The Mimic Men

by V. S. Naipaul

  Create the scenes then. Imagine Browne, the leader, in his shabby journalist’s suit, energetic, enthusiastic, frequently breaking into the local dialect, for purposes of comedy or abuse. Beside him set myself, as elegant in dress as in speech: I knew my role. Imagine the public meetings in squares, in halls. Imagine the tours along dusty country roads in the late afternoon and at night, the headlights illuminating the walls of sugarcane on either side. Imagine the developing organization in the Roman house, the willing black hands of clerks from business houses and our civil service. Imagine the lengthening reports of our speeches in the Inquirer. Imagine that other mark of success: the policemen in heavy serge shorts, becoming less aggressive and more protective as their numbers grew. Their amiability was pathetic: it was like the amiability of the gangster who finds himself in polite society. Add an enlivening detail: the yellow light on shining black faces, an old crazed woman somewhere in the crowd proclaiming her own message of doom, and here and there the flambeaux on stalls which now, because they are part of the people, one and entire, the police will not move on or break up.

  Add the smell of Negro sweat as, to applause, we make our way through our followers, shining eyes in shining faces, to the platform, they so squat and powerfully built, we so tall and slender. In this smell of heated sweat, once rejected, I tried to find virtue, the virtue of the poor, the labouring, the oppressed. Such is the vulgarity that mobs generate, in themselves and in their manipulators. The virtue I found in that acrid smell was the virtue of the protecting, the massed and heedless. It was Browne’s privilege to be less sentimental. ‘The old bouquet d’Afrique,’ he would mutter. And sometimes, when we were on the platform: ‘Did you get the old booky?’

  It was genuine, this sentiment, part of his ambivalence. But it was also, increasingly, an attempt to reassure me, to tell me, in the shorthand of speech we had evolved for use in public, that we were as one. For other scenes have to be created, other details added: casual estate labourers, picturesque Asiatics, not willing to share distress, lounging about a country road at dusk, unaroused, polite only because of my name. Someone in our party struggles with a microphone or a pressure lamp. The impassive shopkeeper in his dark shop sells sugar or flour to a young girl, who is indifferent to our mission; as afterwards he sells us beer. Then comes the drive back through the still land: weak lights in silent houses. The mud and deep ruts surprise us. We are aware of the remoteness of the safe town and those facilities we have taken for granted. We sympathize silently with the picturesque people we have left behind. In this sympathy we feel confirmed in our mission and our cause. Time was all that we needed, to bind all in distress.

  Fill the Roman house with people once again. Suppress all rowdiness and strenuous gaiety. But do not destroy the coldness that is the fate of houses which have been mentally abandoned by their builders before they are complete. Until they are warmed by new tenants these houses are never like places to live in. Remember the cold kitchen and the terrazzo of empty rooms where a lost girl, pure of body, walked about, thinking of other landscapes. Fill these rooms now with a new and more appropriate feminine atmosphere. It is the atmosphere of dedication and mutual loyalty, in which speech is soft, statements, however inexact, are never violently contradicted, and even drink, served by loyal women to deserving men, is taken sacramentally.

  A court had developed around us. There was competition to serve; and among these helpers there was, as we knew, murder in the wings. Outside the gates strange men began to appear in the evenings. We thought at first they were from the police, and no doubt in the early days one or two were. But we got to know the faces. They were of people who had come unasked from the city to protect us. So with the court there came drama. Drama created itself around us. When reports came to us of violence, in various districts, the protection around the house increased.

  What had begun could not, it seemed, be stopped. Were we in the court responsible? In the feminine atmosphere of the Roman house all was goodwill and dedication. A sacramental quality attached not only to food and drink but to the liaisons that had grown up among our courtiers, between handsome men and ugly women, handsome women and mean-featured men. Sex a sacrifice to the cause and a promise of the release that was to come: so different from the cartoon unreality I had found in the relationship between Browne’s sister and her boy-friend, ugliness coming to ugliness in mock humanity, on the only occasion I had been to Browne’s house, when we were both schoolboys at Isabella Imperial.

  In the Roman house itself, then, those interiors I had feared to enter opened up to me. In this atmosphere delight could not be openly proclaimed. And I will say that the reports which increasingly reached us of violence, more and more racial in character, filled us with awe. We were already sufficiently awed at ourselves, sitting up in the still nights, the splashing fountains drawing attention to the silence, assessing our progress, writing speeches, planning tours. We felt we had discovered something good and true in ourselves. We, I say. We, I perhaps felt. But this awe was something which excluded me. For our courtiers, men and women in poor jobs in teaching and the civil service, it was awe of a sort I can only call holy. I write with control: this awe was moving and frightening to behold. It was the awe of the ungifted who thought they had, simply through enduring, suddenly discovered, in this response of the ungifted among their people, the source of the power and regeneration they had waited for without hoping to find.

  I couldn’t be sure where Browne stood in this. He was as dedicated as the rest. But he was more frivolous than any of us dared be. We met regularly, but we were never as close again as on that first evening in the Roman house. It was as though each had declared himself irrevocably then, and further probings were unnecessary. So that, absurdly, we became close again on the public platform, when we each became our character.

  The awe of our court excluded me, I say. I sometimes thought: they are presuming, they are asking too much of me. But I could only assent, and the time soon came when I felt it was up to the others to make some worthy reassuring statement when an Asiatic vendor was beaten up in the name of our movement, or a white girl insulted. This had to be put aside. It was superficial. Those were my own words. I heard them echoed. The truth of our movement lay in the Roman house, the court inside, the guard outside. In my own silence and assent there was dedication to the organization I had built up. There was also vanity: the vanity of the prime mover who believes it is in his power to regulate what he has created. There was no self-violation in the article I wrote for The Socialist. I wrote that violence in the Americas was not new. It had come with Columbus; we had lived with violence ever since. The cry was taken up by the court. But I noted that they continued in their special awe.

  The truth of the movement lay in the Roman house. It also lay in our undeniable success. We attracted support from all races and all classes. We offered, as it soon appeared, more than release from bitterness. We offered drama. And to our movement there was added a name which made mine fade a little. It was the name of Deschampsneufs: Wendy, indifferent to the recent past, heedless of rebuff, presuming on the eccentricity of an ancestor. What could I do? How could I put that relationship right? There was a welcome for her: she was right. She came to the Roman house and ruled it for two months, and I was helpless before her assurance. She became the mother to us all in her brisk young-girl way; she offered the final benediction of her name and her race, both of which separated her from us. Ugly, flat-footed, squeaky-voiced!

  Rumour did things to her. It attached her to dockers. It attached her to Browne. It finally attached her to me. It was a favourable rumour in the early days. Later it was one of the things to be used against me: it proved that even in the beginning I had been corrupted by glamour and as such was prompt to betray. Wendy relished every rumour. Whenever we were at a meeting together she did what she could to suggest that our intimacy was of the sacramental sort I have described. And the people were favourable. They adored Wendy for her sacrifice. The squat
men with bright eyes in dumb faces offered her the protection they offered the rest of us. She moved among them like their ugly queen. And as for me: it will come as no surprise that I became, at least so far as appearances went, what others saw in me. It was play for me, play for her.

  At the end of two months she pronounced herself bored with the movement and bored with the island. Everyone forgave her. She flew off to join her brother in Canada. And from Canada for the next year I received a series of letters from her brother. He was still painting and had just discovered Hinduism. He set me the riddles of the universe and of existence and asked in so many words for ancient wisdom. I did what I could.

  A twinge of jealousy, an alarm of loneliness: this was what I felt when Wendy left. I envied her her freedom and saw her as the freest of us all. I was grateful to her too for the relief she had provided from the intensity of those days. It was an intensity made up of confusion, dishonesty, fear, delight, awe. My awe was not the awe of the others. It was wonder and puzzlement at this suddenly realized concept of the people, who responded and could be manipulated, for whom tactics of the broadest sort could be planned in the Roman house. And with this wonder there went, I can confess it now, a great awakening fear of those shining faces; a fear just buried under the delight I felt at being protected by this foolish strength, as virtuous as the smell of its sweat; a fear just under my delight as speaker and manipulator, the new possessor of the sense of timing, with the instinct now for the right place for the big word, to arouse that gasp of admiration, the instinct for the right place for the joke with which we abolished the past, the right place for the dandyism which, with me, was like the comedian’s catchword when he plays to an audience who knows him well. And dishonesty: those speeches, whose brilliance so many commented on and travelled distances to hear, had as their basis contempt, the knowledge that it didn’t matter what was said. The presence was enough. Whatever was said, the end was always the same: applause, the path made through the crowd, the hands tapping, rubbing, caressing my shoulder, the willing hands of slaves now serving a cause they thought to be their own.

  Confusion: in the end it possessed us all. We were dazed by success. We didn’t know whether we had created the movement or whether the movement was creating us. And I come back to the awe. When I examine myself I can think of no cause, no politician’s speeches stirring enough or convincing enough to send me into the streets, to make me one of a manipulable crowd. We zestfully abolished an order; we never defined our purpose. And it has happened in twenty countries: this realization of the concept of the people, the politician’s humanity, this bewildering proof of the politician’s truth.

  What did we talk about? We were, of course, of the left. We were socialist. We stood for the dignity of the working man. We stood for the dignity of distress. We stood for the dignity of our island, the dignity of our indignity. Borrowed phrases! Left-wing, right-wing: did it matter? Did we believe in the abolition of private property? Was it relevant to the violation which was our subject? We spoke as honest men. But we used borrowed phrases which were part of the escape from thought, from that reality we wanted people to see but could ourselves now scarcely face. We enthroned indignity and distress. We went no further.

  I am not sure that the wild men of our party did not speak more honestly than we did. They promised to abolish poverty in twelve months. They promised to abolish bicycle licences. They promised to discipline the police. They promised intermarriage. They promised farmers higher prices for sugar and copra and cocoa. They promised to renegotiate the bauxite royalties and to nationalize every foreign-owned estate. They promised to kick the whites into the sea and send the Asiatics back to Asia. They promised; they promised; and they generated the frenzy of the street-corner preacher who thrills his hearers with a vision of the unattainable rich world going up in a ball of fire. We disapproved, of course. But what could we do? We were awed, I say. We were helpless with our awe. It wasn’t dishonesty. Detachment alone would have shown us that in the very success of our movement lay the pointlessness and hopelessness of our situation. In our very success lay that disorder which, daily, we feared more.

  3

  THE election was at hand. The frenzy was heightened and given acute point. To the victors would go the spoils: further constitutional conferences in London and, after that, independence. More night meetings, more processions, demonstrations, motorcades; tedious journeys by motorcar; late meetings in the Roman house. Among our supporters, among our court, there were occasional alarms. We let them play with visions of defeat which, in the frenzy, must have appeared total; they were encouraged to greater effort.

  It all led to the inevitable: the success of election night, the cheering, the flag-waving, the drinking. It led to that moment of success which, after long endeavour, is so shatteringly brief: a moment that can almost be fixed by the clock, and recedes and recedes, leaving emptiness, exhaustion, even distaste: dissatisfaction that nags and nags and at last defines itself as apprehension and unease.

  Unease: with us, even during those first hours of victory in the Roman house, this centred on Browne. The thought came to us at intervals that in just a few hours, between the colleague of the day before and the Chief Minister of a few hours hence, he had been set apart. He had been set apart by our efforts. The play was over. Exhilaration went. We could no longer draw strength from one another. It was one of those occasions when each person looks down into himself and finds only weakness, sees the boy or child he was and has never ceased to be.

  From this awareness of weakness – strength only when it was in combat with something we judged to be strong – we arrived at dismay. It was as though, in a tug-of-war contest, the other side had suddenly let go. It has happened in twenty countries like ours: the sobering moment of success, when playacting turns out to be serious. Our grievances were our reality, what we knew, what had permitted us to grow, what had made us. We wondered at the ease of our success; we wondered why no one had called our bluff. We felt our success to be fraudulent. But none of this would have mattered as much if we hadn’t also understood that in the game we had embarked on there could be no withdrawal. And each man was now alone.

  That morning saw the end of the life of the Roman house. In the moment of success the feminine atmosphere vanished. Everyone was easily irritated. Innumerable jealousies were at last expressed. There were one or two open quarrels. The wand had been waved: the prince had become a toad again.

  On such occasions we look for someone to give the lead and set the new mood. We looked to Browne. He made an effort. He tried to heighten both aspects of his manner, the authoritative and the colloquial. Selfconscious ourselves, we studied him critically, and no more so than when he returned that afternoon from Government House after his consultations with the Governor. We looked for weakness and found it. It amazed us a little to find that he behaved like a man socially graced. I knew that this was an extension of the Browne who spoke with familiarity of the writers and commentators who contributed to the journals he read. It was part of his literalness and part of his enthusiasm, finding something new to feed on. But it delighted the foolish women in our court for another reason. They saw in this a complete vindication of the movement, a triumph of the race, Browne their representative speaking on terms of equality with the representative of the ruling power. In normal circumstances Browne would have dismissed their pleasure as servile. But now he seemed not at all displeased.

  He had an analytic mind that dealt in abstractions; he had no descriptive gift. Now he revealed a descriptive talent. His story of his encounter with the Governor reminded me of nothing so much as the talk of my mother’s father after he had returned from an air trip to Jamaica. It was the first time anyone in our family had been in an aeroplane, and that too had made a dry man flourish.

  Now Browne held us with his talk of furnishings and rituals, of views of our own city through windows and doors, of paintings. There was a moment when the Governor, leading Browne to an alcov
e, had said: ‘But we rather like this little thing.’ The little thing was a view of a pink-and-white Mediterranean fishing village, a gift to the Governor, mentioned by his first name, ‘from Winston’. We shared Browne’s admiration: this was an ennobling link with the world, with a great man and great events. Then Browne remembered his new role. Earnestness replaced delight.

  ‘To think,’ he said, in the pause our admiration had created, ‘that decisions concerning our future have been made for so long in a room like that.’

  It was disappointing. But I wonder whether we were right to be disappointed by Browne’s delight or by his emphasis that day on legality and ritual. Our disappointment was part of our simplicity. Ritual was a link with the security of the past. Browne, like the rest of us, required reassurance; he too was made irritable by the thought that his behaviour might be misinterpreted. Later I was to say that my betrayal had been thought out beforehand, but I never believed this. We never operated with such sophistication.

  A crowd had gathered outside the Roman house. Various businessmen came to pay their respects. There were also petitioners seeking better jobs or houses or the reversal of court decisions. We were quickly fatigued; we ordered that no more people should be admitted. But there was an old Negro who would not be denied. He shouted out slogans and added religious texts. He was crazed with distress and passionate for justice. He was almost in tears when he was allowed in.

  He ignored us all and went straight to Browne, redeemer of the race. He unwrapped a parcel he was carrying and offered the contents: a small bookstand, which he said he had made himself. He began to tell his story. But his distress did not abate and his words could not always be followed. For years, he said, he had been working for an English contracting firm. For years he had been passed over when it came to promotion. Inferior Negroes were the ones his employers selected for promotion, to prove that Negroes couldn’t do responsible jobs well. For years he had been subjected to insult and had kept his peace. Now he could speak. All the insults he had secreted over the years he now poured out, in proof of his virtue and merit. He had worked in the evenings on the bookstand; he had despaired of finding someone worthy to give it to. This was no longer so. Look: the bookstand was made of four interlocking, detachable pieces: no glue had been used.