The mimic men - V. S. Naipaul [129]
I was fighting the afternoon alarm of homelessness, an inseparable part of the gipsy life that had inexplicably befallen me. But this was the limit of desolation. The moment linked to nothing. I felt I had no past. Nothing had happened that morning or yesterday or the last eleven days. To attempt to explain my presence in this station to myself, or to look forward to the increasingly improbable search that awaited me in a London to which I was drawing no nearer, to attempt to do either was to be truly lost, to see myself at the end of the world. The green doors of the buffet were closed. Three circular sticky tables, a very narrow sticky counter, a sticky floor; the glass cases empty, even the plastic orange at rest in the orange-squash vat of cloudy plastic.
The tall magenta trains passed, summer clothes above, black, busy metal below, and blinded me with their racing, rippling shadows, that fell on me, on the platform. “Standing by himself on Swindon station.” They were the words of Mr Mural, breeder of boy scouts. Poor emperor, I had thought, subject to such witness. I had seen him, though, standing on Swindon station as he had stood in the photograph in Browne’s house: in his cloak, his head thrown back, dignified, aloof. Such was the exile of Mr Mural’s witness; and dignity and aloofness implied an audience. It wasn’t like this: a man sitting at the limit of desolation with sixty-six pounds of luggage in two Antler suitcases, concentrating on the moment, which he mustn’t relate to anything else. And who will later give me even Mr Mural’s proof of this moment? It was a moment of total helplessness. It occurred on an afternoon of sunshine, while the holiday trains passed.
That was a long time ago. Such a moment cannot return. It is the moment which really closes that section of my life which I have been chronicling these past fourteen months. An absurd moment, but from it and by it I measure my recovery. Je vens d’lué.
It does not worry me now, as it worried me when I began this book, that at the age of forty I should find myself at the end of my active life. I do not now think this is even true. I no longer yearn for ideal landscapes and no longer wish to know the god of the city. This does not strike me as loss. I feel, instead, I have lived through attachment and freed myself from one cycle of events. It gives me joy to find that in so doing I have also fulfilled the fourfold division of life prescribed by our Aryan ancestors. I have been student, householder and man of affairs, recluse.
My life has never been more physically limited than it has been during these last three years. Yet I feel that in this time I have cleared the decks, as it were, and prepared myself for fresh action. It will be the action of a free man. What this action will be I cannot say. I used to think of journalism; sometimes I used to think of a job with the UN. But these were attractive only to a harassed man. I might go into business again. Or I might spend the next ten years working on a history of the British Empire. I cannot say. Yet some fear of action remains. I do not wish to be re-engaged in that cycle from which I have freed myself. I fear to be continually washed up on this city.
Nine or ten months ago, when I was writing about my marriage and had written myself back into my aching love for Sandra, I used to ask myself what I would do if suddenly one day, from behind my pillar, I saw her enter the dining-room alone. I know of course what I would have done then: the question was no more than a wish. But now I find I have gone back to something closer to my original view. I once again see my marriage as an episode in parenthesis; I see all its emotions as, profoundly, fraudulent. So writing, for all its initial distortion, clarifies, and even becomes a process of life.
I do not believe I exaggerate either about Sandra or my mood. Last Saturday there was much excitement in the hotel. We, through our lord and lady,