Half a Life_ A Novel - V. S. Naipaul [69]
There had been no challenge to our authoritarian but easygoing government for many years, and it had grown strangely lazy. In his great security the ruler had grown to feel that the details of governing were a burden, or so it appeared; and he had farmed out or leased out important governmental activities to eager, energetic and loyal people. Those people became very rich; and the richer they became the more loyal they were, and the better they did the jobs that had been farmed out to them. So there was a kind of rough logic and effectiveness in this principle of government.
Some such principle was at work now in the growth of the garrison and the development of our town. The peace was continuing. People no longer lived with the idea of danger. Yet year by year the war money came. It touched us all. We felt rewarded and virtuous. Everybody counted his gain many times. And then it came out that the new money had been touching our friend Correia more than anybody else in our group, sly Correia who for years had tried to frighten us with his vision of disaster, and had many bank accounts abroad. Correia had been brought into contact with some great man in the capital, and (while still running his estate) he had become the agent in our town or province, or perhaps even the country, for a number of foreign manufacturers of unlikely-sounding technical things. In the beginning Correia liked to boast of his closeness to the great man, who was a proper Portuguese. The great man clearly had a lot to do with Correia's agencies, and we talked among ourselves in a mocking, jealous way about the extraordinary relationship. Had Correia sought out the great man? Or had the great man, for some special reason, and through some intermediary (perhaps a merchant in the capital) chosen Correia? It didn't matter, though, how it had come about. Correia had scored. He was way above us.
He talked of trips to the capital (by air, and not by the dingy old coasting ships most of us still used); he talked of lunches and dinners with the great man, and once even of a dinner at the great man's house. But then after a while Correia talked less of the great man. He began to pretend, when he was with us, that his business ideas were his own; and we had to pretend with him. Though when he recited the foreign companies he was involved with, and the technical-sounding things he was importing, things that the army or the town might some day need, I found myself amazed at how little I knew of the modern world. And amazed at the same time at the ease with which Correia (who really knew only about estate work) was picking his way through it.
He became our big shot. When he found that the jealousy had subsided, and no one among us, his friends and neighbours, was quibbling about his new position, he became oddly modest. He said to me one Sunday, “You could do what I do, Willie. It's just a matter of courage. Let me tell you. You've spent time in England. You know the Boots shops. Over here we need the things they make, the medicines and other things. They have no agent. You could be the agent. So you write to them. You provide the references they will ask for, and you're in business. They'll be delighted.” I said, “But what am I going to do with the goods they send me? How am I going to start selling it? Where am I going to put it?” He said, “That's the trouble. To do business you have to be in business. You have to start thinking in a different way. You can't write to people like Boots and think they'll want to do business with you just for a year and a day.” And I thought, from the way he talked, that he and his principal had gone quite seriously into the Boots business, and nothing had come of it.
He said one Sunday that he had begun to think of representing a certain famous manufacturer of helicopters. That took our breath away, because we knew now