‘But we’re still around. That lady you see there’ – he pointed to the shiny and terrible oil portrait – ‘was an ancestor of this boy.’
‘Not of yours,’ Champ said. It seemed a family joke.
‘She was born in Santo Domingo. It wasn’t too bad with old Toussaint in the beginning. Then of course we all came here. She was still a child. When she was about fifteen she went to Paris. To be educated, to get to know people. You know. She was very pretty, as you can see. She was a little bit wild too. I think you can see that too. Very popular and sought after and so on. She used to stay in the house of a woman called Clémentine Curial.’
I didn’t know the name.
‘Her husband was a general, a count. What I call Napoleon brand. There was a man who was in and out of the house. Ugly little fellow, full of talk. And not too well off either. He was about forty, and writing a lot of rubbish nobody wanted to read. Biographies and travel books and so on. Fat little fellow. And you know what? She’ – he pointed to the portrait – ‘fell for him. His name was Henri Beyle.’
I gave a start.
Mr Deschampsneufs lifted the palm of his hand, applauding my knowledge but asking to be allowed to go on. ‘When she came back to Isabella she had a stack of letters from Henri Beyle. Of course nothing had happened. The trouble with that fellow Beyle was that he was better at talking love than making it. One day, I think it was in 1831, nothing like Abolition or anything like that yet, she got a book from Paris. It was called Le Rouge et le Noir. On the fly-leaf Beyle had written the number of a page. She turned to this page and saw that two short paragraphs had been marked. When she read the paragraphs she tore up all Henri Beyle’s letters and destroyed the book.’
We had studied Le Rouge et le Noir in the sixth form. I hadn’t liked it. The language seemed to me crude, and I thought the story was simple and unreal, more like a fairytale than a story about real people. I said this to Mr Deschampsneufs.
‘Well, it must seem like that to us out here. We don’t have people like marquises and so on here or anything like their society. And we can’t see the point of a man like Julien or the Marquis de la Mole. But still, they tell me it’s a great book.’
‘I know. I had to write essays about it. What were the paragraphs Stendhal marked?’
‘The paragraphs. You know the story well? You remember when Julien climbs into Mlle de la Mole’s room at night?’ He went to the bookcase and took out a book. It opened easily at the place he required. ‘Julien has just thrown the ladder and the rope down on the flowerbeds. You remember?’
‘That was the sort of fairytale thing I couldn’t appreciate.’
‘Yes, yes.’ He began to read from the book: ‘Et comment moi m’en aller? dit Julien d’un ton plaisant, et en affectant le langage créole.’ Mr Deschampsneufs’s accent was suitably broad. ‘Suddenly, you see, that fellow Beyle throws in a reference to creole French. For no reason at all. It’s a big moment in his story, and he goes and does a thing like that. And then he puts in, in brackets, mark you: Une des femmes de la maison était née à Saint-Domingue. – Vous, vous en aller par la porte, dit Mathilde, ravie de cette idée. For no reason at all. That bit of dialogue in creole French. Just for a private joke. And the joke was that he had exchanged those very words in the house of Clémentine Curial with that woman whose picture you see there.’
I was deeply impressed. I felt that Mr Deschampsneufs’s story had brought the past close. It was possible to believe in the link between our island and the great world. My own dreams were rendered absurd. The outside world was stripped of its quality of legend and reduced to the comprehensible. Grand figures came near. A writer accounted great had been turned into a simple man, fat and middle-aged and ironic. And nearness exalted; it did not diminish.
‘A whole life. And that is all that remains. A little aside in a novel, a sentence in brackets. A little affectionate, a little mocking. Femme de la maison. Not true, not nice. What do you think? I don’t know about you, but I feel it’s more than I’m going to leave behind. This immortality is a funny thing. You can never tell who is going to get it. How many people who read that book would stop and think about what I’ve just told you, you think? She tore up all the letters. Do you think she was right to feel insulted?’
Another familiar topic, clearly. And, as with the first, I took no part. Shortly afterwards I left. Champ walked part of the way with me. I asked him whether it was true about his ancestor and Stendhal. He said, ‘My father would kill himself if it wasn’t true. I believe Le Rouge is the only novel he’s read.’
It was the end of another of our Isabella days, the sun gone, the wind cool, the sky ablaze in the west with red-tinted clouds, and against this swiftly passing splendour the tall palmistes and branching saman were black, but with a suggestion of deeper, warmer tints. With Stendhal and the ancestor and the creole language of Santo Domingo in my head, I saw the scene as though I had already been removed from it and it was occurring in memory, in a book.
‘The painting of the lady, is that old?’
‘Don’t try to be too polite with me. It was done by a man in Florida or Minnesota or some such place. He paints from photographs and my father sent him a sketch of some sort. There is another one, if you want to know, in my parents’ bedroom. I made them put it there. Done on a dish, and glazed.’
I was carrying away more than a story of Stendhal and the lady. I was carrying away a memory of the absurdity with which the meeting had ended. Did old Deschampsneufs genuinely not see when I attempted to shake hands? I attempted twice, and when he did give me his hand it was only two fingers. The pointlessness of the insult had taken me by surprise. It was as if an unknown, unnoticed man whom I was passing on the pavement had suddenly attacked me and walked on. So private! So much a thing to keep! And walking back through this horribly man-made landscape of which Browne had spoken, I thought, above Champ’s talk: You do not care for what they stand or what they are and they have nothing to offer you. You are about to leave, you have left: the mother saw that. Why, recognizing the enemy, did you not kill him swiftly?
We underestimate or overestimate our strength always. We refuse to wound and thereby throw away our hand. We create problems for the future. Le Rouge. Our attention in class had been drawn to Stendhal’s cleverness in making Julien, right at the beginning of the book, mistake water on a church floor for blood. This had seemed to me crude. But now, full of the closeness of Stendhal, I looked at the red sky and saw blood. And yet was glad I was leaving. Do not dismiss melodrama and style: they are human needs. How easy it is to turn that landscape, which we make ordinary by living in it and becoming part of it, into the landscape of the battlefield.
One journey had to be made before I left. It was to my father. Some months after the end of the war he had been released. For a few days the newspapers were interested. So too were some of our new-style politicians the Royal Commission had brought into being, businessmen and contractors who saw in politics a potentially rewarding extension of their private affairs. These men thought my father’s approval was still important. But my father had not responded and they had gone away. My father did not go back to his camp in the eastern hills. He selected a wooded site in the southwest, near the sea. This was also on crown lands. But the government, I was glad to see, did not molest him.
I went with money in my pocket. I had a debt to repay. His camp was in a clearing off a track. It was an ugly clearing, a disfiguring of the woods. He, or the disciples he still had with him, had turned the ground between the tree stumps into mud; and on the mud they had laid passageways of planks and coconut trunks. The land was not cleared all the way down to the sea. A thin screen of woods hid the sea, as though that was a tainted view. At one end of the clearing was his hut, with mud walls and a thatch of carat palms. On a tree stump on a mound was what looked like a toy replica of this hut. The mound had been scraped clean of weeds and grass and had been plastered. The toy hut was obviously a shrine of some sort. Such c
hildishness was not what I had expected from Gurudeva. Better the leader of the mob than this wasted, scruffily bearded man in a yellow robe who now, ignoring me, went to his shrine and rearranged his little bits and pieces, his stones and shells and leaves and roots and his coconut. The coconut seemed especially important. He had invented so much. His inventions had been so brilliant. Had the gift now been withdrawn?
I went to the larger hut. A woman dressed in white greeted me. She recognized me and I knew who she was. The embarrassment was mine alone. I said, ‘I am leaving the island for good. I have come to see him before I go.’ She spoke to me in Hindi: ‘Have you come then for a sight of him?’ She used a word with strong religious associations: darshan. I did not wish to lie. I said nothing, surrendering, as I had surrendered at the Deschampsneufs’, to the woman’s idea of herself, her concept of the holiness of her charge and the holiness of the ground. She was beyond the reproach of sex: this was the reproach I had feared to sense. She said: ‘It is his day of silence. He has given up the world. He has become a true sanyasi.’
Sanyasi, yellow-robed, among woods! Woods hymned endlessly in Aryan chants and found here on an island surrounded by a brown-green sea. It was his day of silence. When he came back to the hut from his shrine he greeted me without recognition at first. But then he put his arms around me. I remembered the embrace of his arms before, the day he towed me on the crossbar of his bicycle. He was gentle and silent. He went to the inner room of the hut. The sympathy that remained was for the idea of him. Gurudeva, asvamedha: these were the inspired moments, the fulfilment in a few weeks of a promise that had festered long.
But I had also come to repay a debt. It couldn’t really be repaid, but the gesture was necessary. I said to the woman, ‘I would like to leave this for Gurudeva.’ I gave her a prepared wad of a hundred dollars. Then I gave her three ten-dollar bills. ‘My father borrowed this from your son Dalip.’ Clad in white, the colour of purity, she took the money, showing no surprise.
Afterwards I went for a walk on the beach. The coast here was wild and untidy. The water at times frothed yellow with mud. The beach was littered with driftwood and other debris from the mighty South American rivers which, in flood, pushed their discolouring fresh waters as far north as this. The sand was black and pebbly and sharp. Another cloudy day, the clouds as dirty and ragged as the sea and the beach. I walked. The woods of crown lands gave way to the mangy coconut grove of a rundown estate. The trunks of the trees had orange blotches; beyond them were the white wooden houses of the labourers, white distemper streaked with the running salt rust of old tin roofs. There was a car on the beach. And in a little huddle in the shallows, as though in the vastness of sky and sea and sand they had come together for protection, was a white family, made up it seemed only of women and girls. A man, clearly of the party, was standing on the beach. A man burdened by women. We walked towards one another.
He said, as one sharing a joke, ‘You went to Gurudeva’s camp?’
‘I’ve just been to see him. I am his son.’
‘Oh! Deschampsneufs told me you went to see him.’
‘His son asked me to tea.’
He was not more than forty, but he had the used-up look of a man who had found his niche early and could already look back to a stupendous twenty years’ experience.
‘How did you like old Des?’ he asked.
‘He was all right.’
‘He told you about his ancestress?’
‘I heard about her.’
‘Poor Deschampsneufs.’
‘I don’t see how anybody can call Deschampsneufs poor.’
‘It’s pathetic, really. He’s got this French thing.’
‘I know.’
‘But of course, as you know, the Niger is a tributary of that Seine.’
The phrase came out whole: it had been used before. I felt choked. I wanted fresh air. I wished to be among people of greater fears.
‘Des told me you were going abroad to further your studies.’ He used the newspaper words. His thin hair fell crinkly and wet over his sallow forehead, above eyes hollow from glasses. ‘You know, it’s an odd thing. But I’ve never been abroad. All my friends they go abroad and come back and say what a wonderful time they had. But I note they all come back. I tell you, boy, this place is a paradise.’ That word again. ‘I suppose you going to do like all the others and come back with a whitey-pokey.’ Again that word.
He lifted his hand to his forehead to push back the loose hair. I studied his veins. They were like the map of a river. Whitey-pokey: I had learned to read that word. The Niger was a tributary of that Seine, in paradise. Fresh air! Escape! To bigger fears, to bigger men, to bigger lands, to continents with mountains five miles high and rivers so wide you couldn’t see the other bank, to journeys that took two days and a night. Goodbye to this encircling, tainted sea!
My friends from Isabella Imperial planned a dinner for me. I was overwhelmed by the gesture. It was sweet to find that after all the fumbling with relationships I had friends who wished to mark my going. Too sweet; too disturbing. When Hok came to take me in his car to the restaurant I made some excuse. I couldn’t explain why at the last minute I no longer wanted to go. It was an impulse of childishness, no doubt: a fear of the big occasion, a fear of warmth and friendship, a poisoning feeling of inadequacy and the wish to be alone with that sudden, nameless hurt. I don’t know. I was ashamed and regretful a moment after he had left, taking my excuse to the others. The next morning he brought the book they were going to give me. It carried all their stylish, evolving signatures. Fête Champêtre: The Paintings of Watteau and Fragonard. I felt that the choice of book had been left to Deschampsneufs.
It was only on the ship, well on my way, that I came upon a narrow strip of paper between the pages. It carried an unsigned typewritten message: Some day we shall meet, and some day.… I suspected Hok, because of the typing and because the paper was of the sort used for copy in newspaper offices. It was like that last family lunch my father had arranged. There is something after all in the staged occasion, the formal sentiment. It came to me on the ocean, this message ending in dots, telling me that all my notions of shipwreck were false, telling me this against my will, telling me I had created my past, that patterns of happiness or unhappiness had already been more or less decided.
I thought of Columbus as hour after hour, day after day – with no pause at night, as I had been half-expecting – we moved through that immense ocean. The wind whipped the crests of the waves into rainbow-shot spray. The sunlight grew paler and faded; the rainbows disappeared. I thought of that world which, as I was steadily separated from it, became less and less discovered, less and less real. No more foolish fears: I was never to return.
And witness me then, just four months later, standing in the attic of a boarding-house called a private hotel in the Kensington High Street area, holding a photograph of a girl and praying for a little bit of immortality, a prophylactic against the greater disorder, the greater shipwreck that had come to me already.
7
I WISHED then to go back as whole as I had come. But though a fresh start is seldom possible and the world continues our private fabrication, departure is departure. It fractures; the bone has to be set anew each time. I was in London, awaiting health, Sandra my luck, when I heard that my father was dead. The news came in a guarded letter from my sister. I went to the British Council reading room, to which I had been long a stranger, to look at our local newspapers. What was not even a paragraph in a London paper had made headlines in the Inquirer, with photographs of the camp I had seen once, now unfamiliar and oddly exposed with officials and policemen standing about. My father had been shot dead, and a woman with him. The weapon was a Luger. The news required a response. It required sentiment and the opposite of sentiment. I walked about the streets. Later I went with a prostitute. I was full of my news. But I saved it for the end. Her shallow whorish reaction, of sentiment and reproof, was all I could have asked for. Later, in t
he blankness of night, I cried on Sandra’s breasts. And suddenly I discovered I was ready to leave. We left from Avon-mouth. It was August but the wind was chill. Gulls bobbed like cork amid the harbour litter. We headed south and sailed for thirteen days.
THREE
1
AS I write, my own view of my actions alters. I have said that my marriage and the political career which succeeded it and seemed to flow from it, all that active part of my life, occurred in a sort of parenthesis. I used to feel they were aberrations, whimsical, arbitrary acts which in some way got out of control. But now, with a feeling of waste and regret for opportunities missed, I begin to question this. I doubt whether any action, above a certain level, is ever wholly arbitrary or whimsical or dishonest. I question now whether the personality is manufactured by the vision of others. The personality hangs together. It is one and indivisible.
Sandra saw in me a husband. She was right. She saw what was there. I think of the day she left. It was officially on a shopping trip to Miami. This was a pilgrimage our group was beginning to establish as fashionable. From these trips our women returned with large light parcels in unfamiliar wrappings and that day’s edition of the Miami Herald: dramatic sunglassed figures as they stepped out of the Pan-American aeroplane. For me it was a moment of another type of drama: the aeroplane the cinematic symbol: Bogart in Casablanca, macintoshed, alone on the tarmac, the Dakota taking off into the night.
Afterwards I drove back to the Roman house. I walked around the central swimming-pool, the fountains splashing noisily into the blue water, no one now, I thought, to listen to them. I went to her room and looked through her cupboards. There was no sign that she intended to return. Some shoes she had left behind, abandoned for good, some dresses she hadn’t worn for some time. I held a shoe and studied the worn heel, the minute cracks in the leather. I touched the dresses. I was light with whisky; the gestures seemed suitable for a moment of private theatre.
The Mimic Men: A Novel Page 20