In A Free State

by Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul

  'He has fourteen. He's living with three of those animals right now. So polished. So nice. So well-spoken. You wouldn't believe he doesn't even know how to hold a pen in those hands. You wouldn't believe the filth he comes out of. But you like dirt, don't you, Peter? You like going in to some black hole to eat filth and dance naked. You will steal and lie to do that, won't you?'

  'I like the quarters, sir.'

  'While I live you will stay there. You won't move in here, Peter. I don't want you to bank on that. If I die you will starve, Peter. You will go back to bush.'

  'That is true, sir.'

  'And you like me. I am good to you. But I haven't been good to you. In this room we've had people talking about exterminating you. Don't you remember?'

  'I don't remember.'

  'You're a liar.'

  'I like you, sir.'

  'What about the boy who was locked in the refrigerator?'

  'That was somewhere else.'

  'So you remember that.'

  'I never talk about these things, sir.'

  'The whippings? There was a lot of that. What about the crops you weren't allowed to grow? You remember that? You say you like me?'

  'I hate you, sir.'

  'Of course you hate me, and I know you hate me. Last week you killed that South African. Old, helpless. Didn't you? Lived here for twenty years. Married one of your women.'

  'Thief kill him, sir.'

  'That's what they always say, Peter. But we know who killed him. It was someone who hated him.'

  'No, sir.'

  'Do you remember when your woman was sick, Peter?'

  'You know about that, sir.'

  'Tell me again.'

  Peter's staring eyes were inflamed, moist with tears of irritation.

  His half-open mouth was collapsed, the upper part of his face taut. 'It's a story you always tell,' the colonel said. 'People always listen.'

  Timothy was leaning against one of the square pillars in the middle of the room, head back, slightly to one side, looking on. 'My wife was sick,' Peter said. He stopped, choked with irritation.

  'You had three others. Go on.'

  'She cry every night in the quarters.'

  'Black with filth and stink.'

  'One night she was very sick. I get car and take her to hospital.

  They say no. Hospital for Eu'peans only. Huts for natives. Indian doctor take her. Too late, sir. She die.'

  'And you went out the next day and got other women and sent them to the forest to chop wood.' And they loaded up the wood on their backs and came back to you in the evening. It's a good story, especially for visitors.'

  'I never talk about these things, sir.'

  'Who do you hate more? The Indian or me?'

  'I hate the Indian.'

  'You are ungrateful. Who do you hate more? The Indian or me?'

  'I will always hate you, sir.'

  'Don't you forget it. Your hate will keep me alive. One night, Peter, you will knock on my door -'

  'No, sir.'

  'You will be wearing a raincoat or you will have a jacket. You will be holding your elbows close to your side -'

  'No, sir. No, sir.' Peter was closing and opening his eyes.

  'I won't behave like the South African, Peter. When you say, "Good evening, sir," I won't say, "Why, it's Peter, my own boy. Come in, Peter. Have some tea. How are you? How's your family?" There'll be no cups of tea. I won't behave like that. I'll be waiting. I'll say, "It's Peter. Peter hates me." And you won't come past that door. I'll kill you. I'll shoot you dead.'

  Peter opened his eyes and looked at the top of the colonel's head.

  'This is how I swear my oath,' the colonel said. 'Under these lights, in the open, before witnesses. Tell your friends: For some time Peter stood looking at the top of the colonel's head. His mouth closed, became firm again; there were no tears in his inflamed eyes. He put his hand in the pocket of his khaki trousers and took out a key-ring with two keys. He was going to place it on the table, but the colonel held out his hand and Peter put the keys in the colonel's palm. There was nothing more to keep him; and with a step as light and springy and athletic as before he walked through the dining-room to the kitchen.

  The colonel didn't look at anyone in the room. He took up a glass of water, but his hands trembled and he put the glass down. His face went pale.

  Timothy left the pillar and made himself busy.

  When the colonel recovered, and· colour came back to his face, he looked at Linda and said, 'It's their big night. They've been building up to it all week. Mister Peter was going to turn up in the hotel Volkswagen. A lot of them believe he's already taken over. Oh, out there he's quite a politician, Mister Peter. Well, that's his problem. Isn't it, Timothy?' He had stopped trembling; he smiled at Timothy.

  Timothy smiled back, in relief.

  There was chatter in the kitchen again. A high-pitched voice began to squeal, and there was laughter.

  'Do you hear him?' the colonel said to Linda. Taking a fork to her mouth, she nodded.

  'That's Peter, although you wouldn't believe it. Do you know what they're saying? It sounds as though they're having the most fantastic argument, but they're saying _nothing__. They're like the birds when it comes to chattering. You should hear Timothy here when he gets going: Timothy, clearing away the Israelis' last plates, smiled at the compliment, but remained correct. He creased his forehead and pulled back the corners of his closed mouth.

  There was a peal of laughter from the kitchen.

  'That's Peter all right,' the colonel said. 'They can go on like that for hours. It means nothing at all. What did you think of the dinner?'

  'It was very nice,' Linda said.

  'Nothing to do with me. Cookboy does it all. Just tells me and I write the menu. You would laugh if you saw him.' The colonel smiled. 'Fresh from the bush. Never sat on a chair until he came here. I wonder what will happen to him when I go. But what's the use?'

  'Are you thinking of going?'

  'I think of nothing else. But it's too late now. Can't wait for the Americans to come and buy us all out. That'll come. But it'll be too late for me.'

  The Israelis, by signs alone, called for their bill. Timothy took their money and gave them change. The colonel made a point of not looking. When the Israelis went past the colonel's table they hesitated and bowed briefly. The colonel said nothing. He raised his eyes to acknowledge them and then he stared into space, as though their passage had disturbed the train of his thoughts. He kept on staring until the Israelis, in the gravelled yard, began to talk more loudly.

  'These people don't know how _lucky__ they are,' the colonel said. A car door banged, once, twice. An engine started.

  'If the Europeans had come here fifty years earlier, they would have been hunted down like game and exterminated. Twenty, thirty years later – well, the Arabs would have got here first, and they would all have been roped up and driven down to the coast and sold. That's Africa. They'll kill the king all right. They'll decimate his tribe before this is over. Did you know him? Have you been listening to the news?'

  'I only saw him,' Linda said.

  'Came here for lunch once. Very polished. If I were a younger man I would go out and try to rescue him. Though that wouldn't have made much sense either. He's no different from the others. Given half the chance, he'd be hunting the witchdoctor. They say there's good and bad everywhere. There's no good and bad here. They're just Africans. They do what they have to do. That's what you have to tell yourself. You can't hate them. You can't even get angry with them. Really angry.'

  Dinner was almost over. Timothy was clearing the tables that had been laid and not used.

  'Too late,' the colonel said, straightening the magazines and books on his table. 'Too late for that South African. He used to come here, until he had that last stroke. That was his great mistake. A real old Boer. They found the teapot half full, the two cups on the floor, and tea and blood everywhere. Once or twice he brought his wife. The u
gliest woman you ever saw. Like a wrinkled and very happy old ape.' He paused. 'These past few years I've seen _things__ here that would make you cry.'

  At the sudden falseness, the tone of a man saying what he thought was expected of him, Bobby looked up. He saw the colonel looking at him. Bobby, sipping coffee, blew at the steam. The colonel looked away.

  The squealing and chatter in the kitchen stopped.

  It was like a signal for the colonel. He stood up. 'Not the sort of thing you read in the papers. Not the sort of thing the people in the High Commission want to hear about either. For them it's all sweetness and light now. Mustn't offend the witchdoctor.' Steadying himself on his feet, he straightened the magazines again, rearranged his sauce bottles, took up his book and held it against his chest. 'Not many votes in this quarter now.'

  He spoke it like an exit line. Walking off, he held himself exaggeratedly upright, but he couldn't hide his injured hip. In the bar, and then down the verandah to his room, his footsteps were slow, one light, one flat and heavy.

  Timothy, moving with a new, almost playful, looseness, swiftly gathered up tablecloths. He made large and rapid gestures; he took long, stretching strides, each ending with a little skid, as though he was demonstrating his great height and reach. His smell swirled about the room.

  It was not quite half-past eight.

  'I'm beginning to feel there's something to be said for the Belgians,' Linda said. 'Never eat before ten.'

  'The Flemings,' Bobby said. 'The fat ones.' Timothy switched off two of the three lights.

  'You are the expert on the local amusements,' Bobby said. 'Wait for me in the bar,' Linda said. 'We might go for a walk.' Bobby didn't care for her confident, confiding manner. It was as though disappointment, and darkness, had brought out the wife in her and she was casting him in the role of Martin. But he didn't want to be alone either. He went into the bar. Timothy switched off the last light in the dining-room and could be heard squealing with someone in the kitchen. The barboy was behind the bar, still drooping, still. apparently studying the bar; it turned out now that he was reading a book. Presently Linda came down, a cardigan hanging on her shoulders. She gave a comic shiver, as though shivering at more than cold.

  In the boulevard they couldn't hear the voices from the kitchen or the quarters. They heard only the sound of their shoes on the sand and loose gravel of the broken road and the occasional slap of the unseen lake against the lake wall. The glow from the quarters at the back gave depth to the hotel building; the light from the bar, spreading out into the yard on one side, and showing faintly through the open windows of the unlit dining-room on the other side, outlined the hotel's concrete wall. Beyond that was the darkness of the great tree and the empty house.

  Linda said, 'I wouldn't like to be by myself here.'

  Ahead of them was one of the street lamps that worked, a splintering, fluorescent circle, smoky after the day's rain. Objects began to define themselves; shadows grew hard. Light fell on the stepped line of a broken brick wall. Wet palm fronds shone; there were glitters in the park.

  'It's funny,' Linda whispered, 'how you can forget the houses and feel that the lake hasn't even been discovered.'

  'I don't know what you mean by discovered,' Bobby said, not whispering. 'The people here knew about it all the time.'

  'I've heard that one. I just wish they'd managed to let the rest of us know.'

  They came to the house with the broken corrugated-iron roof that hung down like a bird's spread wing. In the verandah there was a group squatting around a small fire.

  Linda said, 'They hadn't moved into the boulevard when I was here the last time.'

  As she spoke, she stumbled. A pebble skidded away. An African stood up in the verandah, thin bare legs and ragged jacket silhouetted against the fire. Linda and Bobby looked straight ahead.

  When they had passed the house, Linda said, 'He's right. They'll kill him.'

  They passed the filling station; the tourist shop; the cinema, still blank and closed. They came to the end of the boulevard and continued into the tree-hung lane from which the running soldiers had come out earlier that evening. There was no asphalt· surface on this lane; their feet fell on wet sand, pebbles, leaves. The blackness grew intense very quickly. The pale walls of villas set far back in gloomy overgrown gardens were barely visible; verandahs were like part of the surrounding blackness. There were no fires here. The trees were low above the lane; the sense of openness had gone.

  A dog barked, a low, deep sound; and then it was beside them, big and growling. They walked on, the dog shepherding them angrily past his lot. Dogs barked on either side of the road ahead. And soon they were walking between dogs that obeyed no boundaries. A faint electric light, not a campfire, burned in an inside room of a villa. From that villa, too, dogs came bounding, without a bark, paws ripping through undergrowth and then, over the low twisted wooden fence, beating lightly on the sand of the road, scattering small pebbles. And always, from the black road ahead, came the sound of more dogs. No voices called to the dogs.

  'This is nonsense,' Linda said.

  They turned back. But where before the dogs had only been keeping them to the centre of the lane, now the dogs crossed in front of them and behind them. Paws pattered on the sand and made an almost metallic sound; growls were deep, abrupt, never loud. Always there was barking in the distance. The pack grew.

  'Oh my God,' Linda said. 'These dogs don't have any owners.

  They've gone wild.'

  'Don't _talk,'__ Bobby said. 'And for God's sake don't stumble.' And their speech did madden the dogs more. Now the dogs occupied the lane completely and their movements were thick and. flurried. They were waiting for a signal: the first leap by the bravest in the pack, a sudden gesture from Bobby or Linda, a dislodged pebble. But, steadily, the boulevard and the light came nearer.

  'You said your mother's dog left those two parallel lines on your calf?' Linda said.

  Rage overcame Bobby. 'I'll kill them. I'm wearing these steel-tipped shoes. I'll kill the first one that attacks me. I'll kick its skull in. I'll kill it.' The anger stayed with him and was like courage. And it was as if the dogs responded to his anger. They began to keep to the edge of the lane; they began to fall behind. But the boulevard was near; the darkness was thinning in the fluorescent light; and the boulevard was the boundary the dogs recognized.

  Bobby was trembling. Slowly on the boulevard the sense of time came back to him.

  Linda was saying, 'They say you have to have fourteen injections for tetanus.'

  'They brought these dogs here to attack Africans.'

  'All right, Bobby. They're attacking everybody now.'

  'They trained them to attack Africans.'

  'They didn't train them very well.'

  'It isn't funny.'

  'How do you think I feel?'

  They walked back to the hotel without talking. They didn't look at the campfires they passed. In the hotel the bar lights were still on; there was no light in the colonel's room, next to the office. In the verandah Linda appeared to wait for Bobby to say something. He said nothing. He set his face, turned away from her, and went alone into the bar. She went down the verandah to the passage; he heard her go up the stairs to her room. It was just past nine. The adventure had lasted less than half an hour.

  Bobby sat on a barstool and drank Dubonnet. The fear drained out of him; the moment of panic in the dark lane became remote. The anger turned to exhaustion, and melancholy at his own solitude, in that bar, beside that vast African lake. Vacantly considering the dusty head of the barboy in the red tunic, Bobby thought: poor boy, poor African, poor African's head; and tears began to come to Bobby's eyes.

  'I read French book,' the barboy said, showing a tattered book in very limp covers.

  Bobby heard but didn't understand. He looked at the boy and remembered the dogs and thought: poor boy.

  'I read geometry,' the barboy said, lifting another tattered book from below the bar.


  And Bobby understood that the barboy was trying to start a conversation. It was what some young Africans did. They tried to start conversations with people they thought were visitors and kindly; they hoped not only to practise their English but also to acquire manners and knowledge. It moved Bobby to be singled out in this way; it moved him that, after all that had happened, the boy should show such trust; and it distressed him that he had allowed himself to be influenced by the colonel and had so far not looked at the boy, had seen only an African in uniform, one of the colonel's employees, part of the hateful hotel.

  'You read geometry,' Bobby said. 'You show me where you read.'

  The barboy smiled and danced up and down on his toes. He pressed his elbows on the bar and at the same time turned the first few pages of the book, gathering up each page with the whole of his palm. The pages he turned were black and furred, the edges worn.

  'I read here,' the boy said. Still hopping, he placed a palm across two pages and shoved the book towards Bobby.

  Bobby put the book in the middle of the bar. 'You read here?

  The three angles of a triangle together make one hundred and eighty degrees?'

  'I read here.' The boy leaned sideways across the bar. 'You teach me.'

  'I teach you. You give me paper.' The boy brought out a chit-pad.

  'Look, I teach you. I draw straight line. That straight line make one hundred and eighty degrees. Hundred eighty. Look now. I draw triangle on straight line. Like that. That angle here and that other angle here and that angle up there, all that make hundred eighty degrees. You understand?'

  'Hundate.'

  'You no understand. Look, I teach you again. I draw circle here. Circle make three hundred and sixty degrees.'

  'Hundate.'

  'No. No hundate. Three hundred and sixty. Three hundansixty. I show you hundate. I draw line through circle. Hundate up there. Hundate here.'

  'I read French.'

  'You read plenty. What for you like read so much?'

  'I go school next year,' the boy said, showing off now, looking down his nose, sticking out his lower lip, and pulling back the geometry book with the fingertips of both hands. 'I buy more schoolbooks. I get big job.'