A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul [67]
Yvette said, without moving, “Would you like a drink, Raymond?”
He said, “It will spoil it for me, Evie. I’ll be going back to my room in a minute.”
Raymond’s presence in the room had been noted. A young man and a girl had begun to hover around our group. One or two other people came up. There were greetings.
Indar said, “I hope we haven’t disturbed you.”
Raymond said, “It made a pleasant background. If I look a little troubled, it is because just now, in that room, I became very dejected. I began to wonder, as I’ve often wondered, whether the truth ever gets known. The idea isn’t new, but there are times when it becomes especially painful. I feel that everything one does is just going to waste.”
Indar said, “You are talking nonsense, Raymond. Of course it takes time for someone like yourself to be recognized, but it happens in the end. You are not working in a popular field.”
Yvette said, “You tell him that for me, please.”
One of the men standing around said, “New discoveries are constantly making us revise our ideas about the past. The truth is always there. It can be got at. The work has to be done, that’s all.”
Raymond said, “Time, the discoverer of truth. I know. It’s the classical idea, the religious idea. But there are times when you begin to wonder. Do we really know the history of the Roman Empire? Do we really know what went on during the conquest of Gaul? I was sitting in my room and thinking with sadness about all the things that have gone unrecorded. Do you think we will ever get to know the truth about what has happened in Africa in the last hundred or even fifty years? All the wars, all the rebellions, all the leaders, all the defeats?”
There was a silence. We looked at Raymond, who had introduced this element of discussion into our evening. Yet the mood was only like an extension of the mood of the Joan Baez songs. And for a little while, but without the help of music, we contemplated the sadness of the continent.
Indar said, “Have you read Muller’s article?”
Raymond said, “About the Bapende rebellion? He sent me a proof. It’s had a great success, I hear.”
The young man with the girl said, “I hear they’re inviting him to Texas to teach for a term.”
Indar said, “I thought it was a lot of rubbish. Every kind of cliché parading as new wisdom. The Azande, that’s a tribal uprising. The Bapende, that’s just economic oppression, rubber business. They’re to be lumped with the Budja and the Babwa. And you do that by playing down the religious side. Which is what makes the Bapende dust-up so wonderful. It’s just the kind of thing that happens when people turn to Africa to make the fast academic buck.”
Raymond said, “He came to see me. I answered all his questions and showed him all my papers.”
The young man said, “Muller’s a bit of whiz kid, I think.”
Raymond said, “I liked him.”
Yvette said, “He came to lunch. As soon as Raymond left the table, he forgot all about the Bapende and said to me, ‘Do you want to come out with me?’ Just like that. The minute Raymond’s back was turned.”
Raymond smiled.
Indar said, “I was telling Salim, Raymond, that you are the only man the President reads.”
Raymond said, “I don’t think he has much time for reading these days.”
The young man, his girl now close to him, said, “How did you meet him?”
“It is a story at once simple and extraordinary,” Raymond said. “But I don’t think we have time for that now.” He looked at Yvette.
She said, “I don’t think anybody is rushing off anywhere right at this minute.”
“It was long ago,” Raymond said. “In colonial times. I was teaching at a college in the capital. I was doing my historical work. But of course in those days there was no question of publishing. There was the censorship that people pretended didn’t exist, in spite of the celebrated decree of 1922. And of course in those days Africa wasn’t a subject. But I never made any secret of what I felt or where I stood, and I suppose the word must have got around. One day at the college I was told that an old African