A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul [96]
He had been a teacher in the capital. Chance—in early middle age—had brought him in touch with the mother of the future President. Chance—and something of the teacher’s sympathy for the despairing African boy, a sympathy probably mixed with a little bitterness about the more successful of his own kind, the man perhaps seeing himself in the boy: that advice he had given the boy about joining the Defence Force appeared to have in it something of a personal bitterness—chance had given him that extraordinary relationship with the man who became President and had raised him, after independence, to a glory he had never dreamed of.
To Yvette, inexperienced, from Europe, and with her own ambitions, he must have glittered. She would have been misled by her ambitions, much as I had been by her setting, in which I had seen such glamour. Really, then, we did have Raymond in common, from the start.
THREE
The Big Man
12
I often thought about the chance that had shown me Yvette for the first time that evening in her house, in that atmosphere of Europe in Africa, when she had worn her black Margit Brandt blouse and had been lighted by the reading lamps placed on the floor, and every kind of yearning had been stirred in me by the voice of Joan Baez.
Perhaps in another setting and at another time she would not have made such an impression on me. And perhaps if I had read Raymond’s articles on the day Yvette had given them to me, nothing would have happened the following afternoon when she came to the flat. I wouldn’t have given her cause to show me her profile against the white wall of the studio-sitting room; we might instead have simply gone to the Hellenic Club. Seeing her house in the light of midday had already given me a little alarm. To have understood more about Raymond immediately after might have made me see her more clearly—her ambition, her bad judgment, her failure.
And failure like that wasn’t what I would have chosen to be entangled with. My wish for an adventure with Yvette was a wish to be taken up to the skies, to be removed from the life I had—the dullness, the pointless tension, “the situation of the country.” It wasn’t a wish to be involved with people as trapped as myself.
But that was what I had now. And it wasn’t open to me to withdraw. After that first afternoon, my first discovery of her, I was possessed by Yvette, possessed by that person I never stopped wanting to win. Satisfaction solved nothing; it only opened up a new void, a fresh need.
The town changed for me. It had new associations. Different memories and moods attached to places, to times of day,weather. In the drawer of my desk in the shop, where Raymond’s magazines had once lain forgotten for two days, there were now photographs of Yvette. Some of them were quite old and must have been precious to her. These photographs were her gifts to me, made at various times, as favours, rewards, gestures of tenderness; since, just as we never embraced when we met, never wasted the sense of touch (and in fact seldom kissed), so, as if by unspoken agreement, we continued as we had begun and never exchanged words of tenderness. In spite of the corrupt physical ways our passion had begun to take, the photographs of Yvette that I preferred were the chastest. I was especially interested in those of her as a girl in Belgium, to whom the future was still a mystery.
With these photographs in my drawer, the view from my shop had a different feel: the square with the bedraggled trees, the market stalls, the wandering villagers, the unpaved roads dusty in the sun or running red in the rain. The broken-down town, in which I had felt neutered, became the place where it had all come to me.
With that I developed a new kind of political concern, almost a political anxiety. I could have done without that, but it couldn’t be helped. Through Yvette I was bound to Raymond, and through Raymond I was bound more closely than ever to the fact