The mimic men - V. S. Naipaul [36]
But the mood that overcame us seldom came to any consummation. It might have done if we were willing to outrage all sensibility, to do in public what plebeian rumour attributed to our group. But our mood seldom carried us to our house; we could not obliterate the feeling of failure, the feeling of the house’s emptiness, the feeling that whatever solution we achieved would be only temporary, would not destroy the night or the morning to come. We had never slept on a double bed; it had always seemed to me unpleasant and, in the tropics, where the body oozes oil, unhealthy; and we had taken to sleeping in separate rooms so that the sleeplessness of the one might not disturb the other. And frequently, on returning, we had simply gone to our respective rooms.
Was it the house? It was one of those large timber town houses of the old colonial period, slightly decaying in spite of its modern kitchen. We both thought it attractive but for some reason we had never succeeded in colonizing it. Large areas of it remained empty; it felt like a rented house, which soon has to go back to its true owner. It had never seemed important to us to have a house of our own. I had no feeling for the house as home, as personal creation. I had no things, no treasures, no collection even of books, no household gods, as Sandra would have said; and apart from a few school prizes, neither had she. Still, to build a house seemed a thing to do; to continue living in an old rented house was beginning to appear ostentatious. I was looking through a picture book about Pompeii and Herculaneum. I was struck by the simplicity of the Roman house, its outward austerity, its inner, private magnificence; I was struck by its suitability to our climate; I yielded to impulse.
But was it something more? Wasn’t it that cotton-clad body, with the cleanliness and freshness of the barren, a body without danger or mystery and forbidding for that reason? A body which was no more than what it was, holding no promise of growth, speaking only of flesh and futility and our own imminent extinction.
We violate no body so much as our own; towards it we display the perversity of the cat that constantly rips its wounds open. I saw that there was waste; and I felt, let there be waste. The habits of my student days, which had never altogether died, were now revived. On the island I had become acquainted with a number of women of various races, of the utmost discretion; what had been an occasional extravagance became, as before, an addiction, but now guiltless and clinical. Sometimes I had to stifle my own disgust; sometimes it went well. And it was after a good and successful afternoon – they speak of the sadness of the animal after coitus: but in my experience fulfilment was always followed by a mood of exceptional gentleness and optimism – it was after one good afternoon that I found myself about to say to Sandra as we were dressing to go out – the sentence was fully phrased: delight had been converting itself into reporting words all afternoon – ‘Darling, I’ve had a most marvellous afternoon. I’ve been in bed with a most skilled and delightful woman.’ It was only as I was, I repeat, on the point of saying this, that I realized that perhaps similar sentences had sometimes come to Sandra herself.
And I was amazed at my innocence.
Men in the position in which I now saw myself to have been for some time arouse a variety of reactions. There is ridicule, which I find puzzling. I have never been able to enter into the Sicilian attitude to possession; though I wonder whether this ridicule isn’t simply a required attitude, and disingenuous, a covering up for a private fear. But then there is also anger, contempt, pity. And in the special nature of my marriage these things were to fall upon my head in full measure. Was it my placidity which made me indifferent, that very placidity which had dismissed the numerous stories I had had from so many people? Would I be believed if I say that