Sir Vidia's Shadow (7 page)

Some people mistook the apparent spareness of his sentences for a faltering imagination, or a lack of stylistic ambition, or sheer monotony. But he said he was deliberate in everything he wrote, calculating each effect, and the simplicity was contrived. In his view, he was like someone making a model of an entire city out of the simplest material, a Rome made of matchsticks, say, a Rome whose bridges a full-sized human could stand on and run carts over. He detested falsity in style, he loathed manner in writing. He said he never prettified anything he saw or felt, and “prettified,” a new word to me, like “chuntering,” was added to my vocabulary.

“The truth is messy. It is not pretty. Writing must reflect that. Art must tell the truth.”

But early on, I had kept after him for the names of writers he admired. He shrugged. “Shakey, of course,” he said. “Jimmy Joyce. Tommy Mann.”

What books, I wondered, and why?

“Forget Nabokov. Read
Death in Venice
. Pay close attention to the accumulation of thought. Notice how each sentence builds and adds.”

What about American writers? Surely there was someone he liked.

“Do you know the first sentence of the short story ‘The Blue Hotel' by Stephen Crane? About the color blue?” he asked. “I like that.”

His own work served as a better example of how complex and yet transparent prose fiction could be. It was original, freshly imagined in both form and content. Its brilliance was not obvious—he did not use the word “brilliance,” but he was wholly satisfied with the work, had no misgivings, saw nothing false or forced in it.

“
Miguel Street
is deceptive,” he said. “Look at it again and you'll see how I used my material. Look at those sentences. They seem simple. But that book nearly killed me, man.”

Marlon Brando had read
Miguel Street
with pleasure, he had been told by a mutual friend, the novelist Edna O'Brien, who had also reported that Brando was attracted to women with dark nipples. It pleased Naipaul to know that Brando admired the book, and that knowledge made Naipaul feel friendly towards the actor.
The Teahouse of the August Moon
was a film he had liked, he said. He had not gone to many films lately, but he had seen every film that had come to Trinidad between the years 1942 and 1950, when he left for Oxford.

“You know what Brando says about actors?”

I said I did not know.

“An actor is a guy who, if you ain't talking about him, ain't listening.” Naipaul laughed his deep appreciative laugh and repeated the sentence.

Yomo was in bed when I got back home.

“
Bibi gonjwa
,” the housegirl said in a low voice, sounding as though she had been scolded. “Your woman's sick.”

Yomo said in a feeble voice that she was feeling awful and wished she had some kola nuts. I made a cup of tea for her and then rooted through my bookshelf and found an anthology of American short stories, which included “The Blue Hotel.”

This was how the story began: “The Palace Hotel at Fort Romper was painted a light blue, a shade that is on the legs of a kind of heron, causing the bird to declare its position against any background. The Palace Hotel, then, was always screaming and howling in a way that made the dazzling winter landscape of Nebraska seem only a gray swampish hush.”

Then Yomo was at the door, wearing the bed sheet like a toga, blinking in the lights and saying, “Please read to me.”

 

Naipaul complained so heartily about his house that I told him about my upstairs neighbors—newly married, a middle-aged man and a much younger woman—who giggled and chased each other around the house. They splashed in the bathtub and clattered plates and silver when they ate and called out constantly from room to room, “I can't hear you!” But we could hear everything they said. It seemed at times they were carrying on for our benefit, using us as witnesses, proving something. They made love noisily—she was a screecher in her orgasms; it was a noise that built in volume and frequency, like someone working hard, pumping a tire, sawing a log. Their bed rocked and squeaked. At times it sounded like a muffled inquisition, the ordeal of someone whose confession was being painfully extracted.

“Who are they?” Naipaul asked.

“New people. From Canada.”

“Infies,” he said. “Doesn't it make you hate all Canadians?”

I said no, and Pat laughed.

“Well, it would make me hate them,” Naipaul said. “Do you speak to them?”

“Sometimes.”

“You should cut them.”

“You mean not speak to them?”

“I mean not see them. You walk past them. You cut them. They don't exist. Nothing at all.”

Not even the G. Ramsay Muir treatment—you just walked on.

The point about the rocking, squeaking hobbyhorse of a bed was that when I heard it, its first murmurs and jerks and hiccups, hesitating, just foreplay, nothing rhythmic yet, I prepared myself, and soon it was swaying and calling like a corncrake, and the woman was urging this late-night plowing. Then, almost against my will, I became aroused and woke Yomo and we made love.

One of those nights Yomo turned me away, hugged herself, and said she was really ill.

“You might be pregnant,” I said. “You have to see the doctor.”

“I don't want the doctor. I don't need him.”

“He's good. He'll need to examine you.”

“Indian doctor,” she said. “Bloody shit.”

Dr. Barot was a Gujarati, Uganda born, trained in the Indian city of Broach, who in the past had treated me for gonorrhea and for malaria. I asked him if he would see Yomo. He said of course, that he was also an obstetrician, and that it was important that he see Yomo soon.

Sleepy-eyed, reluctant, slightly sulky, Yomo finally agreed. She always took pains to dress up before leaving the house, but this was a greater occasion than most. She put on her brocade sash, her expensive cloak, her best turban. I loved seeing her dress up, and she became haughty and offhand when she wore her elegant clothes.

The February heat was oppressive. In the car Yomo said, “You don't know. Black people get hotter than white people. It's our skin.” I wondered whether this was true.

Dr. Barot greeted her and took her into his examining room. I heard the scraping sound of her disrobing, stiff colorful clothes sliding away, of her folding them. If she was going to have a baby, I would be happy. It was not what I had planned, but really I had no plans. There was something wrong with the very idea of a plan, and anyway I half believed that my life was prefigured—perhaps, as people said, like the lines on my palm. My random life was pleasant enough, and everything good that had happened to me had come accidentally. I just launched myself and trusted to luck.
Mektoub
—it is written.

I sat waiting, thinking of nothing in particular. When the examining room door opened I smiled, having just been reminded of why I was there.

“What's the verdict?”

“Four months pregnant,” Dr. Barot said.

Yomo looked shyly at me and slipped next to me as we watched Dr. Barot write his bill on a pad. While he wrote, he said that Yomo was healthy and that she should see him regularly from now on so he could monitor her blood pressure.

In the car, sitting on the hot upholstery, I said, “How can you be four months pregnant? You've only been here three months.”

I felt innumerate and confused and was not blaming her but rather trying to explain my bewilderment.

Yomo said, “I had a friend in Nigeria before I came here to see you.”

Now it became harder for me to drive. The road was full of obstacles, and it was much hotter in the car.

“What are we going to do?” I said.

She was silent, but I could see she was sad, and her sadness seemed worse because she was dressed so beautifully.

“Do you think you should see your friend?” I asked.

She said nothing. She did not cry until that night, when her clothes were neatly folded on the chair, all that stiff cloth in a deep stack. She was in bed, hiding her face, sobbing.

I did not know what to say. I did not have the words. I loved her, but I had just discovered that I did not know her. Who was this friend, and what was this deception? It must have been obvious to her that she was at least one month pregnant soon after she arrived in Uganda.

“I want to go home,” she said in a voice that broke my heart, and it was awful to hear the Canadians upstairs fooling around and calling out.

“This is your home.”

“No,” she said, and went on weeping.

Yomo was one of only three passengers on the plane from Entebbe to Lagos a week later. Her posture was different, her sadness making her slower and giving her a halting way of walking, and she sighed as we moved towards the barrier, where I kissed her goodbye. It seemed a kind of death, because it was as though we were losing everything.

“I liked it when you read that story to me,” she said. She began to weep again.

The road from Entebbe to Kampala was known for its frequent fatal car accidents. I drove it that day feeling fearless and stupid, not caring if it was my turn to die on this road, because hadn't everything else come to an end? I was numb, but when I got to my house I knew that I had lost my love and would have to begin again, and all that helped was my knowing that for Yomo it would be worse. So I helped myself by sorrowing for her.

Naipaul asked me where I had been. He had not seen me in the painful week that had just passed.

“Oh, God,” he said. “Oh, God.” His voice cracked, his face was tormented. “Are you all right? Of course you're not. Paul, Paul, Paul.”

He was truly upset. He was sharing the burden. That was the act of a friend.

He took my hand and turned it over and studied it again, this time tracing it with his finger, and this time he spoke.

“You must not worry. You're going to be all right.”

“Thanks, Vidia.” It was the first time I used the name.

“That is a good hand.”

3

I
T WAS THE MONTH
of bush fires, smoky skies, black hills, fleeing animals; the season of haze and hawks.

With all my love lost, I lay in the bedroom alone where we had slept together, staring at the long-nosed stains on the ceiling, goblins with the voices of the yelling Canadians upstairs. I was sorrowful without Yomo and her laughter. Naipaul—Vidia, as I now called him—was kind, but kindness was not enough. I needed a more intimate friend or else no one at all, just the consolation of the African landscape, which was a reminder to me that life goes on.

It was the season when Africans set fire to the bush, believing the blaze to be helpful to next year's crops. I set off for the north, drove almost to the Sudan, and walked among the elephant palms to the shriek and twang of the same insects the people ate there; then I drove on to Arua, in West Nile province, on the Congo border, with its scowling purplish Kakwa people, of whom the chief of staff of the Uganda Army, Idi Amin, was the stereotype.

Hawks hovered above the grass fires and swooped down on the mice and snakes and other small creatures that were roused and panicked by the flames. There were hawks all over the smoky sky. Something about the wildfires and the hovering birds and the scuttling mice spoke to me of sex and its consequences.

At Kitgum, in the far north, I hiked in a hot wind, sinking in sand to my ankles, kicking at dead leaves to scatter the snakes. Each night in the village where I stayed a toothless old woman squatted on the dirt floor of a hut and sang a lewd song in an ululating voice. “She is beautiful and has a neck like a swan, but she has stroked the spear of every man in the district” was the way her song was translated for me. It was coarse and upsetting, but this hidden corner of Africa was peaceful for being hot and remote. Black water tumbled over Karuma Falls. To justify my trip to my department head, I traveled southwest and slipped between the Mountains of the Moon and visited schools at Bundibugyo, where Yomo and I had planned to lose ourselves in the bush. One night after rain I went outside and found thirsty children licking raindrops off my car.

Hawks, bush fires, heat, envious songs, and desperate children: so far, not much consolation on this safari.

A sign reading
Very Big Lion
was nailed to a tree near Mityana, where I stopped on my way back to Kampala. Another sign said
Good News—To See A Very Big Lion—It eats 50 lbs of Meat Daily
. A coastal Swahili man with gray eyes in a grubby skullcap asked me for a shilling and then showed me the lion.

“
Simba! Simba!
”

Covered with flies, the lion lay in a pen made of corrugated iron, thrown up in a clearing near the road. The man in the skullcap made the beast growl by poking it with the skinned and bloody leg of a dead animal, a gazelle's perhaps. The lion thrashed but could not seize the meat in its yellow stumps of teeth. I looked into the lion's eyes and saw the sort of lonely torment that I felt.

“
Bwana. Mumpa cigara
.”

Within a week the lion had escaped and killed six villagers and was finally shot by the Mityana district game warden. All that violence for the lion's being in a pen. I saw a link between that hunger and the animal's captivity—that appetite, that denial. I tried to write a story about it, but there was no story, only the incident.

“Someday you will use it,” Vidia said, though he said he disliked animal stories. He told me that when he was my age, working on his first book, a man had told him to read Hemingway's story “Hills Like White Elephants.”

I said, “For anyone who lives in Africa—for me, at any rate—Hemingway is unreadable.”

“Nevertheless, I read the story immediately it was recommended to me.”

Vidia was still helping me with my essay on cowardice, frowning over it, the tenth version. He said that it was improving but that it would be better if I cut it by half. I nodded but doubted that I would.