The mimic men - V. S. Naipaul [12]
The warning signs were so clear. Yet at the time I thought I was simply playing, that in the keeping of trophies and writing-up of experience I was expressing a non-existent side of myself. As though we ever play. As though the personality, for all its byways and wilful deviations, all its seeming inconsistencies, does not hang together. There are certain states into which, during periods of stress, we imperceptibly sink; it is only during the climb back up that we can see how far, for all the continuing consciousness of wholeness and sanity, we had become distorted. Coming to London, the great city, seeking order, seeking the flowering, the extension of myself that ought to have come in a city of such miraculous light, I had tried to hasten a process which had seemed elusive. I had tried to give myself a personality. It was something I had tried more than once before, and waited for the response in the eyes of others. But now I no longer knew what I was; ambition became confused, then faded; and I found myself longing for the certainties of my life on the island of Isabella, certainties which I had once dismissed as shipwreck.
Shipwreck: I have used this word before. With my island background, it was the word that always came to me. And this was what I felt I had encountered again in the great city: this feeling of being adrift, a cell of perception, little more, that might be altered, if only fleetingly, by any encounter. The son-lover-brother with Lieni, the player of private games in public rooms, the sensitive young man with a girl like Beatrice; the brute with the girl who, undressed, had revealed a back of irritating coarseness and had then, in tearful response to my disgust – how inconsequentially people act in extremity – shown me a picture of her Norman farmhouse. This last remained a memory of shame for some time; for I had actually shouted at the girl. I have been guilty of three or four acts of pure cruelty in my life, no more. I have now recorded two; they occurred close together, during a period of stress.
In the great city, so three-dimensional, so rooted in its soil, drawing colour from such depths, only the city was real. Those of us who came to it lost some of our solidity; we were trapped into fixed, flat postures. And, in this growing dissociation between ourselves and the city in which we walked, scores of separate meetings, not linked even by ourselves, who became nothing more than perceivers: everyone reduced, reciprocally, to a succession of such meetings, so that first experience and then the personality divided bewilderingly into compartments. Each person concealed his own darkness. Lieni; the English student in his scarf; Duminicu, forever in my imagination sitting in vest and pants on the semen-stained magenta spread of his narrow bed, spearing ham from a tin and, moustache working above weak mouth, speaking between and through mouthfuls of his imminent escape; and myself. Little twinges of panic too, already. Not the panic of being lost or lonely; the panic of ceasing to feel myself as a whole person. The threat of other people’s lives, the remembered private landscapes, the relationships, the order which was not mine. I had longed for largeness. How, in the city, could largeness come to me? How could I fashion order out of all these unrelated adventures and encounters, myself never the same, never even the thread on which these things were hung? They came endlessly out of the darkness, and they couldn’t be placed or fixed. And always at the end of the evening the book-shaped room, the tall window, myself sitting towards the light or towards the mirror.
The signs were all there. The crash was coming, but I could