Half a Life_ A Novel - V. S. Naipaul [57]
I felt very far away from everything I had known, a stranger in that white concrete house with all the strange old Portuguese colonial furniture, the unfamiliar old bathroom fittings; and when I lay down to sleep I saw again—for longer than I had seen them that day—the fantastic rock cones, the straight asphalt road, and the Africans walking.
I drew comfort from Ana, her strength and her authority. And just as now, as you may have noticed, Sarojini, I lean on you, so in those days, ever since she had agreed to my being with her in Africa, I leaned on Ana. I believed in a special way in her luck. Some of this had to do with the very fact that she was a woman who had given herself to me. I believed that she was in some essential way guided and protected, and as long as I was with her no harm could come to me. It may be because of something in our culture that, in spite of appearances, men are really looking for women to lean on. And, of course, if you are not used to governments or the law or society or even history being on your side, then you have to believe in your luck or your star or you will die. I know that you have inherited our mother's uncle's radical genes and have different ideas. I am not going to argue with you. I just want to tell you why I was able to follow someone I hardly knew to a colonial country in Africa of which I knew little except that it had difficult racial and social ideas. I loved Ana and I believed in her luck. The two ideas went together. And since I know, Sarojini, that you have your own ideas about love as well, I will explain. Ana was important to me because I depended on her for my idea of being a man. You know what I mean and I think we can call it love. So I loved Ana, for the great gift she had brought me, and to an equal degree I believed in her luck. I would have gone anywhere with her.
In the sitting room one morning, in that first or second week, I found a little African maid. She was very thin, shiny-faced, and in a flimsy cotton dress. She said, in an overfamiliar but rather stylish way, “So you are Ana's London man.” She put her broom against the high upholstered armchair, sat on the chair as on a throne, both her forearms resting flat on the worn upholstered arms of the chair, and began to engage me in polite conversation. She said, as if speaking from a textbook, “Did you have a pleasant journey?” And: “Have you had a chance to see something of the country? What do you think of the country?” I had been studying the language for some time and knew enough of it now to talk in the same stilted way to the little maid. Ana came in. She said, “I wondered who it was.” The little maid dropped her grand manner, got up from the chair and took up her broom again. Ana said, “Her father is Júlio. He is the carpenter. He drinks too much.”
I had met Júlio. He was a man of mixed race with smiling unreliable eyes, and he lived in the servants' quarters. His drinking was a joke there, and I was to learn not to be too frightened by it. He was a weekend drinker, and often late in the afternoon on a Friday or Saturday or Sunday his African wife would run out to the garden of the main house, quite alone in her terror, moving backwards or sideways step by step, her African cloth slipping off her shoulder, watching all the time for the drunken man in the quarters. This could go on until the light faded. Then the generator would come on, drowning everything with its vibration. The unsteady electric light would further alter the aspect of things; the crisis would pass; and in the quarters in the morning there would