Guerrillas

by V. S. Naipaul

  He was enervated, sick with excitement. He could feel that his pants were wet. He was tormented and deliciously saddened by that dream of beauty. It had come to him years before, when he was a schoolboy; it had only been a story, but it had become like a memory of something seen. It was a Monday morning story at school, a story that had penetrated the back yards of the city over the weekend and had then been brought to the school by various boys, who told the story as it might have been told by the older women of the back yards, awed rather than shocked at what had happened, fearful of the punishment about to come to all, and half protective, half resigned.

  It was the story of the rape of a white girl at the beach by a gang. The girl had bled and shrieked and fainted. One of the men had then run to a brackish creek in the coconut grove and had tried, using his cupped hands alone, to bring water to the girl.

  The boy from whom Jimmy had first heard the story that Monday morning—and in the boy’s voice could be detected the accents of the women of the back yard where he lived—the boy had told of this episode of the water as part of the lunacy and terror after the event. But to Jimmy it was the most moving part of the story, and it had stayed with him, in a setting that had grown as stylized as a tourist poster: the soft light and blurred shade below the coconut palms, the white sand, the sunlit breakers, the olive sea and blue sky beyond the crisscross of the curved gray coconut trunks, the bleeding girl on the front fender of the old Ford, the cupped hands offering water, the grateful eyes, remembering terror.

  He could write no more. He wakened from his dream to the emptiness about him, to the interior he had so carefully prepared, for an audience that didn’t exist. He was restless; he could have screamed like the girl on the Ford fender. At such a time he needed crowds, adventure, encounters, something in which he could forget himself. There was only the stillness of the bush and the abandoned industrial park.

  He went and stood beside Bryant’s chair, Bryant the loveless, the rejected, the lost. Almost like himself. Yet even in Bryant what beauty was concealed. He put his hand on Bryant’s shoulder and his fingers touched Bryant’s neck. Bryant said, “Jimmy,” and let the paper fall. Such beauty, if only it could be known. His hands moved down inside Bryant’s jersey, felt the nipples twitch and harden, felt the well-defined chest and then, moving lower, felt the firm molding of Bryant’s stomach. Bryant began to swallow; his stomach muscles tensed and dipped. Lower, past the navel, to the hard curve, the springy hair, a man after all, the concealed complete beauty.

  “Jimmy, Jimmy.”

  But then, almost roughly, he withdrew his hands, and went to the bedroom and the telephone.

  Jane answered. “Hello.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “Hello.” She spoke the number.

  “Jane? Jimmy Ahmed.”

  “Oh yes.”

  She was caught: he could tell.

  He said, “What an English way you have of answering the phone. Only people in England answer the phone like that.”

  “You mean giving the number?”

  “How are you?”

  “Harassed. And hot.”

  Mock irritation: she was going coy, was beginning to act.

  “Jane. I’m coming in to town tomorrow. I am under an obligation to meet some business executives at the Prince Albert. They are giving me lunch. Could you be there at two o’clock in the lobby? You know the Prince Albert?”

  “What do you want to see me for?”

  “We can talk about England. It will make a change after the business executives.”

  “Do you want me to come alone?”

  “You can bring massa if you like. But I want to give you your dollar back.”

  He began to wait for her response; he wanted to laugh, to break the tension he sensed developing. He wanted to say: Bryant’s a bad boy. But then, sternly, he put the telephone down.

  The stern face remained when he went back to the living room. But his restlessness had been appeased. Bryant recognized the new mood; he picked the paper up and began to read again. And Jimmy felt his head grow clear; he had the clearest vision of the world.

  HE TOOK a hired car to the Prince Albert and arrived some minutes after one. The uniformed doorman opened the car door. Jimmy hadn’t lost his self-consciousness about the Prince Albert and preferred to arrive by car. In the old days, just before and just after the war, before the airplanes and the tourist rush, the Prince Albert had been the big hotel of the island; and to Jimmy, even after London, the very name still suggested luxury.

  Once the area around the main park had been residential and fashionable. But the people who had lived there had emigrated or had moved up to the hills; and the big private houses around the park had been turned into government offices or restaurants or business offices, and later, with independence, into embassies and consulates. The Prince Albert was still, in spite of renovations and additions in concrete, and in spite of its internal iron pillars, like a grand old-fashioned estate house, an affair of timber and polished floors, with an open verandalike lobby. Once it had been barred to black people and received tourists from the cruise ships coming down from the north, sightseers only in those days, before the beaches were discovered. Now it had an air of having been passed by; the tourists went to beach hotels; the Prince Albert had become local. The uniforms of doorman and waiters were not as crisp and starched as they would once have been; the building itself had begun to go in parts, with yielding floorboards in the lobby. At lunchtime the renovated air-conditioned bar was busy with people who worked in the offices nearby, so that the atmosphere was casual where once it had been exclusive. But to Jimmy the name, Prince Albert, still had a wonderful sound, still suggested privilege and splendor.

  He sat in a wicker chair in the open lobby, just outside the air-conditioned bar, and ordered an orange juice. By half past one the lunchtime drinkers had left the bar to return to their offices; the lobby was almost empty; the travel desk, with BOAC posters of London on the wall at the back, was empty; the elevator was not busy; and elevator man, doorman, and waiters were relaxed in the great heat.

  The hotel faced the park. Drought had burned the grass, and scattered midday walkers, moving briskly, kicked up little puffs of dust. The view of the park, in ordinary times one of the attractions of the Prince Albert, was now the view of a dustbowl; dust had settled on the floor of the lobby. The rails of the park had been taken down during the war, part of the island’s war effort; and little metal stumps showed. The rails had not been replaced, and there was no longer a true division between pavement and park. The pavement had buckled here and there from the spreading roots of great trees, and patches of the park had been worn smooth. Beyond the park was the first ridge of hills, scarred with housing settlements, with red gashes that marked the zigzag of roads, with red roofs, silver roofs, and yellow-white walls against a background of brown.

  The orange juice was finished. She was late. He was half relieved. She came at about a quarter past two. She was in tight trousers, curving down the groin; she came into the lobby without fuss, the Prince Albert obviously less to her than to him.

  He couldn’t read her mood. Seen against the glare of the park, she was less tall than he remembered, and she had a clumsy, slightly dragging walk. Her arms were a little too short for her body, and she held them close to her sides. Her face was the puzzle: he hadn’t been able to remember it, and now he thought he saw why. It seemed characterless, soft, without definition; it could become many faces. He noted the mouth, as though for the first time: it was too big, the top lip slightly puffy, as though from a blow, and the creased vertical lines suggested a healed wound. It was the kind of mouth he associated with certain children and with adults who remained childlike: weak, spoiled, with the cruelty of the weak and the spoiled.

  He had been preparing a face and a mood for her. But now, as he studied her face, he found that an attitude had come to him. He stood up, walked toward her, and said, “My car is waiting.”

&
nbsp; “Where are we going.”

  “My house.”

  “It’s been bad enough getting down here. I’m going to have something cold to drink.”

  He walked back with her to where he had been sitting, at the far end of the lobby. The position was open: the lobby in front, and on one side a wide passage like an internal veranda, beside a patio where, within a concrete border, a little forest garden had been created: lit up now by the sun which was directly overhead, a garden of thick green vines and creepers with large heart-shaped leaves that grew in the shade of the deep forest, the lower leaves browned in the drought, the black earth dry.

  He sat in his chair against the wall and pressed for the waiter. She sat in the chair that was half in the veranda; her posture was easy. She put her bag down on the floor, and he noted that: the woman with time, awaiting developments.

  He said, “In public places these days I always prefer to sit with my back against a wall. It’s a simple precaution. Remain observable in public places. Never sit with your back to a door.”

  She lit a cigarette with a lighter, a blue cylinder; and he noticed, with slight disgust, how her bruised top lip came down over her teeth and then fitted tightly over them. Her eyes were beginning to grow moist; she was no longer as casual and cool as when she had arrived.

  He hitched up his trousers, feeling the neatness of his own gestures and the neatness of his own clothes. He passed the thumb and middle finger of his right hand over his mustache.

  He said, “That’s a nice lighter.”

  “It’s French. You throw them away when you’re finished with them. Sahara gas, I suppose.”

  She passed it to him. But her eyes were beginning to cloud with irritation. When the waiter came she ordered a rum punch. And she smoked her cigarette, looking at the forest garden.

  He stood the lighter upright on the table.

  He said, “You would find this hard to believe, but when I was a boy my big ambition was to be a waiter in this hotel. They didn’t allow black people.”

  “It’s a pretty tatty place.”

  “We get things when we don’t want them. The world is for the people who already have it. For the people who don’t take chances.”

  The rum punch came.

  “Like the duplicator you saw at Thrushcross Grange. We get things last hand and they expect us to be grateful.”

  She appeared to revive after sipping at the rum punch.

  She said, “How did it go with the executives?”

  He didn’t understand. Then his mind raced, and he felt betrayed. As in a dream he saw confused swift events: a drive to his house, her reading of his writings, exposure. He didn’t know what to do with his eyes. Then he remembered their conversation on the telephone.

  He said, “The Lions?”

  “Peter is a Lion. Was he there?”

  “Massa wasn’t there. These business people, they’re all on your side now. But I’m not giving anybody any certificate of good conduct. I’m not giving massa a certificate. That’s what Sablich’s want and that’s what they’re not going to get.”

  “Nobody likes Sablich’s here.”

  “I hate them. Do you know how the Sablich fortune was made? Sablich was an immigrant from Prussia or somewhere in Germany. He came over in 1803. He went to Trinidad. They were giving away land there. The more blacks you brought in the more land you got. Free. In 1807 the slave trade was abolished. It was like immigration controls in England: everybody rushed to beat the ban. Sablich ordered a boatload of Negroes from a Liverpool firm. Nobody knows how many. Two or three hundred, at a hundred pounds a head. They got here just in time. And then Sablich refused to pay. When the fuss died down Sablich was a very rich man. And then he left Trinidad and came over here. That was the start of that very, very respectable firm.”

  Jane’s irritation had returned. Her eyes were moist; to Jimmy it seemed that she was either about to cry or to lose her temper.

  She said, “I don’t know why everybody feels obliged to tell me that story. I can’t tell you how often I’ve heard about the origin of the Sablich fortune.”

  “Massa’s firm.”

  “But not mine.”

  Jimmy said, “Look. I don’t want us to be friends.”

  And she was instantly alert, on the defensive.

  He noted that. He said, “In England I had too many women friends.”

  She understood his meaning. He studied her eyes alone.

  He didn’t give her time to say anything. He jerked his chin toward the park. “When we were at school we used to come to play there some afternoons. Cricket and football. The white people would watch us. And we would act up for them. When I was in England I met a girl who had been here as a girl. She passed through with her parents and they stayed at the Prince Albert. All she remembered of the place were the little black boys playing football in the park outside the hotel. We worked out the dates. And I realized she must have seen me. That I must have been one of the black boys. What do you make of that?”

  “Was she one of the women with whom you were not friends?”

  The woman courted, ready to be courted.

  He said, and he spoke solemnly, “I was nervous about seeing you this afternoon. I don’t notice hair. I don’t notice clothes. What I felt about you I felt as soon as I saw your eyes. They looked as they look now. Half screaming.”

  She was unwilling to let the topic pass. She said, “Why were you nervous?”

  “I thought my imagination might have been playing tricks.”

  “Was it?”

  He didn’t reply. He pressed for the waiter. “Bryant is waiting for us. He wants to give you back your dollar. The car will bring you back.”

  She would object. But he knew now that she was going to come.

  THE DOORMAN stopped leaning against the iron pillar of the portico and blew on his whistle. Across the road, the driver, sitting on a park bench with other drivers in the half-shade of a big tree, stood up, short and very fat, and shook out the seat of his trousers. The big American car turned wide in the road and entered the semicircular hotel drive.

  Through the haze of heat and rum punch Jane noted the size of the car. It was absurd, pathetic; she could have giggled. The doorman opened the door; Jimmy tipped him. It was pathetic and absurd. The car seat was hot; the sun burned her arms. They turned toward the city center, away from the dustiness and glare of the park and the view of the red-scarred hills, into a deader heat; the wind that came through the windows was warm. Black asphalt streets, still residential-looking; white or yellow-white buildings; shadows contracted and black. Beyond the blue-tinted windscreen, a pale sky.

  The car was so wide they sat at far ends of the seat. Jimmy sat erect and formal, his left foot on his right knee, his narrow trousers riding up above his thin nylon sock, his right hand resting on his exposed lower calf. Jane sat directly behind the driver. The driver’s bright blue shirt, of a shiny synthetic material, showed the black skin below and a white reticulated vest; on his neck, half hidden by his shirt collar, was a thick roll of black flesh with scattered springs of hair; a blue light, from the tinted windscreen, fell on his bare fat arms.

  Jimmy said, “The Tennis Club.”

  She didn’t turn to look. She was aware only of buildings close to the road: no openness there, no sign of courts. But the area was like that: new buildings standing in the grounds of old, open spaces everywhere filled in.

  Jimmy said, “That girl I was telling you about, her father was in Intelligence. When he came here he went to the Tennis Club one day. I think it was the championships or something. Of course, no blacks allowed. He got mad when he saw the local whites behaving as though there wasn’t a war on. He felt that the Vichy people in Martinque could seize the island at any time. He asked one of the players—the boy was sitting next to him, very cool and don’t-care-a-damn—whether he didn’t think he should be fighting for the mother country. The boy said, ‘I prefer playing tennis.’ ”

  Jane was
only half listening, sitting at the far end of the seat, withdrawn, in a haze of rum punch and heat which was like a sense of the adventure she had committed herself to. Half amused at the reference to that girl, unnamed, whose father had been in Intelligence, knowing it to be something laid out to catch her attention, she yet allowed herself to wonder about the girl; she yet allowed herself to play with the images he had set floating in her mind.

  She had driven through the city many times and had long ago ceased to see it. Now, in the excitement that amounted to stupor, the feeling of a dissolving world, she found herself catching at details: the top galleries of old-fashioned Spanish-style buildings overhanging pavements where ragged beggars sat vacant, beside old women selling muddy-looking cakes and colored sweets and sweepstakes pinned to boards. In this sense of being transported out of herself, transported out of a stable world into something momentarily unstable, lay the adventure. She had been half prepared for it. What she hadn’t been prepared for, what gave her little twinges of alarm, was this feeling of a sudden descent into the city itself, until then unknown, unexplored. And yet, with another part of herself, she continued to be amused by the absurd motorcar and her position in it, by the glances that the car and she in it and Jimmy with her were getting. Such a misunderstanding; so absurd.

  Jimmy was saying, “Now, they’ve all gone. Canada, England, America. Australia. They’ve all gone.”

  The tennis players. So strange, this elegy for them, in the heat. He spoke, she noted, as from a great distance. As though he had been left behind.

  They came to the main square, once an area of trees and asphalted walks, now full of parked motorcars and rough wooden booths. The reggae shrieked from a dozen amplifiers, now above the roar of motorcars and trucks, now below it. Diseased pariah dogs wandered about; some lay prostrate on the crowded pavements; and she studied one, dead-eyed, with a growth like raw flesh protruding out of its mangy yellow fur. The sea, when they came to it, gave no feeling of air and lightness: the fine red powder of bauxite, sheds of corroded corrugated iron, the reek of the burning rubbish dump, everything here—hillside, forest, sea, mangrove—turned to slum.