The mimic men - V. S. Naipaul [75]
Withdrawal: it became urgent now for me. Before it had been part of fantasy, part of the urge to escape shipwreck and to return to lands I had fashioned in my imagination, lands of horsemen, high plains, mountains and snow; and time had been as unreal as place. Now I felt the need only to get away, to a place unknown, among people whose lives and even language I need never enter. I transferred my urgency to others. There was a master whom I had startled in my first year at Isabella Imperial by going up to him at the beginning of a class and asking, ‘Are you really a B.A.?’ I had seen the tremendous fact recorded in the school magazine. He saw irony where I had intended only reverence and he chased me back to my desk; he was, in fact, sensitive about his university, which was Canadian and obscure. Now I startled him again by asking, during a relaxed period, ‘How do you feel, sir, about living in Isabella?’ He saw it as a political question. I had to explain. ‘I mean you have lived in famous countries and seen famous cities. Don’t you think you would prefer to live there?’ He said, ‘I’ve never thought about it. I used to go to England and the Continent before the war on leave. It was all right. I did the usual things. But I always felt that my work was here. I’ve never thought about it, really.’ I didn’t believe him. I remembered how one day he began to talk about the varieties of Canadian apples. I remembered him saying another time, ‘You can go skiing in the Laurentians.’ And then, as though talking to himself, as though seeing the white-and-blue landscape again, he had added, ‘Mind you don’t break your leg, though’; and the moment and the imagined landscape had been fixed in my mind forever. The Laurentians! Beautiful name for slopes of white, uninhabited snow! I longed in that barrenness to go skiing, even at the risk of breaking my leg. My element, and I feared I would be denied it. And there was the Belgian, of execrable accent, French and English, and almost no memories: a neat, bored and boring man in goldrimmed glasses. Even he had gone off one afternoon into chuckling, glazed-eye reminiscence: the subject, la circulation, not circulation but traffic: and suddenly we were with him in a taxi in a traffic jam, the meter ticking, the taxi-driver pulling his cap over his eyes, disclaiming all responsibility for his active meter. There, in Liège in a traffic jam, on the snow slopes of the Laurentians, was the true, pure world. We, here on our island, handling books printed in this world, and using its goods, had been abandoned and forgotten. We pretended to be real, to be learning, to be preparing ourselves for life, we mimic men of the New World, one unknown corner of it, with all its reminders of the corruption that came so quickly to the new.
My obsession took an odd turn. I developed the fear that our old timber house was unsafe. It was not uncommon in our city for houses to tumble down; during the rainy season our newspapers were full of such tragedies. I began to look for these reports, and every report added to my fear. As soon as I lay down on my bed my heart beat faster, and I mistook its throbbing for the shaking of the house. At times my head swam; ceiling and walls seemed about to cave in on me; I felt my bed tilt and I held on in a cold sweat until the disturbance passed. I was safe and lucid only when I was out of the house. So more and more I found myself abroad in that island whose secrets Browne was bent on revealing to me.
I had been able at certain moments to think of Isabella as deserted and awaiting discovery. Browne showed me that its tropical appearance was contrived; there was history in the vegetation we considered most natural and characteristic. About the bread-fruit and Captain Bligh we all knew. He told me about the coconut, which fringed our beaches, about the sugarcane, the bamboo and mango. He told me about our flowers, whose colours we saw afresh in the postcards which were beginning to appear in our shops. The