A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul [98]
As it did on the evening when I understood, from something one of our visitors said, that Raymond had applied for a job in the United States and had been rejected. The visitor, a bearded man with mean and unreliable eyes, was speaking like a man on Raymond’s side. He was even trying to be a little bitter on Raymond’s behalf, and this made me feel that he might be one of those visiting scholars Yvette told me about, who, while they were going through Raymond’s papers, also took the opportunity of making a pass at her.
Times had changed since the early 1960s, the bearded man said. Africanists were not so rare now, and people who had given their life to the continent were being passed over. The great powers had agreed for the time being not to wrangle over Africa, and as a result attitudes to Africa had changed. The very people who had said that the decade was the decade of Africa, and had scrambled after its great men, were now giving up on Africa.
Yvette lifted her wrist and looked carefully at her watch. It was like a deliberate interruption. She said, “The decade of Africa finished ten seconds ago.”
She had done that once before, when someone had spoken of the decade of Africa. And the trick worked again. She smiled; Raymond and I laughed. The bearded man took the hint, and the subject of Raymond’s rejected application was left alone.
But I was dismayed by what I had heard, and when Yvette next came to the flat I said, “But you didn’t tell me you were thinking of leaving.”
“Aren’t you thinking of leaving?”
“Eventually, yes.”
“Eventually we all have to leave. Your life is settled. You’re practically engaged to that man’s daughter, you’ve told me. Everything is just waiting for you. My life is still fluid. I must do something. I just can’t stay here.”
“But why didn’t you tell me?”
“Why talk of something you know isn’t going to come off? And it wouldn’t do us any good if it got around. You know that. Raymond doesn’t stand a chance abroad now anyway.”
“Why did he apply, then?”
“I made him. I thought there was a possibility. Raymond wouldn’t do a thing like that by himself. He’s loyal.”
The closeness to the President that had given Raymond his reputation, and had made people call him out to conferences in different parts of the world, now disqualified him from serious consideration abroad. Unless something extraordinary happened, he would have to stay where he was, dependent on the power of the President.
His position in the Domain required him to display authority. But at any moment he might be stripped of this authority, reduced to nothing, with nothing to fall back on. In his place I don’t think I would have been able to pretend to have any authority—that would have been the hardest thing for me. I would have just given up, understanding the truth of what Mahesh had told me years before: “Remember, Salim, the people here are malins.”
But Raymond showed no uncertainty. And he was loyal—to the President, to himself, his ideas and his work, his past. My admiration for him grew. I studied the President’s speeches—the daily newspapers were flown up from the capital—for signs that Raymond might be called back to favour. And if I became Raymond’s encourager, after Yvette, if I became his champion and promoted him even at the Hellenic Club as the man who hadn’t published much but really knew, the man every intelligent visitor ought to see, it wasn’t only because I didn’t want to see him go away, and Yvette with him. I didn’t want to see him humiliated. I admired his code and wished that when my own time came I might be able to stick to something like it.
Life in our town was arbitrary enough. Yvette,