Half a Life_ A Novel - V. S. Naipaul [81]
It was only after we had left the lunch table that I came face to face with Graça, the new manager's wife, Carla's friend from the convent school. The first thing I noticed about her were her light-coloured eyes—disturbed eyes: they made me think again about her husband. And the second thing I noticed was that, for a second or two, no more, those eyes had looked at me in a way that no woman had looked at me before. I had the absolute certainty, in that second, that those eyes had taken me in not as Ana's husband or a man of unusual origin, but as a man who had spent many hours in the warm cubicles of the places of pleasure. Sex comes to us in different ways; it alters us; and I suppose in the end we carry the nature of our experience on our faces. The moment lasted a second. It might have been fantasy, that reading of the woman's eyes, but it was a discovery for me, something about women, something to be added to my sensual education.
I met her again two weeks later, at a patriotic occasion in the town, which began with a military parade in honour of a visiting general in the main square. It was a strange occasion, full of pomp and splendour, in which at the same time no one believed. It was an open secret that this conscript army, assembled here at such cost, no longer wanted to fight a war in Africa; it had become more concerned with conditions at home. And while at one time there was praise for the general who had devised the strategy of the wide sweep to the borders, now (when, from what we heard, it was already too late) it was said that the better strategy would have been to deploy the army on the border, in a chain of fortified areas, each fortified area with a strong mobile force that could combine with others at any given point. But on that Saturday morning all was still well with the army in the town. There were flags and speeches. The band played and the parade went on, and we all, young and old, Portuguese and Africans and people of the half-and-half world, merchants and loafers and beggar children, stood and watched and were carried away by the uniforms and the swords and the ceremonial, the music and the marching, the shouted orders and the complicated parade evolutions.
Afterwards there was the reception for the visiting general in the little governor's house in the town, opened up for the occasion. The governor's house was the oldest building in the town and one of the oldest in the colony. Some people said it was two hundred and fifty years old; but no one knew precisely. It was a stone-and-rubble building on two floors, square and plain, and from the outside it was perfectly ordinary. Perhaps in the old days governors had lived there or stayed there when they visited; but nobody lived in the governor's house now. It was a mixture of museum and historical monument, and the lower floor was open to the public one day a week. The two or three times I had been I hadn't seen anybody else, and there wasn't much to look at: a bleached but newish rowing boat that was said to be like the one Vasco da Gama had used when he came ashore here; and after that an assortment of old anchors, sometimes quite small, unexpectedly tall wooden rudders, put together from great planks and showing the skill of carpenters working with rough and heavy tools, winches, lengths of old rope: historical naval debris, like forgotten family junk, which no one wanted to throw away but which no one could identify and truly understand and honour.
It was different upstairs. I had never been there before. It was a grand dark room. The wide old floorboards, dark and rich with age, had a deep shine. The shutters, set far back in the thick walls, softened the light of sea and sky. On the faded, dark-painted ceiling there was some half-effaced decoration. All around the room were portraits of old governors, all the same size and all done in the same way—simple outlines, flat colours, with the name of each governor painted in mock old lettering at the top—suggesting a recent commission by some government