A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [114]
Mr Biswas was impressed.
‘Spanish,’ Jagdat said.
Mr Biswas knew this was a euphemism for a red-skinned Negro. ‘Too hot for me, man.’
‘But faithful,’ Jagdat said.
Knocked about on the wooden seat of the rackety rickety dim-lit bus, going past silent fields and past houses which were lightless and dead or bright and private, Mr Biswas no longer thought of the afternoon’s mission, but of the night ahead.
Early next morning Mr Maclean turned up at the barracks and said he had put off other pressing work and was ready to go ahead with Mr Biswas’s house. He was in his poor but respectable business clothes. His ironed shirt was darned with almost showy neatness; his khaki trousers were clean and sharply creased, but the khaki was old and would not keep the crease for long.
‘You decide how much you want to start off with?’
‘A hundred,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘More at the end of the month. No concrete pillars.’
‘Is only a sort of fanciness. You watch. I will get you a crapaud that would last a lifetime. Wouldn’t make no difference.’
‘Once it neat.’
‘Neat and nice,’ Mr Maclean said. ‘Well, I suppose I better start seeing about materials and labour.’
Materials came that afternoon. The crapaud pillars looked rough; they were not altogether round or altogether straight. But Mr Biswas was delighted by the new scantlings, and the new nails that came in several wrappings of newspaper. He took up handfuls of nails and let them fall again. The sound pleased him. ‘Did not know nails was so heavy,’ he said.
Mr Maclean had brought a tool-box which had his initials on the cover and was like a large wooden suitcase. It contained a saw with an old handle and a sharp, oiled blade; several chisels and drills; a spirit-level and a T square; a plane; a hammer and a mallet; wedges with smooth, fringed heads; a ball of old, white-stained twine; and a lump of chalk. His tools were like his clothes: old but cared-for. He built a rough work-bench out of the materials and assured Mr Biswas that all the material would be eventually released for the house and would surfer little damage. That was why, he explained in reply to another of Mr Biswas’s queries, no nail had been driven right in.
The labour also came. The labour was a labourer named Edgar, a muscular, full-blooded Negro whose short khaki trousers were shaggy with patches, and whose vest, brown with dirt, was full of holes that had been distended by his powerful body into ellipses. Edgar cutlassed the site, leaving it a rich wet green.
When Mr Biswas returned from the fields he found the brushed site marked in white with the plan of the house. Holes for pillars had been indicated and Edgar was digging. Not far off Mr Maclean had constructed a frame which rested level on stones and answered wonderfully to the design he had drawn in his yard.
‘Gallery, drawingroom, bedroom, bedroom,’ Mr Biswas said, hopping over the spars. ‘Gallery, bedroom, bedroom, drawingroom.’
The air smelled of sawdust. Sawdust had spilled rich red and cream on the grass and had been ground into the damp black earth by Edgar’s bare feet and Mr Maclean’s old, unshining working-boots.
Mr Maclean talked to Mr Biswas about the difficulties of labour.
‘I try to get Sam,’ he said. ‘But he a little too erratic and don’t-care. Edgar, now, does do the work of two men. The only trouble is, you got to keep a eye on him all the time. Look at him.’
Edgar was knee-deep in a hole and regularly throwing up spadefuls of black earth.
‘You got to tell him to stop,’ Mr Maclean said. ‘Otherwise, he dig right through till he come out the other side. Well, boss, how about something to wet the job?’ He made a drinking gesture. In the early days he had preferred to drink on the completion of a job; now he got his drink as soon as he could.
Mr Biswas nodded and Mr Maclean called, ‘Edgar!’ Edgar went on digging.
Mr Maclean tapped his forehead. ‘You see what I tell you?’ He put two fingers in his mouth and whistled.
Edgar looked up and jumped out of his hole. Mr Maclean asked him to go to the rumshop and buy a nip of rum.