The Mimic Men

by V. S. Naipaul

  The gift of the phrase: she relied on this more and more, letting simple words harden into settled judgements and attitudes. She used the gift to render grotesque the girls whose company she had once sought and whose way of life had delighted her. She turned them into a kind of comic chorus, evolving for each a pejorative racial description. A bulky girl from Amsterdam, married to a man from Surinam who had migrated to Isabella, became a ‘subkraut’; the Latvian became, rather tellingly, the ‘sub-Asiatic’. I accepted these phrases; and in our household, which had of course its own racial contradictions, I might hear myself saying quite naturally, ‘Shall we have the subkraut over to genever on Sunday morning?’ Or: ‘It looks as though the Lapp has forgiven you. She wants you to go to a party she is giving for a bearded fellow-countryman. He is over here collecting voodoo songs to play on the Swedish radio.’

  An invitation like the last was reconciliation indeed. Among us, cosmopolitan though we were, nothing was prized so much as the visitor from countries reasonably far away. Over such a visitor our women would fight, practising exclusions to indicate disfavour or offering invitations to announce reconciliation. This was the basis of the hospitality on which we prided ourselves, this pampering of the visitor while he remained a visitor, while his foreign cigarettes and shirts and foreign shoes lasted, before he became one of us. Invariably, with such a visitor, there would occur a moment, unplanned, of collective sadness, each girl then seeming to see at the same time the landscape from which she had broken; and in a darkened veranda, from which we offered our visitor the tropical night, there would be soft criticism, anticipating the visitor’s judgement, of the narrowness of island life: the absence of good conversation or proper society, the impossibility of going to the theatre or hearing a good symphony concert. Why the quality of the symphony concerts we were being denied should have been stressed I don’t know. It always was; it was as though on Isabella we were subjected, as a condition of residence, to an endless series of bad symphony concerts. And it was at one such session of soft criticism – at the Indian Commissioner’s, Indian Republic Day, such diplomatic or quasi-diplomatic corps as we had on Isabella all assembled, our women in saris, light glinting on silk from Banaras and jewellery from Guiana – it was then that Sandra, in a sari herself, succeeded in antagonizing the entire group, by saying loudly, in the middle of their music complaint, ‘The one thing I’ve learnt to recognize since I’ve come to this place is a bad symphony concert.’

  So Sandra battled on with her North London tongue, responding openly to hostility which was not hostility but only that type of provocation which I have described. Until at last an undeclared state of war existed between the others and ourselves. We continued to meet and to offer and receive hospitality; but it was now accepted that no holds were to be barred. It was our final setting apart. For all this I was to pay later; but then it was Sandra who suffered. Common: it was the word Sandra had given us, and it was the word to which she was now herself pinned. She became a girl from the East End of London, without breeding or education, who had been rescued by myself, besotted by the glamour of her race. But money was the subject of greater fantasies. I don’t suppose we could have made anyone believe that to Sandra money had come as no surprise, it being no more than what she had considered her element; that about money she had always been vague, not knowing even as a student what her grant was or how much she had in the bank; that in money matters she lacked the neurotic precision of myself, who was uneasy unless he knew how much he had and how much he could resonably expect to have in a year’s time; and that to me it had come as no surprise that the very girl who before her marriage would have considered fifty pounds wealth should be talking calmly three years later of our overdraft of a hundred thousand dollars. Her feeling for the luxurious, her readiness to create the occasion with very little, never altered from the time I met her; her demands, even during the days of riches, remained small; and when she left me she left more or less as she had come. Not only from pride; nor yet from that sense of tainted fairy money which the money-gift brings; but, I feel certain, from the conviction that money had ceased to be an issue. It is the peculiar madness that comes with the gift; it makes so many unlikely people – to the wonderment of the world – throw away all.

  The simplicities! The distortions! The incident at the Indian Commissioner’s, for instance, was more than modified in the retelling. The talk, it was said, had turned to music. The Canadian Trade Commissioner had said to Sandra, ‘Do you care for music?’ To which, the story would have it, Sandra replied in a low-class London accent: ‘What do you think I am? I would have you know that I like a good symphony concert.’ Then there was the bookshop story, in which I figured. Was it the assistant who spread the hilarious exchange in which he had said to me, ‘Oh, your wife likes reading!’ and I had angrily replied, ‘Look here, I would have you know that my wife reads good books’? This was the dialogue style of these stories: Sandra and I were always ‘having people know’ things. To these stories and to others, of lasciviousness, betrayal and even sexual quaintness, I reacted not at all; and I thought that Sandra shared that placidity, partly her gift, which had come to me with our marriage. But she suffered more than I knew. It did not occur to me that she was not always able to handle a situation which she had provoked; it did not occur to me that, with the gift of the phrase, she could also be vulnerable to the phrase; and that against a low level of distortion she was helpless, as some children remain helpless against the taunts of their fellows, for all the philosophizing of their elders.

  She would cultivate a woman friend assiduously, jealously, someone newly arrived, someone new to the group; she would see this person every day and show her every sort of generosity and favour. In no time every aspect of the relationship would be exhausted; and there would occur the inevitable rupture, the anger that was really hurt. More and more I noticed she cultivated Americans; in our group they were a neutral and variable element; and they were as charmed by her accent as she by theirs. With every new encounter, every new friend, she fashioned a matching myth of racial niceness. She was never content with the individual as individual; she wished to go beyond; it was what remained of her avidity and enthusiasm, which could revive at so little. I wish I had seen then, as I see so clearly now, that she was sinking.

  What makes a marriage? What makes a house with two people empty? Surely we were compatible, even complementary. Yet it was this very compatibility that drew her away from me. She had begun to get some of my geographical sense, that feeling of having been flung off the world, for all the landscapes and memories that were locked in the heads of those we met. She spoke increasingly of her childhood, of school, of walks, and of one friend whose wish it was to own a motorcar of pure white. One morning – we had for some time been sleeping in separate rooms – she told me she had awakened in the night with a feeling of fear, a simple fear of place, of the absent world. That she shared a fear I knew so well strengthened me; and subtly my attitude towards her changed. The very things I had once admired in her – confidence, ambition, rightness – were what I now pitied her for; I felt we had come together for self-defence. But there was always morning, always the healing phrase – what a comforting, deceptive thing it is, the gift of words. ‘I suppose this must be the most inferior place in the world,’ she said. ‘Inferior natives, inferior expats. Frightfully inferior and frightfully happy. The two must go together.’ I suggested a trip to England. But she was not interested; it remained the country she had wished to get away from. No family or group awaited her; and she was no tourist; she didn’t want to see the Tower or do the galleries or go to the theatre; she didn’t even need to close her eyes to see what two weeks or a month in London would be like. She said, ‘I can take that as read.’ She spent more time in the house; in the hot, airless afternoons she often walked about barefooted in her white cotton petticoat and a brassiere supporting breasts she no longer painted. A man came in two or three mornings a week to look after the garden; we
had a Grenadian woman cleaner. Apart from these we employed no servants, Sandra having grown to resent them, sometimes hysterically, as intruders. There would have been little for anyone to do anyway. The well-equipped kitchen of our rented house was cold for much of the time. Little came out of it: coffee and toast, hot milk, scrambled eggs, some simple bit of frying. On the shelves were musty, once-used tins and drums of herbs; at night, as soon as the fluorescent tube jumped into dazzle, cockroaches scattered lightly in all directions over bare white surfaces. The women of our group were outraged. On my behalf then; later, of course, it would be different.

  But to me as well as to Sandra our house was something to get out of whenever we could. Into that most inferior place in the world. Where could we go? The beaches? We knew them all; we could take them ‘as read’. The mountain villages, Negro or mulatto, with their slave history and slave customs? They were more exciting to read about in the Sunday edition of the Inquirer than to see: rundown villages of concrete and corrugated iron, set in green, always shining green, like a dozen others elsewhere. At nights we would go out driving, just for the sake of motion. We drove to the airport and sat drinking in the lounge with intransit passengers, listening to the names of foreign cities. We hunted out every new bar or restaurant or nightclub: Isabella was the sort of place where such establishments regularly opened and closed under new management. We were at our happiest outside; it was outside, in a crowd, late at night, the champagne working, that we communed. The sight of Sandra across a room could stir me to a degree that was sometimes disgraceful. Those ill-tempered eyes! That bony face with its jut of jaw. Those feet, as nervous and expressive as hands, but so much more subtle and complex, so much more beautifully made! Those breasts she was always ready to offer me, as to a child. I liked to go across to her and detach her from the man – usually American now – whom those breasts had attracted. And so, in public, we would commune. It was the word we used. I would say, ‘Shall we commune?’ ‘Let’s,’ she might reply. ‘Let me get a drink first.’ On a high settee she might then sit, her head and shoulders jammed against the wall, her feet hanging loose over my shoulders as I sat on the floor below the settee; and I would be content, kissing and stroking those feet and legs which twitched and squeezed in answer. As much as by Sandra’s cold kitchen the feminine instincts of Europe and Asia were outraged – and perhaps rightly – by these public displays.

  But the mood that overcame us seldom came to any consummation. It might have done if we were willing to outrage all sensibility, to do in public what plebeian rumour attributed to our group. But our mood seldom carried us to our house; we could not obliterate the feeling of failure, the feeling of the house’s emptiness, the feeling that whatever solution we achieved would be only temporary, would not destroy the night or the morning to come. We had never slept on a double bed; it had always seemed to me unpleasant and, in the tropics, where the body oozes oil, unhealthy; and we had taken to sleeping in separate rooms so that the sleeplessness of the one might not disturb the other. And frequently, on returning, we had simply gone to our respective rooms.

  Was it the house? It was one of those large timber town houses of the old colonial period, slightly decaying in spite of its modern kitchen. We both thought it attractive but for some reason we had never succeeded in colonizing it. Large areas of it remained empty; it felt like a rented house, which soon has to go back to its true owner. It had never seemed important to us to have a house of our own. I had no feeling for the house as home, as personal creation. I had no things, no treasures, no collection even of books, no household gods, as Sandra would have said; and apart from a few school prizes, neither had she. Still, to build a house seemed a thing to do; to continue living in an old rented house was beginning to appear ostentatious. I was looking through a picture book about Pompeii and Herculaneum. I was struck by the simplicity of the Roman house, its outward austerity, its inner, private magnificence; I was struck by its suitability to our climate; I yielded to impulse.

  But was it something more? Wasn’t it that cotton-clad body, with the cleanliness and freshness of the barren, a body without danger or mystery and forbidding for that reason? A body which was no more than what it was, holding no promise of growth, speaking only of flesh and futility and our own imminent extinction.

  We violate no body so much as our own; towards it we display the perversity of the cat that constantly rips its wounds open. I saw that there was waste; and I felt, let there be waste. The habits of my student days, which had never altogether died, were now revived. On the island I had become acquainted with a number of women of various races, of the utmost discretion; what had been an occasional extravagance became, as before, an addiction, but now guiltless and clinical. Sometimes I had to stifle my own disgust; sometimes it went well. And it was after a good and successful afternoon – they speak of the sadness of the animal after coitus: but in my experience fulfilment was always followed by a mood of exceptional gentleness and optimism – it was after one good afternoon that I found myself about to say to Sandra as we were dressing to go out – the sentence was fully phrased: delight had been converting itself into reporting words all afternoon – ‘Darling, I’ve had a most marvellous afternoon. I’ve been in bed with a most skilled and delightful woman.’ It was only as I was, I repeat, on the point of saying this, that I realized that perhaps similar sentences had sometimes come to Sandra herself.

  And I was amazed at my innocence.

  Men in the position in which I now saw myself to have been for some time arouse a variety of reactions. There is ridicule, which I find puzzling. I have never been able to enter into the Sicilian attitude to possession; though I wonder whether this ridicule isn’t simply a required attitude, and disingenuous, a covering up for a private fear. But then there is also anger, contempt, pity. And in the special nature of my marriage these things were to fall upon my head in full measure. Was it my placidity which made me indifferent, that very placidity which had dismissed the numerous stories I had had from so many people? Would I be believed if I say that my first thought was not for myself but for Sandra? I was filled, I was overwhelmed, with pity for her; at no time since we had met did I feel such responsibility for her. For myself I felt only a slight, sickening twinge of fear. It was fear of the unreality around me; it was the fear of the man who feels the veils coming down one by one, muffling his deepest responses, and panics at not being able to tear down the unreality about him to get at the hard, the concrete, where everything becomes simple and ordinary and easy to seize. It was my London fear; and now, in addition, I feared for the luck I attributed to Sandra, this luck to which I thought mine was linked. It was then that I began to will everything away: the gift, ambition, everything; and consoled myself consciously with thoughts of extinction, as a vague and general fate, as once, in London, I could get to sleep only with the thought of the Luger at my head. Strange reaction to shattering news! Too good to be true. Perhaps. But certainly too good to be good. I should have fought and created scenes. I should have slapped her on that mouth which it gave me so much pleasure to contemplate. It might have revived us both. As it was, I let the poor child sink. I left both fear and pity unexpressed, and waited in silence for something to overtake us.

  And all this while at Crippleville our Roman house was being built. It built itself. We had both lost interest in it, but we both kept this secret from the other. It is a strain to inspect the progress of a house in which you know others will live. A house, though, is one of those things in which the principle of inertia is clearly demonstrated. It is more difficult to abandon the building of a house than to take it to the end. To the end we took ours, through all the rites that go with the building of the house, sacred symbol; until we came to the final rite, the housewarming, the installing of the household gods who convert brick and timber into something more. The lights, the food, the illuminated swimming-pool (our modification of the Roman impluvium), the discreet band; the shining faces of those outside the gates wh
o had come to watch; the road choked with motorcars; and even a couple of policemen, like hospital attendants with their white night armbands. In the centre of all this I felt a stranger, as so often happens during grand occasions of one’s own. Everyone we had invited had come. I noticed Sandra’s American, slightly too hearty towards me, who felt nothing but paternally towards him; though this had been overlaid by what I thought he must feel about me, so that a muted embarrassment now existed between us. And I noticed too how even at this late stage our position was proclaimed; it was still possible for us to accept our role, if only we had known how. The women had dressed with unusual care; most of them had clearly spent the morning or the afternoon at the hairdresser’s. Whatever might have passed between us, our housewarming was still, magnificently, an occasion.

  There can be no surprise, considering my own mood, that the occasion should have gone wrong or should have been turned into an occasion of another sort. I was never sure how exactly it started. Possibly the example of recent ‘breaking-up’ parties was unfortunate; at an appointed hour at these parties, usually after drinks and just before food, guests were required to destroy certain things indicated by the host – glassware and china from sets that had been irredeemably decimated, items of furniture that had been overtaken by our racing taste, an old-style radio, toys that had been outgrown. It might also have been that boredom against which we all fought; when we did not talk of our children we talked of occasions that had just passed and occasions that were to come. And, indeed, after the champagne, the caviar on buttered toast, the barbecue, what was there to do? What was the new thing that could hold us? After the thrill of the campfire preparation of food, what could we do except eat the food? And there was the swimming-pool. A swimming-pool is a most tedious thing. You get in and swim twelve lengths and that is fine. But if you are not a swimmer seeking exercise, if you are nothing more than an extravagant bather, if you wish to be in a swimming-pool only to savour the luxury of being in a swimming-pool at night, with uniformed attendants who at a wave hurry to the pool’s edge with trays of food and drink in appetite-killing variety, if you wish to do only that, you are soon restless. It was there, in the tedium of the swimming-pool, that everything began, I am sure. There were calls from the pool for balls, for games. Was it from the American’s hefty hand that the ball was sent flying among tables, breaking plates and glasses and cracking a window? I am not sure. But within seconds the ball was sent from hand to hand, from pool to house to pool again, and there was a positive destroying fury. The pool was set centrally, so that damage was satisfying and easy. There rose excited laughter; it seemed that at the first, releasing sound of breaking glass and china a sort of hysteria had set in among our guests. Everyone pretended to be drunker than he was; everyone was suddenly very active. But for the first time since I had come back to the island I knew anger, a deep, blind, damaging anger. I shouted, I screamed; I did not know where I walked or who I hit or what I said after the presentiment of the anger breaking up through me. Just pictures: of the disturbed blue of the pool, rocking to rest in an instant of stillness, of the splashed edges of the pool, the bright lights, the recessed areas of gloom, the flies fluttering above the caged underwater light, the faces of one or two registering so clearly the thought that I had gone mad, about me the splashings and the spilled drinks and wasted food.