A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul [55]
I was shocked. I felt betrayed. If we had been living in our compound on the coast, he would have lived his own life, but there would have been no secrets. I would have known who his woman was; I would have known when his baby was born. I had lost Metty to this part of Africa. He had come to the place that was partly his home, and I had lost him. I felt desolate. I had been hating the place, hating the flat; yet now I saw the life I had made for myself in that flat as something good, which I had lost.
Like the girl outside, like so many other people, I waited for Metty. And when, very late, he came in, I began to speak at once.
“Oh, Metty, why didn’t you tell me? Why did you do this to me?” Then I called him by the name we called him at home. “Ali, Ali-wa! We lived together. I took you under my roof and treated you as a member of my own family. And now you do this.”
Dutifully, like the servant of the old days, he tried to match his mood to mine, tried to look as though he suffered with me.
“I will leave her, patron. She’s an animal.”
“How can you leave her? You’ve done it. You can’t go back on that. You’ve got that child out there. Oh, Ali, what have you done? Don’t you think it’s disgusting to have a little African child running about in somebody’s yard, with its toto swinging from side to side? Aren’t you ashamed, a boy like you?”
“It is disgusting, Salim.” He came and put his hand on my shoulder. “And I am very ashamed. She’s only an African woman. I will leave her.”
“How can you leave her? That is now your life. Didn’t you know it was going to be like that? We sent you to school, we had the mullahs teach you. And now you do this.”
I was acting. But there are times when we act out what we really feel, times when we cannot cope with certain emotions, and it is easier to act. And Metty was acting too, being loyal, reminding me of the past, of other places, reminding me of things I could scarcely bear that night. When I said, acting, “Why didn’t you tell me, Metty?” he acted back for my sake. He said, “How could I tell you, Salim? I knew you were going to get on like this.”
How did he know?
I said, “You know, Metty, the first day you went to school, I went with you. You cried all the time. You began to cry as soon as we left the house.”
He liked being reminded of this, being remembered from so far back. He said, almost smiling, “I cried a lot? I made a lot of noise?”
“Ali, you screamed the place down. You had your white cap on, and you went down the little alley at the side of Gokool’s house, and you were bawling. I couldn’t see where you had gone. I just heard you bawling. I couldn’t stand it. I thought they were doing terrible things to you, and I begged for you not to go to school. Then the trouble was to get you to come back home. You’ve forgotten, and why should you remember? I’ve been noticing you since you’ve been here. You’ve been very much getting on as though you’re your own man.”
“Oh, Salim! You mustn’t say that. I always show you respect.”
That was true. But he had returned home; he had found his new life. However much he wished it, he couldn’t go back. He had shed the past. His hand on my shoulder—what good was that now?
I thought: Nothing stands still. Everything changes. I will inherit no house, and no house that I build will now pass to my children. That way of life has gone. I have lost my twenties, and what I have been looking for since I left home hasn’t come to me. I have only been waiting. I will wait for the rest of my life. When I came here, this flat was still the Belgian lady’s flat. It wasn’t my home; it was like a camp. Then that camp became mine. Now it has changed again.
Later, I woke to the solitude of my bedroom, in the unfriendly world. I felt all the child’s heartache at being in a strange place. Through the white-painted window I saw the trees