Half a Life

by V. S. Naipaul

  He became our big shot. When he found that the jealousy had subsided, and no one among us, his friends and neighbours, was quibbling about his new position, he became oddly modest. He said to me one Sunday, “You could do what I do, Willie. It's just a matter of courage. Let me tell you. You've spent time in England. You know the Boots shops. Over here we need the things they make, the medicines and other things. They have no agent. You could be the agent. So you write to them. You provide the references they will ask for, and you're in business. They'll be delighted.” I said, “But what am I going to do with the goods they send me? How am I going to start selling it? Where am I going to put it?” He said, “That's the trouble. To do business you have to be in business. You have to start thinking in a different way. You can't write to people like Boots and think they'll want to do business with you just for a year and a day.” And I thought, from the way he talked, that he and his principal had gone quite seriously into the Boots business, and nothing had come of it.

  He said one Sunday that he had begun to think of representing a certain famous manufacturer of helicopters. That took our breath away, because we knew now that he wasn't joking, and it gave us some idea how big he had become. He seemed to know a lot about helicopters. He said the idea had come to him all at once—he made it sound like a saint's illumination—when he was driving along the road to the coast. He talked about helicopters for many weeks. And then we read in the controlled press—in an item we might have paid no attention to if we didn't know Correia—that a number of helicopters were being acquired, but of a different make from the one Correia had talked about. We heard no more from him about helicopters.

  So Correia became rich—the helicopter business was only a stumble—and he and his wife spoke in their old simple-minded way about their money. Yet they still had that idea of the disaster to come. Their good fortune had made them more worried than ever, and they said they had decided not to spend their money in the colony. The only thing they did here was to buy a beach house, not far from the restaurant we used to go to, in a holiday area that was now opening up fast. They did that as an “investment.” It was one of their new words. They formed a company called Jacar Investments; and they passed around to us, as to country cousins they had left behind, cards printed with the stylish name, which combined elements of their first names, Jacinto and Carla. They travelled a lot because of their new business, but now they didn't only open bank accounts. They began to think of getting “papers” for various places—making us feel even more left behind—and on their travels they set matters in train: papers for Australia, papers for Canada, papers for the United States, papers for Argentina and Brazil. They even talked—or Carla talked one Sunday—of going to live in France. They had just been there, and they brought a bottle of a famous French wine for the Sunday lunch. There was a half glass for everybody, and everybody sipped and said what nice wine it was, though it was actually too acidic. Carla said, “The French know how to live. A flat on the Left Bank, and a little house in Provence—that would be very nice. I've been telling Jacinto.” And we who were not going to France sipped the acid wine like poison.

  After some years of this—when it seemed that to the success of the Correias there could be no end, as long as the army was there, and the town was growing, and the great man was in his place in the capital—after some years there was a crisis. We knew it by the Correias' behaviour. They drove an hour and a half every morning to the mission church and heard mass. Three hours' driving, and an hour's mass, every day, and heaven knows how many prayers or novenas or whatever at home: it wasn't the kind of behaviour anyone could keep secret. Jacinto Correia grew pale and thin. Then we read in the controlled newspapers that irregularities had been uncovered on the procurement side. For some weeks the newspapers allowed the scandal to spark away, and then the great pure Portuguese man with whom Jacinto Correia was connected made a statement in the local executive council. In everything that concerned the public weal, the great man said, the government had to be ever vigilant, and he intended, without fear or favour, to get to the bottom of what had happened on the procurement side. The guilty would be brought to book; no one in the colony should doubt that.

  It was the other side of the easy-going authoritarian state, and we knew that the Correias were in deep trouble, that neither bank accounts in great cities nor papers for great countries could rescue them. Darkness here was darkness.

  Poor Carla said, “I never wanted this life. The nuns will tell you. I wanted to be a nun.”

  And we knew then—it was something we had talked about for years among ourselves—why Correia had been chosen by the great man. It was for just such a moment, when the great man might have to throw someone into the darkness. To destroy a Portuguese like himself would have been to break caste, according to the code of the colony, and to become disreputable. There was no trouble at all in throwing a man of the second rank into the darkness, someone from the half-and-half world, educated and respectable and striving, unusually knowledgeable about money, and ready for many reasons to do whatever he might be required to do.

  For three or four months the Correias lived with this torment. They dreamed all the time of simpler days, before the agencies, and all the time they rebuked themselves. Our hearts went out to them; but their wretchedness also made them tedious. Jacinto became like an invalid, living with his disease as with an enemy and thinking of little else. And then, abruptly, the crisis was over. Jacinto's great man in the capital had found some way of putting down the rival who had started all the mischief. The newspapers then stopped writing their poisonous paragraphs, and the procurement scandal (which had existed only in the newspapers) simply ceased to be.

  But it wasn't the end of Jacinto's anxiety. He had been given an idea of the uncertain ways of power. He knew now that he might not always have the protection of a great man, and then, for any number of reasons, someone might wish to reopen the case against him. So he suffered. And in one way that was strange, since for years we had heard Jacinto talk (and sometimes with zest) of a calamity to come, something that would sweep away the life of the colony, sweep away all his world. A man who lived easily with that idea (and liked to frighten people with it) shouldn't have worried for a moment about the schemings of a few vengeful people in the capital— all doomed, anyway. But Jacinto's big event, which was going to take away everybody and everything, was a philosophical sham. As soon as you looked at it you saw that it was very vague. It really was a moral idea and a way of self-absolution, a way of living in the colony and at the same time standing outside it. It was an abstraction. The disgrace he was worried about was not abstract. It was very real, easy to work out in many of its details; and it was personal. It was going to fall on him alone and leave the rest of the whole sweet world untouched.

  One Sunday, when it was our turn to give the lunch, we went to the beach restaurant with the yellow and blue tiled floor. It was Correia's idea afterwards that we should all go to see his beach house, the investment. Ana and I and many of the others had never seen it, and he said he hadn't been there for two years. We drove from the restaurant back to the narrow asphalt coast road, a black crust on the sand, and after a while we turned off into a firm sandy road that led between brilliant green sand shrubs and tropical almond trees back to the sea. We saw an African hut, its smooth grass roof shining and almost auburn in the light. We stopped. Correia called out, “Auntie! Auntie!” An old black woman in an African cloth came out from behind the straight reed fence. Correia said to us, “Her son is half-Portuguese. He is the caretaker.” He was loud and friendly with the African woman, overdoing it a little, perhaps to show off to us, acting out the twin roles of the man who got on with Africans and the employer who treated his people well. The woman was worried. She was resisting Correia's role-playing. Correia asked for Sebastiao. Sebastiao wasn't at home. And we followed Correia, who was making a lot of noise, to the house on the beach.

  We found a half ruin. Windows had been broken;
in the moist salt air nails had rusted everywhere, and the rust had run, staining faded paint and bleached wood. The French doors on the ground floor had been taken off their hinges. Half in and half out of what should have been the sitting room there was a high-sided fishing boat propped up on timbers as in a dry dock.

  The old African woman stood some distance behind Correia. He said nothing. He just looked. His face creased and went strange. He was beyond anger, and far away from the scene about him. He was helpless, drowning in pain. I thought, “He's mad. I wonder why I never saw it before.” And it was as if Carla, the convent girl, was used to living with what I had just seen. She went to him and, as though we were not there, talked to him as to a child, using language I had never heard her use. She said, “We'll burn the fucking place down. I'll go and get the kerosene right now and we'll come back and burn the whole damned thing, with the fucking boat.” He said nothing, and allowed her to lead him by the arm back to the car, past Auntie's hut.

  When we next saw them, some weeks later, he looked drained. His thin cheeks were soft and slack. Carla said, “We're going to Europe for a while.”

  Mrs. Noronha, hunched up in her chair, said in her soft voice, “A bad time.” Carla said, “We want to go and see the children.” The Correias' two children, who were in their teens, had been sent a year or so before to boarding schools in Portugal. Mrs. Noronha said, “A better time for them.” And then, without any change of tone, “What's the matter with the boy? Why is he so ill?” Carla became agitated. She said, “I didn't know he was ill. He hasn't written that.”

  Mrs. Noronha paid no attention. She said, “I made a journey once at a bad time. It was not long after the war. And it was long before I took to this chair. Before I took the throne, you might say. We went to South Africa, to Durban. A pretty town, but it was a bad time. About a week after we got there the natives began to riot. Shop-burning, looting. The riots were against the Indians, but I got caught up in the trouble one day. I didn't know what to do. I didn't know the streets. In the distance I saw a white lady with fair hair and a long dress. She beckoned to me and I went to her. She led me without a word through various side streets to a big house, and there I stayed until the streets were quiet. I told my friends about the incident that evening. They said, ‘What was this lady like?' I told them. They said, ‘Describe the house.' I described the house. And somebody said, ‘But that house was pulled down twenty years ago. The lady you met lived there, and the house was pulled down after she died.'” And having told her story, which was really about her own powers, Mrs. Noronha turned her head to one side, against her shoulder, like a bird settling down to sleep. And, as often with her when she was soothsaying or storytelling, we couldn't tell at the end how we had got to where we had got. Everybody just had to look solemn and stay quiet for a while.

  Bad time or not, the Correias went off to Europe, to see their children and then to do other things. They stayed away for many months.

  *

  I GOT TO KNOW their estate manager. I saw a lot of him in the town. He was a small and wiry mixed-race man in his forties with an educated way of speaking. Sometimes he could overdo it. He would say, for instance, about a Portuguese or Indian shopkeeper with whom he had been having trouble, “He isn't, by the remotest stretch of the imagination, what you would call a gentleman.” But his speech limbered up when he saw more of me. He became full of mischief, and at the same time quite trusting, and I felt I was being drawn into a series of little conspiracies against the Correias. We tried the new cafés (they opened up and closed down all the time). We got to know the bars. I got to know the new flavour of the military town, and I liked it. I liked being with the Portuguese soldiers. There was sometimes an officer with a long memory muttering about Goa and the Indians. But the Indian takeover of Goa had happened seven or eight years before. Few of the young conscripts knew about it, and the soldiers were generally very friendly. There was as yet no war in the bush. There had been stories about guerrilla training camps in the desert in Algeria and later in Jordan; but these stories had turned out to be fanciful: a few students from Lisbon and Coimbra playing at being guerrillas in the vacations. In our military town there was still peace and a great deal of civility. It was like being in Europe, and on holiday. It was for me like being in London again, but with money now. My excursions to the town took longer and longer.

  Álvaro, the Correias' manager, said to me one day, “Would you like to see what they do?” We were in a café in the capital, having a coffee before driving home, and he lifted his chin at a group of brightly dressed African women, brilliant in the mid-afternoon light, who were passing in front of the café window. Normally the afternoon view was of torpid begging children, very dusty, who leaned on walls or shop windows or posts, opened and closed their mouths in slow motion all the time, and seemed not to see anything. Even when you gave them money they seemed not to know; and they never went away, however much you gave them; you had to learn to ignore them. The women were not like that. They were quite regal. I supposed they were camp-followers, and I said to Álvaro that I would like to see what they did. He said, “I'll come for you tomorrow evening. It's much better in the evenings, and it's much better at the weekends. You'll have to find some way of making your excuses to Madame Ana.”

  Álvaro made it sound easy, but I found it hard. In ten years I hadn't lied to Ana; there hadn't been the occasion. In the beginning, in London, when I couldn't see my way ahead, I had fabricated things, mainly about my family background. I don't know how much of that Ana believed, or whether it meant much to her. In Africa I had after a while let those London lies drop; in our half-and-half group they seemed to have no point. Over the years Ana had picked up the truth about me. It wasn't too different from what she had always believed; and she had never made me feel small by reminding me of the stories I had told her. In Africa we were very close, and that closeness seemed natural. She had given me my African life; she was my protector; I had no other anchor. So I found it hard to make my excuses to her. It spoilt the next day. I began to work out a story. It felt like a lie. I tried to straighten it out, and it became too involved. I thought, “I am going to sound like someone from the quarters.” And then I thought, “I am going back to my London ways.” When the time came Ana hardly listened to what I had to say. She said, “I hope Carla is going to have an estate to come back to.” It was as easy as that. But I knew I had broken something, put an end to something, for almost no reason.

  Álvaro was dead on time; he might have been waiting in the dark just outside the estate compound. I thought that we would be going to the town, but Álvaro didn't make for the main road. Instead, we drove slowly about the backways, all ordinary to me now, even at night. I thought that Álvaro was killing time. We drove, now past cotton fields, now through open bush, now past dark plantations of cashew trees. Every few miles we came to a village, and then we drove very slowly. Sometimes in a village there was a kind of night market, with petty stalls in low open huts, lit by a hurricane lantern, selling matches and loose cigarettes and small tins of various things, and with a few improvident people, men or women or children, finding themselves penniless that day and sitting at the roadside with candles in paper bags beside very small heaps of their own food, sticks of dried cassava, or peppers, or vegetables. Like people playing at housekeeping, and playing at buying and selling, I had always thought.

  Álvaro said, “Pretty, eh?” I knew some of these villages very well. I had seen these night markets scores of times. It wasn't what I had come out to see with Álvaro. He said, “You wanted to see what the Africans did at night. I'm showing you. You've been here ten years. I don't know how much you know. In a couple of hours these roads we've been driving along will be crawling with people looking for adventure. There will be twenty or thirty parties tonight all around you. Did you know that? And they aren't going there just to dance, I can tell you.”

  The headlights of the Land Rover picked out, just in time, a little girl in a s
houlder-strap dress ahead of us. She stood at the side of the road and, shiny-faced in the lights, watched us pass. Álvaro said, “How old do you think that girl is?” I really hadn't thought; the girl was like so many others; I wouldn't have recognised her again. Álvaro said, “I will tell you. That girl is about eleven. She's had her first period, and that means that she's ready for sex. The Africans are very sensible about these things. No foreign nonsense about under-age sex. That girl who looks like nothing to you is screwing every night with some man. Am I telling you things you know?” I said, “You are telling me things I don't know.” He said, “It's what we think about you, you know. I hope you don't mind.” And really in ten years I had never looked in that way at the villages and the Africans walking beside the road. I suppose it was a lack of curiosity, and I suppose it was a remnant of caste feeling. But then, too, I wasn't of the country, hadn't been trained in its sexual ways (though I had observed them), and had never before had someone like Álvaro as a guide.

  In the very beginning, when I hadn't even known about the pleasures of living in the wilderness, I had thought that the mixed-race overseers couldn't have had much of a life, living so close to Africans, surrendering so much of themselves. Now I saw that for some it would have been a life of constant excitement. Álvaro lived in a dingy four-roomed concrete house. It stood by itself on an exposed, treeless patch on Correia's estate. It looked a comfortless place to call home, but Álvaro lived happily there with his African wife and African family, and with any number of mistresses or concubines or pick-ups within reach in the surrounding villages. In no other part of the world would Álvaro have found a life like that. I had thought at the beginning of the evening that he was killing time, driving about the backways. He wasn't. He was trying to show where hidden treasure lay. He said, “Take that little girl we just passed. If you stopped to ask her the way she would stick up her little breasts at you, and she would know what she was doing.” And I began to understand that Álvaro was already wound up, thinking of that little girl or some other girl sticking up her little breasts at him.