A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul [19]
We exchanged greetings, and in the African way we could make that take time. It was hard to go on after we had finished with the greetings. He offered me nothing in the way of news; he left it to me to ask questions. And when I asked—for the sake of asking—some question like “What did you do at school today?” or “Does Father Huismans take any of your classes?” he gave me short and precise answers that left me wondering what to ask next.
The trouble was that I was unwilling—and very soon unable—to chat with him as I would have done with another African. I felt that with him I had to make a special effort, and I didn’t know what I could do. He was a boy from the bush; when the holidays came he would be going back to his mother’s village. But at the lycée he was learning things I knew nothing about. I couldn’t talke to him about his school work; the advantage there was on his side. And there was his face. I thought there was a lot going on behind that face that I couldn’t know about. I felt there was a solidity and self-possession there, and that as a guardian and educator I was being seen through.
Perhaps, with nothing to keep them going, our meetings would have come to an end. But in the shop there was an attraction: there was Metty. Metty got on with everybody. He didn’t have the problems I had with Ferdinand; and it was for Metty that Ferdinand soon began to come, to the shop and then to the flat as well. After his stiff conversation in English or French with me, Ferdinand would, with Metty, switch to the local patois. He would appear then to undergo a character change, rattling away in a high-pitched voice, his laughter sounding like part of his speech. And Metty could match him; Metty had absorbed many of the intonations of the local language, and the mannerisms that went with the language.
From Ferdinand’s point of view Metty was a better guide to the town than I was. And for these two unattached young men the pleasures of the town were what you would expect—beer, bars, women.
Beer was part of people’s food here; children drank it; people began drinking from early in the morning. We had no local brewery, and a lot of the cargo brought up by the steamers was that weak lager the people here loved. At many points along the river, village dugouts took on cases from the moving steamer; and the steamer, on the way back to the capital, received the empties.
About women, the attitude was just as matter-of-fact. Shortly after I arrived, my friend Mahesh told me that women slept with men whenever they were asked; a man could knock on any woman’s door and sleep with her. Mahesh didn’t tell me this with any excitement or approval—he was wrapped up in his own beautiful Shoba. To Mahesh the sexual casualness was part of the chaos and corruption of the place.
That was how—after early delight—I had begun to feel myself. But I couldn’t speak out against pleasures which were also my own. I couldn’t warn Metty or Ferdinand against going to places I went to myself. The restraint, in fact, worked the other way. In spite of the changes that had come to Metty, I still regarded him as a member of my family; and I had to be careful not to do anything to wound him or anything which, when reported back, would wound other members of the family. I had, specifically, not to be seen with African women. And I was proud that, difficult though it was, I never gave cause for offence.
Ferdinand and Metty could drink in the little bars and openly pick up women or drop in at the houses of women they had got to know. It was I—as master of one man and guardian of the other—who had to hide.
What could Ferdinand learn from me? I had heard it said on the coast—and the foreigners I met here said it as well—that Africans didn’t know how to “live.” By that was meant that Africans didn’t know how to spend money sensibly or how to keep a house. Well! My circumstances were unusual, but what would Ferdinand see when he considered my establishment?
My shop was a shambles. I had bolts of cloth