A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul [12]
I had never been to a real European restaurant or tasted wine—forbidden to us—with any pleasure; and I knew that the life Nazruddin had described had come to an end. But I drove through Africa to Nazruddin’s town as to a place where this life might be re-created for me.
When I arrived I found that the town from which Nazruddin had brought back his tales had been destroyed, had returned to the bush he had had a vision of when he had decided to sell. In spite of myself, in spite of all that I had been told about recent events, I felt shocked, let down. My faithlessness hardly seemed to matter.
Wine! It was hard to get the simplest food; and if you wanted vegetables you either got them out of an old—and expensive—tin, or you grew them yourself. The Africans who had abandoned the town and gone back to their villages were better off; they at least had gone back to their traditional life and were more or less self-sufficient. But for the rest of us in the town, who needed shops and services—a few Belgians, some Greeks and Italians, a handful of Indians—it was a stripped, Robinson Crusoe kind of existence. We had cars and we lived in proper houses—I had bought a flat over an empty warehouse for almost nothing. But if we had worn skins and lived in thatched huts it wouldn’t have been too inappropriate. The shops were empty; water was a problem; electricity was erratic; and petrol was often short.
Once for some weeks we were without kerosene. Two empty oil barges had been shanghaied by people downriver, towed as river spoil to a hidden creek, and converted into living quarters. The people here liked to scrape their yards down to the red earth, to keep away snakes; and the steel decks of the barges provided an ideal living surface.
On those keroseneless mornings I had to boil my water on an English-made cast-iron charcoal brazier—part of my shop stock, intended for sale to village Africans. I took the brazier to the landing of the external staircase at the back of the house, squatted and fanned. All around me people were doing the same; the place was blue with smoke.
And there were the ruins. Miscerique probat populos et foedera jungi. These Latin words, whose meaning I didn’t know, were all that remained of a monument outside the dock gates. I knew the words by heart; I gave them my own pronunciation, and they ran like a nonsense jingle in my head. The words were carved at the top of a block of granite, and the rest of the granite was now bare. The bronze sculpture below the words had been torn away; the jagged little bits of bronze that remained anchored in the granite suggested that the sculptor had done banana leaves or palm branches at the top, to frame his composition. I was told that the monument had been put up only a few years before, almost at the end of the colonial time, to mark sixty years of the steamer service from the capital.
So almost as soon as it had been put up—no doubt with speeches about a further sixty years of service—the steamer monument had been knocked down. With all the other colonial statues and monuments. Pedestals had been defaced, protective railings flattened, floodlights smashed and left to rust. Ruins had been left as ruins; no attempt had been made to tidy up. The names of all the main streets had been changed. Rough boards carried the new, roughly lettered names. No one used the new names, because no one particularly cared about them. The wish had only been to get rid of the old, to wipe out the memory of the intruder. It