Half a Life_ A Novel - V. S. Naipaul [86]
For years she had dreamt of coming back to the countryside she knew as a child, where on her family's two-acre plot simple things, chickens and animals and flowers and fruit trees, had made her so happy in the school holidays. She had come back now; she was living as the manager's wife in an estate house with antique colonial furniture. It was a sham grandeur; things were as uncertain as they had ever been. It was as though the moods and stresses of the past would always be with her, as though her life had been decided long before.
This was what Graça told me about herself over many months. She had had a few lovers on the way. She didn't make them part of the main story. They occurred outside of that, so to speak, as though in her memory her sexual life was separate from her other life. And in this oblique way I learned that there had been people before me, usually friends of them both, and once even an employer of Luis's, who had read her eyes as I had read them, and spotted her need. I was jealous of all of these lovers. I had never known jealousy before. And thinking of all these people who had seen her weakness and pressed home their attack, I remembered some words of Percy Cato's in London, and for the first time had my own sense of the brutality of the sexual life.
I was deep in that brutality now with Graça. Sexual pictures of her played in my head when I was not with her. With her guidance, since she was the more experienced, our love-making had taken forms that had astonished, worried and then delighted me. Graça would say, “The nuns wouldn't approve of this.” Or she would say, “I suppose if I went to confession tomorrow I would have to say, ‘Father, I've been immodest.'” And it was hard to forget what she had taught, to unlearn the opening up of new senses; it was hard to go back to the sexual simplicities of earlier days. And I thought, as I often did on such occasions, of the puerility of my father's desires.
The months passed. Even after two years I felt myself helpless in this life of sensation. At the same time now some half-feeling of the inanity of my life grew within me, and with it there came the beginning of respect for the religious outlawing of sexual extremes.
Ana said to me one day, “People are talking about you and Graça. You know that, don't you?”
I said, “It's true.”
She said, “You can't talk to me like this, Willie.”
I said, “I wish you could be in the room when we make love. Then you would understand.”
“You shouldn't do this, Willie. I thought you at least had manners.”
I said, “I'm talking to you like a friend, Ana. I have no one else to tell.”
She said, “I think you've gone mad.”
And later I thought that perhaps she was right. I had talked out of a moment of sexual madness.
The next day she said, “You know that Graça is a very simple person, don't you?”
I didn't know what she meant. Did she mean that Graça was poor, of no social standing, or did she mean that Graça was simple-minded?
She said, “She's simple. You know what I mean.”
A little later she came back to me and said, “I have a half-brother. Did you know that?”
“You never told me.”
“I would like to take you to see him. If you agree, I'll arrange it. I would like you to have some idea of what I've had to live with here, and why when I met you I thought I had met someone from another world.”
I felt a great pity for her, and also some worry about being punished for what I had done. I agreed to go and see her half-brother.
He lived in the African city on the edge of the town proper.
Ana said, “You must remember he is a very angry man. He wouldn't express this by shouting at you. He will show off. He will try to let you know that he doesn't care for you