The mimic men - V. S. Naipaul [56]
So it was Cecil who brought the news, and I pretended to hear it for the first time. Then we all ran out, the girls in their bathing suits tripping along the beach, now at low tide very wide, Cecil running far from us through the edge of the foaming water, taking high, splashing steps, an odd celebratory figure. The sand was like the sand of a tainted arena. The fishermen had disappeared. Their boats were out. The cork floats of the seine were in a wide arc on the sea beyond the breakers. Two boats were coming through the breakers in a confusion of white water; suddenly they were clear and driven down and up almost to the limit of the sea; they were being beached. The crowd split and ran to the two boats to take hold of the rope to pull in the seine. The story of the drownings came to us again. It was just before two, the period of stillness between morning and afternoon. The fishermen pulled in their measured way; the visitors and townspeople, already recognizable by their clothes, pulled frantically, as in a tug-of-war contest. And that record still played in the café. Still those words rode over wind and coconut branches. Bésame mucho, como si fuera la última vez. The absurd words of popular songs I Then I recognized Deschampsneufs and perhaps members of his family among the frantic pullers. I did not want to be observed. I stood aside. Until then the whole extended incident had been a private moment; now I became an observer.
The arc of the cork floats steadily contracted. It came in closer and closer. It cleared the breakers. Net appeared. Then came shouts. The dragging of the sea! Such an endeavour, so futile, like something in The Heroes. Yet it had produced results. The first body appeared, the second, the third. They had all died together, the rolling, drifting bodies, mingled now, as the seine came in to the shore, with fish, alive and silver. There were the fish we called the dogfish, attracted by death, people said. And there were thousands of little fish. And soon everything lay strained and dry on the dirty beach. The fish lay flapping on the sand, curving in brief spasms. The dogfish, threats until a minute ago, lay expiring, and people went among them as though animated by personal revenge and mangled their heads.
The bodies were laid out side by side on the sand in the sun, the bathing costumes still like living parts of them, wet as my own costume would have been if I had been swimming. Away from the group around the stretched-out bodies little arguments had started between the fishermen and some of the people who had helped to pull the seine. The people wanted the fish; the fishermen wanted money for the fish; the people said the fishermen had already been paid, and just for casting the seine. One toothless fisherman continually spoke obscenities. Eventually it was settled. I believe the fisherman got their money. The bodies were taken away; and on the low-tide beach, shining everywhere else, there remained matt marks where the bodies had lain, scrapings and scratchings and scuffed sand to show, just for a few more hours, what had happened. The beach was strewn with small fish, so recently whole and now so dull, so like garbage, silver turning to dark grey. The pariah dogs prowled nervously. The vultures watched from the coconut trees. The stingray, on its brown back, its underside bluish-white, showed a bloody stump where its tail had been hacked off.
The beach in this section of our island stretched for more than twenty miles, broken at intervals by the neat channels of streams, fresh but brackish, that flowed into the ocean from the cocoteraie. Coconut trees and beach and the white of breakers seemed to meet at a point in the distance. It was not possible to see where coconut turned to mangrove and swampland. Here and there, interrupting the straight line of beach, were the trunks of trees washed up by the sea. I set myself to walk to one tree, then to the other. I was soon far away from the village and from people, and was alone