowd split and ran to the two boats to take hold of the rope to pull in the seine. The story of the drownings came to us again. It was just before two, the period of stillness between morning and afternoon. The fishermen pulled in their measured way; the visitors and townspeople, already recognizable by their clothes, pulled frantically, as in a tug-of-war contest. And that record still played in the café. Still those words rode over wind and coconut branches. Bésame mucho, como si fuera la última vez. The absurd words of popular songs I Then I recognized Deschampsneufs and perhaps members of his family among the frantic pullers. I did not want to be observed. I stood aside. Until then the whole extended incident had been a private moment; now I became an observer.

  The arc of the cork floats steadily contracted. It came in closer and closer. It cleared the breakers. Net appeared. Then came shouts. The dragging of the sea! Such an endeavour, so futile, like something in The Heroes. Yet it had produced results. The first body appeared, the second, the third. They had all died together, the rolling, drifting bodies, mingled now, as the seine came in to the shore, with fish, alive and silver. There were the fish we called the dogfish, attracted by death, people said.
And there were thousands of little fish. And soon everything lay strained and dry on the dirty beach. The fish lay flapping on the sand, curving in brief spasms. The dogfish, threats until a minute ago, lay expiring, and people went among them as though animated by personal revenge and mangled their heads.

  The bodies were laid out side by side on the sand in the sun, the bathing costumes still like living parts of them, wet as my own costume would have been if I had been swimming. Away from the group around the stretched-out bodies little arguments had started between the fishermen and some of the people who had helped to pull the seine. The people wanted the fish; the fishermen wanted money for the fish; the people said the fishermen had already been paid, and just for casting the seine. One toothless fisherman continually spoke obscenities. Eventually it was settled. I believe the fisherman got their money. The bodies were taken away; and on the low-tide beach, shining everywhere else, there remained matt marks where the bodies had lain, scrapings and scratchings and scuffed sand to show, just for a few more hours, what had happened. The beach was strewn with small fish, so recently whole and now so dull, so like garbage, silver turning to dark grey. The pariah dogs prowled nervously. The vultures watched from the coconut trees. The stingray, on its brown back, its underside bluish-white, showed a bloody stump where its tail had been hacked off.