The mimic men - V. S. Naipaul [102]
What did we talk about? We were, of course, of the left. We were socialist. We stood for the dignity of the working man. We stood for the dignity of distress. We stood for the dignity of our island, the dignity of our indignity. Borrowed phrases! Left-wing, right-wing: did it matter? Did we believe in the abolition of private property? Was it relevant to the violation which was our subject? We spoke as honest men. But we used borrowed phrases which were part of the escape from thought, from that reality we wanted people to see but could ourselves now scarcely face. We enthroned indignity and distress. We went no further.
I am not sure that the wild men of our party did not speak more honestly than we did. They promised to abolish poverty in twelve months. They promised to abolish bicycle licences. They promised to discipline the police. They promised intermarriage. They promised farmers higher prices for sugar and copra and cocoa. They promised to renegotiate the bauxite royalties and to nationalize every foreign-owned estate. They promised to kick the whites into the sea and send the Asiatics back to Asia. They promised; they promised; and they generated the frenzy of the street-corner preacher who thrills his hearers with a vision of the unattainable rich world going up in a ball of fire. We disapproved, of course. But what could we do? We were awed, I say. We were helpless with our awe. It wasn’t dishonesty. Detachment alone would have shown us that in the very success of our movement lay the pointlessness and hopelessness of our situation. In our very success lay that disorder which, daily, we feared more.
3
THE election was at hand. The frenzy was heightened and given acute point. To the victors would go the spoils: further constitutional conferences in London and, after that, independence. More night meetings, more processions, demonstrations, motorcades; tedious journeys by motorcar; late meetings in the Roman house. Among our supporters, among our court, there were occasional alarms. We let them play with visions of defeat which, in the frenzy, must have appeared total; they were encouraged to greater effort.
It all led to the inevitable: the success of election night, the cheering, the flag-waving, the drinking. It led to that moment of success which, after long endeavour, is so shatteringly brief: a moment that can almost be fixed by the clock, and recedes and recedes, leaving emptiness, exhaustion, even distaste: dissatisfaction that nags and nags and at last defines itself as apprehension and unease.
Unease: with us, even during those first hours of victory in the Roman house, this centred on Browne. The thought came to us at intervals that in just a few hours, between the colleague of the day before and the Chief Minister of a few hours hence, he had been set apart. He had been set apart by our efforts. The play was over. Exhilaration went. We could no longer draw strength from one another. It was one of those occasions when each person looks down into himself and finds only weakness, sees the boy or child he was and has never ceased to be.
From this awareness of weakness – strength only when it was in combat with something we judged to be strong – we arrived at dismay. It was as though, in a tug-of-war contest, the other side had suddenly let go. It has happened in twenty countries like ours: the sobering moment of success, when playacting turns out to be serious. Our grievances were our reality, what we knew, what had permitted us to grow, what had made us. We wondered at the ease of our success; we wondered why no one had called our bluff. We felt our success to be fraudulent. But none of this would have mattered as much if we hadn’t also understood that in the game we had embarked on there could be no withdrawal. And each man was now alone.
That morning saw the end of the life of the Roman