A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [179]
‘Next bus to Port of Spain in ten minutes,’ the conductor said conversationally. Mr Biswas got up. Mrs Tulsi pulled him down. ‘They like to reverse first.’ The bus reversed in a dirt lane and came to rest on the verge, under an avocado pear tree.
The driver and conductor squatted under the tree, smoking. Across the road and next to the lane in which the bus had reversed Mr Biswas saw an open square of ground, mounds and faded wreaths alone indicating its purpose.
Mr Biswas waved at the forlorn little cemetery and the dirt lane which, past a few tumbledown houses, disappeared behind bush and apparently led only to more bush and the mountain which rose at the end. ‘Estate?’ he asked.
Mrs Tulsi smiled. ‘And on this side.’ She waved at the other side of the road.
Beyond a deep gully, whose sides were sheer, whose bed was strewn with boulders, stones and pebbles, perfectly graded, Mr Biswas saw more bush, more mountains. ‘A lot of bamboo,’ he said. ‘You could start a paper factory.’
It was easy to see just how far the buses went. Up to the dirt lane the road was smooth, its centre black and dully shining. Past that the road narrowed, was gravelly and dusty, its edges obscured by the untended verge.
‘I suppose we go along there,’ Mr Biswas said.
They began walking.
Mrs Tulsi bent down and tore up a plant from the verge. ‘Rabbit meat,’ she said. ‘Best food for rabbits. In Arwacas you have to buy it.’
Below the overarching trees the road was in soft shadow. Sunlight spotted the gravel in white blurs, spotted the wet green verges, the dark ridged trunks of trees. It was cool. And then Mr Biswas began seeing the fruit trees. Avocado pear trees grew at the side of the road as casually as any bush; their fruit, only just out of flower, were tiny but already perfectly shaped, with a shine they would soon lose. The land between the road and the gully widened; the gully grew shallower. Beyond it Mr Biswas saw the tall immortelles and their red and yellow flowers. And then the untrodden road blazed with the flowers. Mr Biswas picked one up, put it between his lips, tasted the nectar, blew, and the bird-shaped flower whistled. Even as they stood flowers fell on them. Under the immortelles he saw the cocoa trees, stunted, their branches black and dry, the cocoa pods gleaming with all the colours between yellow and red and crimson and purple, not like things that had grown, but like varnished wax models stuck on to dead branches. Then there were orange trees, heavy with leafand fruit. And always they walked between two hills. The road narrowed; they heard no sound except that of their feet on the loose gravel. Then, far away, they heard the bus starting on its journey back to bustling, barren, concrete and timber Port of Spain. Impossible that it was less than an hour away!
The gully grew shallower and shallower, and then it was only a depression carpeted with a soft vine of a tender green. Mrs Tulsi bent down and disturbed it. A vine hung from her fingers; it had a faint smell of mint.
‘Old man’s beard,’ she said. ‘In Arwacas they grow it in baskets.’
The house was partly hidden by a large, branching, towering saman tree. Swollen parasite vines veined its branches and massive trunk; wild pines sprouted like coarse hair from every crotch; and it was hung with lianas. Below the tree, beside the gully, there was a short walk lined with orange trees, and around the trunk there was a clump of wild tannia, pale green, four feet tall, nothing but stem and giant heart-shaped leaves, cool with quick beads of dew.
An old signpost stood slightly askew in the gully. The letters were bleached and faint: Christopher Columbus Road. It was fitting. The land, though fruitful from a former cultivation,