The mimic men - V. S. Naipaul [11]
But my luck – let the word stand – intervened. The next afternoon a letter in a small envelope came. I want to give you your dollar back. Please take it. No more; no dear, no love. The clear-sighted Swiss! The mystery had been too much for her; she preferred to avoid it. She had sensed more than the absurdity of our relationship; she had sensed its wrongness. And, perhaps, she had seen the absence of virtue.
Let me explain. Virtus: how could any one who had gone through Isabella Imperial and studied Latin with Major Grant fail to know the meaning of that word? Let me take you to the book-shaped room; let the scene not dissolve as we close the door and the face of the girl, already growing serious and blank, is averted and still. It was a logical moment. But it was the moment I dreaded. Both of us adrift in London, the great city, I with my past, my own darkness, she no doubt with hers. Always at these moments the talk of the past, the landscapes, their familiar settings which I wished them to describe and then feared to hear about. I never wished even in imagination to enter their Norman farmhouses or their flats in Nassjo, pronounced Neshway, or their houses set atop the rocky fiords of geography books. I never wished to hear of the relationships that bound them to these settings, the pettinesses by which they had already been imprisoned. I never wanted our darknesses, our auras, to mingle. Understand the language I use. I am describing a failure, a deficiency; and these things can be so private. I had spent all my life among women; I could not conceive of an existence away from them or their influence. Perhaps the relationship into which I had fallen with Lieni was sufficient; perhaps all else was perversion. Intimacy: the word holds the horror. I could have stayed for ever at a woman’s breasts, if they were full and had a hint of a weight that required support. But there was the skin, there was the smell of skin. There were bumps and scratches, there were a dozen little things that could positively enrage me. I was capable of the act required, but frequently it was in the way that I was capable of getting drunk or eating two dinners. Intimacy: it was violation and self-violation. These scenes in the book-shaped room didn’t always end well; they could end in tears, sometimes in anger, a breast grown useless being buttoned up, a door closed on a room that seemed to require instant purification.
But there was my ‘character’. I took to retaining trophies from the girls who came to the book-shaped room: stockings, various small garments, once even a pair of shoes from a girl who had thought of staying the night. Not for fetichist reasons, I give my word! Though even now I cannot understand my motives. I believe I had read or heard that it excited some men to think of girls going back to their rooms and travelling on underground trains without certain garments. Nor can I understand why I began keeping a sexual diary. I began it, I remember, out of boredom and idleness; but soon it developed into a type of auto-erotic enterprise. It was myself, my minutest reactions, that I sought to analyse. Ridiculous! Vile! So it was to me too, even at the time. Yet I persevered, and stopped only when I discovered that Lieni, who had been sending me out into the world to conquer, read this diary as regularly as I wrote it. I was not annoyed. It was the sort of relationship I had with her: it seemed to me no intrusion that she should come into my room at odd hours or read my letters. I welcomed this sort of participation. But I stopped the diary. She spoke about it to some of the boarders in the front basement room one evening; it was considered a great joke, suited to my ‘character’. The Frenchman said, ‘You should go to France and marry a French girl.’ But his thoughts must have been elsewhere, perhaps on the dinner of Lieni’s he had just eaten, for he added: ‘She will make you the most wonderful dishes with a little piece of bread and a little