Half a Life_ A Novel - V. S. Naipaul [64]
One day I couldn't find that envelope. I asked the house people; Ana asked. But no one had seen anything or had anything to say. The loss of the passport worried me more than everything else. Without my passport I didn't see how I could prove to any official in Africa or England or India who I was. It was all right for Ana to say that I should write home for another passport. Her idea of bureaucracy was of a strict, impartial thing, grinding slowly, but grinding. I knew the ways of our offices—easy for me to re-create in my mind's eye: the pea-green walls shiny with grime at the levels of head and shoulders and bottom, the rough carpentry of counters and cashiers' cages, the floor black with dirt, the pan-chewing clerks in their trousers or lungis, each man correctly marked on the forehead with a fresh caste-mark (his principal duty of the day), on every desk the ragged stacks of old files in many faded colours, poor-quality paper crumbling away—and I knew that I would wait a long time in far-off Africa, and nothing would come. Without my passport I had no credentials, no claim on anyone. I would be lost. I wouldn't be able to move. The more I thought about it, the more unprotected I felt. For some days I could think of nothing else. It began to be like my torment, on the way out, all down the coast of Africa, about losing the gift of language.
Ana said one morning, “I've been talking to the cook. She thinks we should go to a fetish-man. There is a very famous one twenty or thirty miles from here. He is known in all the villages. I've asked the cook to call him.”
I said, “Who do you think would want to steal a passport and old letters?”
Ana said, “We mustn't spoil it now. We mustn't take any names. Please be ruled by me. We mustn't even think of anyone. We must leave it to the fetish-man. He's a very serious and self-respecting man.”
She said the next day, “The fetish-man is coming in seven days.”
That day Júlio the carpenter found the brown envelope and one of Roger's letters in his workshop. Ana called the cook and said, “That's good. But there are other things. The fetish-man still has to come.” Day after day it went on like this, with new discoveries—Roger's letters, my school exercise books—in various places. But the passport and the five-pound notes were still missing, and everyone knew that the fetish-man was still coming. In the end he never came. The day before he was due the passport and the money were found in one of the small drawers of the bureau. Ana sent the fetish-man money by the cook. He sent it back, because he hadn't come.
Ana said, “It is something you must remember. Africans may not be afraid of you and me, but they are afraid of one another. Every man has access to the fetish-man, and this means that even the humblest man has power. In that way they are better off than the rest of us.”
I had got the passport back. I felt safe again. Ana and I, as if by agreement, talked no more about the matter. We never mentioned the fetish-man. But the ground had moved below me.
*
OUR FRIENDS—or the people we saw on weekends—had their estate houses within a two-hour drive. Most of that would have been on dirt roads, each with its own quirks and dangers (some roads twisting through African villages), and anything much beyond two hours was hard to do. The tropical day was twelve hours long, and the rule in the bush was that people on the road should