The Mimic Men

by V. S. Naipaul

  It became a pleasure to get ready for an evening at the British Council, and with arms loosely held aloft to spin into my cummerbund. I exaggerated the dancer’s movements if I had an audience – some poor scholar from my island, for instance, who, seeking company, had brought me his complaints, and whom my frivolity, I could see, was reducing to despair. It was Lieni who told me that I ought to spend the extra half-crown two or three times a week to arrive at the School in a taxi, having travelled by public transport the better part of the way. It was Lieni who dressed me, approved of me, and sent me out to conquer. I delighted in my act, and the boys of my island of Isabella, I was glad to see, with their feeling for the stylish, their tolerance of what they felt to be absurd, which, however, if well carried off, they were prepared to admire, the boys of Isabella approved of me. I exaggerated the role they admired. ‘My dear fellow,’ I said to a young man, wrapped in a college scarf, whom I met as he was coming out of a teashop, one of a popular chain, ‘my dear fellow, never, never, never let me see you coming out of those doors again. And remember that the sole purpose of your college scarf is to shine your shoes.’ This is not of course how it occurs in my memory; I was probably no more than flippantly reproving. I give the story as it circulated in Isabella some years later, when I had gained a little local celebrity. And I must confess I was pleased then that the character Lieni created had in its own small way become a legend.

  But Lieni, with the woman’s limited view of the world, had sent me out to conquer. She wished to share or at any rate witness my conquests; she expected me to bring back women to her boarding-house. And because she expected me to do so, I did. It was not hard. In the halls of the British Council there were always women to be picked up. Those halls could be disagreeable, with acrid-accented Africans in stiff white collars and gold-rimmed glasses nursing racial grievance like a virtue and righteously seeking sexual reward from the innocent. But I preferred the halls of the British Council to the halls of the School. I could not separate those earnest scholarship girls from their families, from the bitterness and mean ambitions that had been passed on to them; I knew their language too well. It suited me better to have a relationship with someone whose language I couldn’t speak. From the halls of the British Council I wandered off on occasion to the art galleries. I thought that with their vast intercommunicating rooms, their excuse for movement backwards, forwards and sideways, any number of times, they provided the perfect hunting ground. It grieved me to find out that I was not the first to have seen the possibilities. But the excursion trains to provincial centres of culture were, I flatter myself, a discovery wholly original.

  To the town of Oxford, for instance, there used to run in those days a Wednesday excursion train. It left Paddington station at a quarter to twelve; it arrived at Oxford at three minutes to one; the return fare was seven shillings and sixpence. The Continental girls were easy to pick out. As I remember, in the late forties these girls went in for very pale, bloodless colours; they wore flat-heeled tan shoes and their macintoshes were nearly always of a fawn colour. I would try to choose my compartment sensibly; but in the end I always surrendered to instinct and luck; in these matters they are as good a guide as any. I would not attempt any conversation immediately. I would wait until the ticket collector came round. The excursion ticket was, suitably, fawn-coloured, contrasting with the regular ticket, which was green. If the girl proffered a fawn ticket I would put her down as a tourist like myself. I had taken care to provide myself with magazines, notably Punch, published as it still is on a Wednesday. Punch, then, I might offer; it would always be accepted. The way was then open for that type of conversation at which I was becoming adept. The slow French; the question about the Norwegian crossed o or the Swedish j; followed by the suggestion that we might do our exploring of the cultural centre together. At any one of three or four stages the encounter might have been rendered futile. But when one is in vein, as the French say, when dedication and commitment are total, mistake is rare. Will I be believed if I say that on four successive Wednesdays I made lucky strikes on the Oxford train? A Norwegian – what a country, Norway, its reputation in this respect dimmed by the somewhat inflated reputation of its vulgar neighbour Sweden; a French girl and a French woman; and a German Swiss. After the disturbance of this last adventure I transferred my attentions elsewhere.

  It had been disturbing indeed. No walks up the twisted wooden steps of colleges on vacation, no exploring of the spacious sitting-rooms of undergraduates and their cramped bedrooms. We had just walked and walked, pausing occasionally for refreshment; and the day had ended with us back in London, in St John’s Wood, past one in the morning, still walking, after innumerable cups of hot tea from stalls, though excitement, of a sort never experienced by me in London, would have been enough to give me energy. In the deserted streets – and a detail like this enables us to judge change, for today streets are as noisy at two in the morning as during the day – in the deserted streets a declaration had been made to me, and it had moved me in spite of myself. Beatrice had decided that I was to be her friend. She explained the significance of the word, and I was afraid that some invitation to my book-shaped room was expected. But no; we walked round and round the house in St John’s Wood where she was staying; and when at last we stopped in front of the house and the moment for separation came, I saw with relief that nothing was expected of me. She kissed me lightly on the lips – observe how I had surrendered all will – and for a little pressed her hand on the side of my face as though learning its shape. She said it had been a good beginning.

  I returned to the boarding-house in an agony of disturbance. I doubted whether I even knew what she looked like. I had fallen in so completely with her mood. She had led; I had followed. When she made her declaration I had felt called upon to respond. I had been careful not to perjure myself – it had never been my way in these encounters – but I had given her an Isabella dollar-note which I kept in my wallet and which had served me in the past as a useful topic of conversation when the hilarity of the Swedish j had faded. At the time the surrendering of this dollar-note seemed important – how we flounder when emotion overtakes us. Now, however, out of this emotion only disturbance and threat remained. The threat of the ‘good start’; the threat, frequently expressed, of a father arriving from Basle in a fortnight, a ‘man of culture’, to whom she desired passionately to present me since we had so much in common.

  Luck intervened. The day remained whole, unsullied. Was it luck, though? Mightn’t I have found that order I looked for, mightn’t order have come with this complete break from the past, if I had pursued where I had been so moved? But I had my doubts then; I didn’t know whether during that day I had simply become what she had wanted me to be. Still, I wonder: wouldn’t it have been better, or at any rate more amusing, if I had met the father, the man of culture – these European phrases: how quaint they are when turned into English – and if I had gone away with that girl and we had milked our cows among mountains and snow and rolled our cheeses down the hillsides?

  But my luck – let the word stand – intervened. The next afternoon a letter in a small envelope came. I want to give you your dollar back. Please take it. No more; no dear, no love. The clear-sighted Swiss! The mystery had been too much for her; she preferred to avoid it. She had sensed more than the absurdity of our relationship; she had sensed its wrongness. And, perhaps, she had seen the absence of virtue.

  Let me explain. Virtus: how could any one who had gone through Isabella Imperial and studied Latin with Major Grant fail to know the meaning of that word? Let me take you to the book-shaped room; let the scene not dissolve as we close the door and the face of the girl, already growing serious and blank, is averted and still. It was a logical moment. But it was the moment I dreaded. Both of us adrift in London, the great city, I with my past, my own darkness, she no doubt with hers. Always at these moments the talk of the past, the landscapes, their familiar settings which I wished them to describe and then feared
to hear about. I never wished even in imagination to enter their Norman farmhouses or their flats in Nassjo, pronounced Neshway, or their houses set atop the rocky fiords of geography books. I never wished to hear of the relationships that bound them to these settings, the pettinesses by which they had already been imprisoned. I never wanted our darknesses, our auras, to mingle. Understand the language I use. I am describing a failure, a deficiency; and these things can be so private. I had spent all my life among women; I could not conceive of an existence away from them or their influence. Perhaps the relationship into which I had fallen with Lieni was sufficient; perhaps all else was perversion. Intimacy: the word holds the horror. I could have stayed for ever at a woman’s breasts, if they were full and had a hint of a weight that required support. But there was the skin, there was the smell of skin. There were bumps and scratches, there were a dozen little things that could positively enrage me. I was capable of the act required, but frequently it was in the way that I was capable of getting drunk or eating two dinners. Intimacy: it was violation and self-violation. These scenes in the book-shaped room didn’t always end well; they could end in tears, sometimes in anger, a breast grown useless being buttoned up, a door closed on a room that seemed to require instant purification.

  But there was my ‘character’. I took to retaining trophies from the girls who came to the book-shaped room: stockings, various small garments, once even a pair of shoes from a girl who had thought of staying the night. Not for fetichist reasons, I give my word! Though even now I cannot understand my motives. I believe I had read or heard that it excited some men to think of girls going back to their rooms and travelling on underground trains without certain garments. Nor can I understand why I began keeping a sexual diary. I began it, I remember, out of boredom and idleness; but soon it developed into a type of auto-erotic enterprise. It was myself, my minutest reactions, that I sought to analyse. Ridiculous! Vile! So it was to me too, even at the time. Yet I persevered, and stopped only when I discovered that Lieni, who had been sending me out into the world to conquer, read this diary as regularly as I wrote it. I was not annoyed. It was the sort of relationship I had with her: it seemed to me no intrusion that she should come into my room at odd hours or read my letters. I welcomed this sort of participation. But I stopped the diary. She spoke about it to some of the boarders in the front basement room one evening; it was considered a great joke, suited to my ‘character’. The Frenchman said, ‘You should go to France and marry a French girl.’ But his thoughts must have been elsewhere, perhaps on the dinner of Lieni’s he had just eaten, for he added: ‘She will make you the most wonderful dishes with a little piece of bread and a little piece of cheese.’ After this Lieni became freer. Sections of the diary, which she had apparently memorized, she would quote at me in the presence of others; and in her playful Maltese way she would grab at my crutch, threatening to bite ‘it’ off. In moments of especial hilarity she even attempted to unbutton me. So to my boarding-house character was added this humorous modification.

  The warning signs were so clear. Yet at the time I thought I was simply playing, that in the keeping of trophies and writing-up of experience I was expressing a non-existent side of myself. As though we ever play. As though the personality, for all its byways and wilful deviations, all its seeming inconsistencies, does not hang together. There are certain states into which, during periods of stress, we imperceptibly sink; it is only during the climb back up that we can see how far, for all the continuing consciousness of wholeness and sanity, we had become distorted. Coming to London, the great city, seeking order, seeking the flowering, the extension of myself that ought to have come in a city of such miraculous light, I had tried to hasten a process which had seemed elusive. I had tried to give myself a personality. It was something I had tried more than once before, and waited for the response in the eyes of others. But now I no longer knew what I was; ambition became confused, then faded; and I found myself longing for the certainties of my life on the island of Isabella, certainties which I had once dismissed as shipwreck.

  Shipwreck: I have used this word before. With my island background, it was the word that always came to me. And this was what I felt I had encountered again in the great city: this feeling of being adrift, a cell of perception, little more, that might be altered, if only fleetingly, by any encounter. The son-lover-brother with Lieni, the player of private games in public rooms, the sensitive young man with a girl like Beatrice; the brute with the girl who, undressed, had revealed a back of irritating coarseness and had then, in tearful response to my disgust – how inconsequentially people act in extremity – shown me a picture of her Norman farmhouse. This last remained a memory of shame for some time; for I had actually shouted at the girl. I have been guilty of three or four acts of pure cruelty in my life, no more. I have now recorded two; they occurred close together, during a period of stress.

  In the great city, so three-dimensional, so rooted in its soil, drawing colour from such depths, only the city was real. Those of us who came to it lost some of our solidity; we were trapped into fixed, flat postures. And, in this growing dissociation between ourselves and the city in which we walked, scores of separate meetings, not linked even by ourselves, who became nothing more than perceivers: everyone reduced, reciprocally, to a succession of such meetings, so that first experience and then the personality divided bewilderingly into compartments. Each person concealed his own darkness. Lieni; the English student in his scarf; Duminicu, forever in my imagination sitting in vest and pants on the semen-stained magenta spread of his narrow bed, spearing ham from a tin and, moustache working above weak mouth, speaking between and through mouthfuls of his imminent escape; and myself. Little twinges of panic too, already. Not the panic of being lost or lonely; the panic of ceasing to feel myself as a whole person. The threat of other people’s lives, the remembered private landscapes, the relationships, the order which was not mine. I had longed for largeness. How, in the city, could largeness come to me? How could I fashion order out of all these unrelated adventures and encounters, myself never the same, never even the thread on which these things were hung? They came endlessly out of the darkness, and they couldn’t be placed or fixed. And always at the end of the evening the book-shaped room, the tall window, myself sitting towards the light or towards the mirror.

  The signs were all there. The crash was coming, but I could see this only when the crash had come and when the search for order had been abandoned for something more immediate and more reassuring. And the need for reassurance was constant. I began, as the saying is, to frequent prostitutes. Instinct alone didn’t suggest this; I was also influenced by what I had read. I became an addict of what these women offered, which was less and more than pleasure: the quick stimulation of fear, followed by its immediate dissipation. But it was a grotesque business, not the least grotesque part of which was the vocabulary. Personal service; correction; domination; thirty shillings dressed, two guineas undressed. The first occasion was a failure; it was an occasion of unrelieved fear. I remember a very warm ante-room with a gas fire, a wallpaper of flowered, country cottage pattern, and an elderly cigarette-smoking maid in an upholstered armchair reading the evening paper by the light of a dim ceiling lamp. In the room beyond there was the manageable talk of money and something extra for the maid; then the humiliation. After some time the body threw me off, rearranging its stiff, evil-smelling hair. But the cruelty and cheating were, as I discovered later, exceptional; I never experienced them again. The occasions that followed are a blur: of encounters less with individual bodies than with anonymous flesh. Each occasion pressed me deeper down into emptiness, that prolonged sensation of shock with which I was every minute of every day trying to come to terms. Still the cummerbund, though, still the well-brushed hair: in those days my only act of heroism.

  I write as though Lieni is in some way to blame. This is not my intention. Lieni might even have saved me. I was not with her when the crash came. I had left the boarding-house
, and the move had been a climax to disturbance. The house had been sold to the Countess and we had all, Lieni as well, been given notice. So we scattered. I made no attempt to look up Lieni. Presently I had my own private fight; I didn’t think I could face her. I saw her, from a taxi, twelve years later. It was in that same area, on a Sunday afternoon, sunny, the street littered with paper. She was in a party of macintoshed Maltese, perhaps the very men I knew: small, pale, worried, with bodies and faces that carried the signs of childhood deprivation. Her own style had changed little. Her heels were still very high, her lipstick still a little too bright on her wide mouth: not the smart London girl, but a full-bodied woman who could be recognized at a glance as an immigrant, Maltese, Italian, Cypriot.

  Six months after I moved I saw both the Countess and the boarding-house mentioned in the News of the World. The house had been turned into a brothel. I cried out to Mrs Mural, my landlady, when I read the item, delighted to recognize an address with which I had been connected. It was the Murals’ paper and it was the sort of item they relished. But they did not care for the connection. The Murals were on their postwar rise; they were breeders of boy scouts; they grew more grave as they grew more acquisitive. Mr Mural once had a suit made to measure by a firm with many branches; for a full week the card advising him that his suit was ready lay on the letter tray in the hall. He was a scrupulous bill-maker. The bill which followed a minor illness, during which they had had to feed me, began: Telephone call to Doctor 3d. I paid without comment. Folding my cheque, not putting it away, he became genial; he told me that once, during the war, he had seen the Emperor Haile Selassie. ‘Standing by himself on Swindon station.’ Poor Emperor! Mrs Mural nourished her family with care, and my ration card was not without its uses towards this end. Some little portion fell to me, it is true. My breakfast, with its little pat of rationed butter and its little dish of rationed sugar, was brought up to me in procession every morning: Mrs Mural, her daughters, aged five and seven, and the dog.