The mimic men - V. S. Naipaul [124]
Do not yet think that I speak calmly from the position of the secure, the physically safe, the man who has found refuge thousands of miles away in this suburban hotel, where every evening I dine below the portraits of the man and woman whom we here regard as our protecting lord and lady. My inactivity and folly amounted to cruelty. But I was a helpless spectator of this cruelty. Helpless; yet I cannot say that at the time I felt guilt. I lived; I passed the days. Everything in the Roman house continued to work. The water in the swimming-pool continuously changed, continuously passed through the filter. If the machine had failed for thirty-six hours that blue pool, restlessly webbed with light throughout its depth, would have become as still and milky green and opaque with minute vegetation as a pool in the jungle. So the water-jets splashed; and every morning, beside them, I sat in the shade at my breakfast table – avocadoes, fried plantains, cinnamon-scented chocolate, white tablecloth, ironed white napkin, a small bowl of fresh flowers – and read the newspapers.
When the organized violence began, when men distraught with anger and fear and outrage, who considered themselves betrayed by me yet saw that in their predicament they had no one else to turn to, when these men, braving the city streets, came to me at the Roman house with tales of Asiatic distress, of women and children assaulted, of hackings, of families burnt alive in wooden houses, I closed my eyes and thought about the horsemen riding to the end of the world. The details of physical suffering entered into me. In a book about Japanese prisoner-of-war camps I had once seen a photograph: an Australian, blindfolded, on his knees, far from home, about to be beheaded. Heroic this central figure had seemed to me, in my quick fear: heroic and very private, and by this privacy ridiculing the ridicule of his tormentors. Now I asked my informers to give me no more details. I offered them the comfort I offered myself. I said, ‘Think about this as something in a book, in a newspaper. Do not give me names. Do not tell me how people died. Say instead, “Race riots occurred”. Say, “There was loss of life”.’
One poor man had brought a stone stained and sticky with blood and fine hair, the hair perhaps of a child. What could I do with his evidence, his witness? I tried to get him to enter my mind, to ride with me to the end of the empty world. His grief made him, as it had made others, receptive. It was night. I took him to the garden of the Roman house and asked him to drop the stone. He was glad to obey. The link between us then was more than the link of speech. The comfort I offered him was the comfort I offered myself, to destroy the images of vulnerable flesh. Was this cruel or fraudulent? The gift of comfort which at that moment I discovered in myself, this ability to transmit my own vision of the world, this was something I could have worked miracles with, I know, even at that late stage. But this would have required an assurance of imminent order, and to a belief in that I could lead no one. The call to action and self-fulfilment was the necessary complement to the vision I offered; without this the gift was useless, destructive. So the gift, at the moment of its discovery, was abandoned. I became a leader too late.
And it would not surprise me to hear that that very man, whose face in the dark garden I couldn’t even see, turned on me a week later when he heard that I had accepted, from our new leaders, the offer of a free and safe passage, to London again, by air, with sixty-six pounds of luggage and fifty thousand dollars. A fraction of my fortune. My irresponsibility extended even to myself: I had not taken the proper precautions. They were simple, frightened men. I am sure they had no wish to harm me. But in their situation they could no longer trust themselves;