A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul [80]
“The idea has worked beautifully. Every week we get requests from one university or the other where they would like to keep some kind of intellectual life going without getting involved in local politics. Of course, we’ve attracted the usual freeloaders, black and white, and we’ve run into trouble with the professional anti-Americans. But the idea is good. I don’t feel I have to defend it. Whether it’s doing any good as of now is another matter. And perhaps we don’t have the time. You’ve seen the boys at the Domain here. You’ve seen how bright they are. But they only want jobs. They’ll do anything for that, and that’s where it may all end. There are times when I feel that Africa will simply have its own way—hungry men are hungry men. And that is when I can get very low.
“To work for an outfit like this is to live in a construct—you don’t have to tell me that. But all men live in constructs. Civilization is a construct. And this construct is my own. Within it, I am of value, just as I am. I have to put nothing on. I exploit myself. I allow no one to exploit me. And if it folds, if tomorrow the people at the top decide we’re getting nowhere, I’ve now learned that there are other ways in which I might exploit myself.
“I’m a lucky man. I carry the world within me. You see, Salim, in this world beggars are the only people who can be choosers. Everyone else has his side chosen for him. I can choose. The world is a rich place. It all depends on what you choose in it. You can be sentimental and embrace the idea of your own defeat. You can be an Indian diplomat and always be on the losing side. It’s like banking. It is stupid setting up as a banker in Kenya or the Sudan. That was more or less what my family did on the coast. What do the banks say in their annual reports about those places? That many of the people are ‘Outside the monetary sector’? You’re not going to be a Rothschild there. The Rothschilds are what they are because they chose Europe at the right time. The other Jews, just as talented, who went to bank for the Ottoman Empire, in Turkey or Egypt or wherever, didn’t do so well. Nobody knows their names. And that’s what we’ve been doing for centuries. We’ve been clinging to the idea of defeat and forgetting that we are men like everybody else. We’ve been choosing the wrong side. I’m tired of being on the losing side. I don’t want to pass. I know exactly who I am and where I stand in the world. But now I want to win and win and win.”
10
Indar had begun his story at the end of that evening at Raymond and Yvette’s. He had added to it at different times later. He had begun his story on the first evening I had seen Yvette, and whenever I saw Yvette afterwards she was in his company. I had trouble with both their personalities: I could pin down neither.
In my mind I had my own picture of Yvette, and this never varied. But the person I saw, at different times of day, in different kinds of light and weather, in circumstances so different from those in which I had first seen her, was always new, always a surprise. I was nervous of looking at her face—I was becoming obsessed with her.
And Indar too began to change for me. His personality too had a dissolving quality. As he filled in his story he became in my eyes quite unlike the man who had presented himself in my shop many weeks before. In his clothes then I had seen London and privilege. I had seen that he was fighting to keep up his style, but I hadn’t thought of his style as something he had created for himself. I had seen him more as a man