Guerrillas

by V. S. Naipaul

  Roche knew the beggar. But listening now to the persistent cry, not seeing the man, he felt only its strangeness and his own solitude. And out of this there came to him a feeling of apprehension, at first vague and perhaps a little willed, not focused on anything, but which then, as he stood half naked in the sunlit concrete washroom, with its heated sour smell, all at once became overpowering. He was becoming detached from his normal self; his perceptions were being distorted; and he continued to feel that he was willing it. His mood was wrong; and he was sufficiently alert to know that to go outside into that city, in that mood, was to invite physical attack. Drying his face and chest, he thought: I must drive carefully when I leave here. When he went back to the green office he thought again of telephoning Jimmy. But then he thought: I must be careful; I mustn’t become involved.

  At four the office closed. Doors banged in various parts of the building, footsteps resounded on wooden floors. Going down to the parking lot, he passed a door that opened into the gallery of the darkened emporium below the main offices. Clerks were doing up bolts of cloth and straightening counters: young men in neat trousers and shirts with nicely knotted ties, men who during working hours gave an impression of great civility, but who came from houses like the one he had visited that afternoon, and whose manners now, after closing time, were already changing. In the parking lot he could hear the roar of the released city: an extra volume of sound around the beggar’s cry, more people, more cars and trucks, shouts, innumerable bicycle bells.

  The watchman sat in his Windsor chair. He looked without expression at Roche. Roche greeted the watchman, and was relieved when a smile appeared on the man’s smooth round baby face.

  He had rehearsed, as far as he was able, the dangers of the afternoon drive home. In the business area of the city he watched out for the abrupt stops and starts of the route taxis, the bare arms of the drivers making dancer’s gestures outside their windows. Later, around the park, he watched out for the cyclists, and especially for the exhibitionists among them: the riders without hands, celebrating the end of the working week by riding with shirts open all the way down, shirttails flapping above their saddles, riding fast and swinging out to overtake more sedate cyclists. He watched out for the mule carts and the hand carts, the queues at bus stops.

  The afternoon light, already touched with amber, shot through the dust kicked up by vehicles that ran over the broken edges of the asphalt road; the scorched verges were tawny. The road began to climb; the air became lighter, the streets wider. He passed the botanical gardens; bamboo clumps that had ignited and burned down created the effect of ruins. A little later, the road still climbing, he saw the black police cars, blocking half the road.

  It was routine after some incident down in the city, this blocking of one of the escape routes to the hills. After seven months he had got to know the police officers who were posted in the area. As he slowed down he recognized the sergeant. He was expecting to be waved on. But the sergeant signaled to him to stop and pull over to the side. He smiled at the sergeant; the sergeant looked embarrassed. The men with the rifles didn’t smile. Other cars slowed down and were waved on. His car was searched: the trunk, the engine, under the seats. The padding on the doors was felt. And Roche stood exposed at the side of the road in the amber light.

  A man pushing a bicycle up the hill, a laborer, shouted at the policemen: “Search him!”

  And it didn’t help when, a little later, a young brown man, whose own car had been waved on, put his head out of the window and shouted to Roche: “Sue them! Sue them!”

  The sergeant, from being embarrassed, had become official. They didn’t talk; and when the search was over Roche didn’t smile at the sergeant. They parted as strangers. Roche drove away slowly. The light was soft; the shadows of trees fell right across the road. As he drove up into the clearer air, into the region of gardens, children, uniformed servants, and well-fed watchdogs, he thought: Something is being prepared for me. Driving as carefully in these quiet roads as he had driven in the city, he thought: Perhaps I should get out.

  A golden light touched the bare front lawn. He went into the house through the kitchen. Adela was not yet available; Jane was out. The house felt shut up and hot. He opened the door of the back room and went out on the porch. The cooler air refreshed him. From here he could see the airport and the white and silver glints of the planes. The evening haze was already building up above the rubbish dump and the swamp. He watched the light turn, saw color come to the tops of clouds: rose and gold and then lilac.

  Pipes hissed in the house. Adela came out to him, in her ironed white uniform.

  She said softly, “Water, Mr. Roche.”

  He was taken aback by her gentleness.

  She said, “You would like some tea?” And she spoke without aggression. She stood for a while on the porch: she had something to say. She said, “Your lady gone out with Mistress de Tunja.” But that wasn’t her news. She said, “You know Dr. Handy Byam, Mr. Roche?”

  He had seen the posters for this latest American evangelist, but now he was confused by Adela’s aspirates and wasn’t sure whether the evangelist’s name was Andy or Handy.

  “I feel so good, Mr. Roche, after last night. So good. Handy Byam say he wasn’t going to heal anybody with his own hands. Last night he say the people have to do their own healing now and he is just there to guide them. He say that Israel is in her glory and the power is now on the Nig-ro people. He ask us to turn to whoever was next to us and to hold their hands and to pray and pray hard, so that every man would heal his neighbor.”

  She demonstrated, standing with her firm legs apart, rocking back on her heels, and making separate clasping gestures with her hands. The clasping hands became clenched fists; she closed her eyes and quivered.

  “And I hold my neighbor like that, and he hold me like that, and we pray and pray until Handy Byam call on us to stop and shout if we was cured. And you shoulda hear the shout then, Mr. Roche. You know Handy Byam, Mr. Roche? One-among-you should get to know him, you know. He is like you too, a little bit. Your size and your color.”

  It was like a tribute. It was the first time she had shown him such regard.

  THE COAST here was intermittently rocky. At high tide, below what Harry de Tunja called his beach house, there was no beach; the sea came right up to the foot of the low cliff. Low tide exposed a narrow, steeply curving rim of coarse sand littered with seaweed and sea grapes, the debris of the sea. Two hundred yards away there was a breach in the cliff wall. A forest river had once emptied itself into the sea at this point. Great trees now grew in the old river channel. The river had laid its silt far out into the sea in a wide convex bed, so that the sea here had receded and was calmer, with little waves breaking at odd angles. At low tide there was a beach: an expanse of waterlogged muddy sand, declining gradually to sea, with gray islets of shingle, crushed shells, tiny brown crabs, and small stranded fish. Of the forest river there remained now the merest stream, ending in a woodland pool, dark and green from the trees it reflected; and the pool spilled over onto the beach in a miniature estuary of ever-changing channels, inches deep, that left rippled or plaited patterns on the gray sand.

  It was an ancient site. Aboriginal Indians had beached their canoes here; around this shady river bed, a meeting place, there had been Indian villages and food gardens. The gardens had lasted longer than the people: even after forest, the plantations, and now the beach houses, cassava grew in unexpected places. Seafarers from Europe knew the site for its fresh-water stream. Now it was a local pleasure spot, not a place for tourists, not a place for bathing, but a place for Sunday excursions, for drinking parties, and for the celebration of certain religious rites that required the sea or a river.

  At eleven o’clock it was crowded. Old buses with locally built bodies of wood and tacked-on tin were parked in the side road above, their windows hung with clothes. Clothes hung on bushes; and bundles and baskets were everywhere. Radios played the reggae. Out of the sh
ade of the trees, on a little bluff of dry sand, men and women gowned in black or red rang bells and chanted, facing the sea. The sky, blue inland, was silver here in the heat.

  Jane, Roche, and Harry de Tunja had walked far beyond the little estuary and the crowds, and were now walking back. They walked in the narrow strip of sand between the cliff and the ebbing sea; and soon they began again to see the long white candles on the sand, amid the tangle of weed, the dead coconut branches, the unfamiliar tins dropped somewhere in mid-ocean. Long white candles, still whole, still fresh, with only the tips of the wicks burned. And, here and there, the little nailed-up rafts, hatcheted strips of hairy yellow box boards, on which the candles had been sent out on the water, to be doused at the first wave or to collapse at the first turbulence: a drama taking place again, in the distance, in the shallows outside the estuary: a black-gowned man, standing up to his waist in the sea, ringing a bell with one hand, holding a little raft steady with the other hand, a blindfolded woman in a pink chemise beside him, with a lighted candle in her hand. Yellow box-board rafts, pushed far from their launching places by the wavelets that broke at odd angles, bobbed about at the edge of the sea, struck muddy sand, floated again, were stranded. Candles, splashed with gritty black mud, littered the estuary beach.

  Harry de Tunja, interrupting his deep-breathing exercises, said asthmatically, “I don’t know why, but I don’t like seeing this thing at all.” And he choked in the hot moist air.

  Jane and Roche waited for him to catch his breath. After a series of gasps he fell again into the rhythm of his deep breathing.

  Jane said, “Wax and water. Fire and water.”

  A fat barefooted woman, with three elderly women attendants in white, was preaching, shouting, chanting. And Mary lay dong, and de chile lay dong: they were the only words that were clear, and she spoke them again and again between passages of gibberish. She looked down at the beach; she seemed to be addressing someone stretched out there, for whom, from her gestures, she continually spread an imaginary rug or sheet. It was a private frenzy. No one was listening to her; no one stopped to watch; her three attendants in white stood quiet and relaxed, holding Bibles, not looking at her, looking vacantly at the sea and the people passing up and down.

  Bells rang on the dry sandy bluff. A blindfolded group was being prepared for the walk out to the sea. They marched without moving, holding unlighted candles; and about them black-gowned and red-gowned men and women chanted. On the wet beach below the bluff people watched: half naked these watchers, black and brown bodies on which sand had stuck in patches and dried gray, and they stood and swayed as though infected by the rhythm of the bells and the stamp of the six blindfolded marchers above them, who were fully dressed, and stamping holes in the dry sand.

  The marchers were in two columns of three. The woman in front was middle-aged; she held her candle upright and worked her hands and hips in an easy grinding way. The man was youngish; whenever he stamped his left foot he seemed about to collapse, but it was his own variation of the march: it was what he was allowing his body to do, this quivering descent, this mock half-fall. They stamped and stamped, digging their feet deeper into the sand. The woman sweated prodigiously; great circles of sweat had spread from under the arms of her white bodice. She held herself erect; her pumping elbows and her stamping feet created their own rhythm. She marched like a leader. The man beside her marched like a clown. The white blindfold emphasized his broad forehead, his heavy, ill-formed lips and his sagging jaw. The bells rang and rang. And though about the chief bell ringer, stylish in a black gown with a yellow sash, there was something of the showman, pleased to draw a crowd, and though among the watchers there were those who had begun, half humorously, to mimic the marchers, all eyes were on the marchers, on those repetitive steps, on the upright woman, her blindfolded face held up, her hands and elbows moving in steady rhythmic circles, and on the semicollapsing man in khaki trousers and white shirt, both man and woman seemingly locked, behind the blindfold, in a private world.

  Harry de Tunja said after a while, “I think we should be moving on.”

  Jane, chalky white from her period, and with little red spots at the side of her mouth, said, “Do they object?”

  Harry said, “For them, man, the more the merrier.” As they walked off he added, “But sometimes when I watch these things I can feel the ground moving below me.”

  They walked past a plump woman in a yellow bathing suit and a red hat sitting with her dimpled brown legs flat on the muddy sand, past family parties and other groups detached from the ceremonies, past the wreckage of box-board rafts and the scatter of whole candles, to where the river channel ended, the cliff wall rose up, and the beach narrowed again, washed clean by the receding tide, with only the fresh sea litter of weeds and berries and entangled vines like broken garlands. Bells and radios, the reggae as repetitive as the bells, were muffled by the wind and the sea, less placid here, with shingle grating down the curved beach with every wave.

  A zigzag of massive concrete steps—high tides, searching out the weaknesses of cliff and concrete, had left the lower steps exposed and isolated, like some rock formation—led up to Harry’s house. Harry paused after every few steps to catch his breath. When he got to the top he put his hands on his hips, threw out his chest and breathed deeply five or six times. And then he seemed to be all right.

  He said, “You see, it’s under control now. I know I’ve got it beaten. The trouble is, I don’t know whether it’s the honey diet, the yoga, or the deep breathing. And the damn doctors here don’t know either. I ask old Phillips about it, and he say, ‘Well, Harry-boy, I don’t know what to say. I feel it must be psychological.’ ”

  Harry’s speech, now that it was unobstructed, was extraordinarily musical, rising, falling, with unexpected passages of emphasis and unexpected changes of pace. Psychological, as Harry spoke it, was like a line of song.

  The air was fresher, even at this low height; it was without the hot salty moistness of the air at the estuary. The house was set back from the cliff end; the parched, pebbly lawn was shaded by Honduras pines and almond trees, flat round leaves of green and red and brown on horizontal black branches; and in the porch, where there was only a view of the sky and the distant sea, and no reflected glare, it was cool. Chairs had been put out, two Guatemalan hammocks strung up. Rum punch, tumblers, and a bowl of ice cubes were on a table.

  Harry said, “When you’re up here, you wouldn’t believe that that nonsense is going on down there.”

  This was the routine of Sunday at Harry de Tunja’s beach house: the early morning drive down from the Ridge through the silent city, the quiet suburbs and factory area, the uncrowded roads; the drive through the bush of what had once been coffee and cocoa plantations, past the weatherbeaten little tin-and-timber huts that dated from that time; along the rocky coast, little bays of untrodden sand, sharp rocks, and white, crashing waves, turbulent rock-bound coves; through the forest then, thinning out on the cliff above the sea: arrival, the early morning breeze, the early morning light, the walk along the beach, and then rum punch until midday.

  Jane had been to the beach house about half a dozen times. This was the routine she knew. But today something was missing; the house was missing some presence. It was missing Marie-Thérèse, Harry’s wife. She had, without warning, left him. One afternoon she had driven their two children to the airport—they were going back to their school in Canada after the holidays—and she hadn’t returned home. It was a drama. The de Tunja house was one of the best known on the Ridge. To people who didn’t know them well, like Jane when she had just arrived, the gaiety of the de Tunjas could seem excessive, even forced; they seemed to like too many people; they offered friendship too easily. But the naturalness of the de Tunjas had overcome all doubts; they were like people without secrets; and they had become Jane and Roche’s only friends. It had seemed such a settled house; they had taken such pride in its fixtures and its garden and the frivolities of the dark and
very cold air-conditioned room known as Harry’s Bar. The breakup had unsettled many people. But there was little sympathy for Harry, because with the breakup the even more unsettling news had come out that the de Tunjas had been establishing their status as Canadian “landed immigrants.” Harry had been the complete Ridge man. Now, to many people on the Ridge, his news was like a double confirmation of the instability in which they all knew they lived.

  Something of this instability, of an order suddenly undermined, extended to the beach house, so that, independently, both Jane and Roche understood they had come to the end of the last pleasure they shared on the island: Sunday at Harry’s beach house. The furniture in the porch was the same; the striped hammocks were the same; Joseph was busy in the kitchen; yet the day had been reduced to its routine and the house was already like something vacated.

  Marie-Thérèse had left, but she hadn’t gone far. The civil servant whose mistress she had become lived on the Ridge as well. She still acknowledged certain duties toward Harry and visited their house two or three times a week to see that everything worked. There was even some question that she might be coming to the beach house on this Sunday. But now, near midday, it was clear that she was spending the day elsewhere.