A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul [118]
“He is killing those men, Salim. They are screaming inside, and he knows they’re screaming. And you know, Salim, that isn’t a fetish he’s got there. It’s nothing.”
She was looking at the big photograph in the shop, which showed the President holding up his chief’s stick, carved with various emblems. In the distended belly of the squat human figure halfway down the stick the special fetish was thought to be lodged.
She said, “That’s nothing. I’ll tell you about the President. He’s got a man, and this man goes ahead of him wherever he goes. This man jumps out of the car before the car stops, and everything that is bad for the President follows this man and leaves the President free. I saw it, Salim. And I will tell you something. The man who jumps out and gets lost in the crowd is white.”
“But the President hasn’t been here, Beth.”
“I saw it, Salim. I saw the man. And you mustn’t tell me that you don’t know.”
Metty was good all that day. Without referring to what had happened, he handled me with awe (awe for me as a violent, wounded man) and tenderness. I recalled moments like this from our own compound life on the coast, after some bad family quarrel. I suppose he recalled such moments too, and fell into old ways. I began in the end to act for him, and that was a help.
I allowed him to send me home to the flat in the middle of the afternoon; he said he would close up. He didn’t go to his family afterwards, as was his custom. He came to the flat and discreetly let me know that he was there, and staying. I heard him tiptoeing about. There was no need for that, but the attention comforted me; and on that bed, where from time to time I caught some faint scent from the day before (no, that day itself), I began to sleep.
Time moved in jerks. Whenever I awakened I was confused. Neither the afternoon light nor the noisy darkness seemed right. So the second night passed. And the telephone didn’t ring and I didn’t telephone. In the morning Metty brought me coffee.
I went to Mahesh and Shoba’s for lunch: it seemed to me that I had been to Bigburger and received that invitation a long time ago.
The flat, with its curtains drawn to keep out the glare, with its nice Persian carpets and brass, and all its other fussy little pieces, was as I remembered it. It was a silent lunch, not especially a lunch of reunion or reconciliation. We didn’t talk about recent events. The topic of property values—at one time Mahesh’s favourite topic, but now depressing to everybody—didn’t come up. When we did talk, it was about what we were eating.
Towards the end Shoba asked about Yvette. It was the first time she had done so. I gave her some idea of how things were. She said, “I’m sorry. Something like that may not happen to you again for twenty years.” And after all that I had thought about Shoba, her conventional ways and her malice, I was amazed by her sympathy and wisdom.
Mahesh cleared the table and prepared the Nescafé—so far I had seen no servant. Shoba pulled one set of curtains apart a little, to let in more light. She sat, in the extra light, on the modern settee—shiny tubular metal frame, chunky padded armrests—and asked me to sit beside her. “Here, Salim.”
She looked carefully at me while I sat down.