A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul [60]
There were the cités and the squatters’ settlements (some of them I was driving into for the first time) with their hills of rubbish, their corrugated dusty lanes, and a lot of old tires lying in the dust. To me the rubbish hills and the tires were features of the cités and shanty towns. The spidery little children that we had here did wonderful somersaults off those tires, running, jumping on the tires, and then springing high in the air. But it was nearly noon. There were no children doing somersaults when we drove by; and I realized that (after a monument with nothing on it, and pedestals without statues) I was literally just showing Indar a lot of rubbish. I cut short the tour at that point. The rapids and the fishermen’s village—that had been incorporated into the State Domain; that he had already seen.
As we drove to the Domain—the intervening area, once empty, now filling up with the shacks of new arrivals from the villages: shacks which, in Indar’s company, I seemed to be seeing for the first time: the red ground between the shacks stained with rivulets of black or grey-green filth, maize and cassava planted in every free space—as we drove, Indar said, “How long did you say you’ve been living here?”
“Six years.”
“And you’ve shown me everything?”
What hadn’t I shown him? A few interiors of shops and houses and flats, the Hellenic Club—and the bars. But I wouldn’t have shown him the bars. And really, looking at the place with his eyes, I was amazed at the little I had been living with. And I had stopped seeing so much. In spite of everything, I had thought of the town as a real town; I saw it now as an agglomeration of shack settlements. I thought I had been resisting the place. But I had only been living blind—like the people I knew, from whom in my heart of hearts I had thought myself different.
I hadn’t liked it when Indar had suggested that I was living like our community in the old days, not paying attention to what was going on. But he wasn’t so far wrong. He was talking about the Domain; and for us in the town the Domain had remained only a source of contracts. We knew little of the life there, and we hadn’t wanted to find out. We saw the Domain as part of the waste and foolishness of the country. But more importantly, we saw it as part of the President’s politics; and we didn’t want to become entangled with that.
We were aware of the new foreigners on the periphery of our town. They were not like the engineers and salesmen and artisans we knew, and we were a little nervous of them. The Domain people were like tourists, but they were not spenders—everything was found for them on the Domain. They were not interested in us; and we, thinking of them as protected people, looked upon them as people separate from the true life of the place, and for this reason not quite real, not as real as ourselves.
Without knowing it, and thinking all the time that we were keeping our heads down and being wise and protecting our interests, we had become like the Africans the President ruled. We were people who felt only the weight of the President’s power. The Domain had been created by the President; for reasons of his own he had called certain foreigners to live there. For us that was enough; it wasn’t for us to question or look too closely.
Sometimes, after Ferdinand had come to the town to see his mother during one of her shopping trips, I had driven him back to his hostel in the Domain. What I saw then was all that I knew, until Indar became my guide.
It was as Indar had said. He had a house in the Domain and he was a guest of the government. His house was carpeted and furnished showroom style—twelve hand-carved dining chairs, upholstered chairs in fringed synthetic velvet in two colours in the sitting room, lamps, tables, air conditioners everywhere. The air conditioners were necessary. The Domain houses, naked in levelled land, were like grander concrete boxes, with roofs that didn’t project at all, so that at any hour