A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [124]
And there were some things he wanted to leave untouched. It was bad enough to deceive Tarzan. He didn’t want to deceive Anand and Savi. He turned and cycled back, past the fields whose terror was already familiar, to Green Vale.
It occurred to him that by repeating as far as he could all his actions of the previous night he might somehow exorcize the thing that had fallen on him. So, with a deliberation that was like the deliberation of the day before, he bathed, cooked, ate, then sat down and opened Notre Dame.
But the reading only brought back the memory of the previous night, the discovery of fear, and left his hands dusted with gilt.
Every morning the period of lucidity lessened. The bedsheet, examined every morning, always testified to a tormented night. Between the beginning of a routine action and the questioning the time of calm grew less. Between the meeting of a familiar person and the questioning there was less and less of ease. Until there was no lucidity at all, and all action was irrelevant and futile.
But it was always better to be out among real people than to be in his room with the newspapers and his imaginings. And though he continued to solace himself with visions of deserted landscapes of sand and snow, his anguish became especially acute on Sunday afternoons, when fields and roads were empty and everything was still.
Continually he looked for some sign that the corruption which had come without warning upon him had secretly gone away again. Examining the bedsheet was one thing. Looking at his fingernails was the other. They were invariably bitten down; but sometimes he saw a thin white rim on one nail, and though these rims never lasted, he took their appearance to mean that release was near.
Then, biting his nails one evening, he broke off a piece of a tooth. He took the piece out of his mouth and placed it on his palm. It was yellow and quite dead, quite unimportant: he could hardly recognize it as part of a tooth: if it were dropped on the ground it would never be found: a part of himself that would never grow again. He thought he would keep it. Then he walked to the window and threw it out.
One Saturday Seth said, while they were by the unfinished house, ‘What’s the matter, Mohun? You are the colour of this.’ He placed his large hand on one of the grey uprights.
And Mr Maclean called. Someone he knew had offered him some timber at a bargain price. It would be enough to wall one room.
They went to look at the house. Mr Maclean saw the asphalt hanging from the roof but said nothing about it. The floorboards in the back bedroom had begun to shrink, cracking and cambering. Mr Maclean said, ‘The man did say that the wood was cured. But cedar is a damn funny wood. It does never cure at all.’
The new timber was bought. It was cedar.
‘No tongue-and-groove,’ Mr Maclean said.
Mr Biswas said nothing.
Mr Maclean understood. He had seen this apathy overcome the builders of houses again and again.
The back bedroom was walled. The door to the partially floored drawingroom was built and hung. The door to the non-existent front bedroom was built and nailed into the doorway: ‘To prevent accident,’ Mr Maclean said, ‘in case you want to move in right away.’ Mr Biswas had wanted doors with panels; he got planks of cedar nailed to two cross bars. The window was built in the same fashion and hung; the new black bolts gleamed on the new wood.
‘It coming along nice,’ Mr Maclean said.
Into Mr Biswas’s busy, exhausted mind came the thought: ‘Hari blessed it. Shama