The mimic men - V. S. Naipaul [15]
3
IN that period of my life which was to follow, the period between my preparation for life and my withdrawal from it, that period in parenthesis, when I was most active and might have given the observer the impression of a man fulfilling his destiny, in that period intensity of emotion was the thing I never achieved. I felt I had known a double failure, and I felt I continued to live between their twin threats. It was during this time, as I have said, that I thought of writing. It was my hope to give expression to the restlessness, the deep disorder, which the great explorations, the overthrow in three continents of established social organizations, the unnatural bringing together of peoples who could achieve fulfilment only within the security of their own societies and the landscapes hymned by their ancestors, it was my hope to give partial expression to the restlessness which this great upheaval has brought about. The empires of our time were short-lived, but they have altered the world for ever; their passing away is their least significant feature. It was my hope to sketch a subject which, fifty years hence, a great historian might pursue. For there is no such thing as history nowadays; there are only manifestos and antiquarian research; and on the subject of empire there is only the pamphleteering of churls. But this work will not now be written by me; I am too much a victim of that restlessness which was to have been my subject. And it must also be confessed that in that dream of writing I was attracted less by the act and the labour than by the calm and the order which the act would have implied.
It would have been, as I said, in the evening of my days. Life lived, endeavour past, the chances taken. My place of retirement an old cocoa estate, one of our rundown former slave plantations, blighted by witchbroom, not bringing in an income likely to revive any acquisitive anxiety. Myself installed in the old timber estate house, grey, its corrugated roof painted in stripes of faded red and white, the wide, low-eaved verandas hung with cooling ferns, the floors dark and worn and shining. Everywhere there would have been the smell of old timber and wax; everywhere the eye would have found pleasure in fashioned wood, in the white fretwork arabesques above doorways, the folding screen between drawing-room and dining-room, the tall panelled doors. There is no finer house than the old estate house of the islands. Few survive; I doubt whether there are now four in Isabella.
And cocoa: it is my favourite crop. It grows in the valleys of our mountain ranges, where it is cool and where on certain mornings your breath turns to vapour. There are freshwater springs that make miniature waterfalls over mossy rocks and then run clear and cold and shallow in their own channels of white sand. The floor of the cocoa woods is covered with broad brown-and-gold cocoa leaves; and between the cocoa trees, stunted, black-barked, as nervously branched as the oak, there are bright green coffee bushes with red berries; the whole sheltered by giant immortelle trees which at their due season lose all their leaves and set every hillside ablaze with bird-shaped flowers of yellow and orange which then, for days, float down on the woods. You hear the murmur and gurgle of streams everywhere, mountain streams which after rain turn to torrents that occasionally flood the depressions. Walk through the woods then at five. It is a walk from grotto to grotto; the level flood water is the colour of mud; it sucks and sighs and crackles in the gloom; and from this level water the tormented black trunks of the cocoa trees rise, their shining cocoa pods, in all the colours from lime green through scarlet to imperial purple, attached to them individually, by the shortest of stems, without leaves.
In the deep valleys of the cocoa woods the sun comes up late. I would have gone riding in the early morning. The labourers would have been at their undemanding tasks; cutting down the pods