The mimic men - V. S. Naipaul [91]
I was carrying away more than a story of Stendhal and the lady. I was carrying away a memory of the absurdity with which the meeting had ended. Did old Deschampsneufs genuinely not see when I attempted to shake hands? I attempted twice, and when he did give me his hand it was only two fingers. The pointlessness of the insult had taken me by surprise. It was as if an unknown, unnoticed man whom I was passing on the pavement had suddenly attacked me and walked on. So private! So much a thing to keep! And walking back through this horribly man-made landscape of which Browne had spoken, I thought, above Champ’s talk: You do not care for what they stand or what they are and they have nothing to offer you. You are about to leave, you have left: the mother saw that. Why, recognizing the enemy, did you not kill him swiftly?
We underestimate or overestimate our strength always. We refuse to wound and thereby throw away our hand. We create problems for the future. Le Rouge. Our attention in class had been drawn to Stendhal’s cleverness in making Julien, right at the beginning of the book, mistake water on a church floor for blood. This had seemed to me crude. But now, full of the closeness of Stendhal, I looked at the red sky and saw blood. And yet was glad I was leaving. Do not dismiss melodrama and style: they are human needs. How easy it is to turn that landscape, which we make ordinary by living in it and becoming part of it, into the landscape of the battlefield.
One journey had to be made before I left. It was to my father. Some months after the end of the war he had been released. For a few days the newspapers were interested. So too were some of our new-style politicians the Royal Commission had brought into being, businessmen and contractors who saw in politics a potentially rewarding extension of their private affairs. These men thought my father’s approval was still important. But my father had not responded and they had gone away. My father did not go back to his camp in the eastern hills. He selected a wooded site in the southwest, near the sea. This was also on crown lands. But the government, I was glad to see, did not molest him.
I went with money in my pocket. I had a debt to repay. His camp was in a clearing off a track. It was an ugly clearing, a disfiguring of the woods. He, or the disciples he still had with him, had turned the ground between the tree stumps into mud; and on the mud they had laid passageways of planks and coconut trunks. The land was not cleared all the way down to the sea. A thin screen of woods hid the sea, as though that was a tainted view. At one end of the clearing was his hut, with mud walls and a thatch of carat palms. On a tree stump on a mound was what looked like a toy replica of this hut. The mound had been scraped clean of weeds and grass and had been plastered. The toy hut was obviously a shrine of some sort. Such childishness was not what I had expected from Gurudeva. Better the leader of the mob than this wasted, scruffily bearded man in a yellow robe who now, ignoring me, went to his shrine and rearranged his little bits and pieces, his stones and shells and leaves and roots and his coconut. The coconut seemed especially important. He had invented so much. His inventions had been so brilliant. Had the gift now been withdrawn?
I went to the larger hut. A woman dressed in white greeted me. She recognized me and I knew who she was. The embarrassment was mine alone. I said, ‘I am leaving the island for good. I have come to see him before I go.’ She spoke to me in Hindi: ‘Have you come then for a sight of him?’ She used a word with strong religious associations: darshan. I did not wish to lie. I said nothing, surrendering, as I had surrendered at the Deschampsneufs’, to the woman’s idea of herself, her concept of the holiness of her charge and the holiness of the ground. She was beyond the reproach of sex: this was the reproach I had feared to sense. She said: ‘It is