A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [120]
The image changed. It was no longer a forest, but a billowing black cloud. Unless he was careful the cloud would funnel into his head. He felt it pressing on his head. He didn’t want to look up.
Surely it was only a trick of the oil lamp, which stood directly in front of him on the table?
He huddled a little more on the chair and smacked his lips again.
Then he was so afraid that he almost cried out.
Why should he be afraid? Of whom? Esmeralda? Quasimodo? The goat? The crowd?
People. He could hear them next door and all down the barracks. No road was without them, no house. They were in the newspapers on the wall, in the photographs, in the simple drawings in advertisements. They were in the book he was holding. They were in all books. He tried to think of landscapes without people: sand and sand and sand, without the ‘oses’ Lal had spoken about; vast white plateaux, with himself safely alone, a speck in the centre.
Was he afraid of real people?
He must experiment. But why? He had spent all his life among people without even thinking that he might be afraid of them. He had faced people across a rumshop counter; he had gone to school; he had walked down crowded main roads on market day.
Why now? Why so suddenly?
His whole past became a miracle of calm and courage.
His fingers were dusted with gilt from the pall-like cover of the book. As he studied them the clearing became overgrown again and the black cloud billowed in. How heavy! How dark!
He put his feet down and sat still, staring at the lamp, seeing nothing. The darkness filled his head. All his life had been good until now. And he had never known. He had spoiled it all by worry and fear. About a rotting house, the threats of illiterate labourers.
Now he would never more be able to go among people.
He surrendered to the darkness.
When he roused himself he opened the top half of the door. He saw no one. The barracks had gone to sleep. He would have to wait until morning to find out whether he was really afraid.
In the morning he had a full minute of lucidity. He remembered that something had nagged and exhausted him the previous evening. Then, still in bed, he remembered, and the anguish returned. He got up. The bedsheet looked tormented. The mattress was exposed in places and he could smell the dingy old coconut-fibre. Slowly and carefully, like his actions the night before, his thoughts came, and he framed each thought in a complete sentence. He thought: ‘The bed is a mess. Therefore I slept badly. I must have been afraid all through the night. Therefore the fear is still with me.’
Outside, beyond the closed window, the light breaking through the chinks and fanning out in dust-shot rays, was the world. Outside there were people.
He spoke aloud some of the words of cornfort that hung on the walls. Then, trying to feel them as deeply as he could, he closed his eyes and spoke them again slowly, syllable by syllable. Then he pretended to write the words on his head with his finger.
Then he prayed.
But even in prayer he found images of people, and his prayers were perverted.
He dressed and opened the top half of the door.
Tarzan was waiting.
‘You are glad to see me,’ he thought. ‘You are an animal and think that because I have a head and hands and look as I did yesterday I am a man. I am deceiving you. I am not whole.’
Tarzan wagged his tail.
He opened the lower half of the door.
People!
Fear seized him and hurt like a pain.
Tarzan jumped upon him, egg-stained, shining-eyed.
Grieving, he stroked him. ‘I enjoyed this yesterday and the day before. I was whole then.’
Already yesterday, last night, was as remote as childhood. And mixed with his fear was this grief for a happy life never enjoyed and now lost.
He set about doing the things he did every morning. At the beginning of every action he forgot his pain: split seconds of freedom, relished only after they had gone. Breaking the hibiscus twig, for instance, as he did every morning, to brush his teeth with one of the crushed ends, he automatically looked past the trees to see whether