A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul [40]
The President had sent terror to our town and region. But at the same time, by terrorizing the army as well, he was making a gesture to the local people. The news of the executions would have spread fast, and people would already have become confused and nervous. They would have felt—as I began to feel—that for the first time since independence there was some guiding intelligence in the capital, and that the free-for-all of independence had come to an end.
I could see the change in Metty. He had brought quite bloody news. Yet he seemed calmer than in the morning; and he made Ferdinand calmer. Late in the afternoon we began to hear guns. In the morning that sound would have panicked us all. Now we were almost relieved—the guns were far away, and the noise was a good deal less loud than thunder, to which we were accustomed. The dogs were disturbed by the strange noise, though, and set up a barking that rolled back and forth, at times drowning the sound of the guns. Late sunlight, trees, cooking smoke: that was all we could see when we went out to the landing of the external staircase to look.
No lights came on at sunset. There was no electricity. The machinery had failed again, or the power had been deliberately turned off, or the power station had been captured by the rebels. But it wasn’t bad to be without lights now; it meant that at least there would be no uprising during the night. People here didn’t like the dark, and some could sleep only with lights in their rooms or huts. And none of us—neither Metty nor Ferdinand nor myself—believed that the station had been captured by the rebels. We had faith in the President’s white men. The situation, so confused for us in the morning, had become as simple as that now.
I stayed in the sitting room and read old magazines by an oil lamp. In their room Metty and Ferdinand talked. They didn’t use their daytime voices or the voices they might have used in electric light. They both sounded slow, contemplative, old; they talked like old men. When I went out to the passage I saw, through the open door, Metty sitting on his cot in undershirt and pants, and Ferdinand, also in undershirt and pants, lying on his bedding on the floor, one raised foot pressed against the wall. In lamplight it was like the interior of a hut; their leisurely, soft talk, full of pauses and silences, matched their postures. For the first time in days they were relaxed, and they felt so far from danger now that they began to talk of danger, war and armies.
Metty said he had seen the white men in the morning.
Ferdinand said, “There were a lot of white soldiers in the south. That was a real war.”
“You should have seen them this morning. They just raced to the barracks and they were pointing their guns at everybody. I never saw soldiers like that before.”
Ferdinand said, “I saw soldiers for the first time when I was very young. It was just after the Europeans went away. It was in my mother’s village, before I went to stay with my father. These soldiers came to the village. They had no officers and they began to behave badly.”
“Did they have guns?”
“Of course they had guns. They were looking for white people to kill. They said we were hiding white people. But I think they only wanted to make trouble. Then my mother spoke to them and they went away. They just took a few women.”
“What did she say to them?”
“I don’t know. But they became frightened. My mother has powers.”
Metty said, “That was like the man we had on the coast. He came from somewhere near here. He was the man who made the people kill the Arabs. It began in the market. I was there. You should have seen it, Ferdinand. The arms and legs lying about in the streets.”
“Why did he kill the Arabs?”
“He said he was obeying the god of Africans.”
Metty had never told me about that. Perhaps he hadn’