The mimic men - V. S. Naipaul [76]
This was what Browne taught. This was the subject of his own secret reading. I thought his passion would resolve itself in a definition of a purpose or even an attitude. I was patient. But no definition came. He appeared to pursue the subject for its own sake. His friendship became a burden.
He cycled up to our house one Saturday morning and rang his bicycle bell from the street. Neither he nor any other boy from the school, except Cecil, had come to our house before. The visit showed to what extent we had abolished the private hemisphere of school, and I feel sure it was intended as a gesture. I was not in. My mother had not seen Browne before. She saw only an urchin of the people sitting on his bicycle saddle, ringing his bell and smiling. It was an unfortunate characteristic of Browne’s – until in his thirties he grew a beard – that he always appeared to be smiling nervously. The skin from his lower lip to the tip of his chin was curiously taut and corrugated; it was as though he was holding back a laugh. At the very tip of this chin, accentuating the smile that wasn’t a smile, was a wart; from a distance this looked like a drop of water and suggested that Browne had just washed his face and not bothered to dry it. All this gave him the comedian’s appearance which his parents had exploited. My mother looked out from between the ferns on our veranda and asked what he wanted. He said he wanted to see me. But he used my last name. My mother thought he was another mocker of her husband and herself and drove him away as she would have driven away a street arab.
I was appalled when I heard. I knew where he lived and I went straight there. His house was as old as ours and of similar style. But it was on one of the busy streets of the city; it had no veranda and rose almost directly from the pavement, with a jalousied top half. A genuine old-time Negro, grey-headed and pipe-smoking, was leaning out of a window and vacantly regarding the crowded street. He wore a grimy flannel vest. A flannel vest was proletarian wear – flannel the favoured material of Negroes enfeebled by illness or old age – and I wished I had not seen it on Browne’s father. Next to the house was a Negro barbershop called The Kremlin – Negro barber-shops liked to attach such remote drama to themselves – with a caged parrot in the doorway.
I greeted the Negro in the flannel vest and, remembering Browne’s misadventure at my house, hurriedly identified myself as a colleague of Browne’s at Isabella Imperial. I also took care to ask whether ‘Ethelbert’ was at home. It embarrassed me to use the name. I never had before and as I spoke it I remembered what Browne himself had told me: that slaves were frequently given the names of Anglo-Saxon kings or Roman generals. Browne’s father, he who had dressed up his son years before and taught him the words of the coon song, was at once attention. He grunted through his pipe, hurried to open the front door, and then was anxious for me to sit down. It was an honour not to me but to Isabella Imperial, the famous school, where a poor boy who behaved well and was attentive to his books could win a scholarship: this meant studies abroad, a profession, independence, the past wiped out.
There were two bentwood rockers in the front part of the room. He made me sit on one, called out ‘Bertie!’ and sat on the other, sucking at his pipe in old-time Negro fashion and staring at me while he rocked. Bertie! The home name! It was like opening a private letter. I felt that Browne wouldn’t care for this