A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul [95]
THREE
The Big Man
12
I often thought about the chance that had shown me Yvette for the first time that evening in her house, in that atmosphere of Europe in Africa, when she had worn her black Margit Brandt blouse and had been lighted by the reading lamps placed on the floor, and every kind of yearning had been stirred in me by the voice of Joan Baez.
Perhaps in another setting and at another time she would not have made such an impression on me. And perhaps if I had read Raymond’s articles on the day Yvette had given them to me, nothing would have happened the following afternoon when she came to the flat. I wouldn’t have given her cause to show me her profile against the white wall of the studio-sitting room; we might instead have simply gone to the Hellenic Club. Seeing her house in the light of midday had already given me a little alarm. To have understood more about Raymond immediately after might have made me see her more clearly—her ambition, her bad judgment, her failure.
And failure like that wasn’t what I would have chosen to be entangled with. My wish for an adventure with Yvette was a wish to be taken up to the skies, to be removed from the life I had—the dullness, the pointless tension, “the situation of the country.” It wasn’t a wish to be involved with people as trapped as myself.
But that was what I had now. And it wasn’t open to me to withdraw. After that first afternoon, my first discovery of her, I was possessed by Yvette, possessed by that person I never stopped wanting to win. Satisfaction solved nothing; it only opened up a new void, a fresh need.
The town changed for me. It had new associations. Different memories and moods attached to places, to times of day,weather. In the drawer of my desk in the shop, where Raymond’s magazines had once lain forgotten for two days, there were now photographs of Yvette. Some of them were quite old and must have been precious to her. These photographs were her gifts to me, made at various times, as favours, rewards, gestures of tenderness; since, just as we never embraced when we met, never wasted the sense of touch (and in fact seldom kissed), so, as if by unspoken agreement, we continued as we had begun and never exchanged words of tenderness. In spite of the corrupt physical ways our passion had begun to take, the photographs of Yvette that I preferred were the chastest. I was especially interested in those of her as a girl in Belgium, to whom the future was still a mystery.
With these photographs in my drawer, the view from my shop had a different feel: the square with the bedraggled trees, the market stalls, the wandering villagers, the unpaved roads dusty in the sun or running red in the rain. The broken-down town, in which I had felt neutered, became the place where it had all come to me.
With that I developed a new kind of political concern, almost a political anxiety. I could have done without that, but it couldn’t be helped. Through Yvette I was bound to Raymond, and through Raymond I was bound more closely than ever to the fact or the knowledge of the President’s power. Seeing the President’s photograph everywhere had already made me feel that, whether African or not, we had all become his people. To that was now added, because of Raymond, the feeling that we were all dependent on the President and that—whatever job we did and however much we thought we were working for ourselves—we all were serving him.
For that brief moment when I had believed Raymond to be as Indar had described him—the Big Man’s white man—I had been thrilled to feel so close to the highest power in the land. I felt I had been taken far above the country I knew and its everyday worries—the mountainous rubbish dumps, bad roads, tricky officials, shanty towns, the people coming in every day from the bush and finding nothing to do and little to eat, the drunkenness, the quick murders, my own shop. Power, and the life around the President in the capital, had seemed to be what was real and essential about the country.
When I understood what Raymond’s position