The mimic men - V. S. Naipaul [14]
From room to room I moved, from district to district, going ever farther out of the heart of the city. Those houses I That impression of temporary, fragile redness, of habitations set superficially on trampled fields! Those shops! Those newsagents! Quickly each area was exhausted. I remember the total tedium of a summer Sunday – once, in my imagination, a photograph of a girl had been taken on such a day: the purest anthropomorphic sentimentality – during this day I drew the backs of all the houses I could see from my window. I was restless. I travelled to the provinces, taking trains for no reason except that of movement. I travelled to the Continent. I used my savings. Everything of note or beauty reminded me of my own disturbance, spoiling both the moment and the object. My world was being corrupted! I didn’t wish to see. But the restlessness remained. It took me to innumerable tainted rooms with drawn curtains and bedspreads suggesting other warm bodies. And once, more quickening of self-disgust than any other thing, I had a sight of the prostitute’s supper, peasant food, on a bare table in a back room.
With Lieni and Mr Shylock’s boarding-house one type of order had gone for good. And when order goes it goes. I was not marked. No celestial camera tracked my movements. I abolished landscapes from my mind. Provence on a sunny morning, the Wagon-Lit coffee cup steadied by a heavy tablespoon; the brown plateau of Northern Spain in a snowstorm; an awakening clank-and-jerk in the Alps and outside, inches from my window, a world of simple black and white. I abolished all landscapes to which I could not attach myself and longed only for those I had known. I thought of escape, and it was escape to what I had so recently sought to escape from.
But I couldn’t leave right away. There was the degree; and then I wished to go back as whole as I had come. It was two years before I felt strong enough. And then I did not leave alone.
We left from Avonmouth, a port set in a grey-green wasteland. It was August but the wind was chill. Gulls bobbed like cork amid the harbour litter. We headed to the south and sailed for thirteen days. One evening the wind began to blow. We felt for pullovers; but there was no need; this wind was warm. Butter melted in the dishes; the salt didn’t run easily; the officers changed from black to white; the stewards served ice cream instead of beef tea on deck in the morning. The wind whipped the crests of waves into spray and the spray was shot with a rainbow. Then one morning, waking to stillness, we looked out and saw the island. Each porthole framed a picture: pale blue sky, green hills, brightly-coloured houses, coconut trees, and green sea.
So already I had made the double journey between my two landscapes of sea and snow. To each, at the first parting, I thought I had said goodbye, since I had got to know each in my own way. The island before me now: the Technicolor island of The Black Swan, of cinema galleons and men-o’-war, of rippling sails and morning music by Max Steiner. But my rejoicing was not complete, to tell the truth. It was forced, it was tinged with fear; it was a little like the tourist trying to summon up a response to the desired object which, because it is so well known, leaves him cold. So too it was with London later: even from the centre, of six-guineas-a-night hotels, of helpful doormen and chauffeured Humbers, of Lord Stockwell’s drawing-room and Lady Stella’s bedroom, that other London which I had just left remained like a