A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul [21]
The bedroom was at the end of the passage. It was for me a place of special desolation, with its big fitted cupboards and its very big foam bed. What anticipations that bed had given me, as it had no doubt given the lady! Such anticipations, such an assurance of my own freedom; such letdowns, such a sense of shame. How many African women were hustled away at difficult hours—before Metty came in, or before Metty woke up! Many times on that bed I waited for morning to cleanse me of memory; and often, thinking of Nazruddin’s daughter and the faith of that man in my own faithfulness, I promised to be good. In time that was to change; the bed and the room were to have other associations for me. But until then I knew only what I knew.
The Belgian lady had attempted to introduce a touch of Europe and home and art, another kind of life, to this land of rain and heat and big-leaved trees—always visible, if blurred, through the white-painted window panes. She would have had a high idea of herself; but judged on its own, what she had tried to do wasn’t of much value. And I felt that Ferdinand, when he looked at my shop and flat, would come to the same conclusion about me. It would be hard for him to see any great difference between my life and the life he knew. This added to my nighttime glooms. I wondered about the nature of my aspirations, the very supports of my existence; and I began to feel that any life I might have anywhere—however rich and successful and better furnished—would only be a version of the life I lived now.
These thoughts could take me into places I didn’t want to be. It was partly the effect of my isolation: I knew that. I knew there was more to me than my setting and routine showed. I knew there was something that separated me from Ferdinand and the life of the bush about me. And it was because I had no means in my day-to-day life of asserting this difference, of exhibiting my true self, that I fell into the stupidity of exhibiting my things.
I showed Ferdinand my things. I racked my brains wondering what to show him next. He was very cool, as though he had seen it all before. It was only his manner, the dead tone of voice he used when he spoke to me. But it irritated me.
I wanted to say to him: “Look at these magazines. Nobody pays me to read them. I read them because I am the kind of person I am, because I take an interest in things, because I want to know about the world. Look at those paintings. The lady took a lot of trouble over them. She wanted to make something beautiful to hang in her house. She didn’t hang it there because it was a piece of magic.”
I said it in the end, though not in those words. Ferdinand didn’t respond. And the paintings were junk—the lady didn’t know how to fill the canvas and hoped to get away with the rough strokes of colour. And the books and magazines were junk—especially the pornographic ones, which could depress me and embarrass me but which I didn’t throw away because there were times when I needed them.
Ferdinand misunderstood my irritation.
He said one day, “You don’t have to show me anything, Salim.”
He had stopped calling me mister, following Metty’s lead. Metty had taken to calling me patron, and in the presence of a third person, could make it sound ironical. Metty was there that day; but Ferdinand, when he told me I wasn’t to show him anything, wasn’t speaking ironically. He never spoke ironically.
I was reading a magazine when Ferdinand came to the shop one afternoon. I greeted him and went on with the magazine. It was a magazine of popular science, the kind of reading I had become addicted to. I liked receiving these little bits of knowledge; and I often thought, while I read, that the particular science or field I was reading about was the thing to which I should have given my days and nights, adding knowledge to knowledge, making discoveries, making something of myself, using all my faculties. It was a good feeling; from my point