A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul [133]
It was a shock, a puncturing, to find Metty cold. I had made such a journey. I wanted him to know; from him I had been expecting the warmest welcome. He must have heard the slam of the taxi door and my palaver with the driver. But Metty didn’t come down. And all that he said when I went up the external staircase, and found him standing in the doorway of his room, was: “I didn’t expect to see you back, patron.” The whole journey seemed to turn sour then.
Everything was in order in the flat. But about the sitting room and especially the bedroom there was something—perhaps an extra order, an absence of staleness—that made me feel that Metty had been spreading himself in the flat in my absence. The telegram that I had sent him from London must have caused him to retreat. Did he resent that? Metty? But he had grown up in our family; he knew no other life. He had always been with the family or with me. He had never been on his own, except on his journey up from the coast, and now.
He brought me coffee in the morning.
He said, “I suppose you know why you come back, patron.”
“You said this last night.”
“Because you have nothing to come back to. You don’t know? Nobody told you in London? You don’t read the papers? You don’t have anything. They take away your shop. They give it to Citizen Théotime. The President made a speech a fortnight back. He said he was radicalizing and taking away everything from everybody. All foreigners. The next day they put a padlock on the door. And a few other doors as well. You didn’t read that in London? You don’t have anything, I don’t have anything. I don’t know why you come back. I don’t think it was for my sake.”
Metty was in a bad way. He had been alone. He must have been beside himself waiting for me to come back. He was trying to provoke some angry response from me. He was trying to get me to make some protective gesture. But I was as lost as he was.
Radicalization: two days before, in the capital, I had seen the word in a newspaper headline, but I hadn’t paid attention. I had thought of it as just another word; we had so many. Now I understood that radicalization was the big new event.
And it was as Metty had said. The President had sprung another of his surprises, and this surprise concerned us. I—and others like me—had been nationalized. Our businesses had ceased to be ours, by decree, and were being given out by the President to new owners. These new owners were called “state trustees.” Citizen Théotime had been made the state trustee of my business; and Metty said that for the last week the man had actually been spending his days in the shop.
“What does he do?”
“Do? He’s waiting for you. He’ll make you the manager. That is what you have come back for, patron. But you will see. Don’t hurry yourself. Théo doesn’t come to work too early.”
When I went to the shop I saw that the stock, which had gone down in six weeks, was displayed in the old way. Théo hadn’t touched that. But my desk had been moved from its place next to the pillar in the front of the shop to the storeroom at the back. Metty said that had happened on the first day. Citizen Théo had decided that the storeroom was to be his office; he liked the privacy.
In the top drawer of the desk (where I used to keep Yvette’s photographs, which had once transformed the view of the market square for me) there were many tattered French-African photo-novels and comic books: Africans shown living very modern lives, and in the comic books they