In A Free State

by Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul

  A little later he said, 'A doctor gave me some tranquillizers once. This was some years ago. I had a recrudescence of my old trouble and I thought I was going to get my breakdown all over again. I don't suppose you ever lose the fear, really.'

  'Tranquillizers. Oh dear. Don't tell me you're on those.'

  'Listen. He gave me the tranquillizers. Harmless-looking little white tablets. They had a very strange effect. After three days do you really want me to tell you?' He smiled.

  'Do.'

  'After three days they burnt the skin off the tip of my penis.' Linda didn't hesitate. 'How awful for you.'

  'Absolutely scorched.' He was still smiling.

  The rain continued.

  'It's strange,' Bobby said. 'I never learned to drive until I came out here. But during my illness I always consoled myself with the fantasy of driving through a cold and rainy night, driving endless miles, until I came to a cottage right at the top of a hill. There would be a fire there, and it would be warm and I would be perfectly safe.'

  'Rain outside, fire inside. That's always romantic.'

  'No doubt. Very romantic. But it gave me much comfort.' There was a hint of reproof in his voice. 'And then there was this room I saw myself in. Everything absolutely white. White curtains, blowing in with the breeze. White walls, white bed. Lots of tall windows, all open. Outside, the greenest of hills and, at the bottom, a very blue sea.'

  'It sounds like a hospital on some Greek island.'

  'I suppose it was just that. A wish to give up, to be nothing, to do nothing. Just watching yourself become a ghost. I used to spend hours every day in that room. And every night. I didn't have a bedside table. I used to put my watch on the floor. One morning I stepped on it and broke the glass. I was going to have it mended, but then I changed my mind and decided not to mend it until I got better.'

  'Now that is macabre.'

  'Walking around with a smashed watch. It's just the sort of sick thing you can do. But the most terrifying thing is how quickly you can adapt to having your whole life written off. At first I used to say, "I'm going to get better next week." Then it was next month. Then it was next year.'

  'Isn't there some kind of shock treatment?'

  'Like the tranquillizers. I didn't know anything about anything.

  I thought psychiatry was an American joke and a psychiatrist was someone like Ingrid Bergman in _Spellhound__.'

  'It dates us. Wasn't that a gorgeous film?'

  'Wasn't it. In a way, you are right about the shock, though.

  That was how I started to get better. This psychiatrist I used to go to, the one who cured his rheumatism by telling himself he was only frightened of dying, he said to me after one session, "My wife will give you a lift into town." I had never met his wife. I sat in the drawing-room and waited for her. He was that sort of. psychiatrist. No surgery, just his house. Perhaps I should have waited somewhere else. I heard this woman talking to some other people. Then I heard her say in her bright voice, "But I can take you in. I've got to take in one of Arthur's young queers." She didn't know I was right there. I thought everything I'd told the man was confidential. I don't believe I've ever hated anybody so much in my life. I really wanted them both to die. It was unfair really, because he'd done a good job with me. I suppose without knowing it I was getting better. But this shock, as you say, gave me the jolt I needed.'

  Linda looked through the scratched glass at the rain.

  "One of Arthur's young queers.", Bobby smiled. Linda said nothing.

  Bobby knew he had embarrassed and moved her. He said, with a touch of aggression, 'I don't believe I've said anything to surprise you?'

  'You do terrible things,' he said after a while, the smile gone, his voice altered. 'You do terrible things to prove to yourself that you are a real person. I don't believe I ever felt so exploited.'

  'The public attitude has changed a lot.'

  'I wonder why. I hate English queers. They are awful and obscene. And then, of course, I was arrested. On a Saturday night, in the usual place. The policeman was niceness itself. He tried to "reform" me. It was funny. He tried to fill my mind with images of desire. It was like an incitement to rape. I thought at one stage he was going to pull out his wallet and show me pornographic pictures. But he did the usual things. He took my handkerchief off me, very carefully. My handkerchief! I could have died with shame. It was a very dirty handkerchief. My case came up early on the Monday morning. After the tarts. Guilty, guilty; ten pounds, ten pound!'. I told the magistrate I acted "in the heat of the moment". This caused a little titter and as soon as I'd said it I knew I couldn't have said anything more foolish or damning. But I was discharged very quickly and was able to catch the fast train to Oxford. Oh yes, after my wild London weekend I was back in time for lunch in hall. But I thought Denis Marshall told you. I '

  'broke down" and "confessed" to him some time ago. It always gets me into trouble, but I always break down and confess in the end. It's the effeminate side of my nature. What is it Doris Marshall says they do with people like me in South Africa? They shave our heads, classify us as natives, put us in dresses and send us to live in· the native quarter?'

  Linda continued to stare at the rain.

  'I'm sorry. I've been blabbing as usual, and I believe I've depressed you.'

  'I was thinking about the road,' Linda said. 'Even if the mud isn't too bad, I can't see us getting to the compound before eight or nine. I think we should make up our minds pretty quickly whether or not to detour to the colonel's. I was beginning to feel there's something in the settler maxim about aiming to get where you're going by four. It is now half-past two.'

  'I haven't heard of anyone starving on the road to the Collectorate.'

  'We should make up our mind pretty soon. The turning's going to be on us any minute.'

  'No need to ask what your wishes in the matter are.'

  'I always think the old colonel's fun,' Linda said. 'And I would love to see the lake in bad weather.'

  'I'm glad at any rate that I haven't depressed you. It is nice, isn't it?' he said, speaking now of the landscape. 'Even in the rain, as you say.'

  'Driving "through the night" to your little house on the hill.'

  'Oh dear. I see that's been taken down in evidence against me.

  I can't say I'm sorry Denis Marshall's contract isn't going to be renewed. But I don't believe I'll get anyone to believe that it had nothing to do with me.'

  'I don't think. it matters, Bobby.'

  'Busoga-Kesoro brought me the papers. What could I say? We talk so much about corruption among the Africans. And who are my loyalties to, anyway?'

  'Doris Marshall can be very amusing. But no one pays too much attention to what she says.'

  'It makes me laugh. All the time some people are here they run down the country and criticize the people. As soon as they have to go it's another story.'

  'I suppose that's true of me.'

  'I didn't mean it like that. I'm sorry that you are going.'

  'Why should you be sorry?'

  He couldn't say he was sorry because they were in the car together and because he had confessed to her and because she would now always have some idea of him as he truly was.

  He said, 'I'm sorry because it hasn't worked out for you.'

  'It's different for you, Bobby.'

  'You keep saying that.'

  'Look. I do believe they've closed the road.'

  At the road junction, on the road itself, and in the fields about the road, uniformed policemen stood black in the rain with rifles below their capes. Just beyond the junction dark-blue police jeeps blocked the highway to the Collectorate. A red lantern hung from a white wooden barrier; and a black arrow on. a long white board pointed down the side road that ran flat to the mountains.

  The road to the mountains was clear. No policeman waved Bobby down. But Bobby stopped. Fifty feet or so behind the barrier and the jeeps two heavy planks were laid across the highway: the rain-surf danced abou
t two rows of six-inch metal spikes. A hundred yards or so beyond that, just before the highway curved and was hidden by low bush, there were about half a dozen army lorries with regimental emblems on their tailboards.

  Bobby prepared a smile and began to roll down his window.

  The window-frame dripped, the rain blew in. None of the policemen moved; no one came out of the jeeps. Then a man sitting in the back of a jeep, a fat man, quite young, leaned forward, a chocolate-and-yellow flowered shirt below his cape, and impatiently waved Bobby on; he appeared to be eating.

  'Thank God for that,' Linda said. 'I was dreading another search.'

  'They're very good that way,' Bobby said. 'They have a pretty shrewd idea who we are.'

  'At least they've made up our minds for us,' Linda said. 'Now it will have to be the colonel's. I feel that Simon Lubero's writ ends right here, don't you? The army seems very much in control. I hope we don't run into any of their lorries. They're absolute fiends.'

  'I always show the army respect.'

  'Martin says that whenever you see an army lorry you must park off the road until it passes. They run you down for fun.'

  'I wish they could have kept it a police operation,' Bobby said. 'I'm sure it is what Simon himself would have preferred.'

  5

  FOR SOME MILES the road to the mountains was asphalted and as wide and safe as the highway they had just left. But this road wasn't built on an embankment; it followed the level of the land which here, near the mountains, had flattened out into the gentlest slope, smooth and bare, without trees. In the openness fenceposts stood out, and the rain-washed road could be seen for some way ahead, empty, skimming the. tilted land. The mountains were faint in the rain, but they no longer simply bounded the view; they led the eye upwards.

  Fields, fences; a dirt cross-road with a washed-out signpost; a scattered settlement with concrete and timber the colour of wet adobe; trees and bush. The road began to twist and climb. It narrowed. And then there was no more asphalt, only a rough rock surface.

  Climbing, they had glimpses of the high plain they had just left; and even through the rain there were suggestions of the land dropping away beyond that. But then, as they went deeper into the mountains, all they saw was the bush on both sides of the road. Curves were sharp around cuttings, wet rock shining below shredded overhangs of roots and earth. There were little, melting landslides in the shallow overgrown ditch and sometimes on the road.

  'Really it's hard to know what one would choose,' Bobby said. 'A hundred miles of mud on the highway. Or this.'

  Soon they were well into the mountains. Every now and then they saw peaks and further peaks rising above the rain and the mist; so that after only half an hour of climbing. it seemed they were on the roof of the world, at the heart of the continent. The sunlight and the scrub, the straight black road, the hiss of the tyres, the play of light on brilliant green fields: that belonged to another country. The car bumped along the rocks; sometimes for stretches the road was strewn with cinders, which made a squelchy sound; the car was noisy, rattling, low gears always above the din of the rain. Not talking, listening for other motor vehicles, half expecting to see army lorries around every blind corner, Bobby and Linda concentrated on the shut-in road.

  Occasionally now they saw· huts beside the road and wild lilies in small rain-splashed ponds. Sometimes the land fell away on one side and the black trunks of roadside trees and the wet black lower boughs, leaves dripping, framed a view of a grey-green valley: inset terraced hills, red paths going up each hill to a little stockaded grass hut, paths winding away to other, hidden valleys.

  'This was what I meant,' Lindasaid. 'I never expected there would be fields here or that they would terrace up all those hills, right to the very top. I never thought of those tracks, and never thought it would look so old and settled.'

  'It was the land we left them,' Bobby said.

  She leaned back in her seat and took off her dark glasses, and Bobby saw that he had said the wrong thing, had struck the wrong note.

  'It's absurd to think of now,' he said soon after, in another voice. 'I knew nothing at all about Africa when I came here. I was surprised to find them working iron. Somehow no one had thought of telling me that. I was really surprised. But you know that if you leave any old piece of metal lying about -'

  'And not so old. Overnight your car can disappear, with only the seats left to mark the spot. They'll pick a Boeing clean in a week.'

  Bobby knew the joke, but he laughed. 'I suppose I vaguely felt when I came here that they would be hostile because I was white and English and because of South Africa and things like that.'

  'They don't care about South Africa.'

  'That's just it. This extreme sophistication. They laugh.'

  'Sammy Kisenyi was telling me that's because they're very angry.'

  'Sammy exaggerates, like the politicians. Sammy likes to do the racial thing from time to time. He's really just testing you. That can be a bit of a bore. I can't bear that sort of socialistic, thirdworld pose, can you? It's something he picked up in England. It's not typical. They say Sammy had a rough time in England.'

  'It's certainly left him with a thing about the white woman.

  The blind, the lame, the halt, no one's safe.'

  'That's rather pathetic. I wonder how many Sammys we are creating.'

  'Pathetic, it's frightening. Sammy believes he's irresistible because he's black and fat. He feels he learned how to "handle" English people in England. Seriously. He's badly mixed up.'

  'Sammy's an exception. I suppose what I like about ordinary Africans is that with them there's none of this testing. They take you just as you are. Doris Marshall is right. I have a lot to be grateful to Denis for. He made me come over here. The things you do when you're young. Writing the LCC exam because everybody else was writing it, applying to Hedley's because everybody else was applying. I suppose it's a kind of hysteria. There are so many things you can do perfectly adequately. So many things that you know are not enough, but would do. You look steady, when in fact you're just drifting. I wasn't much of a fighter. After Oxford I was just content to be well again. It never occurred to me that I might want to use myself fully as a human being. It isn't easy to explain, I know, and everything one says can be twisted here. There are too many people around who know how to make the correct noises.'

  'You make it so difficult, Bobby.'

  'In what way?'

  'People take jobs for all sorts of reasons. I wonder if people talk about the place they live in as much as they do about Africa.'

  ' Oxford. People talked about nothing else except being up at Oxford.'

  'I suppose we did try too hard to make the correct noises. We should have known from the first day that the country wasn't for us, and we should have taken our courage in both hands and gone back home.'

  'But you've been here six years.'

  'As Martin says, the only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.'

  'And you're really going South?'

  'It's only an idea. In four years Martin will be fifty. I suppose we could go back to England and Martin could go freelance. He is a hack who thinks he is, as Martin says. But you can't really make a fresh start at forty-six. And Martin isn't really the freelance type. He isn't much of a fighter either.'

  The car bumped and bumped. The trees dripped. Through black overhanging leaves they had a glimpse beyond far peaks of a small mountain lake, grey, like the sky. A roadside jacaranda had freshly shed its purple flowers, a brushing of delicate colour on the rock and mud of the road: they went over it.

  'My life is here.'

  'Bobby!'

  On a path on the wooded hillside just above the road about a dozen Africans in bright new cotton gowns were walking one behind the other in the rain, covering their heads with leaves. With the bright colours of their cottons, and the leaves over their heads, they were very nearly camouflaged. They didn't look at the car.

  'T
hat's the sort of thing that makes me feel far from home,' Linda said. 'I feel that sort of forest life has been going on for ever.'

  'You've been reading too much Conrad. I hate that book, don't you?'

  'You mean they're probably just going to a wedding or an annual general meeting.'

  'Now you sound like Doris Marshall.'

  'All right.'

  'I loved Denis. I can never stop being grateful to him for what he did for me. My meeting with him at that college Gaudy changed my life. I began to feel I wanted to use myself again. He got me my job here, and I suppose he showed me how to look at the country. But he wanted me to keep on being helpless. He wanted to remain my go-between. He kept on saying that I didn't understand Africans and he would handle them for me. He didn't like it when I started to find my own feet and get around. Such a naive man, really. He wanted me to remain his property. He went insane when he discovered I didn't object to physical contact with Africans.'

  'You were neither of you discreet.'

  'He talked so much of service· to Africa. I· can't tell you how shattered I was. Arid then he started this campaign against me. I thought I was finished. But that was when I truly got to admire Ogguna Wanga-Butere and Busoga-Kesoro. They understood what Denis was up to.'

  'I don't want to hear any more.'

  'They are all like that.'

  All at once Bobby's excitement died down. He felt he had destroyed the mood of confession and friendship and had lost Linda. He had spoken too much; in the morning he would be full of regret; Linda would be another of those people from whom he would have to hide. He set his face, the silent man.

  They passed more Africans on the hillside. Linda didn't exclaim or point them out. Bobby began to search for words that would restore the old mood. Half an hour ago he had so many things to say; now nothing new suggested itself. Feeling Linda sitting in reproach beside him, he wished only to go over what he had· said, to recapture those passages where he had held her.