The mimic men - V. S. Naipaul [51]
At last we cleared the town and on the open road the lorry pulled away. Our driver made no attempt to keep up. When the lorry was out of sight Cecil’s father broke down. As he spoke he lost control of himself. He clenched and unclenched his fists, struck his palms and struck the back of the driver’s seat. The driver, out of sympathy and perhaps also because he feared assault, pulled up on the verge and, with his hands on the steering wheel, looked ahead past the clicking windscreen wipers.
‘Why you make me suffer like this?’ Cecil’s father asked the driver. ‘Why you make me suffer?’
‘I got his number, boss.’
‘You got his number, you got his number. What good that will do? You put me in the position of listening to all that.’
‘Telephone Mr Mitchell, boss. They will find out about the loaders and fix them up.’
‘Telephone Mr Mitchell, telephone Mr Mitchell. Hello, Mr Mitchell, some damn illiterate people insult me for ten minutes on the road this morning, and my own driver was in the wrong.’ He went wild. He was Cecil’s father and subject to the same somewhat unbalanced rages.
I tried to calm him down. ‘They were only loaders, Nana.’
This excited him more than ever. He howled and slapped his forehead. ‘They make me shame. They make me shame. Oh, my God!’ And in the parked car, close with the windows up, he behaved as though he had just been told he had lost a fortune. The bottler of Coca-Cola, the Isabella millionaire, the nominated Member of the Council.
At first, during that drive, I had felt endangered. Now I thought I saw how easy it was to destroy. A man was only what he saw of himself in others, and an intimation came to me of chieftainship in that island. This was my political awakening. This might be said to have been my first political lesson. A leader of my people? A biter of the hand that fed me? Or simply a Singh, avenging a personal shipwreck? Whatever the impulse, that lesson, so easily learned, so easily carried out when the time came, was an exceedingly simple and foolish one.
2
CECIL sometimes came home with me after school. I was always pleased when he did. I liked Cecil. He was the opposite of Hok but in his own way just as attractive. I liked his confidence and his wildness. I liked his lefthander’s gestures, that lift of the shoulder when he walked. He was impulsively generous; his father used to say, with greater truth than any of us then knew, that Cecil was born to give away. I liked to give Cecil things too. But I had little to give him. The only interesting thing our house had was paper, headed or plain, from the Education Department. My father brought home quantities; he said that the stealing of paper was not really stealing. I used to give Cecil some of this paper. His delight puzzled me; I never knew what he used the paper for.
We were going through my father’s desk one day, both Cecil and I looking for something I could give Cecil, when we came upon a worn little booklet with photographs of naked women, blurred or depilated in patches. Plump little bodies in foolish attitudes: the weak enticing the weak. I was astonished and as ashamed as when I heard the loaders’ obscenities in Cecil’s father’s car. I told Cecil that the photographs were mine, partly to ease the shame and partly to suggest to him that I had resources of vice he had not suspected. I said he could have them. I had ‘used’ them – I don’t know how the word came to me – and I no longer needed them. He was greatly excited, so excited that he forgot to carry out the threat of nailing a Coca-Cola cap to my father’s desk.
He took the booklet to school next day. It created a sensation. It caught the attention of the teachers as well and was passed among them from hand to hand until it rested on the headmaster