A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul [106]
The air of mourning that Mahesh, in Shoba’s absence, had been so glad to put on became a deep and real gloom after Shoba’s return; and then this gloom became shot through with irritations. He began to show his age. The confidence, which had irritated me, left him. I grieved for it, grieved that he should have enjoyed it for so short a time. And he, who had spoken so sharply about Noimon, and spoken with such pride about the way he lived here, now said, “It’s junk, Salim. It’s all turning to junk again.”
No longer able to lunch with them or visit their flat, I took to dropping in at Bigburger on some evenings to exchange a few words with Mahesh. One evening I saw Shoba there.
She was sitting at the counter, against the wall, and Mahesh was sitting on the stool next to hers. They were like customers in their own place.
I greeted Shoba, but there was no warmth in her acknowledgment. I might have been a stranger or someone she barely knew. And even when I sat down next to Mahesh she continued to be distant. She seemed not to be seeing me. And Mahesh appeared not to notice. Was she rebuking me for those things she had grown to condemn in herself?
I had known them both for so long. They were part of my life, however much my feelings about them shifted about. I could see the tightness and pain and something like illness in Shoba’s eyes. I could also see she was acting a little. Still, I was hurt. And when I left them—no cry of “Stay!” from either of them—I felt cast out and slightly dazed. And every familiar detail of street life at night—the cooking fires gilding the thin, exhausted-looking faces of the people who sat around them, the groups in the shadows below the shop awnings, the sleepers and their boundary markers, the ragged lost lunatics, the lights of a bar fanning out over a wooden walkway—everything had a different quality.
A radio was on in the flat. It was unusually loud, and as I went up the external staircase I had the impression that Metty was listening to a football match commentary from the capital. An echoing voice was varying its pace and pitch, and there was the roar of a crowd. Metty’s door was open and he was sitting in pants and undershirt on the edge of his cot. The light from the central hanging bulb in his room was yellow and dim; the radio was deafening.
Looking up at me, then looking down again, concentrating, Metty said, “The President.”
That was clear, now that I had begun to follow the words. It explained why Metty felt he didn’t have to turn the radio down. The speech had been announced; I had forgotten.
The President was talking in the African language that most people who lived along the river understood. At one time the President’s speeches were in French. But in this speech the only French words were citoyens and citoyennes, and they were used again and again, for musical effect, now run together into a rippling phrase, now called out separately, every syllable spaced, to create the effect of a solemn drumbeat.
The African language the President had chosen for his speeches was a mixed and simple language, and he simplified it further, making it the language of the drinking booth and the street brawl, converting himself, while he spoke, this man who kept everybody dangling and imitated the etiquette of royalty and the graces of de Gaulle, into the lowest of the low. And that was the attraction of the African language in the President’s mouth. That regal and musical use of the lowest language and the coarsest expressions was what was holding Metty.
Metty was absorbed. His eyes, below the yellow highlights on his forehead, were steady, small, intent. His lips were compressed and in his concentration he kept working them. When the coarse expressions or the obscenities occurred, and the crowd roared, Metty laughed without