The mimic men - V. S. Naipaul [87]
I used to meet Deschampsneufs from time to time. He was still in the bank and still painting. He had no immediate plans for travel. He said he didn’t feel ready for Quebec or Paris just yet. I got the impression that he was enjoying his reputation in Isabella as a ‘radical’. He had created a stir in our Art Association by painting either a red donkey in a green sky or a green donkey in a red sky. There had been letters to the newspaper, for and against, quoting all sorts of famous names; and at the end Champ had become a figure. He continued to treat me as a ‘serious’ person and we would have intellectual conversations. I believe we both enjoyed the idea of ourselves walking about the rundown colonial city and talking art and ideas. He was getting interested in religion and regarded me as an expert. I didn’t think the reason was flattering – it seemed a curious tribute to my father – but I pretended to speak with the authority he required. These conversations were a strain; I think we were both always a little glad when they ended.
About a month before I left we met by chance in a café one lunchtime. We exchanged an idea or two. Then he said: ‘I hope you can come home one day before you go.’
I was miserable with embarrassment. He spoke like one who knew that an invitation to his home was something which many people on the island would welcome. He also spoke like someone who knew he was exposing himself to a snubbing of sorts, since no one is as ready to snub as the oppressed and the powerless when they find themselves suddenly courted. And again he spoke like someone who was asking for both these considerations to be put aside. His invitation was his offer of reconciliation, his sealing of our stiff intellectuals’ friendship.
I didn’t want to go to his house. We could meet easily only on neutral ground. But I didn’t wish to appear snubbing. I played for time.
I asked, ‘How is the vine?’
‘A strange thing. It’s been attacked by ants.’
The invitation hung in the air.
I said, ‘What’s a good day?’
We fixed an afternoon.
I had given up the island. But a family, especially if it is at home, can impose its idea of itself; and it was to this idea that I found myself reacting when I went to the house. Deschampsneufs’s parents were there and his younger sister Wendy. The father was stocky and swarthy; the mother was pale and thin with no hips to speak of and a sharp worn-out face. Wendy was as thin as her mother but more engagingly ugly. She was at the rubbing-up, flesh-testing, showing-off stage. She climbed over me and my chair, stood on her head in another chair and generally asked for attention. I was told there was some trouble about getting her into a school.
Mrs Deschampsneufs said, ‘She is a very intelligent child, though they don’t seem to think so here. I took her to a psychiatrist in New York when I was there.’
I expressed my interest. I half-believed that psychiatrists existed only in cartoons.
‘He said she was above normal. Very high I.Q.’
Wendy was standing on her head in a deep chair at the end of the room.
‘And it wasn’t as if he knew anything about us or anything like that.’
There were photographs on the walls of various members of the family, including one which I took to be of the great Deschampsneufs, the leader of the man without in 1877. There was also a very large oil painting of a woman in early nineteenth-century costume. The painting looked new and shiny and I thought it was appallingly done. There