The mimic men - V. S. Naipaul [18]
But more often we see the true politican in decay. The gifts, unexpressed, the skills, undiscovered, turn sour within him; and he who began as wise and generous and fighting for the good cause turns out to be weak and vacillating. He abandons his principles; with every defeat he becomes more desperate; he loses his sense of timing, changing too early or too late; he even loses a sense of dignity. He turns to drink or to fine food or to women coarse or superfine; he becomes a buffoon, contemptible even to himself, except in the still hours of the late evening, when he has no audience save himself and his wife who, though embittered, remains loyal because she alone knows the true man. And through everything he never gives up. Here is your leader. Here is your true politician, the man with the nebulous skill. Offer him power. It will revive him; it will restore the man he once was.
I do not seek to describe myself. For me politics remained little more than a game, a heightening of life, an extension of the celebratory mood in which I returned to my island. Someone better equipped, someone who had paid more attention to the sources of power and had more of the instincts, would have survived. Celebration: after London this was what I wished to maintain. Power came easily; it took me by surprise. It filled me with a degree of tremulousness which more than anything else unfitted me for the position I found myself called upon to hold. I remember so well – how far away that emotion seems now, though I know that, given power again, it will come back – I remember so well the pity I felt for people of all conditions. All were so far below me; and my inexplicable luck made me fearful.
At my secretary’s slightest summons the barber would leave his little shop and come running to my house. His joy in this house exceeded my own. I had built it a few years before, when my marriage was breaking up; it was modelled on the house of the Vetii in Pompeii, with a swimming-pool replacing the impluvium. The happy barber would run his hands through my hair and say, ‘Your hair very soft, sir. What you use? Something special?’ It was the sort of thing Lieni might have said; and I would grieve for the man. It was naturally fine hair, it was true, and Lord Stockwell himself complimented me on it at our first meeting: ‘You’ll never grow bald, that’s for sure.’ But that was at an awkward moment; it was during our little nationalization crisis, and Stockwell’s estates were at issue. By this sentence Lord Stockwell not only removed tension but also, as I could not help noticing with admiration, dismissed his own immense, clumsy height, from which he could no doubt see little more of me than my hair. For Lord Stockwell there was an excuse, and for Lieni. But not for the lowly barber; and I thought, ‘How can this man endure? How, running his hands daily through the hair of other people, can he bear to keep on?’ And not only the barber and the ridiculous shoeshine men, applying themselves with vigour and a curious feminine pleasure to the removal of the last speck of dust and dirt from my shoes, and inviting me to commend their work. How could the newspaper men endure, ‘meeting me at the airport’ – words which occurred, deliciously, in their printed reports? They ran so eagerly to meet me, as full of the importance of their jobs as the girl apprentice at the hairdresser’s. They had lost their sense of their place in the scheme of things. How did they preserve their self-esteem?
To everyone I sought, secretly, and from the height of my power, to