The mimic men - V. S. Naipaul [89]
I said, feeling that he was seeking to drag me back into his world, where he walked with security, ‘I am not coming back.’
He wasn’t put out. ‘It’s what I always say. You fellows from the Orient and so on, ancient civilization etcetera, you are the long-visioned types. You give up too easily. Just the opposite of our Afric brethren. Short-visioned. Can’t look ahead, and nothing to look back to. That is why I am sorry to say I can’t see our Afric friends coming to much. Lot of noise and so on, but short-visioned. I’ll tell you. You know those fellows in the South American bush, when they kill something, say a deer or something like that, you know they just sit down and eat out the whole damn thing, man. They not putting aside any for the morrow, you know.’ He gave a little laugh as he broke into the popular accent.
I said, ‘You mean the bush-Negroes?’
‘Indians.’ He gave another laugh. ‘Amerindians. Bucks, you know. But a similar short-visioned type.’
He was launched on what was clearly a favourite theory. The example he had given, of the South-American deer-feast, had that feel, of a fact polished to myth by its frequent use in argument. In his own way he was a racial expert. His knowledge ranged wide and in some places touched my own, which I had thought personal and sufficiently recondite. The names of books he mentioned revealed him as an addict of racial theory. He rejected simple racial divisions as a crudity. Instead he divided nations into the short-visioned, like the Africans, who remained in a state of nature; the long-visioned like Indians and Chinese, obsessed with thoughts of eternity; and the medium-visioned, like himself. The medium-visioned were the doers, the survivors.
‘No great philosophy and so on, but we’ve survived. Goodness, how many revolutions?’ He pretended to count. ‘The French Revolution, for one. What happened? We came over to this part of the world, to Santo Domingo. And then there was that revolution there. Let’s not talk about Haiti. Ten glorious years of revolution etcetera etcetera, but never mention the hundred and thirty, forty, years afterwards. Let’s not talk about Haiti. Anyway, then we came here. Tonnerre! No sooner here than our friends the English take over. Look at the result. Listen to me talking English in my low Isabella accent. Champ here can scarcely talk French.’
It was true. Champ’s French was dreadful.
‘But we’re still around. That lady you see there’ – he pointed to the shiny and terrible oil portrait – ‘was an ancestor of this boy.’
‘Not of yours,’ Champ said. It seemed a family joke.
‘She was born in Santo Domingo. It wasn’t too bad with old Toussaint in the beginning. Then of course we all came here. She was still a child. When she was about fifteen she went to Paris. To be educated, to get to know people. You know. She was very pretty, as you can see. She was a little bit wild too. I think you can see that too. Very popular and sought after and so on. She used to stay in the house of a woman called Clémentine Curial.’
I didn’t know the name.
‘Her husband was a general, a count. What I call Napoleon brand. There was a man who was in and out of the house. Ugly little fellow, full of talk. And not too well off either. He was about forty, and writing a lot of rubbish nobody wanted to read. Biographies and travel books and so on. Fat little fellow. And you know what? She’ – he pointed to the portrait – ‘fell for him. His name was Henri Beyle.’
I gave a start.
Mr Deschampsneufs lifted the palm of his hand, applauding my knowledge but asking to be allowed to go on. ‘When she came back to Isabella she had a stack of letters from Henri Beyle. Of course nothing had happened. The trouble with