A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul [101]
That was Raymond—still loyal, trying hard to make sense of events which must have bewildered him. It did him no good; all the labour that went into those thoughts was wasted. No word came from the capital. He and Yvette continued to dangle.
But then, for a month or so, their spirits appeared to lift. Yvette told me that Raymond had reason to believe that his selections from the President’s speeches had found favour. I was delighted. It was quite ridiculous; I found myself looking in a different way at the President’s pictures. And though no direct word came, Raymond, after being on the defensive for so long,and after all the talking he had had to do about the madonna cult, began to be more argumentative with visitors and to hint, with something of his old verve, that the President had something up his sleeve that would give a new direction to the country. Once or twice he even spoke about the possible publication of a book of the President’s speeches, and its effect on the people.
The book was published. But it wasn’t the book Raymond had worked on, not the book of longish extracts with a linking commentary. It was a very small, thin book of thoughts, Maximes, two or three thoughts to a page, each thought about four or five lines long.
Stacks of the book came to our town. They appeared in every bar and shop and office. My shop got a hundred; Mahesh got a hundred and fifty at Bigburger; the Tivoli got a hundred and fifty. Every pavement huckster got a little stock—five or ten: it depended on the commissioner. The books weren’t free; we had to buy them at twenty francs a copy in multiples of five. The commissioner had to send the money for his entire consignment back to the capital, and for a fortnight or so, big man as he was, he ran around everywhere with his Land-Rover full of Maximes, trying to place them.
The Youth Guard used up a lot of its stock on one of its Saturday-afternoon children’s marches. These marches were hurried, ragged affairs—blue shirts, hundreds of busy little legs, white canvas shoes, some of the smaller children frantic, close to tears, regularly breaking into a run to keep up with their district group, everybody anxious to get to the end and then to get back home, which could be many miles away.
The march with the President’s booklet was raggeder than usual. The afternoon was overcast and heavy, after early morning rain; and the mud in the streets, drying out, had reached the nasty stage where bicycles and even footsteps caused it to fly about in sticky lumps and pellets. Mud stained the children’s canvas shoes red and looked like wounds on their black legs.
The children were meant to hold up the President’s book as they marched and to shout the long African name the President had given himself. But the children hadn’t been properly drilled;the shouts were irregular; and since the clouds had rolled over black, and it looked as though it was going to rain again soon, the marchers were in a greater hurry than usual. They just held the little book and scampered in the gloom, spattering one another with mud, shouting only when the Youth Guard shouted at them.
The marches were already something of a joke to our people, and this didn’t help. Most people, even people from the deep bush, understood what the madonna cult was about. But I don’t think anyone in the squares or the market had any idea what the Maximes march was about. I don’t think, to tell the truth, that even Mahesh knew what it referred to or was modelled on, until he was told.
So Maximes failed with us. And it must have been so in other parts of the country as well, because shortly after reporting the great