Collected Short Fiction

by V. S. Naipaul

  I said, ‘You must have a lot of shirts.’

  ‘Yes, I have a lot of shirts. Look, I will tell you. Selma and one or two of the other people you see here, we call wabeen.’

  ‘Wabeen?’

  ‘One of our freshwater fish. A lil loose. A lil. Not for any and everybody. You understand? Wabeen is not spole.’

  ‘Spote?’

  ‘Spote is – don’t make me use obscene language, man, Frank. Spote is what you see.’ He waved his hands about the yard.

  The steel-bands sounded nearer, and then through a gate in the corrugated-iron fence at the back of the lot the musicians came in. Their instruments were made out of old dustbins, and on these instruments they played a coarse music I had never heard before.

  ‘They have to hide, you know,’ Henry told me. ‘It’s illegal. The war and so on. Helping the war effort.’

  There was a little open shed at the back. It had a blackboard. I had noticed that blackboard and wondered about it. In this shed two or three people now began to dance. They drew watchers to them; they converted watchers into participants. From rooms in the houses on Henry’s lot, from rooms in other back-yards, and from the sewerage trace at the back, people drifted in steadily to watch. Each dancer was on his own. Each dancer lived with a private frenzy. Women among the watchers tore twigs from the hibiscus hedges and from time to time, as though offering benediction and reward, beat the dancer’s dusty feet with green leaves.

  Henry put his arm over my shoulder and led me to where Selma was standing. He kept one hand on my shoulder; he put the other on her shoulder. We stood silently together, watching. His hands healed us, bound us.

  A whistle blew. There were cries of ‘Police!’ and in an instant the yard was transformed. Dustbins appeared upright here and there; liquor bottles disappeared inside some; the dancers and the audience sat in neat rows under the shed and one man stood at the blackboard, writing. Many of Henry’s girls put on spectacles. One or two carried pieces of embroidery.

  It seemed to me that the police were a long time in entering. When they did, the Inspector shook Henry by the hand and said, ‘The old Adult Education class, eh?’

  ‘As you see,’ Henry said. ‘Each one teach one.’

  The Inspector closed his fingers when he took away his hand from Henry’s. He became chatty. ‘I don’t know, boy,’ he said. ‘We just have to do this. Old Blackwhite really on your tail. And that Mrs Lambert, she too lodge a complaint.’

  I wonder, though, whether I would have become involved with Selma and the others, if, during that first evening after I had undressed and was lying with Selma, I hadn’t seen my clothes dancing out of the window. They danced; it was as though they had taken on a life of their own.

  I called out to Selma.

  She didn’t seem surprised. She said, ‘I think they are fishing tonight.’

  ‘Fishing?’ I ran to the window after my disappearing clothes.

  ‘Yes, you know, fishing through the windows. Lifting a shirt here, a pair of trousers there. It is no good chasing them. Carnival coming, you know, and everybody wants a pretty costume.’

  She was right. In the morning I woke up and remembered that I had no clothes except for my pants and vest. I threw open the back window and saw naked Americans hanging out of windows. We looked at one another. We exchanged no words. The evening was past; this was the morning.

  Boys and girls were going to Mr Blackwhite’s college. Some stopped to examine contraceptives thrown into the gutters. Selma herself was fully dressed when I saw her. She said she was going to work. So it seemed after all that Henry’s story about some of his girls working in stores was right. Henry himself brought me a cup of coffee.

  ‘You can have one of my shirts. I just pass around and ask them for one, you know.’

  The morning life of Henry’s yard was different from the evening life. There was a subdued workaday bustle everywhere. A tall thin man was doing limbering-up exercises. He wore a vest and a pair of shorts, and from time to time he rubbed himself with oil from a little phial.

  ‘Canadian Healing Oil,’ Henry said. ‘I like to give him a little encouragement. Mano is a walker, you know. But a little too impatient; he does always end up by running and getting disqualified.’

  ‘This is terrible,’ I said. ‘But what about my clothes?’

  ‘You’ve got to learn tolerance. This is the one thing you have got to learn on the island.’

  Mano was squatting and springing up. All about him coalpots were being fanned on back steps and women were preparing morning meals. A lot of green everywhere, more than I had remembered. Beyond the sewerage trace I could see the equally forested back-yards of the houses of the other street, and it was in some of these yards that I saw khaki uniforms and white sailor uniforms hanging limp from lines.

  Henry followed my eyes. ‘Carnival coming, Frank. And you people got the whole world. Some people corporate in one way, some in another.’

  I didn’t want Henry’s philosophy just then. I ran out as I was on to the pavement. By the standards of the street I wasn’t too badly dressed in my vest and pants. Next door an old negro sat sunning himself in the doorway of a room which looked like a declining secondhand bookshop. He was dressed in a tight-fitting khaki suit. The open door carried on its inside a flowery sign – MR W. LAMBERT, BOOKBINDER – so that I understood how, with the front door closed, the house was the respectable shuttered residence I had seen the day before, and how now, with the front door open, it was a shop. Beside Mr Lambert – I thought it safe to assume that he was Mr Lambert – was a small glass of rum. As I passed him he lifted the glass against the light, squinted at it, nodded to me and said, ‘Good morning, my Yankee friend, may God all blessings to you send.’ Then he drank the rum at a gulp and the look of delight on his face was replaced by one of total torment, as though the rum and the morning greeting formed part of an obnoxious daily penance.

  ‘Good morning.’

  ‘If it is not being rude, tell me, my good sir, why you are nude.’

  ‘I don’t have any clothes.’

  ‘Touché, I say. Naked we come, and naked go away.’

  This was interesting and worth exploring but just then at the end of the road I saw the jeep. I didn’t know what the punishment was for losing your uniform and appearing naked in public. I ran back past Mr Lambert. He looked a little startled, like a man seeing visions. I ran into the side of Henry’s yard and went up to the front house by the back steps. At the same time Mano, the walker, began walking briskly out from the other side of the house into the road.

  I heard someone say from the jeep, ‘Doesn’t it look to you that he went in white and came out black?’

  A window opened in the next room and an American voice called out, ‘Did you see a naked white man running down here this morning, a few minutes ago?’

  A woman’s voice said, ‘Look, mister, the morning is my period of rest, and the last thing I want to see in the morning is a prick.’

  A pause, and the SPs drove off.

  For me there remained the problem of clothing. Henry offered to lend me some of his. They didn’t exactly fit. ‘But,’ he said, ‘you could pass around by Selma’s store and get a shirt. Look, I’ll give you the address.’

  A bicycle bell rang from the road. It was the postman in his uniform.

  ‘Henry, Henry,’ he said. ‘Look what I bringing today.’

  He came inside and showed a parcel. It was for Mr Blackwhite and had been sent to him from a publisher in the United States.

  ‘Another one come back, another one.’

  ‘O my God!’ Henry said. ‘I’m going to have Blackwhite crying on my hands again. What was this one about?’

  ‘Usual thing,’ the postman said. ‘Love. I had a good little read. In fact, it was funny in parts.’ He pulled out the manuscript. ‘You want to hear?’

  Henry looked at me.

  ‘I am a captive audience,’ I said.

  ‘Make yourself comfortable,’
the postman said. He began to read: ‘ “Lady Theresa Phillips was the most sought-after girl in all the county of Shropshire. Beautiful, an heiress to boot, intelligent, well-versed in the classics, skilful in repartee and with the embroidery needle, superbly endowed in short, she had but one failing, that of pride. She spurned all who wooed her. She had sent frustrated lovers to Italy, to the distant colonies, there to pine away in energetic solitude. Yet Nemesis was at hand. At a ball given by Lord Severn, the noblest lord in the land, Lady Theresa met Lord Alistair Grant. He was tall, square-shouldered and handsome, with melancholy eyes that spoke of deep suffering; he had in fact been left an orphan.” ’

  ‘Christ! Is this what he always writes about?’

  ‘All the time,’ Henry said. ‘Only lords and ladies. Typing like a madman all day. And Sundays especially you hear that machine going.’

  The front door was open and through it now came the voice of Mr Blackwhite. ‘Henry, I have seen everything this morning, and Mrs Lambert has just been to see me. I shall be typing out a letter to the newspapers. I just can’t have naked men running about my street.’ He caught sight of the postman and caught sight of the manuscript in the postman’s hand. His face fell. He raced up the concrete steps into the room and snatched the manuscript away. ‘Albert, I’ve told you before. You must stop this tampering with His Majesty’s mail. It is the sort of thing they chop off your head for.’

  ‘They send it back, old man,’ Henry said. ‘If you ask me, Blackwhite, I think it’s just a case of prejudice. Open-and-shut case. I sit down quiet-quiet and listen to what Albert read out, and it was really nice. It was really nice.’

  Blackwhite softened. ‘You really think so, Henry?’

  ‘Yes, man, it was really nice. I can’t wait to hear what happen to Lady Theresa Phillips.’

  ‘No. You are lying, you are lying.’

  ‘What happened in the end, Mr Blackwhite?’ I slapped at an ant on my leg.

  ‘You just scratch yourself and keep quiet,’ he said to me. ‘I hate you. I don’t believe you can even read. You think that black people don’t write, eh?’

  Albert the postman said, ‘It was a real nice story, Blackwhite. And I prophesy, boy, that one day all those white people who now sending back your books going to be coming here and begging you to write for them.’

  ‘Let them beg, let them beg. I won’t write for them when they beg. Oh, my God. All that worrying, all that typing. Not going to write a single line more. Not a blasted line.’ He grew wild again. ‘I hate you, Henry, too. I am going to have this place closed, if it’s the last thing I do.’

  Henry threw up his hands.

  ‘To hell with you,’ Blackwhite said. ‘To hell with Lady Theresa Phillips.’ To me he said pointing, ‘You don’t like me.’ And then to Henry: ‘And you don’t like me either. Henry, I don’t know how a man could change like you. At one time it was always Niya Binghi and death to the whites. Now you could just wrap yourself in the Stars and Stripes and parade the streets.’

  ‘Niya Binghi?’ I asked.

  ‘Was during the Abyssinian War,’ Henry said, ‘and the old queen did just die. Death to the whites. Twenty million on the march. You know our black people. The great revenge. Twenty million on the march. And always when you look back, is you alone. Nobody behind you. But the Stars and Stripes,’ he added. ‘You know, Blackwhite, I believe you have an idea there. Good idea for Carnival. Me as sort of Uncle Sam. Gentleman, it have such a thing as Stars and Stripes at the base?’

  ‘Oh, he’s one of those, is he?’ Blackwhite said. ‘One of our American merchantmen?’

  ‘I believe I can get you a Stars and Stripes,’ I said.

  Blackwhite went silent. I could see he was intrigued. His aggressiveness when he spoke wasn’t very convincing. ‘I suppose that you people have the biggest typewriters in the world, as you have the biggest everything else?’

  ‘It’s too early in the morning for obscene language,’ Henry said.

  ‘I am not boasting,’ I said. ‘But I am always interested in writing and writers. Tell me, Mr Blackwhite, do you work regularly, or do you wait for inspiration?’

  The question pleased him. He said, ‘It is a mixture of both, a mixture of both.’

  ‘Do you write it out all in longhand, or do you use a typewriter?’

  ‘On the typewriter. But I am not being bribed, remember. I am not being bribed. But if the naked gentleman is interested in our native customs and local festivals, I am prepared to listen.’ His manner changed. ‘Tell me, man, you have a little pattern book of uniforms? I don’t want to appear in any and every sort of costume at Carnival, you know.’

  ‘Some of those costumes can be expensive,’ I said.

  ‘Money, money,’ Blackwhite said. ‘It had to come up. But of course I will pay.’

  This was how it started; this was how I began to be a purveyor of naval supplies. First to Mr Henry and to Mr Blackwhite and then to the street. I brought uniforms; money changed hands. I brought steel drums; money changed hands. I brought cartons of cigarettes and chewing gum; money changed hands. I brought a couple of Underwood standard typewriters. Money didn’t change hands.

  Blackwhite said, ‘Frankie, I think art ought to be its own reward.’

  It wasn’t though. A new line went up on Blackwhite’s board:

  ALSO TYPING LESSONS

  ‘Also typing lessons, Blackwhite?’

  ‘Also typing lessons. Black people don’t type?’

  This had become his joke. We were in his room. His walls were hung with coloured drawings of the English countryside in spring. There were many of these, but they were not as numerous as the photographs of himself, in black and white, in sepia, in coarse colour. He had an especially large photograph of himself between smaller ones of Churchill and Roosevelt.

  ‘The trouble, you know, Blackwhite,’ I said, ‘is that you are not black at all.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You are terribly white.’

  ‘God, I am not going to be insulted by a beachcomber.’

  ‘Beachcomber. That’s very good. But you are not only white. You are English. All those lords and ladies, Blackwhite. All that Jane Austen.’

  ‘What’s wrong with that? Why should I deny myself any aspect of the world?’

  ‘Rubbish. I was wondering, though, whether you couldn’t start writing about the island. Writing about Selma and Mano and Henry and the others.’

  ‘But you think they will want to read about these people? These people don’t exist, you know. This is just an interlude for you, Frankie. This is your little Greenwich Village. I know, I can read. Bam bam, bram, bram. Fun. Afterwards you leave us and go back. This place, I tell you, is nowhere. It doesn’t exist. People are just born here. They all want to go away, and for you it is only a holiday. I don’t want to be any part of your Greenwich Village. You beachcomb, you buy sympathy. The big rich man always behind the love, the I-am-just-like-you. I have been listening to you talking to people in Henry’s yard about the States; about the big cinemas with wide screens and refrigerators as big as houses and everybody becoming film stars and presidents. And you are damn frightened of the whole thing. Always ready for the injection of rum, always looking for the nice and simple natives to pick you up.’

  It was so. We turn experience continually into stories to lend drama to dullness, to maintain our self-respect. But we never see ourselves; only occasionally do we get an undistorted reflection. He was right. I was buying sympathy, I was buying fellowship. And I knew, better than he had said, the fraudulence of my position in the street.

  He pointed to Churchill on the wall. ‘What do you think would have happened to him if he was born here?’

  ‘Hold your head that way, Blackwhite. Yes, definitely Churchillian.’

  ‘Funny. You think we would have been hearing about him today? He would have been working in a bank. He would have been in the civil service. He would have been importing sewing machines and exporting cocoa.’r />
  I studied the photograph.

  ‘You like this street. You like those boys in the back-yard beating the pans. You like Selma who has nowhere to go, poor little wabeen. Big thing, big love. But she is only a wabeen and you are going back, and neither of you is fooling the other. You like Mr Lambert sitting on the steps drinking his one glass of rum in the morning and tacking up a few ledgers. Because Mr Lambert can only drink one glass of rum in the morning and tack up a few ledgers. You like seeing Mano practising for the walking race that is never going to come off. You look at these things and you say, “How nice, how quaint, this is what life should be.” You don’t see that we here are all mad and we are getting madder all the time, turning life into a Carnival.’

  And Carnival came.

  It had been permitted that year under stringent police supervision. The men from the yards near Henry’s made up their bands in the uniforms I had provided; and paraded through the streets. Henry was Uncle Sam; Selma was the Empress Theodora; the other girls were slave girls and concubines. There were marines and infantrymen and airforce pilots on the Pacific atolls; and in a jeep with which I had provided him stood Mr Blackwhite. He stood still, dressed in a fantastically braided uniform. He wore dark glasses, smoked a corncob pipe and his left hand was held aloft in a salute which was like a benediction. He did not dance, he did not sway to the music. He was MacArthur, promising to return.

  On the Tuesday evening, when the streets were full of great figures – Napoleon, Julius Caesar, Richard the Lionheart: men parading with concentration – Blackwhite was also abroad, dressed like Shakespeare.

  Selma and I settled down into a relationship which was only occasionally stormy. I had taken Mr Henry’s advice that first morning and had gone around to the store where she worked. She did not acknowledge me. My rough clothes, which were really Henry’s, attracted a good deal of critical attention and much critical comment on the behaviour of Americans. She acknowledged me later: she was pleased that I had gone to see her in a period as cool and disenchanted as the morning after.