A Way in the World

by Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul

  IT WAS at De Groot’s bungalow that I at last met Blair. De Groot was a lecturer in African history at the university. He was about my own age. He had done a certain amount of original work on the Swahili culture of the coast, and his position at the university was far too modest. He had been moved aside once or twice for Africans, but he thought that in an African country this was as it should be, and he didn’t really mind. He had been born in East Africa and wanted to live nowhere else. That, in fact, was his principal ambition: to be always in Africa, to migrate nowhere else.

  His father was a New Zealander who had gone to East Africa before the Great War. He was an engineer and builder and in East Africa he did small-scale construction work for the railways. His business failed during the Depression, and he lost the remainder of his money in his old age, when he quarrelled with his settler neighbours and started lawsuits against them. He had never been “a ‘settler’ settler,” to use his son’s words.

  The same was true of the son (though he could mimic the settler voices); and he wasn’t much of anything else either. De Groot, the son, understood all attitudes in this part of Africa, and was detached from them all. He divided the expatriate lovers of Africa on the compound into “cob-cullers,” deer-hunters, people on an extended safari, and “matoke-eaters,” plantain-eaters, people who wanted to pretend for a while that they were Africans. He saw himself as belonging to neither group (though he knew that to some people he looked like a matoke-eater). He never defined himself, but I think his attitude was that he was simply a man in his own setting, and fascinated by everything in that setting. In Africa he had no special cause; people looking for a man with a cause found him incomplete.

  He was a bachelor. He liked friends, conversation, stories, jokes. His bungalow was the standard compound bungalow and absolutely the same as mine, in dimensions and plan and fittings, but it seemed much nicer. It was at the edge of the compound, on slightly sloping ground, with a view at the back, beyond a dip, of unregulated bush outside the compound stretching away to the next slope. Most people in the compound decorated their rooms with standard African artifacts—drums, spears, shields, zebra-skin pouffes, carved figures. (The vendors came around constantly; I bought some rubbish myself in the early days.) De Groot had an African eye, and apparently simple objects in his sitting room—like a wooden comb from a particular tribe, with variegated light-catching patterns carved with a relish that made you feel you would like to do some wood-carving yourself—were things you could give attention to and constantly see afresh. But the main reason why De Groot’s bungalow was so attractive was because of the man himself. He was intelligent and quick, and without malice. He was completely open. You felt when you were with him that he took a delight in your character, your oddities, your presence.

  (He was one of the people I thought I should go and see again before beginning this book. He had long ago left the university; he never said, but I believe life there had finally been made too hard even for him. Later he had done some semi-academic half-jobs; notes on Christmas cards had given me the vaguest ideas of those jobs. He had published a few things, but then he seemed to have drifted away from academic life altogether. I had no idea what he was doing when I wrote to him.

  He misunderstood my letter: he thought I was going to be with him in a few days. He couldn’t come to meet me, he said; he was going to send his driver; he described the driver. He said he had run out of Earl Grey tea; he wanted me to bring him some. He had a little farm now. Things were still chaotic, but there were a lot of books and he thought I would be comfortable. I knew the area where the farm was. It was scrubland, dusty, not welcoming. I felt that “farm”—with its suggestions of fields and fruitfulness—might have been too big a word for what he had. I imagined his house as a rougher version, but in wilderness, of his compound bungalow.

  He wrote a second letter. This was clearly the work of an inflamed brain: the writer thought I was going to walk through the door at any moment. The letter was on an air-letter form; half-way through, the handwriting, that to me was so full of his character, broke up. Though the letter had been addressed, it hadn’t been finished: some kind of failure had occurred during the writing, and he had saved his energy for the address.

  De Groot had, in fact, written both letters from a hospital. I had written to him when he was dying. The planning and writing of a book can be attended by such coincidences.

  For years after I left East Africa I used to think of going back one day to have another look, do the long drives. That idea had always assumed that De Groot would be there, to guide, interpret, pass me on to people, and give me the news. He would have been the man to whom I would have brought back my stories. Without him there was no point in going back. I wouldn’t have known how to move; it would have been another country.

  I suppose it would have been possible twenty-five years before to foresee the shrinking of his life to the settler parody at the end. I know that worry about the future did come to him later. But while he was on the compound—still young and finding friends, and doing generous things like arranging the meeting between Blair and me—he was serene. The country had already begun to go very bad—and he knew it—but he was in the full joy of his African life.)

  With his background De Groot would have understood the tensions between Blair and me. He didn’t have to be told anything. And when he said to me one day that he had met Blair and got on with him, and that I should meet him too, I knew at once that De Groot had been doing a little work and that such a meeting would be all right. Blair would have felt the same. So even before we met a kind of goodwill had been established.

  We met late one afternoon on De Groot’s narrow back verandah, concrete-floored and perfectly open, just a few inches above the ground, with weathered wicker chairs and a low, bleached, ring-marked table, with a certain amount of junk pushed together in a corner against the kitchen wall. Beyond the little sloping strip of lawn—De Groot liked to water that—the land fell away, seemingly to bush; and from the hidden settlements below—settlements living off the compound—there came a sound of African voices.

  In 1949, when I was seventeen, I had thought of Blair as a young man. Now he seemed to me middle-aged: he was close to fifty, and I was not yet thirty-four. The wonderful physique had thickened up; he seemed to be less neat in his movements, more assertive, to be taking up more room. Before I could think too much about that he put things right: he made the first gesture.

  He said, “I tell people I saw you do your first piece of writing.” Then he addressed De Groot as well. “It was in the department where we both worked. He wrote an article about a black beauty competition. He showed it to one of the typists and she didn’t like it. She thought he mocked the black M.C. too much.” He gave a deep laugh. “As soon as I began to hear about it I recognized the fellow.”

  I had often thought later—in England, when my writing career appeared not to be starting—of that joyous time of pretend-writing in the department. It took me six years to see what was wrong with that article about the beauty competition. The seventeen-year-old writer was too falsely knowing: his judgements, the angle of his observations, his jokes suggested he knew another, better world. That phantom world, which came with the first, innocent wish to be a writer, was hard to get rid of.

  And it occurred to me now, considering Blair’s freer movements in De Groot’s verandah and a laugh bigger than I remembered, that at about the same time Blair might have come to the realization that the character he had been presenting to the world—the self-made man, still striving, looked up to by all, correct, with the manners of his special community—was in some essential way false to himself. He might have been granted another vision of his isolated community living in the debris of old estates; he might have taken their story back and back, to unmentionable times. And he might have decided then—like me as a writer—to remake himself.

  We met at about half-past four. Blair left us at about six, when it was beginning to grow
dark and cooking smoke from the chattering settlements below began to rise through the bush. We talked of meeting again. He mentioned dinner in his bungalow. (I thought of the burden on his houseboy, Andrew’s kinsman.)

  There was no further meeting. He didn’t live. I was left only with those ninety minutes, and, as can happen after an unexpected or brutal event, ironies began to attach to every gesture and statement of Blair’s that came back to me. It is hard to believe on such occasions that a person doesn’t have, deep down, at some hidden level, an intimation that he has closed the circle and is near the end of things, and hard to believe that this knowledge doesn’t break through a person’s words and actions in a coded way.

  And, in fact, at that last meeting Blair did speak, if not in code, in an oblique way of things that were important to him. Breaking into something De Groot was saying, he said, quite early on, spacing out the words, and with pointing gestures that made him seem enormous in the little verandah, “I know that the world I will be leaving is better than the one I came into.” That was a simple racial statement, easy to understand. It explained his passion, his politics; and it was true: the revolution he had taken part in had succeeded.

  But then a little later he softened the aggression of those big gestures. We were talking of insurance companies and medical tests, and he told a story of going to get a test in a clinic in New York. After his details had been taken down, he was given a dressing gown and told to go to a cubicle and undress. The dressing gowns were in four colours. The colours had no significance and the gowns were given out at random, but when the gowned men gathered in a waiting room, dressing-gown colour groups tended to form. He might have begun this as a serious story, but when De Groot and I laughed at the absurd picture he was creating, he laughed too.

  Much later on, when De Groot was talking of tribal politics in East Africa, Blair gave the conversation an unexpected turn. We were all tribalists and racialists, he said; we could all easily fall into that kind of behaviour, if we thought we could get away with it. He told another story. He was in New York, at a railway station, and standing in line to buy a ticket. (He had a United Nations posting and New York was the setting of many of his stories.) The couple at the head of the line were causing a delay. They were an Asian couple: Blair couldn’t say whether they were Filipinos or Malays or Indonesians or Chinese. They couldn’t speak English. It took a long time for the clerk to establish where they wanted to go; and it was only after the clerk had given the tickets that the man began to look for money to pay. Blair found himself saying, “What’s the matter with that damned Jap?” And the white man in front had turned and looked at Blair with great disregard.

  It was a simple story; Blair and I had grown up surrounded by rougher racial manners and hearing much worse things about all races. But this was more than a story Blair was telling against himself. This was a story to tell us where he had got to; it was an offering to the two of us sitting with him in the fading light. Taken together with what he had said earlier in the afternoon, it was like a statement, made without excuse or apology, that after the passion of his politics he could now be another kind of man, ready for new relationships. De Groot, with his sensitivity in these matters, would have picked up something like that during his own meeting with Blair; and I found myself moved by what I thought Blair was saying. He expected his racial passion to be understood; he didn’t think he had to explain it. That was impressive; it made me think afresh of his lost community in the blighted cocoa woods. I also liked the generosity, and the clumsiness, of his last story. The statement he had made could have been made only obliquely or in code, and with that kind of clumsiness; that was moving in itself. All three of us might have found plain words difficult.

  For the rest of the time De Groot talked about the Swahili culture of the coast. This would have pleased Blair, the idea of the antiquity of Africa, the idea of African history, though he would not have been able truly to share De Groot’s enthusiasms. He had got his certificates and external degrees, but he was not in any wider sense a well-read or educated man. He would have had no idea of the cultures De Groot was talking about, no feeling for the dates or periods.

  But here too he wished to show himself in a new light. He played down whatever pleasure he might have felt at this talk of African history, and he said at a certain moment, “Sometimes here, when people start talking about gold and ivory, you can believe you’re living in Biblical times. You almost expect them to start talking of peacock feathers.”

  This appeared to be a reference to the job he had come out to do for the government, and it appeared to confirm compound stories that Blair had run into trouble with some politicians. They had expected him only to put a squeeze on the Asian community. He was doing a lot more: he had begun to look at the smuggling out of ivory and gold. This was as much of a drain on the country’s resources as the dealings of the harassed businessmen in the capital. It was well known that this kind of smuggling was being done by important men in the party, who (because of the regulations controlling the movement of people, and the innumerable new laws) now ruled in the interior with all the authority of old-fashioned chiefs, and (in spite of the talk of the socialist restructuring of society) often were connected to the old chiefly families.

  De Groot said, after Blair had left, “He should be careful. They are not all like the president. There are some very wild men out there, and they can be pretty crude. The new power has gone to their heads. They feel they can do anything.”

  I got another version of the same message from Richard some days later. He stopped me in the compound and said, “I have been looking up your friend’s record. He’s not exactly Mr. Clean, is he?” I knew then that Blair had begun to tread on important toes, and that Richard was already revolving in his head his defence of the regime, polishing his phrases, against anything that Blair might make public.

  IT WAS as brutal and messy as De Groot had suggested it might be. And so shocking—even to Richard—that for some days no announcement was made of Blair’s death; no one would have known how to present it. Instead, there were rumours, some of them inspired by people who would have wanted Blair out of the way. The first was that he was killed in a brothel just outside the capital. Another was that there had been some kind of Asian conspiracy. Yet another, coming very quickly afterwards, was that his bungalow on the compound had been burgled, his papers and everything else of value stolen, and his houseboy had vanished. There was some truth in the last part of the story. His houseboy, Andrew’s kinsman, wasn’t seen again.

  What was established, after some days, was that Blair’s body had been found in a showpiece banana plantation many miles from the capital. This plantation had been created with foreign advice and money, and was intended to be a model for the collectivized farms of the future. It had a special atmosphere. Old banana leaves, quickly drying and breaking down, and many inches thick, were used as a mulch. To walk on this mulch was like walking on a very thick, soft carpet. It deadened footsteps and seemed to absorb all other sound, and you very quickly began to feel uncertain about your footing. The people who had brought Blair or his body here seem to have intended to bury him below the mulch, but then they had been disturbed or had changed their minds. It was a day or two before the body was found and taken to the capital, and many days after that—and after a short official announcement of the death—before the body was flown back to Trinidad.

  In the version of his death I carried in my imagination I saw Blair alive in that banana plantation, a big man floundering about in silence in his big, shiny-soled leather shoes in the soft mulch, between his sure-footed attackers. There would have been a moment in that great silence when he would have known that he was being destroyed, that his attackers intended to go to the limit; and he would have known why. And I feel that if, as in some Edgar Allan Poe story, at the moment of death, while the brain still sparked, a question could have been lodged in that brain—“Does this betrayal mock your life?”—the answer immediat
ely after death would have been “No! No! No!”

  Andrew grieved for his kinsman but didn’t want to talk about him. He continued to drink on weekends. On Mondays he would be red-eyed, with a very bad headache, as before. But now, in addition, grief dulled his skin; his face was like a carving, without mobility, the lips seemingly clamped together, the lower lip jutting. For some weeks he appeared to be close to tears.

  Moses Lubero didn’t do his slow swivel of neck and eyes to look at me as I drove past. He took care now to look away, to be busy with what he was doing. Six weeks or so later the bicycle that had belonged to Andrew’s kinsman (and had before that belonged to Andrew) began to be ridden about in the compound by a new houseboy.

  And Richard. Two years ago I was in Paris for the publication of one of my books. In a restaurant one day, near the end of a lunch with an overworked French journalist who was bluffing his way through an interview, someone behind me said in my ear in English, “A voice from the remote past.” It was Richard, without cigarette and ivory cigarette-holder. Twenty-five years had given him a lot of hair in his nostrils and ears. He was wearing a grey suit and he said he was working in Paris for a foundation, arranging scholarships for students from eastern Europe. He had left Africa and had married again. “The male menopause,” he said, in his brisk, seemingly jovial way. “What they call the change of wife.” That was like Richard: the tested phrase. I said, “It must be grim for you, seeing what’s happened in so many parts of Africa.” He said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I left Africa only because of what I told you. I wanted a change, and what I am doing now is much more valuable. Eastern Europe is much worse than anything in Africa. A place like Hungary had a perfectly good communist government. They gave that up, and now they are on the brink of ethnic conflict. Nobody says they are barbarians and savages.” That again was like Richard, still concerned only with the rightness of his principles, and somehow still safe.