Half a Life_ A Novel - V. S. Naipaul [68]
But the Africans around us seemed not to have heard anything. There was no change in their manner. Not that day or the next, not the next week or the next month. Correia, the man with the bank accounts, said that the ordinariness was ominous; some terrible jacquerie was preparing here as well. But the ordinariness stayed with us for the rest of the year, and seemed likely to endure. And all the precautions we had been taking—having guns and clubs to hand in the bedroom: futile if there had been anything like a general insurrection, or even a revolt in the quarters—began to seem excessive.
That was when I learned to use a gun. Word came to us and our neighbours, discreetly, that we could get instruction at the police shooting range in the town. The little garrison didn't have that facility, so unready was it for a war. Our neighbours were eager, but I didn't particularly want to go to the police range. I had never wanted to handle guns. There hadn't been anything like a cadet corps at the mission school; and my worry—greater than my worry about Africans—was that I was going to make a fool of myself before important people. But then, to my great surprise, I was entranced the first time I looked down a gun-sight with a finger on the trigger. It seemed to me the most private, the most intense moment of conversation with oneself, so to speak, with that split-second of right decision coming and going all the time, almost answering the movements of one's mind. It wasn't at all what I was expecting. I feel that the religious excitement that is supposed to come to people who meditate on the flame of a single candle in an otherwise dark room was no greater than the pleasure I felt when I looked down a gun-sight and became very close to my own mind and consciousness. In a second the scale of things could alter and I could be lost in something like a private universe. It was strange, being on the shooting range in Africa and thinking in a new way of my father and his brahmin ancestors, starveling servants of the great temple. I bought a gun. I set up targets in the grounds of Ana's grandfather's house and practised whenever I could. Our neighbours began to look at me with a new regard.
The government took its time, but then things began to move. The garrison was increased. There were new barracks, three storeys high, in bright white concrete. The cantonment or military area spread, plain concrete on bare sand. A board with various military emblems said that we had become the headquarters of a new military command. The life of the town altered.
*
THE GOVERNMENT was authoritarian. But most of the time we didn't think of it like that. We felt the government to be far away, something in the capital, something in Lisbon. It sat lightly on us here. I worried about it only at sisal-cutting time, when we made our requisitions from the prisons, and they, for a consideration, sent convicts (properly guarded) to cut sisal. Cutting sisal was dangerous work. Village Africans didn't want to do it. Sisal is like a bigger aloe or pineapple plant, or like a giant spiky green rose, four or five feet high, with thick pulpy blades instead of petals. The blades have cutting serrated edges, frightful to run your hand down the wrong way, and are very thick at the base. They are awkward and dangerous to handle and hard to hack away. The long black point at the end of a sisal blade is needle-sharp and poisonous. Rats are plentiful in a sisal plantation; they like the shade and feed on sisal pulp; and venomous snakes come to feed on the rats, swallowing them whole, and very slowly. It is frightening to see half a rat, head or tail, sticking out of a snake's distended mouth and still apparently living. A sisal plantation is a terrible place, and it was a rule (or just our practice) that a medical nurse should be standing by with medicines and snake-bite serum when sisal was being cut. Such dangerous work; and only five per cent of sisal pulp became sisal fibre; and that fibre was cheap and was used