A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul [117]
Just before seven I went to the centre, to Bigburger. Sacks and boxes of uncollected rubbish were on the pavement. Ildephonse was there, the jacket of his uniform now as worn as the décor. Even at this early hour Ildephonse had been drinking; as with most Africans, he needed just a little of the weak local beer to top up and get high. He had known me for years; I was the first customer of the day; yet he hardly acknowledged me. His beer-glazed eyes stared past me at the street. In one of the lines or furrows of his lower lip he had fitted a toothpick, very precisely, very snugly, so he could talk or let his lower lip fall without the toothpick being disturbed; it was like a trick.
I called him back from wherever he was, and he gave me a cup of coffee and a slice of processed cheese in a roll. That was two hundred francs, nearly six dollars; prices were ridiculous these days.
A few minutes before eight, Mahesh came. He had been letting himself go. He had always been proud of his smallness and spareness. But he wasn’t as spare as he had been; I could just begin to see him as a simpler kind of small fat man.
The effect of his arrival on Ildephonse was electric. The glazed look left Ildephonse’s eyes, the toothpick disappeared, and he began to jump about, smiling and welcoming the early morning customers, mainly guests from the van der Weyden.
I was hoping that Mahesh would notice my condition. But he made no reference to it; he didn’t even seem surprised to see me.
He said, “Shoba wants to see you, Salim.”
“How is she?”
“She is better. I think she is better. She wants to see you. You must come to the flat. Come for a meal. Come for lunch. Come for lunch tomorrow.”
Zabeth helped me to get through the morning. It was her shopping day. Her business had gone down since the insurrection, and her news these days was of trouble in the villages. Young men were being kidnapped here and there by the police and the army: it was the new government tactic. Though nothing appeared in the newspapers, the bush was now again at war. Zabeth seemed to be on the side of the rebels, but I couldn’t be sure; and I tried to be as neutral as I could.
I asked about Ferdinand. His time in the capital as an administrative cadet was over. He was due for some big post soon, and the last I had heard from Zabeth was that he was being considered as a successor to our local commissioner, who had been sacked shortly after the insurrection had broken out. Ferdinand’s mixed tribal ancestry made him a good choice for the difficult post.
Zabeth, speaking the big title quite calmly (I thought of the old subscription book for the lycée gymnasium, and of the days when the governor of the province signed by himself on a whole page, like royalty), Zabeth said, “I suppose Fer’nand will be commissioner, Salim. If they let him live.”
“If he lives, Beth?”
“If they don’t kill him. I don’t know whether I would like him to take that job, Salim. Both sides would want to kill him. And the President will want to kill him first, as a sacrifice. He is a jealous man, Salim. He will allow nobody to get big in this place. It is only his photo everywhere. And look at the papers. His photo is bigger than everybody else’s, every day. Look.”
The previous day’s paper from the capital was on my desk, and the photograph Zabeth pointed to was of the President addressing government officials in the southern province.
“Look, Salim. He is very big. The others are so small you can scarcely see them. You can’t tell who is who.”
The officials were in the regulation dress devised by the President—short-sleeved jackets, cravats, in place of shirts and ties. They sat in neat packed rows and in the photograph they did look alike. But Zabeth was pointing out something else to me. She didn’t see the photograph as a photograph; she didn’t