A Way in the World

by Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul

  This was where I went to work every day, in the Registrar-General’s Department, between St. Vincent Street and Woodford Square.

  MY JOB as an acting second-class clerk was to make copies of birth, marriage and death certificates. People who needed these certificates came to the Red House and made an arrangement with one of the freelance searchers who hung about the entrance to the department, near the notice-boards, waiting for customers. These searchers, after they had been given possible dates by their customers, then used stamped forms to requisition various volumes of certificates; the department’s messengers brought out the thick, heavy bound volumes, more wide than high, from the vaults; the searchers sat in the outer office on a polished long brown desk and searched through the volumes. In this room—with a view through the tall windows of the lawns of the Red House and the trees and iron rails of Woodford Square—there was an unexpected atmosphere of the classroom, with grown and sometimes elderly black men sitting side by side at the long desk, sometimes for a whole morning, as if under an enchantment laid on them at school, and turning the very wide pages of very big books, one page at a time. In a separate area of the outer office lawyers’ clerks looked for deeds. These men sat at single desks and some of them wore ties. They were altogether a higher class than the birth-and-death certificate-searchers, who really were in business—making a small, insecure living—because they could read and write, and many of the people who wanted certificates couldn’t.

  When a searcher found what he was looking for, he made a request for a copy; and a messenger brought the request and the appropriate volume to my table. A table, rather than a desk: I was only an acting second-class clerk, a stop-gap, and I sat at a narrow table near the vault, and did my work facing the green-distempered wall. The messengers passed behind me all the time on their way to and from the vault. The volumes I had to copy from were placed in a pile on my right; when I was finished with them I put them in a pile on my left. The piles were high: each volume was three or four inches thick, and about fifteen inches wide.

  The volumes smelled of fish glue. This was what they were bound with; and I suppose the glue was made from a boiling down of fish bones and skin and offal. It was the colour of honey; it dried very hard, and every careless golden drip had the clarity of glass; but it never lost the smell of fish and rottenness.

  I had been told that everything printed in the island was lodged in the vault. All the records of the colony were there, all the births, deaths, deeds, transfers of property and slaves, all the life of the island for the century and a half of the colonial time. I would have liked to look at old things, old newspapers, old books. But the smell offish glue was very strong in the vault. That, together with the smell of old dust and old paper, the airlessness, which became worse the deeper you went in, the dim light, and the sheer quantity of old paper, was too much for me.

  Morning and afternoon the copies I had written out were checked and initialled by a senior clerk, who came and sat at my table, like a teacher in the kindergarten. Then they were taken for signature to the desk of the big man of our office: the deputy registrar-general or sometimes the acting deputy registrar-general, in whose full name I had had to write out the copies. Then stamps were stuck on, cancelled with the raised letters of the iron seal of the department; and the copies were at last ready to be handed out.

  All of this searching, writing, checking, signing, the attentions of so many people—for a job that might nowadays be done by one person and a computer. All of that fetching and carrying by the messengers: they were on their feet for much of the day, tramping between the vault and the outer office, cradling those bulky, awkwardly shaped volumes in their arms. Theirs was technically an office job, but it required strength and stamina, and they were powerfully built men.

  I would try sometimes to imagine myself spending all my life in that department. A working life of checking and being checked, of writing out certificates in the names of one’s seniors: I thought I could see how, after longing for the security of the civil service job, the job could get at you and you would become full of hate, and not only for the people whose full name you wrote out, as though your own didn’t matter.

  There were two people in the office, a brown man and a Chinese woman, who had served many years and whose thoughts were now of retirement. They had probably entered the government service during the First World War. It was hard for me to think back so far, to imagine that stacking up of the weeks and months and years; it was hard enough for me to go back just ten years, to my discovery of the city, and the first time I had walked down St. Vincent Street with my father. But now for these two people the years had passed. They had seen the job through, and the job had seen them through. Age and endurance were now like a kind of luck that lifted them above other people, above office strife and ambition. They made small, unhurried movements, as though the job and the years had taught them patience.

  The woman—her desk was directly below the front counter: she gave out the completed certificates—was motherly, tender with everyone, as though the job had brought out all her feminine instincts. But the gentleness of the man had been given him by drinking. He was known for it; he would come in on a Monday like a man both revivified and rested, worn a little finer by the drinking of the weekend.

  Sometimes, near pay-day, there was drinking in the office after office hours. It seemed to be a recognized office facility. The drinkers—some with a towel over their shoulders: that towel an emblem of the end of the working day—the drinkers would sit on desks or with their legs over the arms of chairs, and drink seriously for half an hour or so. I was not a drinker; it was the seriousness of these occasions that I remember. There was no humour, no friendship. It was as though the rum went straight to the soul and privacy of every man.

  In the department there was a black boy from St. James. We had been street acquaintances, no more, for some years. I knew he lived near me, but I didn’t know exactly where, and I felt he wanted to keep it like that. He talked sometimes about his mother, and I imagined him living alone with her in a crowded backyard, in one of those tottering old St. James shacks. The difference between us, though, lay not so much in money as in our prospects. I was a college boy, aiming high; he was an elementary-school boy, accepting his limitations. That was the basis of our street relationship, and I had thought of this boy, tall and thin and seemingly uncoordinated, riding a lady’s bicycle, as a jester, a loud-mouth from the backyards. It was only now, seeing the seriousness with which he drank, and seeing how the rum altered him, seeing how he became red-eyed and unfunny, that I felt that he was serious about himself, about his job, his duties as a clerk, about his own ambitions, in a way I had never supposed. He was not at all content. His jester’s personality, the personality of a man not expecting much, not aiming high, was a cover; he didn’t really mean many of his jokes.

  Belbenoit—one of the senior clerks who sometimes checked my certificates—didn’t have this cover. He was a middle-aged “coloured” man. On both sides he would have been of mixed race for some generations; he was fair-skinned. He had no particular qualifications, but he didn’t think he had done well enough. Though every kind of racial assumption showed in his own querulous face, he felt he had been discouraged for racial reasons from aiming higher: at the time when he had entered the service, the best jobs were reserved for people from England. That was no longer so; but the changes had come too late for Belbenoit. He was famous in the office for being a disappointed man; and people treated his unhappiness like an illness, though it was no secret that Belbenoit (with all his old assumptions) felt he hadn’t had the treatment due to his fair colour, and felt his position in the office was in the nature of a racial disgrace.

  His unlikely ally in the office—in office politics, and in representations of various kinds to the civil servants’ council—was Blair. Blair was a black giant, smooth-skinned, erect, with powerful shoulders. His manners were perfect; he could be very serious; he could also laugh easi
ly, but always with control. He had an immense confidence. He came from a purely black village somewhere in the north-east of the island. This made him unusual: he didn’t have the combativeness and nerves of black people who had grown up in mixed communities. At the same time, because of that isolation, Blair had started school late. But he had made up for that. He was already a senior clerk, and everybody in the office knew he was studying now for an external degree of some sort, looking for the qualifications that Belbenoit never had. Blair sometimes checked my certificates. That very big man had the tiniest and neatest initials: they spoke to me of his ambition and strength.

  Blair was courtesy itself to me; but I felt about him that, though we met with ease in the government office, there was much in his background I could never get to know. That all-African village in the north-east, isolated for some generations, without Indians or white people, would have had its own subterranean emotions, its own faith and fantasies. Blair no doubt felt the same about me; my Indian and orthodox Hindu background might have seemed to him even more closed. But in the neutral ground of the department we didn’t have to worry about these home matters; we got on, as far as we had to get on. In a civil service way Blair was perfection—and not without the disquietingness of such perfection. Just months out of school, and having only that experience to judge outsiders by, I thought of him (in spite of Belbenoit’s apparent alliance with him) as a kind of head boy: someone who could be one of the boys and at the same time represent authority.

  He lived out what I felt about him then. Seven years later he abandoned the civil service, gave up that fine career, abandoned that restrained departmental demeanour, and went into local politics. He judged the moment well. He shot up, and then, in a decolonizing world, he rose and rose. He was to have an international career. Nearly twenty years later we were to meet in an independent East African country. He had gone there to work for the local government on a short-term contract. He would have been especially pleased by this assignment in independent Africa; but it was there, not long after we had met again, that he was to die, murdered by the agents of some wild men in the government who felt threatened by him. For two days Blair’s big, mangled body lay undiscovered in a banana plantation, partly covered by dead banana leaves. A career is a career; and death is inescapable. I do not know whether the ironies of his death made a mockery of that career or undid the virtue of it. But that matter will be raised in this book in its place.

  Remember him now, in the office at the Red House: at that mid-point in his career, when with his extraordinary gifts he could have gone one way or the other. Remember him (like me) trailing all the strands of his own complicated past, animated by that past, feeling the current running with him (as the lawyer Evander did), and feeling (again like me) as he studied after work that he was at the most hopeful time of his life.

  WHEN I HAD free time—usually an hour or two a day—I did my writing, the way Blair did his studying. But I had nothing to write about: I was just preparing to be a writer. I kept a kind of notebook and in turquoise ink wrote comments about books I had read and thoughts about life. What I wrote was pretentious and false; I thought of it like that even when I was doing it, and wouldn’t have wanted anyone to see it, though with a small part of my mind I was hoping it was profound. Sometimes I wrote descriptions of landscapes: the Petit Valley woods, remnants of old cocoa estates in the hills to the north-west of the city, after afternoon rain. Sometimes I did Port of Spain scenes: the Western Main Road in St. James at night, after rain (more rain), the red neon Coca-Cola sign on the Rialto cinema flicking on and off, the shiny uneven asphalt reflecting the lights of cars and open shops, the naked light bulbs in the parlours, the flies sleeping on the hanging electric cord, rough with their droppings, the bald head of the Chinese parlour-keeper, the smeared glasscase with stale, floury cakes and soft coconut turnovers. I liked doing those tableaux. I liked even more correcting them, for the sake of the appearance of the corrected page. Artificial, but everything I worked on in this way stayed with me, and years later those descriptions were to be a key to events and moods I had thought beyond recall.

  I went one Saturday or Sunday to a black beauty contest at the Rialto. I went for the material; I hadn’t gone to any beauty contest before that. It was a shabby occasion, shabby to everyone except perhaps one or two of the girls. It wasn’t really funny; I hadn’t found it so; but I tried to write a funny piece about it. There had been no twist, but I tried to give it one: I made the queen cry because of the hoots of the crowd. The writing took two or three weeks, too much time for the simple or flat things I had to say. I wrote with pen and then on an office typewriter, correcting and correcting, deliberately lengthening out the writing time. The correcting didn’t help; it made the essay more and more of a school-magazine piece, with the humour depending more on words than on observation or true feeling.

  I concentrated in what I wrote on the master of ceremonies: his formal clothes, his ungrammatical speech, his vanity. I showed the finished article to a black woman typist in the office whom I had got to know. She held the sheets against her high standard typewriter and read them through. I thought she smiled once or twice, but at the end she said, “If it was an Indian man, you wouldn’t have written like that.”

  It was the last comment I was expecting. I had offered her a piece of writing, and was expecting her to judge it in a higher way. And though what she had said wasn’t true, I grew to feel after some weeks there was something wrong with the writing. What was the basis of the writer’s attitude? What other world did he know, what other experience did he bring to his way of looking? How could a writer write about this world, if it was the only world he knew? I never formulated the questions like that; the doubts were just with me.

  IT WAS some time, six years, before I worked through those doubts. I was in England then, and the first true book that came to me was the one prompted by my discovery of Port of Spain before the war, my delight in the city. To me then it was like going back to the very beginning of things, the Sunday walk down St. Vincent Street with my father, the visit to Nazaralli Baksh’s tailor shop: things barely remembered, things released only by the act of writing.

  After that writing I went back to Trinidad for a few weeks. I went by steamer. The clock was put back every other day; the weather slowly turned. One evening on deck a breeze started up. I braced myself for the chill, but the wind that played about my head and face was warm. I felt when I arrived, and went visiting, and found people becoming less dark than they seemed on the streets, that an age—a vanished adolescence, a forced maturity, England, a book—separated me from the people in the Registrar-General’s Department. But for them only six years had passed. Dingier walls; a more crowded office; more tables. Blair had gone, but so many of the others were still there: Belbenoit, the long-limbed boy (or man) from St. James with the lady’s bicycle, the typist who hadn’t liked what I had written. They were friendly. But there was something new.

  I had heard on the steamer that a new kind of politics had come to Trinidad. There were regular meetings in Woodford Square, across the road from the Red House, which the Spaniards had laid out in the 1780s as the main city square, and which the British had later embellished; where the destitute Indians, refugees from the plantations, had slept until they had died out; and where later the black madmen had come to camp. In that square now there were lectures about local history and slavery. People were being told about themselves, and black feeling was high. This was the politics that had claimed Blair.

  I went to a meeting one night. The square, its scale already altered for me, looked different again now, with the electric lights, the speakers and the microphones on the old bandstand (which I had found so beautiful the first time I had seen it, and now saw as the Victorian or Edwardian bandstand of an English city park); and the dark, scattered, unreadable crowd. The big trees threw distorting shadows and looked bigger than in daylight. Some people stood at the very edge of the square, against the raili
ngs; there were some white people and Indians among them.

  The men on the bandstand spoke of old suffering and current local politics. They spoke like people uncovering a conspiracy. They were at one with their audience. They made jokes easily; and laughter, or a kind of contented humming, came easily to the crowd. The people who spoke were not all black or African, but the occasion was an African one; there could be no doubt of that. (I didn’t see Blair on the bandstand. He was never an orator or front-of-house man; he didn’t have the manner.)

  I knew few of the speakers; I couldn’t pick up the references and the jokes. It was like entering a cinema long after the picture had started, but I felt that what was said didn’t matter. The occasion itself was what mattered: the gathering, the drama, the mood: the discovery (and celebration) by many of the black people in the square, educated and uneducated, of a shared emotion. Of aspects of that emotion I had had many intimations long ago, before I had gone away.

  Intimations: people had lived with this emotion as with something private, not to be carelessly exposed. Everyone—the typist in the office, the black boy or man from St. James, Blair, even the master of ceremonies at the Miss Fine Brown Frame contest, the mocking crowd there, and some of the self-mocking contestants—everyone had lived with it according to his character and intellectual means. Everyone you saw on the street had a bit of this emotion locked up in himself. It was no secret. It was part of the unacknowledged cruelty of our setting, the thing we didn’t want to go searching into. Now all those private emotions ran together into a common pool, where everyone found a blessing. Everyone, high and low, could now exchange his private emotion, which he sometimes distrusted, for the sacrament of the larger truth.