A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul [135]
While we were speaking, children began to appear from the back of the house—country children still, bending a knee at the sight of the adult, before coming up shyly to listen and watch. And then a large Doberman came bounding out at me.
The man with the fork said, “Don’t worry. He’ll miss you. He can’t see very well. A foreigner’s dog. He gave it to me when he went away.”
It was as he said. The Doberman missed me by about a foot, ran on a little way, stopped, raced back, and then was all over me, wagging his docked tail, beside himself with joy at my foreigner’s smell, momentarily mistaking me for somebody else.
I was glad for Raymond’s sake that he had gone away. He wouldn’t have been safe in the Domain or the town now. The curious reputation that had come to him in the end—of being the white man who went ahead of the President, and drew on himself the bad things that should have fallen on the President—that reputation might have encouraged the Liberation Army to kill him, especially now, when the President was said to be planning to visit the town, and the town was being made ready for that visit.
The rubbish hills in the centre were being carted away. The corrugated streets were being levelled and graded. And paint! It was everywhere in the centre, slapped onto concrete and plaster and timber, dripping on the pavements. Someone had unloaded his stock—pink and lime and red and mauve and blue. The bush was at war; the town was in a state of insurrection, with nightly incidents. But suddenly in the centre it seemed like carnival time.
17
Citizen Théotime would come in in the mornings, red-eyed and tormented-looking, high on his breakfast beer, with a couple of comic books or photo-novels to see him through office hours. There was an informal system of magazine exchange in the town; Théo always had something new to look at. And oddly, his comic books or photo-novels, tightly rolled up, gave him a busy, businesslike air when he came into the shop. He went straight to the storeroom, and could stay there without coming out for the whole morning. At first I thought it was because he wanted to be out of the way and not to be any trouble. But then I understood that it was no hardship for him. He liked being in the dark storeroom with nothing in particular to do, just looking at his magazines when the mood took him, and drinking his beer.
Later, when he became easier and less shy with me, his storeroom life became fuller. He began to be visited by women. He liked them to see him as a real directeur, with a staff and an office; and it pleased the women too. A visit could take up a whole afternoon, with Théotime and the woman chatting in the way people chat when they are sheltering from the rain—with long pauses and long hypnotized stares in different directions.
It was an easy enough life for Théotime, easier than anything he could have imagined when he was a mechanic in the health department. But as he gained confidence, and lost his fear that the shop might be taken away from him by the President, he became difficult.
It began to worry him that as a directeur he didn’t have a car. Some woman had perhaps given him the idea, or it might have been the example of other state trustees, or it might have been something he had got from his comic books. I had a car; he began to ask for lifts, and then he required me to drive him to and from his house. I could have said no. But I told myself it was a small thing to do to keep him quiet. The first few times he sat in the front; then he sat in the back. This was a four-times-a-day duty.
He didn’t stay quiet for long. It might have been my easiness, my wish to appear unhumiliated: Théotime was soon looking for new ways