The mimic men - V. S. Naipaul [93]
It was only on the ship, well on my way, that I came upon a narrow strip of paper between the pages. It carried an unsigned typewritten message: Some day we shall meet, and some day.… I suspected Hok, because of the typing and because the paper was of the sort used for copy in newspaper offices. It was like that last family lunch my father had arranged. There is something after all in the staged occasion, the formal sentiment. It came to me on the ocean, this message ending in dots, telling me that all my notions of shipwreck were false, telling me this against my will, telling me I had created my past, that patterns of happiness or unhappiness had already been more or less decided.
I thought of Columbus as hour after hour, day after day – with no pause at night, as I had been half-expecting – we moved through that immense ocean. The wind whipped the crests of the waves into rainbow-shot spray. The sunlight grew paler and faded; the rainbows disappeared. I thought of that world which, as I was steadily separated from it, became less and less discovered, less and less real. No more foolish fears: I was never to return.
And witness me then, just four months later, standing in the attic of a boarding-house called a private hotel in the Kensington High Street area, holding a photograph of a girl and praying for a little bit of immortality, a prophylactic against the greater disorder, the greater shipwreck that had come to me already.
7
I WISHED then to go back as whole as I had come. But though a fresh start is seldom possible and the world continues our private fabrication, departure is departure. It fractures; the bone has to be set anew each time. I was in London, awaiting health, Sandra my luck, when I heard that my father was dead. The news came in a guarded letter from my sister. I went to the British Council reading room, to which I had been long a stranger, to look at our local newspapers. What was not even a paragraph in a London paper had made headlines in the Inquirer, with photographs of the camp I had seen once, now unfamiliar and oddly exposed with officials and policemen standing about. My father had been shot dead, and a woman with him. The weapon was a Luger. The news required a response. It required sentiment and the opposite of sentiment. I walked about the streets. Later I went with a prostitute. I was full of my news. But I saved it for the end. Her shallow whorish reaction, of sentiment and reproof, was all I could have asked for. Later, in the blankness of night, I cried on Sandra’s breasts. And suddenly I discovered I was ready to leave. We left from Avon-mouth. It was August but the wind was chill. Gulls bobbed like cork amid the harbour litter. We headed south and sailed for thirteen days.
THREE
1
AS I write, my own view of my actions alters. I have said that my marriage and the political career which succeeded it and seemed to flow from it, all that active part of my life, occurred in a sort of parenthesis. I used to feel they were aberrations, whimsical, arbitrary acts which in some way got out of control. But now, with a feeling of waste and regret for opportunities missed, I begin to question this. I doubt whether any action, above a certain level, is ever wholly arbitrary or whimsical or dishonest. I question now whether the personality is manufactured by the vision of