The mimic men - V. S. Naipaul [86]
The cinema became Cecil’s toy. It was Coca-Cola all over again: unlimited access to a delight for which the rest of the world had to pay. It was also another place to drive to. He was in and out of the cinema with his valet, harassing the manager; it gave him pleasure to be recognized in the village as the man who owned the cinema. He arrived drunk one evening, when a film was running, and ordered the manager to put on the house lights. There were shouts from the hall. He walked in, Luger in hand, his valet behind him. They climbed up to the stage. They were caught in the light of the projector and threw enormous shadows on the screen. He fired one shot into the floor and one at the ceiling. ‘Get out! Take your money back and get out.’ Some people lined up outside the manager’s office, but most went home. The house lights were dimmed again. Inside Cecil sat, his feet on the seat in front, the Luger in his lap, watching the film, alone with his valet, who didn’t know the language.
I got the story from my sisters. They continued to live in the house. There they continued to meet the young men to whom they had become engaged. For them Cecil was now only part of the atmosphere of their romances; and this was just another Cecil story, like the famous one of his boyhood about the cases of Pepsi-Cola on the picnic launch.
I remained uncertain about that Sunday morning on the beach. But its revelation, its surprise, had been my sudden and intense sympathy for my father. Poor Gurudeva! There on the beach I had felt linked to his power, madness and humiliation. Thirty dollars. The time was to come when I could pay that sum ten thousand times over. But I remembered.
6
JUST after the end of the war Cecil’s father died. His disappointment in Cecil showed in his will, which was unexpectedly scattering. He left my mother enough money for her to say she was well off. He also left fair sums to my sisters and myself. In addition he left me some valueless land, which I tried in vain to sell. If Cecil was peeved he didn’t show it. My grandfather used to say, proudly at first, later with resignation, that Cecil was born to give away. He was right. Within two years Cecil had run Bella Bella down and lost the Coca-Cola licence. Though even then, from what I heard, he lost nothing of his bounce, dramatizing his decline, seeing himself as a victim of fate alone and happy with his memories of childhood as the great days.
The last time I saw him before I left Isabella was on a Monday morning in our main street. He ran out from a bar and asked me to have a beer with him. His friendliness was was so pure and anxious, and this made him so attractive that I agreed, although it was not yet eleven. He was wearing a brilliant white shirt and a tie. This was unusual. He said he was going to the bank. ‘I need a few cents,’ he said loudly. With his left hand he held his half-empty glass almost at the bottom and rapped it hard on the counter. ‘I am going to ask them for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, boy.’ He gave a grunt. I didn’t believe him; I thought he was only trying to impress the barman. But I was concerned for Bella Bella. He also said there was going to be some religious ceremony for his father at the house. He wanted me to come. I said I would. But I didn’t intend to go, and he knew that. The house, now his, was no longer my place of escape: no more the glamour of Coca-Cola, or the security of level floors.
Consider me ungracious. But consider me perhaps also lucky, in that at a time of change I no longer needed these props. I was at last about to leave. I had written to colleges in various parts of the world and I had been accepted by the School in London. Many other people, of every sort, were leaving; the ambition, I now saw, had not been mine alone. The war had brought the world closer to us: the traffic jams in Liège, the white slopes of the Laurentians, the landscapes