A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [123]
In the morning he had a full minute of lucidity. He remembered that something had nagged and exhausted him the previous evening. Then, still in bed, he remembered, and the anguish returned. He got up. The bedsheet looked tormented. The mattress was exposed in places and he could smell the dingy old coconut-fibre. Slowly and carefully, like his actions the night before, his thoughts came, and he framed each thought in a complete sentence. He thought: ‘The bed is a mess. Therefore I slept badly. I must have been afraid all through the night. Therefore the fear is still with me.’
Outside, beyond the closed window, the light breaking through the chinks and fanning out in dust-shot rays, was the world. Outside there were people.
He spoke aloud some of the words of cornfort that hung on the walls. Then, trying to feel them as deeply as he could, he closed his eyes and spoke them again slowly, syllable by syllable. Then he pretended to write the words on his head with his finger.
Then he prayed.
But even in prayer he found images of people, and his prayers were perverted.
He dressed and opened the top half of the door.
Tarzan was waiting.
‘You are glad to see me,’ he thought. ‘You are an animal and think that because I have a head and hands and look as I did yesterday I am a man. I am deceiving you. I am not whole.’
Tarzan wagged his tail.
He opened the lower half of the door.
People!
Fear seized him and hurt like a pain.
Tarzan jumped upon him, egg-stained, shining-eyed.
Grieving, he stroked him. ‘I enjoyed this yesterday and the day before. I was whole then.’
Already yesterday, last night, was as remote as childhood. And mixed with his fear was this grief for a happy life never enjoyed and now lost.
He set about doing the things he did every morning. At the beginning of every action he forgot his pain: split seconds of freedom, relished only after they had gone. Breaking the hibiscus twig, for instance, as he did every morning, to brush his teeth with one of the crushed ends, he automatically looked past the trees to see whether his house had been destroyed during the night. Then he remembered how unimportant the house had become.
Bravely, exposing himself to menace, he stripped to bath at the waterbarrel.
The labourers were up. He heard the morning sounds: the hawking, spitting, the fanning of coal-pots, the hissing of fryingpans, the fresh, brisk morning talk. Negligible, nondescript people yesterday, each now had to be considered individually.
He looked at them and checked. Fear.
The sun was coming up, lighting the dew on the grass, the roof, the trees: a cool sun, a pleasant time of day.
As with actions, so with people. Meeting them, he began to speak as though it was yesterday. Then the questioning came, and the inevitable answer: another relationship spoiled, another piece of the present destroyed.
The day which had begun, for that minute while he was still in bed, as a normal, happy day, was ending with him in an exhausting frenzy of questioning. He looked, he questioned, he was afraid. Then he questioned again. The process was taking a fraction of a second.
By the afternoon, however, he had made some progress. He was not afraid of children. They filled him only with grief. So much that was good and beautiful, from which he was now forever barred, awaited them.
He went to his room, lay down on the bed and forced himself to cry for all his lost happiness.
There was nothing he could do. The questioning went on ceaselessly. One photograph after another, one drawing after another, one story after another. He tried not to look at the newspapers on the wall, but always he had to check, always he was afraid, and then always he became uncertain again.
In the end the futility of lying on the bed caused him to rise and make another of those decisions he had been making all day: decisions to ignore, to behave normally, little decisions, little gestures of defiance that were soon forgotten.
He decided to cycle to Hanuman House.
Every man and woman