A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul [20]
Ferdinand and Metty could drink in the little bars and openly pick up women or drop in at the houses of women they had got to know. It was I—as master of one man and guardian of the other—who had to hide.
What could Ferdinand learn from me? I had heard it said on the coast—and the foreigners I met here said it as well—that Africans didn’t know how to “live.” By that was meant that Africans didn’t know how to spend money sensibly or how to keep a house. Well! My circumstances were unusual, but what would Ferdinand see when he considered my establishment?
My shop was a shambles. I had bolts of cloth and oilcloth on the shelves, but most of the stock was spread out on the concrete floor. I sat on a desk in the middle of my concrete barn, facing the door, with a concrete pillar next to the desk giving me some feeling of being anchored in that sea of junk—big enamel basins, white and blue-rimmed, or blue-rimmed with floral patterns; stacks of white enamel plates with squares of coarse, mud-coloured paper between the plates; enamel cups and iron pots and charcoal braziers and iron bedsteads and buckets in zinc or plastic and bicycle tires and torchlights and oil lamps in green or pink or amber glass.
That was the kind of junk I dealt in. I dealt in it respectfully because it was my livelihood, my means of raising two to four. But it was antiquated junk, specially made for shops like mine; and I doubt whether the workmen who made the stuff—in Europe and the United States and perhaps nowadays Japan—had any idea of what their products were used for. The smaller basins, for instance, were in demand because they were good for keeping grubs alive in, packed in damp fibre and marsh earth. The larger basins—a big purchase: a villager expected to buy no more than two or three in a lifetime—were used for soaking cassava in, to get rid of the poison.
That was my commercial setting. There was a similar rough-and-ready quality about my flat. The unmarried Belgian lady who had lived there before had been something of an artist. To her “studio” atmosphere I had added a genuine untidiness—it was like something beyond my control. Metty had taken over the kitchen and it was in a terrible state. I don’t believe he ever cleaned the kerosene stove; with his servant-house background, he would have considered that woman’s work. And it didn’t help if I cleaned the stove. Metty wasn’t shamed: the stove soon began to smell again and became sticky with all kinds of substances. The whole kitchen smelled, though it was used just for making morning coffee, mainly. I could scarcely bear to go into the kitchen. But Metty didn’t mind, though his bedroom was just across the passage from the kitchen.
You entered this passage directly from the landing of the external staircase, which hung at the back of the building. As soon as you opened the landing door you got the warmed-up, shut-in smell of rust and oil and kerosene, dirty clothes and old paint and old timber. And the place smelled like that because you couldn’t leave any window open. The town, run down as it was, crawled with thieves, and they seemed able to wriggle through any little opening. To the right was Metty’s bedroom: one look showed you that Metty had turned it into a proper little servant’s room, with his cot, his bedding rolls and his various bundles, his cardboard boxes, his clothes hanging on nails and window catches. A little way down the passage, to the left, after the kitchen, was the sitting room.
It was a large room, and the Belgian lady had painted it white all over, ceiling, walls, windows, and even window panes. In this white room with bare floorboards there was a couch upholstered in a coarse-weave, dark-blue material; and, to complete the studio-sitting room effect, there was an unpainted trestle table as big as a Ping-Pong table. That had been spread over with my own junk—old magazines, paperbacks, letters, shoes,