Half a Life_ A Novel - V. S. Naipaul [85]
Her family had a small plot of land, perhaps two acres, with fruit trees and flowers and chickens and animals. Graça loved all of these things. They were things she had known since childhood. She loved seeing the hens sitting patiently on their eggs, seeing the fluffy little yellow chicks hatching out, cheeping, all of the brood being able to find shelter below the spread-out wings of the fierce, clucking mother hen, following the mother hen everywhere, and gradually, over a few weeks, growing up, each with its own colour and character. She loved having her cats follow her about in the field, and seeing them run very fast out of joy and not fear. The thought of cooping up these little creatures, cats or chickens, gave her great pain. The thought now of giving them all up for ever and being locked away herself was too much for her. She became frightened that the nuns would go behind her back to her mother, and her mother, religious and obedient, would give her away to them. That was when she decided to marry Luis, a neighbour's son. Her mother recognised her panic and agreed.
He had been after her for some time, and he was handsome. She was sixteen, he was twenty-one. Socially they were matched. She was more at ease with him than with the convent girls, most of whom were well-to-do. He worked as a mechanic for a local firm that dealt in cars and trucks and agricultural machinery, and he talked of setting up on his own. He was already a drinker; but at this stage it seemed only stylish, part of his go-ahead ways.
They moved after their marriage to the capital. He felt he was getting nowhere in the local town; he would never be able to start up on his own; the local rich people controlled everything and didn't allow the poor man to live. For a while in the capital they stayed with a relation of Luis's. Luis got a job as a mechanic in the railways, and then they were allocated a railway house that matched Luis's official grade. It was a small three-roomed house, one of a line, and built only to fit into that line. It was not built for the climate. It faced west; it baked every afternoon and cooled down only at about nine or ten in the evening. It was a wretched place to be in, day after day; it stretched everyone's nerves. Graça had her two children there. Just after the birth of her second child something happened in her head, and she found herself walking in a part of the capital she didn't know. At about the same time Luis was sacked for his drinking. That was when they started on their wandering life. Luis's skill as a mechanic kept them afloat, and there were times when they did very well. He still could charm people. He took up estate work and quickly became a manager. He was like that, always starting well and picking things up fast. But always, in every job, his resolve wore thin; some darkness covered his mind; there was a crisis, and a crash.
As much as by the life she had had with Luis, she was fatigued by the lies she had had to tell about him, almost from the beginning, to cover up his drinking. It had made her another kind of person. One afternoon she came back with the children from some excursion and they found him drinking home-made banana spirit with the African gardener, a terrible old drunk. The children were frightened; Graça had given them a horror of drinking. Now she had to think fast and say something different.