A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul [92]
The town, when I drove back, had settled down to its own night life. At night now, in the increasingly crowded main streets, there was the atmosphere of the village, with unsteady groups around the little drinking stalls in the shanty areas, the cooking fires on the pavements, the barring off of sleeping places, the lunatic or drunken old men in rags, ready to snarl like dogs, taking their food to dark corners, to eat out of the sight of others. The windows of some shops—especially clothing shops, with their expensive imported goods—were brightly lit, as a precaution against theft.
In the square not far from the flat a young woman was bawling—a real African bawl. She was being hustled along the pavement by two men, each one twisting an arm. But no one in the square did anything. The men were of our Youth Guard. The officers got a small stipend from the Big Man, and they had been given a couple of government jeeps. But, like the officials at the docks, they really had to look for things to do. This was their new “Morals Patrol.” It was the opposite of what it said. The girl would have been picked up from some bar; she had probably answered back or refused to pay.
In the flat I saw that Metty’s light was on. I said, “Metty?” He said through the door, “Patron.” He had stopped calling me Salim; we had seen little of one another outside the shop for some time. I thought there was sadness in his voice; and going on to my own room, considering my own luck, I thought: Poor Metty. How will it end for him? So friendly, and yet in the end always without friends. He should have stayed on the coast. He had his place there. He had people like himself. Here he is lost.
Yvette telephoned me at the shop late the next morning. It was our first telephone call, but she didn’t speak my name or give her own. She said, “Will you be at the flat for lunch?” I seldom had lunch at the flat during the week, but I said, “Yes.” She said, “I’ll see you there.” And that was all.
She had allowed no pause, no silence, had given me no time for surprise. And indeed, waiting for her in the white sitting room just after twelve, standing at the Ping-Pong table, turning over a magazine, I felt no surprise. I felt the occasion—for all its unusualness, the oddity of the hour, the killing brightness of the light—to be only a continuation of something I had long been living with.
I heard her hurry up the steps she had pattered down the previous afternoon. Out of every kind of nervousness I didn’t move. The landing door was open, the sitting room door was open—her steps were brisk and didn’t falter. I was utterly delighted to see her; that was an immense relief. There was still briskness in her manner; but though her face seemed set for it, she wore no smile. Her eyes were serious, with a disturbing, challenging hint of greed.
She said, “I’ve been thinking of you all morning. I haven’t been able to get you out of my head.” And as though she had entered the sitting room only to leave it, as though her arrival at the flat was a continuation of the directness of her telephone call, and she wanted to give neither of us time for words, she went into the bedroom and began to undress.
It was as before with me. Confronted with her, I shed old fantasies. My body obeyed its new impulses, discovered in itself resources that answered my new need. New—it was the word. It was always new, familiar though the body and its responses became, and as physical as the act was, requiring such roughness, control and subtlety. At the end (which I