A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [142]
It was busy under the dome, with messengers in khaki uniforms and clerks in well-ironed clothes carrying buff or green folders, and with people continually passing between St Vincent Street and Woodford Square, where the professional beggars lounged about the bandstand and on benches, so confident of their appearance that they disdained to beg, spending most of their time patching the rags they wore like a uniform, garments thick and shaggy and richly variegated, small rag sewn on to small rag, labours of love. Even about the beggars there was an air of establishment. Woodford Square, cool under the trees and attractively dappled with light, was theirs; they cooked, ate and slept there, disturbed only by occasional political gatherings. They worried no one, and since they all had excellent physiques, and one or two were reputed to be millionaires, no one worried them.
On the green notice-boards, which also served to screen the offices on either side, there were government notices. Mr Biswas was reading these when he heard someone call out. He turned to see an elderly Negro, respectably dressed, waving to him with a one-armed pair of spectacles.
‘You want a certificate?’ The Negro’s lips snapped ferociously shut between words.
‘Certificate?’
‘Birth, marriage, death.’ The Negro adjusted his mutilated spectacles low over his nose and from a shirt pocket stuffed with paper and pencils he pulled out a sheet of paper and let his pencil circle impatiently above it.
‘I don’t want any certificate.’
The pencil stopped playing. ‘I can’t understand it.’ The Negro put away paper and pencil, sat down on a long, shiny bench, took off his spectacles, thrust the scratched, white end of the remaining arm into his mouth, and shook his legs. ‘Nobody wanting certificates these days. If you ask me, the trouble is that nowadays it just have too damn many searchers. When I sit down on this bench in 1919 I was the onliest searcher. Today every Tom, Dick or Harry running up and down this place’ – he jerked his chin towards the fountain –‘calling themself searchers.’ His lips snapped ferociously. ‘You sure you don’t want a certificate? You never know when these things could be useful. I get lots of certificates for Indians, you know. In fact, I prefer getting certificates for Indians. And I could get it for you this afternoon self. I know one of the clerks inside there.’ He waved to the office at his back and Mr Biswas saw a high, polished brown counter and pale green walls, lit, on this bright afternoon, by electric light.
‘Helluva job,’ the Negro said. ‘No Christmas and Easter for me, you know. At times like that nobody want any certificate at all. And every day, whether I search for ten or two or no certificates, that damn clerk inside there got to get his twenty cigarettes.’
Mr Biswas began to move away.
‘Still, if you know anybody who want a certificate – birth, death, marriage, marriage in extremis – send them to me. I come here every morning at eight o’clock sharp. The name is Pastor.’
Mr Biswas left Pastor, overwhelmed by the thought that in the office behind the green notice-board records were kept of every birth and death. And they had nearly missed him! He went down the steps into St Vincent Street and continued south towards the masts. Even Pastor, for all his grumbling, had found his place. What had driven him on a day in 1919 to take a seat outside the Registrar-General’s Department and wait for illiterates wanting certificates?
He had thought himself back into the mood he had known at Green Vale, when he couldn’t bear to look at the newspapers on the wall. And now he perceived that the starts of apprehension he felt at the sight of every person in the street did not come from fear at all; only from regret, envy, despair.
And, thinking of the newspapers on the barrackroom wall, he was confronted with the newspaper offices: the Guardian, the Gazette, the Mirror,