The mimic men - V. S. Naipaul [96]
And there in the Roman house – where I had prepared the scene for an occasion with an altogether different issue – our agreement was made. The blue-and-white Hong Kong raffia chairs and table, the drinks, the illuminated swimming-pool, the Loeb edition of Martial: all this had been meant less to overawe Browne than to create the picture of a man who, whatever might be said about recent events in his private life, had achieved a certain poise. The Martial can be easily explained. I had taken up my Latin again. It was my own therapy. The acquisition in easy stages of a precise, dead language, through an easy author, was curiously soothing. It called for effort; it filled the time; it led from one day to the other.
My mood might explain the excitement I felt, my ready acceptance of an idea which to so many on the island might have seemed absurd and which to me a few months before would have seemed affronting. But I was also a prisoner of my special relationship with Browne, that understanding which began, continued and faded away in misunderstanding. A burdensome relationship, a boyhood uneasiness never quite forgotten when we met. Now it was flattering. He needed alien witness to prove his reality. For me a similar proof was offered by his literalness, which was like generosity. For him I had been, ever since Isabella Imperial, a total person. He remembered phrases, ideas, incidents. They formed a whole. He presented me with a picture of myself which it reassured me to study. This was his generosity; it was a relief after the continual challenge and provocation of relationships within the group that had been Sandra’s and mine. So between Browne and myself the old relationship was resumed. He invited me to share distress. He presented me with my role. I did not reject him. How can I regard what followed as betrayal?
Even at that first meeting in the Roman house my uneasiness was not wholly suppressed. Where once I carried a name that was like a deformity, so now I felt I had a past to which Browne might at any moment refer. He asked me no questions about Sandra, though; and he made no reference to the Roman house. It was my own uneasiness which made me think, even while we spoke, how little I knew of his private life, how unable I was in imagination to see him at home, relaxed. One detail sharpened this. His beard appearing to be causing him some irritation. He wiped the bumpy skin around his Adam’s apple with his handkerchief, placed it against his neck, and let the beard rest on it. A disturbing mannerism: the perspiration on my own neck began to smart. I made some remark about the beard. He dismissed it in his brisk, self-satirizing way as ‘a Negro’s beard’. I didn’t know what to make of this. He then said that in his three years in London he had never been to a barbershop. It had been no problem; hair like his never really grew long.
I thought he was joking. I still don’t know whether he wasn’t: it is hardly the subject for casual query. But with this amazement at a physical fact which would have caused no amazement to most of the people on the island which I was now claiming as mine, there went the dim knowledge that I was now committed to a whole new mythology, dark and alien, committed to a series of interiors I never wanted to enter. Joe Louis, Haile Selassie, Jesus, that black jackass, the comic boy-singer: the distaste and alarm of boyhood rose up strongly. But already Browne had turned the talk to his nationalist publishing house; the fountains splashed, recalling me to the solidity