A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul [114]
I was sitting, among the clothes I had taken off before going to bed, in the round-backed Windsor chair against the wall. The palm of my hand was stiff, swollen. The back of my hand, from little finger to wrist, was aching; bone had struck bone. Yvette raised herself up. Her eyes were slits between eyelids red and swollen with real tears. She sat on the edge of the foam mattress, at the corner of the bed, and looked at the floor, her hands resting palm outwards on her knees. I was wretched.
She said after a time, “I came to see you. It seemed such a good thing to do. I was wrong.”
Then we said nothing.
I said, “Your dinner?”
She shook her head slowly. Her evening was ruined; she had given it up—but how easily! And that head-shaking gesture made me enter into her earlier joy, now gone. My error: I was too ready to see her as someone lost.
She prised her shoes off, using one foot against the other. She stood up, undid her skirt and took it off. Then, just as she was, with her hair done up, her blouse on, she got into the bed, pulled the top cotton sheet over herself and moved to the far side of the bed, always hers. She settled her fluffed-out head on the pillow, turned her back to me; and the encyclopaedia magazine, which had remained on that side of the bed, fell to the floor with its own little noise. And that was how, at this time of farewell, in this parody of domestic life, we stayed for a while, oddly reposed.
She said after some time, “Aren’t you coming?”
I was too nervous to move or talk.
A while later, turning to me, she said, “You can’t keep sitting on that chair.”
I went and sat on the bed beside her. Her body had a softness, a pliability, and a great warmth. Only once or twice before had I known her like that. At this moment! I held her legs apart. She raised them slightly—smooth concavities of flesh on either side of the inner ridge—and then I spat on her between the legs until I had no more spit. All her softness vanished in outrage. She shouted, “You can’t do that!” Bone struck against bone again; my hand ached at every blow; until she rolled across the bed to the other side and, sitting up, began to dial the telephone. Who was she telephoning at this hour? Who could she turn to, who was she so sure of?
She said, “Raymond. Oh, Raymond. No, no. I’m all right. I’m sorry. I’m coming right away.”
She put on her skirt and shoes, and through the door that she left open she swung out into the passage. No pause, no hesitation: I heard her pattering down the staircase—what a sound now! The bed, where nothing had occurred, was in a mess—for the first time, after she had been: I had had the last of that housewifely service. There were the marks of her head on the pillow, the gathers in the sheet from her movements: things now rare, indescribably precious to me, those relics in cloth that would go so soon. I lay down where she had lain, to get her smell.
Outside the door Metty said, “Salim?” He called again, “Salim.” And he came in, in his underpants.
I said, “Oh, Ali, Ali. Terrible things happened tonight. I spat on her. She made me spit on her.”
“People quarrel. After three years a thing doesn’t just end like this.”
“Ali, it isn’t that. I couldn’t do anything with her. I didn’t want her, I didn’t want her. That is what I can’t bear. It’s all gone.”
“You mustn’t stay inside. Come outside. I will put on my pants and shirt and I will walk with you. We will walk together. We will walk to the river. Come, I will walk with you.”
The river, the river at night. No, no.
“I know more things about your family than you, Salim. It is better for you to walk it off. It is the best way.”
“I’ll stay here.”
He stood about for a little, then he went to his room. But I knew that he was waiting and watching. All the back of my swollen