A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul [19]
I had already been disturbed by his face. Now I thought: There’s going to be trouble here.
The lycée wasn’t far from the shop, an easy walk if the sun wasn’t too hot or if it wasn’t raining—rain flooded the streets in no time. Ferdinand came once a week to the shop to see me. He came at about half past three on Friday afternoon, or he came on Saturday morning. He was always dressed as the lycée boy, in white; and sometimes, in spite of the heat, he wore the lycée blazer, which had the Semper Aliquid Novi motto in a scroll on the breast pocket.
We exchanged greetings, and in the African way we could make that take time. It was hard to go on after we had finished with the greetings. He offered me nothing in the way of news; he left it to me to ask questions. And when I asked—for the sake of asking—some question like “What did you do at school today?” or “Does Father Huismans take any of your classes?” he gave me short and precise answers that left me wondering what to ask next.
The trouble was that I was unwilling—and very soon unable—to chat with him as I would have done with another African. I felt that with him I had to make a special effort, and I didn’t know what I could do. He was a boy from the bush; when the holidays came he would be going back to his mother’s village. But at the lycée he was learning things I knew nothing about. I couldn’t talke to him about his school work; the advantage there was on his side. And there was his face. I thought there was a lot going on behind that face that I couldn’t know about. I felt there was a solidity and self-possession there, and that as a guardian and educator I was being seen through.
Perhaps, with nothing to keep them going, our meetings would have come to an end. But in the shop there was an attraction: there was Metty. Metty got on with everybody. He didn’t have the problems I had with Ferdinand; and it was for Metty that Ferdinand soon began to come, to the shop and then to the flat as well. After his stiff conversation in English or French with me, Ferdinand would, with Metty, switch to the local patois. He would appear then to undergo a character change, rattling away in a high-pitched voice, his laughter sounding like part of his speech. And Metty could match him; Metty had absorbed many of the intonations of the local language, and the mannerisms that went with the language.
From Ferdinand’s point of view Metty was a better guide to the town than I was. And for these two unattached young men the pleasures of the town were what you would expect—beer, bars, women.
Beer was part of people’s food here; children drank it; people began drinking from early in the morning. We had no local brewery, and a lot of the cargo brought up by the steamers was that weak lager the people here loved. At many points along the river, village dugouts took on cases from the moving steamer; and the steamer, on the way back to the capital, received the empties.
About women, the attitude was just as matter-of-fact. Shortly after I arrived, my friend Mahesh told me that women slept with men whenever they were asked; a man could knock on any woman’s door and sleep with her. Mahesh didn’t tell me this with any excitement or approval—he was wrapped up in his own beautiful Shoba. To Mahesh the sexual casualness was part of the chaos and corruption of the place.
That was how—after early delight—I had begun to feel myself. But I couldn’t speak out against pleasures which were also my own. I couldn’t warn Metty or Ferdinand against going to places I went to myself. The restraint, in fact, worked the other way. In spite of the changes that had come to Metty, I still regarded him as a member of my family; and I had to be careful not to do anything to wound him or anything which, when reported back, would wound other members of the family. I had, specifically,