Guerrillas

by V. S. Naipaul

  She had always seen decay about her, even while going through all that the society asked of her. Slot machines on railway stations were full of sweets, but she knew they would be empty again; they were meant to be empty, as they had been when she was a child, pieces of junk that no one yet thought of taking away. She saw great squares that were no longer residential, houses that no one was ever rich enough now to live in. She saw spaces getting smaller; she saw buildings everywhere being put to meaner uses than those they were originally intended for. The sight of a London County Council plaque on a house reminded her that the people around her were no longer great, that no house of today would deserve a plaque in the years to come. Neither houses nor personalities would be remembered. She knew that, she felt it. Yet she was attached to her own house, and looked for men who would be doers. She was alert to every change of fashion, yet saw the tinsel quality of most fashions; and in the decor of a fashionable new restaurant, in the very newness, she could see hints of the failure and shoddiness to come.

  She lived in the midst of change, repetitive and sterile; it did not disguise the fact of the greater impermanence. But she was privileged: she told herself that once a day. Security was the basis of her privilege. Yet she saw, with a satiric eye, the people around her as accumulators, concerned about dead rituals and dead forms, unmindful of the approaching catastrophe. She saw the girls who were her friends as empty vessels, waiting to be filled by men, who in time appeared, their names echoing and reechoing in conversation, Roger and Mark and John, as empty as the girls. But Roger and Mark and John could have been models for the men to whom she had once given herself, and in whom she had seen extraordinary qualities. Out of this contradiction between what she did and said and what she felt, out of this knowledge of her own security and her vision of decay, of a world running down, she moved from one crisis to another.

  But now she was not at home, and the sense of impermanence was stronger here. The brown hills held guerrillas; so the newspapers and the government said. The stripped hill at the back of the house, the back garden, sloped down to woodland and a gully; and in that hidden gully there was a regular traffic of people on foot, wild people, disordered and unkempt, who chattered as they passed, briskly, in groups, morning and evening, going to and coming from she knew not where.

  About the Ridge, so high, so seemingly secure, there was an unknown human turbulence. These big houses, these big gardens. The houses would never be completely furnished, would never be allowed to become like family houses that had been lived in for two or three generations. They would never be like Mrs. Grandlieu’s old timber house, with its worn decorative woodwork, its internal arches of fretwork arabesques that caught the dust, its mahogany-stained floor springy but polished smooth, the hard graining of the floorboards standing out from the softer wood. These new houses of the Ridge, while they lasted, would only be what they were now: concrete shells. And, for all the truck loads of topsoil, the gardens would never mature, would never be cool, with green walks. The gardens were too big; they would contract. The disorder of the city and the factory suburbs: that would spread up and up, through roads and woodland, and eventually overwhelm. This was a place that had produced no great men, and its possibilities were now exhausted.

  The sky brightened; the white mist above the swamp thinned. Soon the coolness of the day would go, the fires would start all over the great plain, and from the height of the Ridge it would look as though here and there, through minute punctures, the land was leaking smoke. Far away, the airport was just visible. The airplanes, their shapes not distinct, were little gleams of white.

  Mrs. Grandlieu used to say, “Sometimes I does just look at the airport and think it damn far, you know.” She said it only to unsettle; but it was easy to imagine the Ridge cut off and under siege. Already, something like a state of siege existed every night. There were police roadblocks on all the main hillside roads, so that a dinner party or cocktail party or a visit to Harry’s bar had an added adventure, and gave point to the hysteria of the people who lived on the Ridge, people who felt threatened by what lay below, and moved higher and higher up the hills until, like the people who had held the house before Jane and Roche, they could move no higher and had flown.

  Within the house very little remained to mark the passage of these people. The ocher-washed concrete walls were virgin; no nail had been driven into them, no picture had been hung. A few scratches and black scuff marks on the baseboard in the empty back room hinted at games, a child or children; but that was all.

  There were more reminders of the previous people outside. In the half-rockery half-flowerbed against the stepped concrete wall at the front they had planted roses; and on the spindly yellow stalks of those that survived little single-petaled blooms still occasionally came, opening and wilting in one day. The shrubs they had planted had remained static in the clay and had dried down. The only things that really grew at the front were young trees that had seeded themselves: a flame of the forest between the rocks of the rockery, three or four pink poui in a crack in the concrete at the edge of the gateway, a thorn bush with hundreds of little yellow flowers on spiky black branches.

  At the back of the house concrete steps went a little way down the eroded hillside to where there was a retaining wall of concrete blocks. The cypresses planted beside the steps were stunted, and against the retaining wall were choked growths of Bermuda grass where, during the rains of another season, grass seed from the front lawn and the area around the back porch had washed down. Beyond the wall the land flattened, the soil was better, and there was the remnant of a vegetable garden, with banana trees. Neither Jane nor Roche had touched the vegetable garden. This lower part of the garden, beyond the steps and the retaining wall, Jane seldom walked in; it was some weeks after she had arrived that she had discovered, at the end of the garden, at the edge of the gully, a row of Honduras pine seedlings.

  The most substantial thing the previous people had left was a children’s house or hut on this flatter part of the land. It showed the local carpenter’s hand: it was less a miniature than a replica of many shacks in the city. It stood flat to the ground on a timber frame, with one room and a pitched roof; the walls were multicolored, with old boards from other buildings; and it had been fitted with an old paneled door. It looked whole, but it had begun to rot. There was a great gritty black ants’ nest below the eaves. Jane had imagined this to be alive with ants; but she saw this morning that the nest had cracked and broken away in parts and was dry and empty.

  The door was slightly ajar. Jane pushed at it. It yielded. Then there was some resistance. A length of coarse, shredded string brushed across her hand like an insect; and as she started, slapping at the affected hand, she saw that the hut was tenanted.

  Within, in the darkness, striped with the light that came through the gaps in the boards, in a smell of stale smoke, dirt, old clothes and something like the smell of dead small animals, a wild man of the hills was asleep. His matted hair was done in long pigtails, reddish brown in places and with a kind of thick blue grease; his face was broad, very black and shiny where the light caught it. He was in rags; and he lay amid other rags.

  He stirred at the sound of her slapping hand, and gave a grunt. She saw a cutlass beside his bundle and his old paint can, and she turned and walked very fast to the concrete steps, leaving the hut door open. She began to run up the steps, past the Bermuda grass clumps, the stunted cypresses, not looking back. How long had he been there? For how long had that hut in the garden been his home? At the top of the steps, near the hibiscus bush, she stopped and looked back. There was nothing to see.

  She thought of Bryant in the hut at Thrushcross Grange, with his aggressive pigtails. He, like the man asleep in the children’s hut, had issued out of the city and the plain below, which from this height could be seen all at a glance. Down there, in the garden, the scale had altered; it was like being taken, for a moment, into the intricate life contained in that view.

  The su
n was out; it caught her on the temples. The woodland and the children’s hut cast shadows. The haze on the plain was going. Once the hills were green and had only been part of the view, a foreground spattered with the red and orange of the flame of the forest.

  She thought of Bryant. She thought of Jimmy Ahmed. Succubus. In the house, through the half-open door of his room, she saw Roche asleep. She changed her mind and didn’t awaken him. She went back down the passage to the large sitting room, with a view through the picture window of the front lawn in shadow. From the paperbacks on the nearly empty fitted shelves she took down the Academy English Dictionary. She found the page she wanted. She read: Succubus: demon that mates with a sleeping man.

  He called from his room: “Jane.”

  When she went to him he said, “I’ve just had a terrible dream. Just after you came in from the garden. I was about to be tortured. There was a doctor in a dark suit. He said, ‘We’ll get the coitus out of you.’ And I knew I didn’t want him to use those things in his box on me. And that the coitus I had to get rid of I could get rid of just by going to the lavatory.”

  He had never spoken of a dream like this before, and she was disturbed. He had begun with real distress, but his distress seemed to go as he spoke, and at the end he was even smiling. She didn’t know what to do; and the moment for sympathy and response passed.

  She said, “We dream all kinds of strange things just before we wake up.”

  A car or van had stopped outside the house. It turned in the road, and then it could be heard going away banging down the hill.

  She said, “The paper’s come. I’ll go and get it.”

  A radio came on in the far end of the house. It was Adela, the maid, in her room, listening to the morning program of hymns sponsored by a church of the American South that specialized in Negro souls.

  Adela was young but devout. She was plump and healthy, but she went to all the faith healing meetings that itinerant Southern American preachers held in the city. It had at first amused Jane to hear of these meetings, to hear Adela’s stories of crippled Negroes who had thrown away crutches and ripped off bandages and run up shouting to the platform, of bewitched boys whose bodies had been made to give up nails and other pieces of metal that had somehow, during their bewitchment, been absorbed into their flesh. But Jane had soon regretted the encouragement she had given Adela; for Adela, when she understood that Jane and Roche were not married and were living “in sin,” became permanently annoyed. In her white uniform, on which she insisted, she walked through the large house like a Friday night woman preacher, filling the rooms with her annoyance, and looking for fresh signs of sin.

  Jane, going out to the front gate to get the newspaper, heard Adela shriek. And she knew the cause: the lager bottles on the metal table in the back porch.

  “The an-amount of rum!” Adela shouted. “Rum! Rum! Oh my God, but the an-amount of rum they does drink in this house!”

  After breakfast—Adela back in her room, the radio going again: music, commercials, government announcements—Jane said to Roche, “What would you say if I told you I was going back to London?”

  He was reading the police news in the newspaper: the events of the previous day and early evening: the raids, the shootouts, the slum brawls: for many people down there in the city life had reached crisis in the last twenty-four hours.

  He said, “I would say I wish I was going back with you.”

  “But if I was going for good. If I wasn’t coming back.”

  He didn’t put the paper down. He continued to read; and then, as he unfolded the paper and turned the page, he said, in his precise way, “That would be more complicated.”

  He said no more. His calm robbed her of impatience or combativeness. Mood, emotion, events, led her to action. So it had always been with her; so it was going to be now. She had decided; the time for acting on that decision would come. When Roche returned for lunch they talked of other things; it was as though the crisis had passed.

  THIS MAN fills my whole mind to the exclusion of all other trivial concerns and I don’t know how I can get to see him again. He’s suffered so much in England, I don’t believe he will want to see someone like me. Over here they see him only as a hakwai, but a woman of my class can see what he really is, I can understand what all those other people in England saw in him. They say he was born in the back room of a Chinese grocery, a half black nobody, just a Chinaman’s lucky shot on a dark night, that’s a good laugh, but I can see that he is a man of good blood, only someone of my class can see that, to me he is like a prince helping these poor and indigent black people, they’re so shiftless no one will help them, least of all their own.

  He’s the leader they’re waiting for and the day will come, of that I’m convinced, when they will parade in the streets and offer him the crown, everybody will say then, “This man was born in the back room of a Chinese grocery, but as Catherine said to Heathcliff, ‘Your mother was an Indian princess and your father was the Emperor of China,’ we knew it all along,” and that was in the middle of England mark you, in the days when they had no racial feeling before all those people from Jamaica and Pakistan came and spoiled the country for a man like him. They will see him then like a prince, with his gold color.

  I drive past his solitary forbidding house many times and often late at night I see the lamp burning in his study, he’s wrapped up in his thoughts and I have no wish to intrude and aggravate his impatience because I know he’s writing that book he has a contractual obligation to write. One day I summoned up the courage to telephone him, my heart was beating when he answered, I put the phone down, though I’m dying to hear that soft and cultivated voice, that dark brown voice as it has so aptly been described by many …

  Jimmy put aside the pad and considered Bryant, sitting on one of the furry chairs and trying to read the newspaper without making the sheets rustle.

  Bryant wasn’t a reader. But Stephens made a point of reading the newspapers every day, and Bryant was copying Stephens. Stephens read newspapers in his own way. He especially read the evening paper. Stephens didn’t pay much attention to the foreign news or the big stories about politics; he concentrated on the police items, which were longer in the evening paper, fresher, and with those casual details, usually edited out of the same stories in the morning paper, that he looked for. Stephens could tell, from the names of districts, from the description of an incident by police and eye witnesses, from the places where motorcars were stolen and where they were later found, what his friends and enemies were up to. This was how Stephens read the evening paper, like a private circular. And this was how Bryant tried to read the paper, going through the finely printed paragraphs of little facts, half hoping that in this way he might get some news about Stephens.

  Now that he had stopped writing, now that he had broken the mood and was aware only of the desolation outside, Jimmy felt enervated by his writing. He considered Bryant, the twisted face, the little pigtails, the lips working as they shaped the words, the thin legs in their old blue jeans; and Jimmy was as sad for Bryant as he was for himself.

  He got up. He walked about the blue carpet. He went to the bedroom and stood near the telephone on the chest of drawers. He hesitated. Then he dialed, and waited.

  Adela said, “Roche residence.”

  He didn’t speak.

  “Roche residence.”

  He put the telephone down. He went back to the living room and sat at the desk.

  This man possesses me. He’s a loner; I can see that. Over here they’re jealous of him, cut him down to size, that’s their motto, it’s all they know, leave him in the bush to rot, and in England too they tried to destroy him, talking of rape and assault, he became too famous for them to stomach, they thought he was just a stud, that’s how they wanted to keep him, send him back to rot. But he’s a man not easily destroyed, he’s surprised them I bet, he’s a man once seen never forgotten.

  And then one day scanning the paper as usual for news of hi
s doings I see that he’s going to address a big gathering of the Lions, local and foreign big shots, everybody of course wants to know what he has to say about the issues of the day. He’s addressing this meeting at the Prince Albert Hotel one lunchtime and I make it my business to be there at the appointed hour.

  I see his name and photo on a board in the lobby and I notice that everybody is in a state of suppressed excitement, the waiters themselves are congregating in hushed groups outside the room where he’s addressing the assembly. In the end I heard one set of applause, it seemed there would be no end to the acclamations, and one of the waiters cried out “But that is man,” and then he comes out with all those big shots local and foreign hanging on to his every word, they’re in their suits, he’s so casual in his well-creased trousers and his Mao shirt, but very respectable and polite, with a kind and relevant word for everyone, casual his clothes might be but they reveal the lines of his lithe, pantherlike body.

  My heart is in my mouth, I don’t know whether he will recognize me and whether it will be right for me to accost him, but then he said, “But isn’t it Clarissa,” and I said, “So you remember me.” The big shots fall back and I’m very proud indeed to be seen in the company of this famous man who is so essentially modest. He said, “Of course I remember you, I owe you a dollar.”

  A little smile comes in his eyes and I’m amazed, because nothing is hidden from this man’s gaze, he must have seen how frightened I was that day at the Grange and I suppose that even now when he’s talking to me he can see the terror in my light-colored eyes, because when I’m with him I feel like a mesmerized rabbit, I just want to give up and when I revive he will bring water in his own cupped hands and I will drink water from his tender hands and I will not be afraid of him anymore.