A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul [71]
Indar was embraced by Yvette when we left. And I was embraced, as the friend. It was delicious to me, as the climax to that evening, to press that body close, soft at this late hour, and to feel the silk of the blouse and the flesh below the silk.
There was a moon now—there had been none earlier. It was small and high. The sky was full of heavy clouds, and the moonlight came and went. It was very quiet. We could hear the rapids; they were about a mile away. The rapids in moonlight! I said to Indar, “Let’s go to the river.” And he was willing.
In the wide levelled land of the Domain the new buildings seemed small, and the earth felt immense. The Domain seemed the merest clearing in the forest, the merest clearing in an immensity of bush and river—the world might have been nothing else. Moonlight distorted distances; and the darkness, when it came, seemed to drop down to our heads.
I said to Indar, “What do you think of what Raymond said?”
“Raymond tells a story well. But a lot of what he says is true. What he says about the President and ideas is certainly true. The President uses them all and somehow makes them work together. He is the great African chief, and he is also the man of the people. He is the modernizer and he is also the African who has rediscovered his African soul. He’s conservative, revolutionary, everything. He’s going back to the old ways, and he’s also the man who’s going ahead, the man who’s going to make the country a world power by the year 2000. I don’t know whether he’s done it accidentally or because someone’s been telling him what to do. But the mish-mash works because he keeps on changing, unlike the other guys. He is the soldier who decided to become an old-fashioned chief, and he’s the chief whose mother was a hotel maid. That makes him everything, and he plays up everything. There isn’t anyone in the country who hasn’t heard of that hotel maid mother.”
I said, “They caught me with that pilgrimage to the mother’s village. When I read in the paper that it was an unpublicized pilgrimage, I thought of it as just that.”
“He makes these shrines in the bush, honouring the mother. And at the same time he builds modern Africa. Raymond says he doesn’t build skyscrapers. Well, he doesn’t do that. He builds these very expensive Domains.”
“Nazruddin used to own some land here in the old days.”
“And he sold it for nothing. Are you going to tell me that? That’s an African story.”
“No, Nazruddin sold well. He sold at the height of the boom before independence. He came out one Sunday morning and said, ‘But this is only bush.’ And he sold.”
“It could go that way again.”
The sound of the rapids had grown louder. We had left the new buildings of the Domain behind and were approaching the fishermen’s huts, dead in the moonlight. The thin village dogs, pale in the moonlight, their shadows black below them, walked lazily away from us. The fishermen’s poles and nets were dark against the broken glitter of the river. And then we were on the old viewing point, repaired now, newly walled; and around us, drowning everything else, was the sound of water over rocks. Clumps of water hyacinths bucked past. The hyacinths were white in the moonlight, the vines dark tangles outlined in black shadow. When the moonlight went, there was nothing to be seen; the world was then only that old sound of tumbling water.
I said, “I’ve never told you why I came here. It wasn’t just to get away from the coast or to run that shop. Nazruddin used to tell us wonderful stories of the times he used to have here. That was why I came. I thought I would be able to live my own life, and I thought that in time I would find what Nazruddin found. Then I got stuck. I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t come. If you hadn’t come I would never have known about what was going on here, just under