A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul [16]
In a few days, though, he thawed out. And the events of the coast were never spoken of again. He settled down more easily than I expected. I had expected him to go sulky and withdrawn; I had thought, especially after his unhappy journey, that he would have hated our backward town. But he liked it; and he liked it because he was himself liked, in a way he hadn’t been before.
Physically he was quite different from the local people. He was taller, more muscular, looser and more energetic in his movements. He was admired. The local women, with their usual free ways, made no secret of finding him desirable—calling out to him in the street, and stopping and staring with wicked, half-smiling (and slightly crossed) eyes that appeared to say: “Consider this a joke, and laugh. Or take it seriously.” My own way of looking at him changed. He ceased to be one of the boys from the servant houses. I saw what the local people saw; in my own eyes he became more handsome and distinctive. To the local people he wasn’t quite an African, and he aroused no tribal uneasiness; he was an exotic with African connections whom they wanted to claim. He flourished. He picked up the local language fast, and he even got a new name.
At home we had called him Ali or—when we wanted to suggest the special wild and unreliable nature of this Ali—Ali-wa (“Ali! Ali! But where is this Ali-wa?”). He rejected his name now. He preferred to be called Metty, which was what the local people called him. It was some time before I understood that it wasn’t a real name, that it was just the French word métis, someone of mixed race. But that wasn’t how I used it. To me it was only a name: Metty.
Here, as on the coast, Metty was a wanderer. He had the bedroom just across the passage from the kitchen; it was the first door on the right as you came in from the landing of the external staircase. I often heard him coming in late at night. That was the freedom he had come to me for. But the Metty who enjoyed that freedom was a different person from the boy who had arrived bawling and screaming, with the manners of the servant house. He had quickly shed those manners; he had developed a new idea of his worth. He became useful in the shop; and in the flat, his wandering habits—which I had dreaded—kept his presence light. But he was always there, and in the town he was like one of my own. He lessened my solitude and made the empty months more bearable—months of waiting for trade to start up again. As, very slowly, it was beginning to do.
We fell into the routine of morning coffee at the flat, shop, separate lunches, shop, separate evenings. Man and master sometimes met, as equals with equal needs, in the dark little bars that began to appear in our town, signs of reawakening life: rough little cells with roofs of corrugated iron, no ceilings, concrete walls painted dark blue or green, red concrete floors.
In one such place Metty put the seal on our new relationship one evening. When I entered I saw him dancing fantastically—slim-waisted, narrow-hipped, wonderfully made. He stopped as soon as he saw me—his servant’s instinct. But then he bowed and made a show of welcoming me as though he owned the place. He said, in the French accent he had picked up, “I must do nothing indecent in front of the patron.” And that was precisely what he went on to do.
So he learned to assert himself. But there were no strains between us. And he became, increasingly, an asset. He became my customs clerk. He was always good with the customers and won me and the shop much goodwill. As an exotic, a licensed man, he was the only person in the town who would risk making a joke with Zabeth, the marchande who was also a sorceress.
That was how it was with us, as the town came to life again, as the steamers started to come up again from the capital, once a week, then twice a week, as people