Collected Short Fiction

by V. S. Naipaul

  ‘That’s what I have always felt. Excuse me.’

  I went up to my room. The oysters had been too many for me. The sick tightness was in my stomach. Even at this early stage it was necessary for me to drive myself on.

  I was careful, as I always am on these occasions, to prepare sensibly. I lined the waist-band of my trousers with the new funny island money; I distributed notes all over my pockets; I even lay some flat in my shoes.

  A letter from home among my papers. Nothing important; no news; just a little bit about the drains, the wonderful workmen who had helped. Brave girl. Brave.

  I remembered again. I lifted the telephone, asked for a line, dialled. The same voice answered and again my courage left me and I listened to the squawks until the phone went dead.

  I had stripped myself of all my labels, of all my assertions. Soon I would be free. Hilton, Hilton: man as God. Goodbye to that now. My excitement was high.

  I went to the desk, transferred a fixed sum to the hotel vault. The final fraudulence that we cannot avoid: we might look for escape, but we are always careful to provide for escape from that escape.

  While the clerk was busy I took the pen from the desk, blacked out the whites of Gary Priestland’s eyes and sent an arrow through his neck. The clerk was well trained. It was only after I had turned that he removed the disfigured poster and replaced it by a new one.

  The liveried doorman whistled up a taxi. I gave him a local dollar; too much, but I enjoyed his attempt to look unsurprised. He opened the taxi door, closed it, saluted. It was the final moment of responsibility. I did not give the taxi driver the name of any bar; I gave him the name of a department store in the centre of the city. And when I got off I actually went into the store, as though the taxi driver was watching me and it was important that I should not step out of the character which he must have built up for me.

  The store was air-conditioned. The world was cool and muffled. My irritation was sharpened.

  ‘Can I help you, sir?’

  ‘No thank you, I am just passing through.’

  I spoke with unnecessary aggressiveness; one or two customers stared and I instinctively waited for Leonard’s interjection.

  ‘Leonard,’ I whispered, turning.

  But he wasn’t there.

  The shop girl took a step backwards and I hurried out through the other door into the shock of damp heat, white light, and gutter smells. Hooray for air-conditioning. My mood had taken possession of me. I was drunk on more, and on less, than alcohol.

  The money began to leak out of my fingers. This is part of the excitement; money became paper over which other people fought. Two dollars entrance here; one dollar for a beer there; cigarettes at twice the price: I paid in paper. Bright rooms, killing bright, and noisy as the sea. The colours yellow, green, red, on drinks, labels, calendars on the walls. On the television intermittently through a series of such bars, Gary Priestland, chairing a discussion on love and marriage. And from a totally black face, a woman’s, black enough to be featureless, issued: ‘Well, I married for love.’ ‘No, she married for hate.’ Laughter was like the sea. Someone played with the knob on the set; and the thought, perhaps expressed, came to me. ‘It is an unkind medium.’

  In bright rooms, bright seas, I floated. And I explored dark caves, so dark you groped and sat still and in the end you found that you were alone.

  ‘Where is everybody?’

  ‘They are coming just now.’

  In an almost empty room – dim lights, dark walls, dark chairs – the man sitting at the edge of the table invited us to come close up to him. We all six in the room moved up to him, as to a floor show. He crossed his legs and swung them. ‘Is he going to strip?’

  Confusion again. The door; the tiled entrance; the discreet board:

  BRITISH COUNCIL

  The Elizabethan Lyric

  A Course of Six Lectures

  I always feel it would be so much better if I could wait to pick and choose. Time after time I promise myself to do so. But when the girl came and said – so sad it seemed to me – ‘I am going to screw you,’ I knew that this was how it would begin; that I wouldn’t have the will to resist.

  PRIDE, flashed the neon light across the square.

  She ordered a stout.

  ‘You are an honest girl.’

  ‘Stout does build me up.’

  TOIL

  The stout came.

  ‘Ah,’ she said, ‘my old bulldog.’

  And from the neck label the bulldog growled at me. With the stout there also came two men dressed like calypsonians in the travel brochures, dressed like calypsonians on the climbing road to the hotel.

  ‘Allow me to welcome the gentleman to our colourful island.’

  CULTURE

  ‘Get away,’ I shouted.

  She looked a little nervous; she nodded uncertainly to someone behind me and said, ‘Is all right, Percy.’ Then to me: ‘Why you driving them away?’

  ‘They embarrass me.’

  ‘How you mean, they embarrass you?’

  ‘They’re not real. Look, I could put my hand through them.’

  The man with the guitar lifted his arm; my hand went through.

  The song went on: ‘In two-twos, this gentleman got the alcoholic blues.’

  ‘God!’

  When I uncovered my face I saw a ringed hand before it. It was an expectant hand. I paid; I drank.

  A fat white woman began to do a simple little dance on the raised floor. I couldn’t look.

  ‘What wrong with you?’

  And when the woman made as if to discard the final garment, I stood up and shouted. ‘No!’

  ‘But how a big man like you could shame me so?’

  The man who had been sitting with a stick at the top of the steps came to our table. He waved around the room, past paintings of steel-bands and women dancing on golden sand, and pointed to a sign:

  Patrons are requested to abstain from

  lewd and offensive gestures

  By order, Ministry of Order and Public Education

  ‘Is all right, Percy,’ the girl said.

  Percy could only point. Speech was out of the question because of the steel orchestra. I sat down.

  Percy went away and the girl said gently: ‘Sit down and tell me why you finding everything embarrassing. What else you tourists come here for?’ She beckoned to the waitress. ‘I want a fry chicken.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘No damn fry chicken for you.’

  At that moment the band stopped, and my words filled the room. The Japanese sailors – we had seen their trawlers in the harbour – looked up. The American airmen looked up. Percy looked up.

  And in the silence the girl shouted to the room, ‘He finding everything embarrassing, and he damn mean with it.’ She stood up and pointed at me. ‘He travelling all over the world. And all I want is a fry chicken.’

  ‘Frank,’ I heard a voice whisper.

  ‘Leonard,’ I whispered back.

  ‘O boy, I am glad I’ve found you. I’ve had such a time looking for you. I have been in so many different bars, so many. I’ve got all these nice names, all these interesting people I’ve got to assist and give money to. Sometimes I had trouble getting the names. You know how people misunderstand. I was worried about you. Sinclair was worried about you too.’

  Sinclair was sitting at a table in the distance with his back to us, drinking.

  Caught between Leonard and a demand for fried chicken, I bought the fried chicken.

  ‘You know,’ Leonard said confidentially, ‘it seems that the place to go to is The Coconut Grove. It sounds terrific, just what I am looking for. You know it?’

  ‘I know it.’

  ‘Well look, why don’t we all three of us just go there now.’

  ‘Not me at The Coconut Grove,’ the girl said.

  Leonard said to me, ‘I meant you and me and Sinclair.’

  ‘What the hell you mean?’ She stood up and held the bottle of stout at
an angle over Leonard’s head, as though ready to pour. She called, ‘Percy!’

  Leonard closed his eyes, passive and expectant.

  ‘I’ll be with you in a minute, Leonard,’ I said, and I ran down the steps with the girl who was still holding the bottle of stout.

  ‘How you get so impatient so sudden?’

  ‘I don’t know, but this is your big chance.’

  The open car door at the foot of the steps was like an invitation. We got in, the door slammed behind us.

  ‘I’ve got to get away from those people upstairs. They’re mad, they’re quite mad. You don’t know what I rescued you from.’

  She looked at me.

  So it began: the walking out past tables; the casual stares; the refusal to walk the hundred yards to the hotel; the two-dollar taxi; the unswept concrete steps; the dimly lit rooms; the cheap wooden furniture; the gaudy calendars on the wall, mocking desire, mocking flesh; the blue shimmer of television screens; Gary Priestland, now with the news of the hurricane; the startling gentility of glass cabinets; the much-used bed.

  And in lucid intermissions, the telephone: the squawks, the slams.

  So it began. The bars, the hotels, pointless conversations with girls. ‘What’s your name? Where do you come from? What do you want?’ The drinks; the bloated feeling in the stomach; the sick taste of island oysters and red pepper sauce; the airless rooms; the wastepaper baskets, wetly and whitely littered; and white washbasins which, supine on stale beds, one associated with hospitals, medicines, operations, feverishness, delirium.

  ‘No!’

  ‘But I ain’t even touched you yet.’

  Above me a foolish face, the poor body offering its charms that were no charms. Poor body, poor flesh; poor man.

  And again confusion. I must have spoken the words. A woman wailed, claiming insult and calling for brave men, and the bare wooden staircase resounded. Then among trellis and roses, dozens of luminous white roses, a dog barked, and growled. The offended black body turned white with insult. The same screams, the same call for vengeance. Down an aisle, between hundreds and hundreds of fully clothed men with spectacles and pads and pencils, the body chased me. To another entrance; another tiled floor; another discreet board:

  ALLIANCE FRANÇAISE

  Art Course

  Paris Model

  (Admission free)

  And the glimpses of Leonard: like scenes imagined, the man with the million dollars to give away, the Pied Piper whom as in a dream I saw walking down the street followed by processions of steel-bandsmen, singers, and women calling for his money. At the head he walked, benign, stunned, smiling.

  The day had faded, the night moved in jerks, in great swallows of hours. Lighted docks had wise and patient faces.

  The bar smelled of rum and latrines. The beer and some notes and some silver were pushed at me through the gap in the wire-netting. My right hand was gripped and the black face, smiling, menacing, humorous, frightening, which I seemed to study pore by pore, hair by hair, was saying, ‘Leave the change for me, nuh.’

  Confusion. Glimpses of faces expressing interest rather than hostility. A tumbling and rumbling; a wet floor; my own shouts of ‘No’, and the repeated answering sentence: ‘Next time you walk with money.’

  And in the silent street off the deserted square, midnight approaching, the Cinderella hour, I was sitting on the pavement, totally lucid, with my feet in the gutter, sucking an orange. Sitting below the old straw-hatted lady, lit by the yellow smoking flame of a bottle flambeau. On the television in the shop window, Gary Priestland and the Ma-Ho Four, frantic and mute behind plate-glass.

  ‘Better?’ she said.

  ‘Better.’

  ‘These people nowadays, they never have, they only want.’

  ‘What do they want?’

  ‘What you have. Look.’

  The voice was mock American: ‘Man, I can get anything for you?’

  ‘What do you have?’

  ‘I have white,’ the taxi driver said. ‘I have Chinese, I have Portuguese, I have Indian, I have Spanish. Don’t ask me for black. I don’t do black.’

  ‘That’s right, boy,’ the old lady said. ‘Keep them out of mischief.’

  ‘I couldn’t do black or white now.’

  ‘Was what I was thinking,’ the orange lady said.

  ‘Then you want The Coconut Grove,’ the taxi driver said. ‘Very cultural. All the older shots go there.’

  ‘You make it sound very gay.’

  ‘I know what you mean. This culture would do, but it wouldn’t pay. Is just a lot of provocation if you ask me. A lot of wicked scanty clothing and all you doing with your two hands at the end is clapping. The spirit of the older shots being willing, but the flesh being weak.’

  ‘That sounds like me. After mature consideration I think we will go to The Coconut Grove.’

  ‘And too besides, I was going to say, they wouldn’t take you in like this, old man. Look at you.’

  ‘I don’t know, I believe I have lost you somewhere. Do you want me to go to this place?’

  ‘I don’t want nothing. I was just remarking that they wouldn’t take you in.’

  ‘Let’s try.’

  ‘In these cultural joints they have big bouncers, you know.’

  We drove through silent streets in which occasionally neon lights flashed PRIDE, TOIL, CULTURE. On the car radio came the news of midnight. Terrific news, from the way it was presented. Then came news of wind velocity and temperature, and of the hurricane, still out there.

  ‘You see what I mean,’ the taxi driver said when we stopped.

  ‘It has changed,’ I said. ‘It used to be an ordinary house, you know. You know those wooden houses with gables and fretwork along the eaves?’

  ‘Oh, the old-fashioned ones. We are pulling them down all the time now. You mustn’t think a lot of them still remain.’

  Henry’s was new and square, with much glass. Behind the glass, potted greenery; and behind that, blinds. Rough stone walls, recessed mortar, a heavy glass door, heavy, too, with recommendations from clubs and travel associations, like the suitcase of an old-fashioned traveller. And behind the door, the bouncer.

  ‘Big, eh?’ the taxi driver said.

  ‘He’s a big man.’

  ‘You want to try your luck?’

  ‘Perhaps a little later. Just now I just want you to drive slowly down the street.’

  The bouncer watched us move off. I looked back at him; he continued to look at me. And how could I have forgotten? Opposite The Coconut Grove, what? I looked. I saw.

  Ministry of Order and Public Education

  University College

  Creative Writing Department

  Principal: H. J. B. White

  Grams: Olympus

  ‘You don’t mind going so slowly?’ I asked the driver.

  ‘No, I do a lot of funeral work when I’m not hustling.’

  No overturned dustbins on the street now; no pariah dogs timidly pillaging. The street we moved down was like a street in an architect’s drawing. Above the neat new buildings trees tossed. The wind was high; the racing clouds were black and silver. We came to an intersection.

  ‘Supermarket,’ the driver said, pointing.

  ‘Supermarket.’

  A little further on my anxiety dissolved. Where I had expected and feared to find a house, there was an empty lot. I got out of the car and went to look.

  ‘What are you looking for?’ the taxi driver asked.

  ‘My house.’

  ‘You sure you left it here? That was a damn careless thing to do.’

  ‘They’ve pulled down my house.’ I walked among the weeds, looking.

  ‘The house not here,’ the taxi driver said. ‘What you looking for?’

  ‘An explanation. Here, go leave me alone.’ I paid him off.

  He didn’t go. He remained where he was and watched me. I began to walk briskly back towards The Coconut Grove, the wind blowing my hair, making my shirt flap,
and it seemed that it was just in this way, though not at night and under a wild sky, but in broad daylight, below a high light sky, that I had first come to this street. The terror of sky and trees, the force at my feet.

  II

  I used to feel in those days that it was we who brought the tropics to the island. When I knew the town, it didn’t end in sandy beaches and coconut trees, but in a tainted swamp, in mangrove and mud. Then the land was reclaimed from the sea, and the people who got oysters from the mangrove disappeared. On the reclaimed land we built the tropics. We put up our army huts, raised our flag, planted our coconut trees and our hedges. Among the great wooden buildings with wire-netting windows we scattered pretty little thatched huts.

  We brought the tropics to the island. Yet to the islanders it must have seemed that we had brought America to them. Everyone worked for us. You asked a man what he did; he didn’t say that he drove a truck or was a carpenter; he simply said he worked for the Americans. Every morning trucks drove through the city, picking up workers; and every afternoon the trucks left the base to take them back.

  The islanders came to our bit of the tropics. We explored theirs. Nothing was organized in those days. There were no leaflets telling you where to shop or where to go. You had to find out yourself. You found out quickly about the bars; it wasn’t pleasant to be beaten up or robbed.

  I heard about Henry’s place from a man on the base. He said Henry kept a few goats in his back-yard and sometimes slaughtered them on a Sunday. He said Henry was a character. It didn’t seem a particularly enticing thing. But I got into a taxi outside the base one Thursday afternoon and decided to look. Taxi drivers know everything; so they say.

  ‘Do you know a man called Henry?’ I asked the taxi driver. ‘He keeps a few goats.’

  ‘The island small, boss, but not that small.’

  ‘You must know him. He keeps these goats.’

  ‘No, boss, you be frank with me, I be frank with you. If goats you after …’

  I allowed him to take me where he wished. We drove through the old ramshackle city, wooden houses on separate lots, all decay, it seemed, in the middle of the brightest vegetation. It scarcely seemed a city where you would, by choice, seek pleasure; it made you think only of empty afternoons. All these streets look so quiet and alike. All the houses looked so tame and dull and alike: very little people attending to their very little affairs.