A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul [138]
It was worse for Metty. The little services that he had done for Théotime in the beginning became things that he was required to do, and they multiplied. Théotime began sending Metty out on quite pointless errands.
Late one evening, when he returned to the flat after being with his family, Metty came into my room and said, “I can’t take it, patron. I will do something terrible one of these days. If Théo doesn’t stop it, I’ll kill him. I’d rather hoe in the fields than be his servant.”
I said, “It won’t last long.”
Metty’s face twisted with exasperation, and he did a silent stamp with one foot. He was close to tears. He said, “What do you mean? What do you mean?” and went out of the room.
In the morning I went to collect Théotime to drive him to the shop. As a well-to-do and influential local man, Théotime had three or four families in different parts of the town. But since becoming a state trustee he had (like other trustees) picked up a number of new women, and he lived with one of them in one of the little back houses in a cité yard—bare red ground intersected with shallow black drains all down one side, scraped-up earth and rubbish pushed to the edge, mango and other trees scattered about, cassava and maize and clumps of banana between the houses.
When I blew the horn, children and women from the various houses came out and watched while Théotime walked to the car, with his comic book rolled up. He pretended to ignore the watchers and spat casually on the ground once or twice. His eyes were reddened with beer and he tried to look offended.
We drove out of the bumpy cité lane to the levelled red main road, where the buildings were freshly painted for the President’s visit—each building done in one colour (walls, window frames, doors), and each building a different colour from its neighbour.
I said, “I want to talk to you about Citizen Metty’s duties in our establishment, citizen. Citizen Metty is the manager’s assistant. He is not a general servant.”
Théotime had been waiting for this. He had a speech prepared. He said, “You astonish me, citizen. I am the state trustee,appointed by the President. Citizen Metty is an employee of a state establishment. It is for me to decide how the half-caste is to be used.” He used the word métis, to play on the adopted name of which Metty had once been so proud.
The vivid colours of the buildings became even more unreal to me. They became the colours of my rage and anguish.
I had been growing smaller and smaller in Metty’s eyes, and now I failed him altogether. I could no longer offer him the simple protection he had asked for—Théotime made that plain during the course of the day. So the old contract between Metty and myself, which was the contract between his family and mine, came to an end. Even if I had been able to place him in another establishment in the town—which I might have been able to do in the old days—it would have meant that our special contract was over. He seemed to understand this, and it made him unbalanced.
He began to say, “I am going to do something terrible, Salim. You must give me money. Give me money and let me go away. I feel I’m going to do something terrible.”
I felt his pain as an extra pressure. I mentally added his pain to mine, made it part of my own. I should have thought more of him. I should have made him stay away from the shop, and given him an allowance from my own salary, while that lasted. It was, really, what he wanted. But he didn’t put it like that. He involved it in that wild idea of going away, which only frightened me and made me think: Where is he going to go?
So he continued to go to the shop and Théotime, and became more and more tormented. When