The Mimic Men: A Novel

by V. S. Naipaul

  I cannot say that the island was alarmed. We – if for the moment I can detach myself from so intimate a phenomenon – were if anything excited. On Isabella we were starved of large events and we secretly longed for the riots and burnings to continue. We felt we had at last caught up with the other disturbed territories in the region; we were flattered by the hints, now beginning to be thrown out, that we too were ripe for a Royal Commission. But for us who were of the family of Gurudeva – that was the name my father now took – the matter, as might be imagined, was somewhat different. My sisters were especially distressed; style and fashion cannot come easily to the daughters of someone regarded as a lunatic of the commonest sort. In the early days the movement drew most of its support from the three or four very poor areas I have mentioned. There was as yet little publicity, and nothing to suggest that the lunatic was beginning to be seen by some as a great worker’s leader, a successor to the revered Deschampsneufs.

  The first reports that came to the street suggested only that a family which had for years been treated with respect had suddenly thrown up a type of street-corner preacher. Street-corner preachers had their place and enjoyed their own respect. But the lower classes looked for such people among themselves, and just as, out of that immorality which they accepted as a condition of their own existence, they abused the respectable who lapsed, so now they mocked us. They were tirelessly and grotesquely familiar. My sisters left the house and went to live with my mother’s family. The street was pleased; they had ‘driven out’ someone else; tradition had been maintained. My mother and I continued to live in the house. We were left more or less in peace, until my father’s new reputation, as a leader of the poor, made itself felt. Then we received more than respect; we were handled with a mixture of awe, reverence and familiarity, which was a degree more disquieting than simple hostility.

  But my real troubles were at school. I had sought to suppress my father and the life of my family. Now, like Hok years before, I was betrayed; for me school could no longer be a private hemisphere. Our traditions at Isabella Imperial were brutal. Neither masters nor students in those days worried about wounding anyone’s racial or political susceptibilities; the curious result was that almost no one was offended. A Negro boy with an extravagantly jutting head could, for instance, be Mango to everyone. So now I became Guru. Major Grant gave the name and popularized it. He taught us Latin and wore a monocle, partly I believe as a comic prop; he was a great manufacturer of names. I had learned that the only way to handle the Major was to be brutal in return. So now the double act was forced on me of dissociating myself from my father at the same time as I stuck up for him.

  An old joke of Major Grant’s was that a boy who did badly at school could either join the staff of one of our newspapers – if he had failed English, that is – or join the staff of the City Council and ever after ride through the streets in glory on his own blue rubbish-cart. For Browne, the singer, Major Grant had predicted not the Isabella Inquirer – Browne’s English was all right and this automatically disqualified him – but the blue rubbish-cart. He accordingly called Browne Blue-cart Browne, and this over the years had been shortened to Blue.

  Browne came to school late one morning.

  ‘Late this morning, Blue? Been making the rounds as usual?’

  ‘As usual,’ Browne said. ‘There was a lot of trash on Rupert Street.’

  A defeat for the Major: he lived in Rupert Street. He tried to rally. ‘Well, I am glad we are not all on strike.’ He got no response. He didn’t wait; he went on, just teaching now. ‘A thing which many people don’t know is that it was our friends the Ro-mans who invented the strike.’ It was his way of talking, laying stresses on words he considered important or funny, pronouncing them in what he considered a funny or foreign way, turning t and r into Spanish-sounding consonants. ‘The first strike took place in 494 B.C.’ He got up and wrote the date on the blackboard. ‘494 B.C. 259 A.U.C. And what, you may ask, is A.U.C.? And I will tell you, sir. Ab urbe condita.’ He spat out the the Latin, making it almost a single word. ‘And they called their strike a secessio.’ He wrote the word out, underlined the dates he had written, added in English first strike, and went back to his desk. ‘Strikes were not invented, as some of us have begun to believe, by Gu-ru-de-va.’

  He got his laughs and stared mischievously at me. A desk lid banged hard, twice. It was like a warning. It came from Browne. I wasn’t looking for support there, I must say. Major Grant himself was taken aback. He was a harmless old soul whose jokes, by their fewness and badness, had become jokes, known to generations of Isabella Imperial boys. For the rest of the lesson he tried to pacify Browne. He addressed him gently and often as Blue and for stretches appeared to be talking to him alone.

  ‘Caeruleus. When you see the word don’t all reach for your grubby little pens and scratch “sea-blue”.’ He spoke the last word in falsetto, and continued in falsetto. ‘Thaeruleuth. It’h thea-blue, mummy. Rubbish, sir! Caeruleus simply means sea-colour. It might be blue, it might be brown, it might be green. It might even, Blue, be black.’ He stopped abruptly, horrified at the unexpected twist of his words.

  Amid the laughter Browne’s desk lid banged again. He rose and walked out of the classroom without a word. Major Grant went red. He fitted his monocle carefully into his eye and looked down at his Vergil.

  It was then that I saw that what I had thought of as my betrayal was no longer a betrayal. School had ceased to be a private hemisphere. The outside world, which we had denied for so long, had begun to invade it; and after Browne’s widely reported gesture there was no need for me to fear ridicule. To many I became what I already was on our street: the son of the leader suddenly found. But I continued, as they say, to play both sides. With some boys I was as detached as before about my father’s movement, though their criticism still pained me. And then I could not reject the conspiratorial devotion of the others. With them I was conspiratorial myself and behaved as though I knew of even greater things to come. For a time it did seem that greater things might be coming. The newspapers spoke about police reinforcements being ‘rushed’ to the hills; and there was a photograph of the Police Commissioner, pistol in hand, leading his apprehensive-looking men in a search of some building. It was strange how drama overtook certain areas, to which no one would have attributed romance or the possibility of adventure, and transformed them, so that even their names acquired a different flavour. Policemen watched our house; the fact was reported in the newspapers; I became a minor figure of drama myself.

  It wearied and nauseated me, to tell the truth: the foolish drama, the foolish devotion so many offered me. If I try concretely to describe my reaction to what had overtaken our family – and at times, in lightheaded moods of withdrawal and shock, it was possible as after an accident to see the whole horror afresh, to compare past with present – I would say that the episode gave me a sensation of rawness and violation. It was as though I was chewing rubbery raw flesh and being made to swallow tainted oil. I had made my decision to abandon Isabella, to eschew my shipwreck on the tropical desert island. But the island had been the island of The Black Swan, the fresh green island sighted at dawn, to music Now it felt corrupted and corrupting. It was this corruption which I now wished to flee. I wished to make a fresh start in my own element; to rid myself of those relationships which it had solaced me to think of as temporary and unimportant, but which I now felt to be tainting.

  Yet time, our life, passes. We cannot keep ourselves back for some tract of life ahead. We are made by everything, by action, by withdrawal; and those relationships, begun in corruption, which I thought I could shrug off when the time came, turned out in the end to be able to imprison. They grew on me; I did not look for them. But my failure was my silence. I was silent, to give just one example, in the geography class. It was a drowsy afternoon class. The master was reading from a dull book about the manufacture of sugar. At the beginning of the year, he read out, the ripened canes were cut. He had come to
the end of a sentence; he sighed and added, still reading from the book, but it was like a personal interjection, that the cutters were paid by the root. ‘Paid? Less than a cent a root!’ It was Browne who had spoken. His voice was loud and precise; it silenced the drone and mutter of the master, who continued to look down at his book. In the silence many of the boys looked at me, as though I was campaigning for an increase in cutters’ pay. The true embarrassment, I could see, was my presence in the class. I stared into space, giving away nothing. It was hideous and diminishing, this devotion, this assumption that I was one of them. I felt threatened. My chieftaincy lay elsewhere. But I was silent.

  A movement like my father’s could not endure. It was, as I have said, no more than a gesture of mass protest, a statement of despair, without a philosophy or cause. And the administration remained calm. A rash governor might have attempted to evict my father and his followers from their camp on crown lands; and then there might have been bloodshed and bitterness. As it was, certain necessary precautions were taken to prevent looting and arson in surrounding areas; the camp was guarded without being in any way harassed; and the frenzy was allowed to subside. Some acres of forest reserve were burned and some half-hearted planting of crops occurred. But the forests of glory did not yield food in four weeks or six weeks. People wearied of taking offerings to the camp and getting little in return; they wearied of idleness and the absence of drama. A drift began back to the city. It became marked when the dock strike was settled and the Volunteers’ were withdrawn. The union thus established plagued us ever after.

  The camp in the hills became another fact of our island life. For two or three days at a time the newspapers made no reference to it. At school we – if I might detach myself once more – gave it up as a source of drama. It was frustrating both to those who had hoped for some vague social upheaval and to those, like Deschampsneufs, who relished the excitement. But we were not surprised. We accepted that on Isabella we were a people of mainly domestic interests, incapable of supporting large events. Our attention turned rapidly to other things. It turned, more characteristically, to a slogan competition.

  The slogan was for a brand of rum. The first prize was the unheard-of sum of five thousand dollars, and the winner was to be announced soon. Cecil had been ceaselessly inventive. Thousands and thousands of the coloured entry forms had been showered on the city and our towns and villages – you could see the pink, blue or green forms even in the gutters – but Cecil was convinced that the prize was going to be his. He said, impressively, that he ‘needed’ the money: The name of the rum was Isabella Rum and Cecil’s final prize-winning slogan, which he publicized as soon as he had sent it in, hoping no doubt to reduce the rest of us to despair, was At my parties I fly high with Isabella. We had all assumed that a reference to parties was the ‘trick’ requirement of the slogan judges: the drawing on the entry form was of a party scene in a country of the North. I now believe the drawing to have been an imported multi-purpose block. It could have been used to advertise a dance or dancing school, a gala night at a restaurant or hotel, a tailoring establishment. But in all our slogans we assumed the role of metropolitan party-givers. We did so easily; at Isabella Imperial we were natural impersonators.

  The slogan excitement, alas, ended as limply as many of our other excitements. The result dismayed the school. Many secret slogan-coiners came out into the open and were as noisy as Cecil had been. We didn’t think the judging had been fair. For one thing the result came too soon after the closing date of the competition. And we didn’t think much of the winning slogan. It was Don’t thank me, thank Isabella. The drawing that went with it showed a man in evening garb of some sort showing his guests to the door on a night which, to go by the furs of the tall ladies, was wintry. He was speaking the words to his guests; and in a further balloon, attached to his head by a line of diminishing circles, to indicate unspoken thought, were the words ‘Is a rum, Isabella!’ For a week or so the newspapers carried the photograph of the very happy slogan-deviser. He was an old Negro labourer, one of those who worked on his own plot of chives or on a citrus plantation. He sat on a bentwood chair in front of his weather-beaten shack; before him was a table with bottles of Isabella Rum and tumblers on an embroidered tablecloth.

  ‘I am not going to touch Isabella Rum from now on,’ Cecil said. ‘Let them drink their own rum. “Is a rum, Isabella.” I don’t call that a slogan.’

  Deschampsneufs said, ‘I don’t know why you people worried your heads so much for. Of course they had to give it to a black man. And a black working man.’ He had been sending in slogans like everyone else and was a little peeved.

  ‘Eh,’ Eden said. ‘I don’t see why for you grudge a poor black man. After all is they who does drink the blasted thing.’

  ‘Me grudge. Is for you to grudge. Wait. You will see where you getting this poor and this black from. Poor black man! You call that a slogan? They call it a competition. But look at the prize-winners. They pick one in this part, one in that part, and they mix up the races to keep everybody sweet. And all of all-you was busting your educated brains. That is what is happening in this island. Wait. Just now they will have foolish black men like that one running the place. Not because they brilliant and so on, but because they foolish and they black. You just wait for this Royal Commission.’

  ‘And a damn good thing too,’ Eden said.

  ‘You know, Eden,’ Deschampsneufs said reflectively, ‘the one thing I can’t understand is why you didn’t win this competition. You didn’t have to send in a slogan. All you had to do was to send in a photo. In Technicolor.’

  Eden was something of a buffoon. He was the blackest boy in the school and for some time was known as Spite because some boys said he was black for spite. His reputation as a buffoon and his special relationship with Deschampsneufs had been established early at Isabella Imperial. In a third-form science class one day the master held up a simple device and asked whether we knew what it was for. It looked like a two-pronged fork with a shiny handle; both prongs were hinged to a wooden or metal base. It might have been a switch, of the sort scientists ‘threw’ in films. Deschampsneufs, sitting next to Eden, whispered, ‘It generates electricity.’ Eden whipped his fingers at the master, demanding to answer. ‘Hush!’ the master said. ‘We are getting news from Adam. Yes, Eden?’ ‘It generates electricity, sir.’ The master went wild. He threw the device on the floor. Then he took up everything within reach on the long lab bench and let it fall. ‘Let’s drop it. This and this and this and this. Let’s drop everything.’ He dropped two or three light bulbs; he was like a man suddenly indifferent to his personal safety. ‘It generates electricity, sir. You get this to generate electricity, Eden, and I will give you my salary for the month. For the month? I’ll give you my salary for the rest of the year. For the rest of my life. I will give you my pension. I will work for you in the evenings. I will send my children to an orphanage and divorce my wife.’ So it had gone on, the agitated red man railing at the placid black boy, until glass shattered on the floor – a test tube or a light bulb; and as it shattered, the master bellowed: ‘I will work for you in your garden.’ He had saved it for last, not only the familiar pun on Eden’s name, but his statement, white man to black boy, of what he considered Eden’s true role, that of garden-boy or yard-boy. It was cruel; it went too near the truth; Eden’s background was of the simplest. Our traditions were brutal; but now we all went still. Deschampsneufs stared down frowning at his crossed arms, like someone sharing the abuse.

  Later, when the incident had become a joke, Deschampsneufs claimed that he knew what the device was and had deliberately misled Eden. I don’t believe he knew, though. I believe he was genuinely using or misusing a word he had just acquired; and I believe his shock, at his error and the abuse that followed it, was as great as ours. But this became their relationship: Deschampsneufs the comic, Eden his willing straight man.

  We were talking one day about marriage and the absurdity of the institutio
n that would turn all the foolish boys we knew into husbands, lords and masters to girls who, poor things, could not at that moment guess their maturing fate. We went on to talk about selective breeding. Deschampsneufs laid down the restrictions he would apply. On this subject he was allowed a certain authority. It was known that in the slave days the Deschampsneufs had kept a slave stud-farm on one of the islets off Isabella; the Negroes there were said to be a super-race still. Eden, attempting to clown and perhaps also looking for a tribute to his own superb physique, said, ‘Champ, you would let me breed?’ Deschampsneufs considered him. ‘It would be a pity to let the strain die out,’ he said. ‘Yes, Spite. I think we will let you breed. But we will have to cross you with a damn intelligent woman.’

  Much was forgiven Deschampsneufs because from the security of his aristocracy he mixed easily with the poorest and crudest boys; in this he was unlike the son of the English clergyman who, possessing only piety, didn’t acknowledge black boys in the street, and thereby made himself ridiculous. A lot more was forgiven Deschampsneufs because he was witty and inventive. He loved, for instance, to put a price on a boy; but only he could have got away with it. Only he would have been allowed to say, of a boy he didn’t like, ‘He wouldn’t fetch five dollars.’ Outrageousness of this sort was required of him.