The mimic men - V. S. Naipaul [100]
A court had developed around us. There was competition to serve; and among these helpers there was, as we knew, murder in the wings. Outside the gates strange men began to appear in the evenings. We thought at first they were from the police, and no doubt in the early days one or two were. But we got to know the faces. They were of people who had come unasked from the city to protect us. So with the court there came drama. Drama created itself around us. When reports came to us of violence, in various districts, the protection around the house increased.
What had begun could not, it seemed, be stopped. Were we in the court responsible? In the feminine atmosphere of the Roman house all was goodwill and dedication. A sacramental quality attached not only to food and drink but to the liaisons that had grown up among our courtiers, between handsome men and ugly women, handsome women and mean-featured men. Sex a sacrifice to the cause and a promise of the release that was to come: so different from the cartoon unreality I had found in the relationship between Browne’s sister and her boy-friend, ugliness coming to ugliness in mock humanity, on the only occasion I had been to Browne’s house, when we were both schoolboys at Isabella Imperial.
In the Roman house itself, then, those interiors I had feared to enter opened up to me. In this atmosphere delight could not be openly proclaimed. And I will say that the reports which increasingly reached us of violence, more and more racial in character, filled us with awe. We were already sufficiently awed at ourselves, sitting up in the still nights, the splashing fountains drawing attention to the silence, assessing our progress, writing speeches, planning tours. We felt we had discovered something good and true in ourselves. We, I say. We, I perhaps felt. But this awe was something which excluded me. For our courtiers, men and women in poor jobs in teaching and the civil service, it was awe of a sort I can only call holy. I write with control: this awe was moving and frightening to behold. It was the awe of the ungifted who thought they had, simply through enduring, suddenly discovered, in this response of the ungifted among their people, the source of the power and regeneration they had waited for without hoping to find.
I couldn’t be sure where Browne stood in this. He was as dedicated as the rest. But he was more frivolous than any of us dared be. We met regularly, but we were never as close again as on that first evening in the Roman house. It was as though each had declared himself irrevocably then, and further probings were unnecessary. So that, absurdly, we became close again on the public platform, when we each became our character.
The awe of our court excluded me, I say. I sometimes thought: they are presuming, they are asking too much of me. But I could only assent, and the time soon came when I felt it was up to the others to make some worthy reassuring statement when an Asiatic vendor was beaten up in the name of our movement, or a white girl insulted. This had to be put aside. It was superficial. Those were my own words. I heard them echoed. The truth of our movement lay in the Roman house, the court inside, the guard outside. In my own silence and assent there was dedication to the organization I had built up. There was also vanity: the vanity of the prime mover who believes it is in his power to regulate what he has created. There was no self-violation in the article I wrote for The Socialist. I wrote that violence in the Americas was not new. It had come with Columbus; we had lived with violence ever since. The cry was taken up by the court. But I noted that they continued in their special awe.
The truth