A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul [22]
I was reading a magazine when Ferdinand came to the shop one afternoon. I greeted him and went on with the magazine. It was a magazine of popular science, the kind of reading I had become addicted to. I liked receiving these little bits of knowledge; and I often thought, while I read, that the particular science or field I was reading about was the thing to which I should have given my days and nights, adding knowledge to knowledge, making discoveries, making something of myself, using all my faculties. It was a good feeling; from my point of view, it was as good as the life of knowledge itself.
Metty was at the customs that afternoon, clearing some goods that had arrived by the steamer a fortnight before—that was the pace at which things moved here. Ferdinand hung about the shop for a while. I had felt rebuked by what he had said about not showing him things, and I wasn’t going to take the lead in conversation. At last he came to the desk and said, “What are you reading, Salim?”
I couldn’t help myself: the teacher and the guardian in me came out. I said, “You should look at this. They’re working on a new kind of telephone. It works by light impulses rather than an electric current.”
I never really believed in these new wonder things I read about. I never thought I would come across them in my own life. But that was the attraction of reading about them: you could read article after article about these things you hadn’t yet begun to use.
Ferdinand said, “Who are they?”
“What do you mean?”
“Who are the ‘they’ who are working on the new telephone?”
I thought: We are here already, after only a few months at the lycée. He’s just out of the bush; I know his mother; I treat him like a friend; and already we’re getting this political nonsense. I didn’t give the answer I thought he was expecting. I didn’t say, “The white men.” Though with half of myself I felt like saying it, to put him in his place.
I said instead, “The scientists.”
He said no more. I said no more, and deliberately went back to reading. That was the end of that little passage between us. It was also, as it turned out, the end of my attempts to be a teacher, to show myself and my things to Ferdinand.
Because I thought a lot about my refusal to say “the white men” when Ferdinand asked me to define the “they” who were working on the new telephone. And I saw that, in my wish not to give him political satisfaction, I had indeed said what I intended to say. I didn’t mean the white men. I didn’t mean, I couldn’t mean, people like those I knew in our town, the people who had stayed behind after independence. I really did mean the scientists; I meant people far away from us in every sense.
They! When we wanted to speak politically, when we wanted to abuse or praise politically, we said “the Americans,” “the Europeans,” “the white people,” “the Belgians.” When we wanted to speak of the doers and makers and the inventors, we all—whatever our race—said “they.” We separated these men from their groups and countries and in this way attached them to ourselves. “They’re making cars that will run on water.” “They’re making television sets as small as a matchbox.” The “they” we spoke of in this way were very far away, so far away as to be hardly white. They were impartial, up in the clouds, like good gods. We waited for their blessings, and showed off those blessings—as I had shown off my cheap binoculars and my fancy camera to Ferdinand—as though we had been responsible for them.
I had shown Ferdinand my things as though I had been letting him into the deeper secrets of my existence, the true nature of my life below the insipidity of my days and nights. In fact, I—and all the others