The Mimic Men

by V. S. Naipaul

  ‘Swim!’ Cecil said.

  The Negro ran to the water. Cecil chased him as if in sport. I threw off Dalip and followed them. He fell and remained where he fell. The family went walking on the beach, some in ordinary clothes, some in swimming costume. Dalip raised himself after a little and staggered to the car. He opened the door and appeared to collapse on the back seat among the clothes and the towels. I was at last out of the shallows. The water broke over me, the great breakers – the faded white board on the beach said in red Danger – and with every breaker I felt closer to myself. It was a coming back from far, as the hill people said. Whence had that mood of the previous minutes come? The sea and the sand. Oh, never again.

  Later we found Dalip asleep and totally naked. He had tried to dress but had only got as far as taking off his swimming pants. He had tried to drink some more. The rum bottle was on its side and uncorked and almost empty; rum soaked and scented our clothes. He had apparently also tried to walk home. We followed his tracks through the dry hot sand below the coconut trees to the road. The asphalt was lumpy and rutted and full of holes, green at the base, in which water had collected. About fifty feet up the road he had collapsed. Soft, pale flesh, innocent abused face, genitals foolish and slack. We lifted him back into the car and put some clothes on him.

  We drove back at a rate. The car was damp and gritty with sand and smelled of rum. We put Dalip down at his house. It was a large, clumsy, two-storeyed concrete dwelling, painted in vivid colours. I could see pictures of Hindu deities and Mahatma Gandhi in the top veranda. When we got back to the house they were only reading newspapers. Lunch was to come. It was still morning; the adventure had been brief. The story Cecil told was the story of Dalip’s drunkenness. He referred to nothing else.

  Some doubt remained in my mind. Some doubt remains now. Dalip telephoned the next day and apologized. His voice was soft and winning. I told him not to worry. But I took care not to meet him. We met again years later, after we had both gone abroad and come back. By then the issue was dead; accounts had been settled, down to the thirty dollars.

  I never went back to Cecil’s house. I never saw Sally again. They sent her off some months later to a girl’s college in the the United States. I knew she would never come back to Isabella. So she went out into the contamination of the wider world and was absorbed in it. And I was free to do the same. I was as blank as I had been at the moment we were discovered. I went to my office and wrote out my certificates and what grief I felt sank into the emptiness that had been with me for some time. That did not lift.

  I heard more about the Luger, though.

  Cecil’s father bought a cinema in the country. It was the last thing he bought. It was not much of an investment from his point of view, and I believe that at the back of his mind there was the idea, of a perverted asceticism, that what was frivolity to the rest of the world was to him business. At the end of his career he was back, in a way, and now from perfect security, to ‘fulling bottles with a funnel’. I also believe it was the last act of his special piety: the cinema showed mainly Indian films.

  The cinema became Cecil’s toy. It was Coca-Cola all over again: unlimited access to a delight for which the rest of the world had to pay. It was also another place to drive to. He was in and out of the cinema with his valet, harassing the manager; it gave him pleasure to be recognized in the village as the man who owned the cinema. He arrived drunk one evening, when a film was running, and ordered the manager to put on the house lights. There were shouts from the hall. He walked in, Luger in hand, his valet behind him. They climbed up to the stage. They were caught in the light of the projector and threw enormous shadows on the screen. He fired one shot into the floor and one at the ceiling. ‘Get out! Take your money back and get out.’ Some people lined up outside the manager’s office, but most went home. The house lights were dimmed again. Inside Cecil sat, his feet on the seat in front, the Luger in his lap, watching the film, alone with his valet, who didn’t know the language.

  I got the story from my sisters. They continued to live in the house. There they continued to meet the young men to whom they had become engaged. For them Cecil was now only part of the atmosphere of their romances; and this was just another Cecil story, like the famous one of his boyhood about the cases of Pepsi-Cola on the picnic launch.

  I remained uncertain about that Sunday morning on the beach. But its revelation, its surprise, had been my sudden and intense sympathy for my father. Poor Gurudeva! There on the beach I had felt linked to his power, madness and humiliation. Thirty dollars. The time was to come when I could pay that sum ten thousand times over. But I remembered.

  6

  JUST after the end of the war Cecil’s father died. His disappointment in Cecil showed in his will, which was unexpectedly scattering. He left my mother enough money for her to say she was well off. He also left fair sums to my sisters and myself. In addition he left me some valueless land, which I tried in vain to sell. If Cecil was peeved he didn’t show it. My grandfather used to say, proudly at first, later with resignation, that Cecil was born to give away. He was right. Within two years Cecil had run Bella Bella down and lost the Coca-Cola licence. Though even then, from what I heard, he lost nothing of his bounce, dramatizing his decline, seeing himself as a victim of fate alone and happy with his memories of childhood as the great days.

  The last time I saw him before I left Isabella was on a Monday morning in our main street. He ran out from a bar and asked me to have a beer with him. His friendliness was was so pure and anxious, and this made him so attractive that I agreed, although it was not yet eleven. He was wearing a brilliant white shirt and a tie. This was unusual. He said he was going to the bank. ‘I need a few cents,’ he said loudly. With his left hand he held his half-empty glass almost at the bottom and rapped it hard on the counter. ‘I am going to ask them for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, boy.’ He gave a grunt. I didn’t believe him; I thought he was only trying to impress the barman. But I was concerned for Bella Bella. He also said there was going to be some religious ceremony for his father at the house. He wanted me to come. I said I would. But I didn’t intend to go, and he knew that. The house, now his, was no longer my place of escape: no more the glamour of Coca-Cola, or the security of level floors.

  Consider me ungracious. But consider me perhaps also lucky, in that at a time of change I no longer needed these props. I was at last about to leave. I had written to colleges in various parts of the world and I had been accepted by the School in London. Many other people, of every sort, were leaving; the ambition, I now saw, had not been mine alone. The war had brought the world closer to us: the traffic jams in Liège, the white slopes of the Laurentians, the landscapes that imagination had filled out from the drawings by H. M. Brock in a French reader. A few more scholarships were being offered. Browne got one. He was going to London, to do languages: a disappointment to his family, who required a professional man. I heard no more about his novel. Eden applied for a scholarship to study journalism in Canada and, to our horror, almost got it. His failure didn’t worry him too much; he settled down happily to studying the movements of ships and passengers for his paper. Hok applied for nothing; a type of lethargy had come over him; he was also reportedly in love.

  I used to meet Deschampsneufs from time to time. He was still in the bank and still painting. He had no immediate plans for travel. He said he didn’t feel ready for Quebec or Paris just yet. I got the impression that he was enjoying his reputation in Isabella as a ‘radical’. He had created a stir in our Art Association by painting either a red donkey in a green sky or a green donkey in a red sky. There had been letters to the newspaper, for and against, quoting all sorts of famous names; and at the end Champ had become a figure. He continued to treat me as a ‘serious’ person and we would have intellectual conversations. I believe we both enjoyed the idea of ourselves walking about the rundown colonial city and talking art and ideas. He was getting inte
rested in religion and regarded me as an expert. I didn’t think the reason was flattering – it seemed a curious tribute to my father – but I pretended to speak with the authority he required. These conversations were a strain; I think we were both always a little glad when they ended.

  About a month before I left we met by chance in a café one lunchtime. We exchanged an idea or two. Then he said: ‘I hope you can come home one day before you go.’

  I was miserable with embarrassment. He spoke like one who knew that an invitation to his home was something which many people on the island would welcome. He also spoke like someone who knew he was exposing himself to a snubbing of sorts, since no one is as ready to snub as the oppressed and the powerless when they find themselves suddenly courted. And again he spoke like someone who was asking for both these considerations to be put aside. His invitation was his offer of reconciliation, his sealing of our stiff intellectuals’ friendship.

  I didn’t want to go to his house. We could meet easily only on neutral ground. But I didn’t wish to appear snubbing. I played for time.

  I asked, ‘How is the vine?’

  ‘A strange thing. It’s been attacked by ants.’

  The invitation hung in the air.

  I said, ‘What’s a good day?’

  We fixed an afternoon.

  I had given up the island. But a family, especially if it is at home, can impose its idea of itself; and it was to this idea that I found myself reacting when I went to the house. Deschampsneufs’s parents were there and his younger sister Wendy. The father was stocky and swarthy; the mother was pale and thin with no hips to speak of and a sharp worn-out face. Wendy was as thin as her mother but more engagingly ugly. She was at the rubbing-up, flesh-testing, showing-off stage. She climbed over me and my chair, stood on her head in another chair and generally asked for attention. I was told there was some trouble about getting her into a school.

  Mrs Deschampsneufs said, ‘She is a very intelligent child, though they don’t seem to think so here. I took her to a psychiatrist in New York when I was there.’

  I expressed my interest. I half-believed that psychiatrists existed only in cartoons.

  ‘He said she was above normal. Very high I.Q.’

  Wendy was standing on her head in a deep chair at the end of the room.

  ‘And it wasn’t as if he knew anything about us or anything like that.’

  There were photographs on the walls of various members of the family, including one which I took to be of the great Deschampsneufs, the leader of the man without in 1877. There was also a very large oil painting of a woman in early nineteenth-century costume. The painting looked new and shiny and I thought it was appallingly done. There were also group photographs; pictures of the French countryside; one or two of French châteaux; and half a dozen old prints in old frames of Isabellan scenes: people landing on surfy beaches and being taken ashore on the backs of naked Negroes, forest vegetation, a waterfall, Negroes in straw hats and striped knee-length trousers rolling casks of rum. There were also, on one wall, the photographs at which I feared to look: racehorses, Tamango no doubt among them.

  ‘I hear that you are going to England,’ Mrs Deschampsneufs said. ‘I wonder how you’ll like it.’ She had been flattening out her accent; now she sounded like a woman of the people. I thought she was going to make some remark about the rain or the cold. But what she said, making a face, was, ‘Whitey-pokey.’

  Her husband raised a hand in tolerant reproof.

  I was mortified. This was the term used by Negroes of the street to describe white people. To me it was as obscene in connotation as it sounded. I wondered whether I had always misunderstood the word or whether Mrs Deschampsneufs, attempting vulgarity, hadn’t gone farther than she knew. By the judgement of the street she was whitey-pokey herself, very much so. But she appeared pleased with the word. She used it again. It occurred to me that this might be her attempt at the common touch: her statement, to the man she judged political and nationalist, that she belonged to the island as much as and perhaps more than anyone else. Her next sentence confirmed this.

  ‘It might be, of course, because I’m French. But I don’t think anyone from Isabella can get on with those people. We are different. This place is a paradise, boy. You’ll find that out for yourself.’

  Mr Deschampsneufs asked me, ‘Do you like music?’

  I made a noise which left the issue open.

  He got up from his chair and, with Wendy clinging to his legs and impeding his passage, went to the bookcase. He opened the glass door and took two cards from a shelf.

  ‘Here are some tickets for the concert at the Town Hall. We can’t go. Champ doesn’t like music, and I don’t think they should be wasted. It isn’t as if we get these things every day.’

  ‘Roger is always being sent things like that,’ Mrs Deschampsneufs said.

  ‘Take them,’ her husband insisted.

  ‘Otherwise no one will use them,’ she said.

  Well, I took the tickets.

  Mrs Deschampsneufs asked me what I intended to do in London. I told her about the School. But she was interested in smaller things. She wanted to know how I thought I would spend a Sunday, for instance. I didn’t know what she expected. She pressed me. But I wasn’t going to betray myself by fantasy.

  She said, ‘I imagine you’ll be coming back with a whitey-pokey bride.’

  Her husband said, ‘But why do you want to arrange everybody’s life?’

  ‘Let me tell you, boy. Take a tip from somebody who has seen the world, eh. Don’t.’

  With that she left the room.

  Mr Deschampsneufs said, ‘What do you think you will do when you come back? I don’t see much scope here for what you intend to do there.’

  But I was still thinking about Mrs Deschampsneufs. She had been a little too aggressive, and I thought: goodness, she was aggressive because to her I was someone who was already abroad, no longer subject to the rules of the island.

  Champ said, ‘Who is arranging everybody’s life? Why do you think everybody must pine so to come back?’

  His father said, ‘Oh, yes, we all want to get away and so on. But where you are born is a funny thing. My greatgrandfather and even my grandfather, they always talked about going back for good. They went. But they came back. You know, you are born in a place and you grow up there. You get to know the trees and the plants. You will never know any other trees and plants like that. You grow up watching a guava tree, say. You know that browny-green bark peeling like old paint. You try to climb that tree. You know that after you climb it a few times the bark gets smooth-smooth and so slippery you can’t get a grip on it. You get that ticklish feeling in your foot. Nobody has to teach you what the guava is. You go away. You ask, “What is that tree?” Somebody will tell you, “An elm.” You see another tree. Somebody will tell you, “That is an oak.” Good; you know them. But it isn’t the same. Here you wait for the poui to flower one week in the year and you don’t even know you are waiting. All right, you go away. But you will come back. Where you born, man, you born. And this island is a paradise, you will discover.’

  I said, feeling that he was seeking to drag me back into his world, where he walked with security, ‘I am not coming back.’

  He wasn’t put out. ‘It’s what I always say. You fellows from the Orient and so on, ancient civilization etcetera, you are the long-visioned types. You give up too easily. Just the opposite of our Afric brethren. Short-visioned. Can’t look ahead, and nothing to look back to. That is why I am sorry to say I can’t see our Afric friends coming to much. Lot of noise and so on, but short-visioned. I’ll tell you. You know those fellows in the South American bush, when they kill something, say a deer or something like that, you know they just sit down and eat out the whole damn thing, man. They not putting aside any for the morrow, you know.’ He gave a little laugh as he broke into the popular accent.

  I said, ‘You mean the bush-Negroes?’

  ‘Indians.’ He ga
ve another laugh. ‘Amerindians. Bucks, you know. But a similar short-visioned type.’

  He was launched on what was clearly a favourite theory. The example he had given, of the South-American deer-feast, had that feel, of a fact polished to myth by its frequent use in argument. In his own way he was a racial expert. His knowledge ranged wide and in some places touched my own, which I had thought personal and sufficiently recondite. The names of books he mentioned revealed him as an addict of racial theory. He rejected simple racial divisions as a crudity. Instead he divided nations into the short-visioned, like the Africans, who remained in a state of nature; the long-visioned like Indians and Chinese, obsessed with thoughts of eternity; and the medium-visioned, like himself. The medium-visioned were the doers, the survivors.

  ‘No great philosophy and so on, but we’ve survived. Goodness, how many revolutions?’ He pretended to count. ‘The French Revolution, for one. What happened? We came over to this part of the world, to Santo Domingo. And then there was that revolution there. Let’s not talk about Haiti. Ten glorious years of revolution etcetera etcetera, but never mention the hundred and thirty, forty, years afterwards. Let’s not talk about Haiti. Anyway, then we came here. Tonnerre! No sooner here than our friends the English take over. Look at the result. Listen to me talking English in my low Isabella accent. Champ here can scarcely talk French.’

  It was true. Champ’s French was dreadful.

  ‘But we’re still around. That lady you see there’ – he pointed to the shiny and terrible oil portrait – ‘was an ancestor of this boy.’

  ‘Not of yours,’ Champ said. It seemed a family joke.

  ‘She was born in Santo Domingo. It wasn’t too bad with old Toussaint in the beginning. Then of course we all came here. She was still a child. When she was about fifteen she went to Paris. To be educated, to get to know people. You know. She was very pretty, as you can see. She was a little bit wild too. I think you can see that too. Very popular and sought after and so on. She used to stay in the house of a woman called Clémentine Curial.’