Half a Life_ A Novel - V. S. Naipaul [54]
He wished he had come to Ana's country in another way. The town was big and splendid, far finer than anything he had imagined, not something he would have associated with Africa. Its grandeur worried him. He didn't think he would be able to cope with it. The strange people he saw on the streets knew the language and the ways of the place. He thought, “I am not staying here. I am leaving. I will spend a few nights here and then I will find some way of going away.” That was how he thought all the time he was in the capital, in the house of one of Ana's friends, and that was how he thought during the slow further journey in a small coasting ship to the northern province where the estate was: going back a small part of the way he had just come, but closer now to the land, closer to the frightening mouths and wetlands of very wide rivers, quiet and empty, mud and water mixing in great slow swirls of green and brown. Those were the rivers that barred any road or land route to the north.
They got off at last at a little low-built concrete town, grey and ochre and fading white, with straight streets like the capital but without big advertisements, without even that clue to the life of the place. Just outside, the narrow asphalt road led inland through open country. Always, then, Africans, small and slight people here, walking on the red earth on either side of the asphalt, walking as if in wilderness, but it was not wilderness to them. Never far away, marked by scratchings of maize and cassava and other things, were African settlements, huts and reed-fenced yards, the huts with straight neat lines and roofs of a long fine grass that seemed at times to catch the sun and then shone like long, well-brushed hair. Very big grey rocks, cone-shaped, some the size of hills, rose abruptly out of the earth, each rock cone isolated, a landmark on its own. They turned off into a dirt road. The bush was as high as the car and the villages they passed were more crowded than on the asphalt road. The dirt road was red and dry but there were old puddles that splashed spots of black mud on the windscreen. They left this road and began to climb a noticeable slope towards the house. The road here was corrugated when straight; where it turned it was trenched by the rains, water making its own way down. The house was in the middle of an overgrown old garden and in the shade of a great, branching rain tree. Bougainvillaea screened the verandah which ran on three sides of the lower floor.
The air was hot and stale inside. Looking out from the bedroom window, through wire netting and dead insects, at the rough garden and the tall paw-paw trees and the land falling away past groves of cashews and clusters of grass roofs to the rock cones which in the distance appeared to make a continuous low pale-blue range, Willie thought, “I don't know where I am. I don't think I can pick my way back. I don't ever want this view to become familiar. I must not unpack. I must never behave as though I am staying.”
He stayed for eighteen years.
He slipped one day on the front steps of the estate house. Ana's white grandfather, who at one time went every year to Lisbon and Paris—that was the story—had built the house in the early days of money, after the 1914 war, and the front steps were semi-circular and of imported white-and-grey marble. The marble was now cracked, mossy in the cracks, and on this rainy morning slippery with the wet and the pollen from the big shade tree.
Willie woke up in the military hospital in the town. He was among wounded black soldiers with shining faces and tired red eyes. When Ana came to see him he said, “I am going to leave you.”
She