A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul [54]
Metty succeeded in driving her away from the shop. But one afternoon, when I went to the flat after closing the shop, I saw her on the pavement outside, standing among the dusty hummocks of wild grass near the side entrance to our back yard. An ashy, unwashed cotton smock, wide-sleeved and wide-necked, hung loosely from her bony shoulders and showed she was wearing nothing else below. Her hair was so sparse her head looked shaved. Her thin little face was set in a frown which wasn’t a frown but was only meant to say she wasn’t looking at me.
She was still there when, after making myself some tea, and changing, I went down again. I was going to the Hellenic Club for my afternoon squash. It was my rule: whatever the circumstances, however unwilling the spirit, never give up the day’s exercise. Afterwards I drove out to the dam, to the Portuguese nightclub on the cliff, now got going again, and had some fried fish there—I am sure they did it better in Portugal. It was too early for the band and the town crowd, but the dam was floodlit, and they turned on the coloured lights on the trees for me.
The girl was still on the pavement when I went back to the flat. This time she spoke to me. She said, “Metty-ki là?”
She had only a few words of the local patois, but she could understand it when it was spoken, and when I asked her what she wanted she said, “Popo malade. Dis-li Metty.”
Popo was “baby.” Metty had a baby somewhere in the town, and the baby was sick. Metty had a whole life out there, separate from his life with me in the flat, separate from his bringing me coffee in the mornings, separate from the shop.
I was shocked. I felt betrayed. If we had been living in our compound on the coast, he would have lived his own life, but there would have been no secrets. I would have known who his woman was; I would have known when his baby was born. I had lost Metty to this part of Africa. He had come to the place that was partly his home, and I had lost him. I felt desolate. I had been hating the place, hating the flat; yet now I saw the life I had made for myself in that flat as something good, which I had lost.
Like the girl outside, like so many other people, I waited for Metty. And when, very late, he came in, I began to speak at once.
“Oh, Metty, why didn’t you tell me? Why did you do this to me?” Then I called him by the name we called him at home. “Ali, Ali-wa! We lived together. I took you under my roof and treated you as a member of my own family. And now you do this.”
Dutifully, like the servant of the old days, he tried to match his mood to mine, tried to look as though he suffered with me.
“I will leave her, patron. She’s an animal.”
“How can you leave her? You’ve done it. You can’t go back on that. You’ve got that child out there. Oh, Ali, what have you done? Don’t you think it’s disgusting to have a little African child running about in somebody’s yard, with its toto swinging from side to side? Aren’t you ashamed, a boy like you?”
“It is disgusting, Salim.” He came and put his hand on my shoulder. “And I am very ashamed. She’s only an African woman. I will leave her.”
“How can you leave her? That is now your life. Didn’t you know it was going to be like that? We sent you to school, we had the mullahs teach you. And now you do this.”
I was acting. But there are times when we act out what we really feel, times when we cannot cope with certain emotions, and it is easier to act. And Metty was acting too, being loyal, reminding me of the past, of other places, reminding me of things I could scarcely bear that night. When I said, acting, “Why didn’t you tell me, Metty?” he acted back for my sake. He said, “How could I tell you, Salim? I knew you were going to get on like this.”
How did he know?
I said, “You know, Metty, the first day you went to school, I went with you. You cried all the time. You began to cry as soon as we left the house.