Half a Life_ A Novel - V. S. Naipaul [65]
In the beginning I saw this life as rich and exciting. I liked the houses, the very wide verandahs on all sides (hung with bougainvillaea or some other vine), the cool, dark inner rooms from where the bright light and the garden became beautiful—though the light was harsh when you were in it, full of stinging insects, and the garden was sandy and coarse, burnt away in some parts and in other parts threatening to go back to bush. From within these cool and comfortable houses the climate itself seemed like a blessing, as though the wealth of the people had brought about a change in nature, and the climate had ceased to be the punishing disease-laden thing it had been for Ana's grandfather and others in the early days.
In the beginning I wished only to be taken into this rich and safe life, so beyond anything I had imagined for myself, and I could be full of nerves when I met new people. I didn't want to see doubt in anyone's eyes. I didn't want questions I wouldn't be able to handle with Ana listening. But the questions were not asked; people kept whatever thoughts they might have had to themselves; among these estate people Ana had authority. And, very quickly, I shed my nerves. But then after a year or so I began to understand—and I was helped in this understanding by my own background—that the world I had entered was only a half-and-half world, that many of the people who were our friends considered themselves, deep down, people of the second rank. They were not fully Portuguese, and that was where their own ambition lay.
With these half-and-half friends it was as with the town on the coast. It was always an adventure to drive to the town; but after an hour or so there everything went stale. In some such way a morning drive to an estate house for Sunday lunch could seem fresh and full of promise, but after an hour or so in the house with people who had lost their glamour, and whose stories were too well known, there was nothing more to say, and we were glad, all of us, to have the long business of eating and drinking to attend to, until, at three o'clock, when the sun was still high, we could get into our four-wheel drives and start for home.
These estate friends and neighbours, who had come with the land, we understood only in the broadest of ways. We saw them in the way they chose to present themselves to us; and we saw the same segment of the person each time. They became like people in a play we might have been studying at school, with everyone a “character,” and every character reduced to a few points.
The Correias, for instance, were proud of their aristocratic name. They were also obsessed with money. They talked about it all the time. They lived with the idea of a great disaster about to happen. They were not sure what this disaster was going to be, whether it was going to be local or worldwide, but they felt it was going to do away with their security both in Africa and in Portugal. So they had bank accounts in London, New York and Switzerland. The idea was that when the bad time came they would have an “envelope” of ready money in at least one of these places. The Correias spoke about these bank accounts to everybody. Sometimes they seemed simple-minded; sometimes they seemed to be boasting. But really what they wanted was to infect others with their vision of coming disaster, to start a little panic among their friends in the bush, if only to feel that in their own caution with the bank accounts they had been far-sighted, and ahead of everybody else.
Ricardo was a big, military-looking man with his grey hair in a military-style crewcut. He liked practising