A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul [65]
It was a house of the Domain, like Indar’s. But all the upholstered furniture had been cleared out of the sitting room and had been replaced by cushions and bolsters and African mats. Two or three reading lamps had been put on the floor, so that parts of the room were in darkness.
Yvette said, referring to the furniture, “The President has an exaggerated idea of the needs of Europeans. I’ve dumped all that velvety stuff in one of the bedrooms.”
Remembering what Indar had told me, I ignored the irony in her voice, and felt that she was speaking with privilege, the privilege of someone close to the President.
A number of people were already there. Indar followed Yvette deeper into the room, and I followed Indar.
Indar said, “How’s Raymond?”
Yvette said, “He’s working. He’ll look in later.”
We sat down all three next to a bookcase. Indar lounged against a bolster, a man at ease. I concentrated on the music. As so often when I was with Indar on the Domain, I was prepared only to watch and listen. And this was all new to me. I hadn’t been to a Domain party like this. And the atmosphere itself in that room was something I had never experienced before.
Two or three couples were dancing; I had visions of women’s legs. I had a vision especially of a girl in a green dress who sat on a straight-backed dining chair (one of the house set of twelve). I studied her knees, her legs, her ankles, her shoes. They were not particularly well made legs, but they had an effect on me. All my adult life I had looked for release in the bars of the town. I knew only women who had to be paid for. The other side of the life of passion, of embraces freely given and received, I knew nothing of, and had begun to consider alien, something not for me. And so my satisfactions had only been brothel satisfactions, which hadn’t been satisfactions at all. I felt they had taken me further and further away from the true life of the senses and I feared they had made me incapable of that life.
I had never been in a room where men and women danced for mutual pleasure, and out of pleasure in one another’s company. Trembling expectation was in that girl’s heavy legs, the girl in the green dress. It was a new dress, loosely hemmed, not ironed into a crease, still suggesting the material as it had been measured out and bought. Later I saw her dancing, watched the movements of her legs, her shoes; and such a sweetness was released in me that I felt I had recovered a part of myself I had lost. I never looked at the girl’s face, and it was easy in the semi-gloom to let that remain unknown. I wanted to sink into the sweetness; I didn’t want anything to spoil the mood.
And the mood became sweeter. The music that was being played came to an end, and in the wonderfully lit room, blurred circles of light thrown onto the ceiling from the lamps on the floor, people stopped dancing. What next came on went straight to my heart—sad guitars, words, a song, an American girl singing “Barbara Allen.”
That voice! It needed no music; it hardly needed words. By itself it created the line of the melody; by itself it created a whole world of feeling. It is what people of our background look for in music and singing: feeling. It is what makes us shout “Wa-wa! Bravo!” and throw bank notes and gold at the feet of a singer. Listening to that voice, I felt the deepest part of myself awakening, the part that knew loss, homesickness, grief, and longed for love. And in that voice was the promise of a flowering for everyone who listened.
I said to Indar, “Who is the singer?”
He said, “Joan Baez. She’s very famous in the States.”
“And a millionaire,” Yvette said.
I was beginning to recognize her irony. It made her appear to be saying something when she had said very little—and she was, after all, playing the record in her house. She was smiling at me,