The mimic men - V. S. Naipaul [114]
Nationalization? I would go to London. The idea of a delegation had been accepted: much work had been done behind the scenes, by friend and enemy. In the fortnight I would be away I would be undermined. Violence would be sustained; I would have nothing to return to. I began to know relief, to tell the truth; I longed to leave.
6
RELIEF: I was astonished by the mood that settled on me. Departure had eluded me once before. Now at last, deviously, it was coming: fulfilment and truth. There would be a return, of course; but that would be in the nature of a visit, an ascertaining of what I knew would be there. The time before a departure is a splendid thing. I made my preparations slowly. My briefing was the least of my worries. I had the facts at my fingertips and knew our arguments by heart. And London had made its attitude clear. It would accept a delegation, but the delegation would not be received by the Minister. London was playing the game up to a point, doing us a favour.
Crop-time in Isabella, of the burning sugar-cane fields: early spring in London. The overcoat, then, which it had always given me pleasure to hold over my arm in all the light and heat of our airport lounge: the mark of the man required to travel. On the road to the airport: houses of tin and timber, Mediterranean colours, fields, trees, shops, hoardings, the black face advertisements for toothpaste and stout: none of this would be seen with the eye of possession again. At the airport there was a demonstration. It surprised me, this thoroughness. It was of our movement, of course; it was favourable. I made a speech suited to the occasion; it came as easily as the others. My last speech: I kept my style to the end. Presently we were sealed off, and rising above fields, rivers, roads and settlements whose logic had never been clearer.
Such a send-off; and an almost private arrival at London Airport. This might have made me sensible of the pathos of the politics of places like ours. But now it fitted my mood. A representative of our Commission; junior officials from the Ministry; no newspapermen. But there was a motorcar and a chauffeur; and, at the end of the journey, a first-class hotel. There are few things as fine as an arrival at a first-class hotel in a big city. One is luxuriously housed, with the responsibility only of paying the bill. About one there is a muted, urgent hum of activity: a score of services await one’s lightest call. Glamour touches everyone: the chambermaid, the telephone girl, whose accent and intonation remain with one, the men at the desk, the girl at the newspaper kiosk. They are part of the fairyland, which continues as fairyland until one catches sight of the telephonist at her winking board, the weary uniformed figures sitting slackly on chairs in the laundry rooms, and one sees the pale night-clerk arriving in his shabby macintosh, until the structure of fairyland becomes plain, and the hotel becomes a place of work, linked not to the glamour of airline timetables in racks but to houses such as those seen on the drive from the airport. This is the time to leave; this is when the days begin to race and grow tasteless. Until this time, though, the hotel is a place which radiates its magic to the city.
I was free. Such talks with officials as we had planned were not to take place for a few days. I was alone. Many of my aides had disappeared into various corners of the city, seeking pleasure or looking up friends and relations, students or immigrants, for whom they had brought gifts of rum and cigarettes. How easily in this city they dwindled! A link, this, with my own past in the city. But this was the city which, exploring now from the hotel, I consciously tried to abolish. I had dissected and destroyed the glamour of this city; I had seen it as made up of individuals; I had ceased to see.
Now I tried to re-create the city as show: that city of the magical light in which I could walk without