The Mimic Men

by V. S. Naipaul

  I had left school. The war was still on, and it was impossible to travel. I took a job. So did we all. Eden, fulfilling Major Grant’s prophecy about those boys who failed English, was snapped up by one of our newspapers. Hok – ‘the exception that proves the rule’: Major Grant’s reported words, when he heard the news – joined the Inquirer as a feature-writer. His name presently began appearing above stylishly written articles, whose cleverness could still give me a twinge of jealousy, that jealousy – so easily converted into open admiration – which is the tribute we pay to the naturally brilliant. Browne worked as a clerk of some sort on the American army base. I heard he was writing a novel about a slave. Many people knew the plot: the slave leads a revolt, which is betrayed and brutally crushed; he escapes to the forest, reflects, arrives at self-disgust, and returns willingly to slavery and death. I saw a carbon of an early chapter, the second, I believe. The slaves arrive from Africa; they are happy to be on land again; they dance and sing; they beg to be bought quickly. The scene was all done in mime, as it were, and from a distance. It was brutal and disagreeable; I didn’t want to read more. I don’t believe more was written.

  Deschampsneufs got a job in one of the banks. Those jobs in the banks! The resentment they aroused! They were reserved, quite sensibly, for those whose families had had some secure – rather than lustful and distant – experience of money; and these jobs had as a result acquired the glamour of whiteness and privilege. Eden met me one day on the street and told me enviously about Deschampsneufs’s duties. It seemed that Deschampsneufs had already been put on to weighing coins. To Eden this casual, wholesaler approach to the coin of the realm – as though it was just another commodity like flour or peas – was maddeningly luxurious. This was the level of our island innocence. And I could see, too, that Deschampsneufs was still up to his usual mischief: consciously exciting envy by revealing what he thought were secrets to people who, he rightly judged, longed to know them from the inside. He had succeeded with Eden, who was delighted to know that coins were weighed, and infuriated that he wasn’t allowed to do a little weighing himself.

  I couldn’t give Eden the sympathy he needed. I wasn’t weighing coins. But I was doing an equally dreary job. I was working in a government department as an acting second-class clerk and writing out certificates of one sort and another by hand. The early months of any job are the longest, and I began to feel that I would never leave the department, that some disaster would occur and I would be compelled to stay there for the rest of my life. Pay-day was especially painful. Everybody came in frowning, in a simulated temper; no one spoke; and all morning subordinates and superiors applied themselves with every sign of pain to their duties, which on that day seemed especially onerous. At about ten the first-class clerk, like a man choking down rage, went off with a money sack to the Treasury; he came back an hour later and, losing nothing of his hangman’s grimness, sat down at his desk and distributed the money he had brought into various envelopes. No one looked at him; everyone was furiously at work. Then he made the rounds, offering envelopes and a sheet for signature. Everyone signed; no one checked his envelope. The older men handled their envelopes most casually of all, tossing them to one corner of their crowded tables or into a drawer, and just letting them lie there. Half an hour later the trips to the lavatory started; one by one the envelopes passed out of sight, their contents checked. After lunch it was like a holiday. The men were red-eyed and high, giving satisfied little belches; the girls giggled in the vault, showing one another the purchases, usually of underwear, they had made during the lunch hour.

  They were all people: I could see no reason why I should be spared. I began to envy the older clerks simply for having lived their lives through. I envied them their calm, their deep pay-day pleasures, their withdrawal from struggle. I envied them the age in their faces, the cultivated deliberateness of their gestures and movements. Cultivated, I now feel: those men were not as old as they appeared to me. I longed to be old. I feared to go out, to be by myself. I could not settle down to any reading. I required only the darkness that Sally provided. Part of my sickness, and I feared my sickness. But I hoped that such a fear would in the end be its own protection. Every week-end I went to the solid house and found Sally. The violation we feared, the violation I feared for her but recognized as inevitable: from this I rescued her, knowing that with every week-end the time for rescue and purity was narrowing.

  For the sake of appearances I was forced to go on expeditions with Cecil and his friends and be the wild young man with them. Their wildness could be overdone. Cecil never ceased to enjoy his money and never lost the desire to startle the poor by his money. On a country road he would stop with a squeal of brakes just inches from some poor old woman selling bananas or oranges from a tray. He would shout, ‘Get out! Go home, you ugly bitch! Leave that blasted tray this minute if you don’t want me to break it on your head.’ The terrified woman would make as if to obey; he would call her back angrily and give her ten dollars or twenty dollars, extravagant payment for the tray and oranges he didn’t want but still took. Cecil still behaved as though smoking and drinking were vices he had discovered and patented. He visited degraded Negro whores. Pleasure for him appeared to lie in an increase in self-violation; he was like a man testing his toleration of the unpleasant. I believed in his high spirits less and less. But he communicated these to some of his friends and he communicated them especially to a Negro man of about forty whom he had attached to himself as a bodyguard-companion-valet. He called this Negro Cecil. It might have been the man’s real name; it might just have been Cecil’s fancy. The Negro was illiterate and penniless and seemed to have no family. He depended entirely on Cecil and I got the impression that when they were together in public they liked playing a very dramatic master-and-servant, gangster-and-henchman game. I believe they both saw themselves acting out a film; the smallness of their activities must have been a continual frustration to them. I thought they were both unbalanced.

  From these expeditions it was good to return to Sally. It was a big house, but on week-ends it was full of people. Discovery was inevitable. It was a visitor who found us. I had seen her around, somebody’s mother or aunt, very old, very frail, with glasses that grotesquely magnified her eyes. I was totally blank: no shame, no guilt, no anxiety. I hated as the deeper intrusion the cross-examination that followed. It was detailed and I thought pointless; it reduced everything to absurdity. But for all the threats, there was no sequel then. The visitor’s feebleness of sight and body seemed to be matched by the feebleness of her memory. When we next met at the house she had forgotten who I was.

  At the house that Sunday was a young man I hadn’t seen before. He was introduced as Dalip. He was well dressed and showed no uneasiness at being in a house of strangers. Cecil proposed that the three of us should drive to the beach before lunch. Movement was one of Cecil’s ideas of fun; very often there was nothing to do when we got to a particular place. I was tired of these drives. But Cecil insisted, and Dalip was agreeable. We stopped in a side street not far away. Cecil sounded his horn and his valet came running out. He appeared to have been waiting; he always appeared to be waiting for Cecil. He had a bottle of whisky and a bottle of rum. He sat in the back with Dalip.

  We were soon out in the country. We drove at great speed along narrow, curving roads. ‘They know me, they know me,’ Cecil said, as though this was going to keep us from an accident. He was pleased that I was uneasy. The valet grinned, hanging on to the strap. Dalip was relaxed. We came to an area of curves and hills. The car possessed the road right and left impartially, and once we came to a shocking halt before a bus that appeared round a bend. They celebrated by opening the bottles. I drank with them. The liquor was hateful. In the racing car it was not easy to pour or to drink. Rum and whisky were spilt. The car smelled of rum.

  Cecil said, ‘Open that glove compartment for me a little.’

  I obeyed. Among yellow cloths and grimy glossy booklets and pads I saw t
wo pistols. One small, with an ivory butt; one big, of pure metal. I had never seen a pistol before.

  ‘Take the big fellow out.’

  I took out the big pistol. The car shot over the brow of a hill on the wrong side of the road. I had never held a pistol. I had thought it was all metal, but now I saw that the butt had wood facings, finely cross-hatched. I was astonished at the weight, astonished at the colour of the metal, the precision of the moulding. This precision was like beauty. I passed my fingers along the edges.

  ‘A Luger,’ Cecil said. ‘Heavy, eh?’

  In the back seat Dalip and the Negro grinned like men in a secret, who also knew about Lugers.

  Cecil, staring ahead, one hand on the wheel, dipped into his shirt pocket with that elegant left-handed gesture, all flexible wrist, with which he usually fished out his packet of cigarettes. He pulled out a bullet. He said, ‘This goes with that.’

  I put the Luger back. I took out the smaller gun. It was old and smooth.

  ‘Nice little thing,’ Cecil said. ‘It’s Belgian. A revolver for ladies. You can cover it in the palm of your hand. Try and see.’

  I said, ‘I prefer the Luger.’

  I put the revolver back and closed the glove compartment. It was their idea of fun. The cigarettes, the drinks, the fast car going nowhere, the throwing away of money on frightened peasants. And now the guns.

  An early Sunday morning, and the beach was deserted. From the cocoteraie brackish streams ran under fallen trees into the sand. The sky was grey. It wasn’t going to be a day of sunshine. We stripped. Dalip was plump and would soon be fat. Cecil was thin and stringy and strong as he had always been.

  The Negro had the physique of a weightlifter. We stripped but did not go into the water. Cecil began to idle about and we idled with him. How well I knew this idling about of Cecil’s! It was out of such idling that he fashioned his stories of wonderful times. He kicked sand and did foolish things with coconut branches. The Negro did what he did. Dalip picked up shells and sea eggs. But above all they drank. Soon they were talking with a sort of childlike philosophy about the sea. The sea. Not my element. Yet it entered so many of my memories of the island.

  Suddenly, kicking his big toe hard into the sand, and looking up from the spattering sand to me, Cecil said: ‘You never met Dalip before? You know who he is?’

  I looked at Dalip. His easy-going face had altered. His expression was of pure hate.

  Cecil roared with laughter in that breath-holding, neighing way he had – the nostrils that were so fine in his sister were on him slightly flared – and he said, slapping his thigh, ‘Your brother, you damn fool!’

  I knew at once what he meant. It was not pleasant. This Dalip was the son of the widow who had been living with my father after he had become Gurudeva and taken to the hills. I had hoped never to see her or the son of whom I had heard. But such a meeting had to come; the wonder was that it had not come before. We were a small community, our upper element crisscrossed with marriages, inbred already. There could be no hiding, no secrets. But now, looking at Dalip, soft and very pale, I again had that sense of being forced to eat raw flesh and drink tainted oil; and that sense of the obscene obliterated shame.

  Dalip said, ‘The son of Guru, eh?’

  The Negro laughed.

  Cecil leaned against the bleached trunk of a tree that had collapsed on some other island or continent and had been washed ashore here and anchored in sand. He set his mouth and looked hard at me. I understood. He held a bottle of Coca-Cola by the waist. The wrist-watch on his left wrist adorned his naked body.

  My mind raced. It fixed on a word. I thought of the Luger and the single bullet, the Belgian ladies’ revolver. It was so early in the morning. I thought of one word. Execution. It had occurred before. We were a small community and in a very deep sense we did not recognize the law of the desert island. Our code remained private and whole. Execution, then, on the hot sand on a Sunday morning. A family affair: it could be concealed: such things had been done before. A disappearance; a gutted body sinking to the bottom of the sea beyond the reach of a fisherman’s seine. Yet I couldn’t believe in it. It would be foolish to behave as though this was about to happen. Nothing had been announced. I asked for a drink. They gave me rum. I would have preferred whisky. But I drank the rum. It was raw and sickening. I found, to my alarm, that I was passive. I was like the mouse or lizard mesmerized by the cat. I accepted. I was prepared to do what was expected of me.

  The taunting, as I saw it, began. Dalip was red with drink and his face was swollen, the eyes heavy-lidded. He threw some sand at my feet and said, ‘The son of the great leader. Well, let me tell you. I don’t think he is any great damn leader, you hear. He is a skunk. A crook. A vagabond. They should have locked him up long time.’

  Strange this taunting. What was said left me cold. Yet I responded to it because I knew it was taunting.

  Cecil, reclined against the tree trunk, that silver strap so noticeable on his bare arm, grinned in his breath-holding way. His valet grinned with him.

  I began a sentence: ‘Who the hell do you think –’ and then gave it up, overcome by the weariness of thinking out and speaking a sentence to its end.

  ‘I will tell you something,’ Dalip said. ‘Your father owes me thirty dollars. Thirty dollars.’

  When? Facing execution, my own helplessness, my own acceptance. When? I tried to imagine this other life my father had created, this rediscovery of himself and those gifts the missionary’s lady had seen: that other life, with its own familiar bonds, so familiar that they might include a request for money. In weakness, as a suppliant? Or out of the prophet’s strength and contempt for the things men held to be of value?

  ‘Thirty dollars.’

  Tears came to my eyes. So suddenly I had taken on my father’s pain. It was a debt that had to be repaid, and instantly. Before the future took its course. Thirty dollars. What a sum! But it had once been needed. It had once been asked for. Poor Gurudeva! The tears were tears of my own humiliation as well. For all my wish to repay this debt, to wipe out this insult, I did not have this sum. But I ran to the car as though I had the money. I took out the dollar-notes from my trouser-pockets. Just about twelve. In the car, crouching over the seat behind the open door, I thought: the Luger. But I didn’t have the bullet. I remembered: that was in Cecil’s shirt. But I was unwilling to touch that shirt. Would I know how to insert the bullet? And perhaps the word and the horror lay only in my own mind. It was an absurd situation. The absurdity didn’t lighten me. I would have to go laughing to my death, and up to the last I would have to pretend that death was in no one’s mind. I left the Luger in the glove compartment. I ran back with the dollar notes and offered them to Dalip.

  He said, ‘That’s not thirty dollars.’

  ‘I will give you the rest later.’

  ‘I just want my thirty dollars.’

  I threw the notes at his feet. And of course, I thought, as they fell to rest on the dry sand, they won’t stay there when this is all over.

  He hit me. I hit him, though I wished to go without a fight. And he was drunk. Cecil and his valet, side by side now against the tree trunk, laughed. Dalip threw himself on me. He was heavy, uncontrolled. He missed me and stumbled. He lifted a twisted and polished piece of driftwood. With this he tried to hit me. It was too heavy for him. It fell of its own weight and I was able to get out of the way. Cecil threw some sand on me. His valet did likewise. They had come closer.

  Cecil said: ‘The Luger. The bullet in my shirt.’

  And, really, I hadn’t thought he had left it in his shirt. The Negro ran easily to the car, a man with much time. I ceased to fight. I let Cecil and Dalip hit me. They threw me on the ground and punched me and kicked me. And even then I could not be sure of their aim.

  ‘Thirty dollars. Your father owes me thirty dollars.’ Dalip repeated the sentence over and over.

  And I only thought: the sea, the sand, the green waves, the breakers, the quaint ships
with sails, the morning music. Not my element, and I was ending here. And I had a vision of the three of us shipwrecked and lost, alien and degenerate, the last of our race on this island, among collapsed trees and sand, so smooth where no one had walked on it.

  ‘A car,’ Cecil’s valet said.

  I heard the wheels on coconut husks and sand. A door slammed. There were voices.

  Cecil laughed and said loudly, ‘But what the hell is wrong with this man on the sand?’

  On a bank, just a few feet high, above the brackish freshwater stream from the cocoteraie, I saw a white family. I got up. Dalip got up. He didn’t laugh like Cecil and the Negro. He was still angry, still complaining about his thirty dollars. He still made attempts to fight. He was very drunk. Cecil and his valet kept on laughing, acting for the newcomers. I was forced to struggle with Dalip. The newcomers watched.