The mimic men - V. S. Naipaul [120]
Even then I did not ask myself whether a return to Isabella was necessary. I wished only to delay it, to make a detour, to have a momentary escape. To recover my calm and that limpid vision of the world: this was now all my concern. Everything else dwindled: Stella, Isabella and what awaited me there. I was a student in the city again. I needed new sights, new landscapes, an unfamiliar language. Northern Spain in a snowstorm, the brown earth whitening, the light suddenly grey; Provence on a sunny morning, green and yellow and hazy, the big Wagon-Lit coffee cup kept steady by a heavy spoon.
Stopover: the word from the airline advertisements came to me. Not easy at this stage. But my frenzy ignored rebukes and overcame difficulties. And a few hours later I was walking, as in a dream, through the streets of a city, I thought I didn’t know, which yet now revealed little points of familiarity, abrupt half-remembered areas: so that reality was disturbed, sounds curiously muted, and for stretches I had the sensation of witnessing and performing actions for the second, third, fourth time. I drank the drinks I had first tasted twelve years before, nibbled at the same savouries; they rested as heavily on my stomach. A glimpse of sawdust on a tiled floor of a familiar pattern, the eye-straining fluorescent light in a dark corner, a face, snatches of conversation in a language I could only partly follow: my disturbance was complete. For the second time that day I was frantic with airline officials. But there were no aeroplanes to Isabella that day. Tomorrow, yes: a fresh sticker was gummed to my ticket. Sixteen intransit hours awaited me.
I went into bookshops and looked through expensive, difficult-to-handle editions of the country’s classics until assistants became over-attentive. Then even the shops closed and the streets had nothing to hold me. I dawdled about the hotel, in the lounge, in my room. On the cream-coloured plastic bell-push a flat-footed maid stared placidly and a slender steward raced, tray aloft, coat tails flying. Promise of delight! I rang for snacks I didn’t want and drinks I couldn’t finish. I exhausted the services of the hotel. I had a bath and got into bed. After some time I got out of bed. It was only nine o’clock. I dressed with an effort, and went out into the streets.
I took small drinks from tired barmen in little tiled bars; each drink added to the weight in my stomach. A conjunction of streets, a building, a slope, a turning: a remembered area. A woman walked slowly ahead of me and turned into a café entrance. Memory stirred. I followed the woman through the revolving door. I was strained with more than drink; I was exhausted; it was the last thing I was looking for. But my stomach lightened with an old excitement. I felt I had been guided to this place: the light, the low tables and low chairs, the slender half-filled glasses, the solitary intense young men in double-breasted suits, the carefully made-up women, in twos and threes, so cool, concealing such skills, such energy.
It is for faces I go on such occasions. The body doesn’t interest me, one body being so much like another. The excitement I feel is enough; what follows is perversity or, oddly, duty. I went for a fresh, appealing, witty face, unusually thin