Half a Life_ A Novel - V. S. Naipaul [53]
He worried like this for some days and then he thought, “I've been a fool. I've been waiting to be guided to where I should go. Waiting for a sign. And all this time the sign's been there. I must go with Ana to her country.”
When they next met he said, “Ana, I would like to go with you to Africa.”
“For a holiday?”
“For good.”
She said nothing. A week or so later he said, “You remember what I said about going to Africa?” Her face clouded. He said, “You've read my stories. You know I've nowhere else to go. And I don't want to lose you.” She looked confused. He didn't say any more. Later, when she was leaving, she said, “You must give me time. I have to think.” When she next came to his room, and they were on the little sofa, she said, “Do you think you'll like Africa?”
He said, “You think there'll be something I'll be able to do there?”
“Let's see how you like the bush. We need a man on the estate. But you'll have to learn the language.”
In his last week at the college a letter came from Sarojini in Colombia.
I am glad you've at last got the diploma, though I don't know what you will do with it where you are going. Serious work has to be done in Africa, especially in those Portuguese places, but I don't think it will be done by you. You are like your father, holding on to old ideas till the end. About other matters, I hope you know what you are doing, Willie. I don't understand what you write about the girl. Outsiders who go to India have no idea of the country even when they are there, and I am sure the same is true of Africa. Please be careful. You are putting yourself in the hands of strangers. You think you know what you are going to, but you don't know all of it.
Willie thought, “She likes her own international marriage, but she is worried about mine.”
But, as always, her words, glib though they were, the words of someone still mimicking adulthood, troubled him and stayed with him. He heard them as he did his packing, removing his presence bit by bit from the college room, undoing the centre of his London life. Undoing that, so easily now, he wondered how he would ever set about getting a footing in the city again if at some time he had to. He might have luck again; there might be something like the chain of chance encounters he had had; but they would lead him into a city he didn't know.
*
THEY—HE AND ANA—left from Southampton. He thought about the new language he would have to learn. He wondered whether he would be able to hold on to his own language. He wondered whether he would forget his English, the language of his stories. He set himself little tests, and when one test was over he immediately started on another. While the Mediterranean went by, and the other passengers lunched and dined and played shipboard games, Willie was trying to deal with the knowledge that had come to him on the ship that his home language had almost gone, that his English was going, that he had no proper language left, no gift of expression. He didn't tell Ana. Every time he spoke he was testing himself, to see how much he still knew, and he preferred to stay in the cabin dealing with this foolish thing that had befallen him. Alexandria was spoilt for him, and the Suez Canal. (He remembered—as from another, happier life, far from his passage now between the red desert glare on both sides—Krishna Menon in his dark double-breasted suit walking beside the flowerbeds in Hyde Park, leaning on his stick, looking down, working out his United Nations speech about Egypt and the Canal.)
Three years before, when he was going to England, he had done this part of the journey in the opposite direction. He hardly knew then what he was seeing. He had a better idea now of geography and history; he had some idea of the antiquity of Egypt. He would have liked to commit the landscape to memory, but his worry about the loss of language kept him from concentrating. It was in the same unsatisfactory way that he saw the coast of Africa: Port Sudan,