A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul [131]
It stopped raining, but it remained dark, the darkness of late afternoon. The airplane, at first only a brown smoke trail in the sky, appeared. When we went out to the wet field to board it I saw the man with the fireman’s helmet—and a companion, also helmeted—standing unsteadily beside the gangway. He was, after all, a fireman.
As we rose we saw the river, catching the last of the light. It was gold-red, then red. We followed it for many miles and minutes, until it became a mere sheen, a smoothness, something extra-black between the black forests. Then it was all black. Through this blackness we flew to our destination. The journey, which had seemed so simple in the morning, had acquired another quality. Distance and time had been restored to it. I felt I had been travelling for days, and when we began to go down again, I knew that I had travelled far, and I wondered how I had had the courage to live for so long in a place so far away.
And then, suddenly, it was easy. A familiar building; officials I knew and could palaver with; people whose faces I understood; one of our old disinfected taxis; the well-known lumpy road to the town, at first through bush which had distinguishing features, then past the squatters’ settlements. After the strangeness of the day, it was like organized life again.
We passed a burnt-out building, a new ruin. It had been a primary school, never much of a place, more like a low shed, and I might have missed it in the dark if the driver hadn’t pointed it out to me; it excited him. The insurrection, the Liberation Army—that was still going on. It didn’t lessen my relief at being in the town, seeing the nighttime pavement groups, and finding myself, so quickly after arrival, something of the forest gloom still on me, in my own street—all there, and as real and as ordinary as ever.
It was a shock, a puncturing, to find Metty cold. I had made such a journey. I wanted him to know; from him I had been expecting the warmest welcome. He must have heard the slam of the taxi door and my palaver with the driver. But Metty didn’t come down. And all that he said when I went up the external staircase, and found him standing in the doorway of his room, was: “I didn’t expect to see you back, patron.” The whole journey seemed to turn sour then.
Everything was in order in the flat. But about the sitting room and especially the bedroom there was something—perhaps an extra order, an absence of staleness—that made me feel that Metty had been spreading himself in the flat in my absence. The telegram that I had sent him from London must have caused him to retreat. Did he resent that? Metty? But he had grown up in our family; he knew no other life. He had always been with the family or with me. He had never been on his own, except on his journey up from the coast, and now.
He brought me coffee in the morning.
He said, “I suppose you know why you come back, patron.”
“You said this last night.”
“Because you have nothing to come back to. You don’t know? Nobody told you in London? You don’t read the papers? You don’t have anything. They take away your shop. They give it to Citizen Théotime. The President made a speech a fortnight back. He said he was radicalizing and taking away everything from everybody. All foreigners. The next day they put a padlock on the door. And a few other doors as well. You didn’t read that in London? You don’t have anything, I don’t have anything. I don’t know why you come back. I don’t think it was for my sake.”
Metty was in a bad way. He had been alone. He must have been beside himself waiting for me to come back. He was trying to provoke some angry response from me. He was trying to get me to make some protective gesture. But I was as lost as he was.
Radicalization: two days before, in the capital, I had seen the word in a newspaper headline, but I hadn’t paid attention.