A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul [118]
“I couldn’t stay after that. I had to hide my face from everybody. And then I ran back here, to hide as before. Now I can go nowhere. I only go out at night sometimes. It has got better. But I still have to be careful. Don’t tell me anything, Salim. I saw the truth in your eyes. I can’t go abroad now. I so much wanted to go, to get away. And we had the money. New York, London, Paris. Do you know Paris? There is a skin specialist there. They say he peels your skin better than anybody else. That would be nice, if I could get there. And then I could go anywhere. Suisse, now—how do you say it in English?”
“Switzerland.”
“You see. Living in this flat, I’m even forgetting my English. That would be a nice place, I always think, if you could get a permit.”
All the while Mahesh looked at her face, half encouraging her, half irritated with her. His elegant red cotton shirt with the stiff, nicely shaped collar was open at the neck—it was part of the stylishness he had learned from her.
I was glad to get away from them, from the obsession they had forced on me in their sitting room. Peeling, skin—the words made me uneasy long after I had left them.
Their obsession was with more than a skin blemish. They had cut themselves off. Once they were supported by their idea of their high traditions (kept going somewhere else, by other people); now they were empty in Africa, and unprotected, with nothing to fall back on. They had begun to rot. I was like them. Unless I acted now, my fate would be like theirs. That constant questioning of mirrors and eyes; compelling others to look for the blemish that kept you in hiding; lunacy in a small room.
I decided to rejoin the world, to break out of the narrow geography of the town, to do my duty by those who depended on me. I wrote to Nazruddin that I was coming to London for a visit, leaving him to interpret that simple message. What a decision, though! When no other choice was left to me, when family and community hardly existed, when duty hardly had a meaning, and there were no safe houses.
I left eventually on a plane which travelled on to the east of the continent before it turned north. This plane stopped at our airport. I didn’t have to go to the capital to take it. So even now the capital remained unknown to me.
I fell asleep on the night flight to Europe. A woman in the window seat, going out to the aisle, rubbed against my legs and awakened me. I thought: But that’s Yvette. She’s with me, then. I’ll wait for her to come back. And wide awake, for ten or fifteen seconds I waited. Then I understood that it had been a waking dream. That was pain, to understand that I was alone, and flying to quite a different destiny.
15
I had never travelled on an airplane before. I half remembered what Indar had said about airplane travel; he had
said, more or less, that the airplane had helped him to adjust to his homelessness. I began to understand what he meant.
I was in Africa one day; I was in Europe the next morning. It was more than travelling fast. It was like being in two places at once. I woke up in London with little bits of Africa on me—like the airport tax ticket, given me by an official I knew, in the middle of another kind of crowd, in another kind of building, in another climate. Both places were real; both places were unreal. You could play off one against the other; and you had no feeling of having made a final decision, a great last journey. Which, in a way, was what this was for me, though I only had an excursion ticket, a visitor’s visa,