The Mimic Men (20 page)

We were talking one day about marriage and the absurdity of the institution that would turn all the foolish boys we knew into husbands, lords and masters to girls who, poor things, could not at that moment guess their maturing fate. We went on to talk about selective breeding. Deschampsneufs laid down the restrictions he would apply. On this subject he was allowed a certain authority. It was known that in the slave days the Deschampsneufs had kept a slave stud-farm on one of the islets off Isabella; the Negroes there were said to be a super-race still. Eden, attempting to clown and perhaps also looking for a tribute to his own superb physique, said, ‘Champ, you would let me breed?’ Deschampsneufs considered him. ‘It would be a pity to let the strain die out,’ he said. ‘Yes, Spite. I think we will let you breed. But we will have to cross you with a damn intelligent woman.’

Much was forgiven Deschampsneufs because from the security of his aristocracy he mixed easily with the poorest and crudest boys; in this he was unlike the son of the English clergyman who, possessing only piety, didn’t acknowledge black boys in the street, and thereby made himself
ridiculous. A lot more was forgiven Deschampsneufs because he was witty and inventive. He loved, for instance, to put a price on a boy; but only he could have got away with it. Only he would have been allowed to say, of a boy he didn’t like, ‘He wouldn’t fetch five dollars.’ Outrageousness of this sort was required of him.

‘All you had to do,’ he now said to Eden, ‘was to send in your photo. In Technicolor.’

But he didn’t get his laugh. The moment was wrong. His tone was wrong; it was touched with a genuine bitterness. Browne didn’t like it. Eden, taking his cue from Browne, didn’t like it either. If they were younger they might have come to blows. Eden would have dumbly done what the new mood required of him. But not even angry words passed between them then. The teacher arrived; everyone went to his desk. The declaration of war was left unmade. In this new stage of the old war between master and slave it was left to me to have the fight with Deschampsneufs, a fight I never looked for. I had my own fantasies. I had made my decision to leave. It was horrible to me to be identified with those who struggled outside the gates of the
Cercle Sportif.

My father’s movement faded. Even in our house he faded. He had become a remote public personality, the possession of everyone; he was, occasionally, a name in the newspapers. I found I no longer tried to visualize his day concretely. Such private concern seemed unreal. At school there was no more talk of Gurudeva or riots or burnings; we all preferred, for various reasons, to forget that frustration. The injustices of the slogan competition had also been forgotten. We had a new excitement: the Christmas meeting of the Isabella Turf Club. The
Inquirer
told us every day that racing was the sport of kings; and just as there were depressed boys who
were prepared to talk endlessly with Cecil about models of motorcars they could never hope to drive, so now there were boys, in the Isabellan scale no higher than grooms, who talked endlessly about the sport of kings. They knew the names of horses, jockeys and trainers; they knew about pedigrees, past performances and handicaps. I couldn’t believe in their interest myself. I hated racing; I hated the gambling that went with it. But even I was forced to learn a little.

The main race of the Christmas meeting was the Malay Cup. The
Inquirer
annually told the story of this cup. It had been given to the Turf Club at the turn of the century by the governor, Sir Hugh Clifford. Though it was on Isabella that Sir Hugh exercised his first colonial governorship, he regarded all his service in the Caribbean, in Isabella and elsewhere, as exile from Malaya, to which he was devoted; and he spent much of his time in Government House writing a book of Malayan memories called
Coast and Kampong
which, after an unfavourable review by Joseph Conrad, committed him to the further literary exercise of a lengthy correspondence, ripening to friendship, with the as yet little known novelist. The Malay Cup was Sir Hugh’s parting gift to the island he had liked less than literature.

The favourite for the Malay Cup that year was a horse called Tamango. It belonged to the Deschampsneufs stables. Tamango was popular at school as well, for special reasons. Many boys claimed Deschampsneufs as a friend and therefore claimed a special interest in his horse. Then the name was African; and though the significance of the name was known to be ambiguous, the Negro boys were pleased. At Isabella Imperial we all knew where the name came from. Some people outside didn’t know – so much we could gather from the sports pages, already notorious to us from the howlers Major Grant regularly culled from them; and this private knowledge made us more proprietorial.
Tamango,
in a simplified and abbreviated edition, was one of the French texts we used in the lower forms; we all knew that Mérimée story of the African chief, seller of slaves, himself treacherously enslaved, and finally a leader of revolt. It was typical of the coolness and ambiguity of the Deschampsneufs family to give such a name to a horse: they seemed constantly anxious to call attention to a past which they agreed had been disreputable.

The interest in his family’s horse made Deschampsneufs insufferable at school. He came in in the morning smelling of horse, with his shoes and the bottoms of his trousers wet and dirty and stuck with bits of grass. He looked harassed, as though he had been up all night, a man with worries which the frivolous sporting world, mere watchers and gamblers, taking pleasure for granted, could never know or appreciate. He permitted himself no levity throughout the day, and as soon as the last lesson was over he was off again. His manner invited anxious questioning. But all inquiry or interest made him impatient and rude. He was especially brutal with those boys who, partly to please him, pretended to know more about horses than they did.

Then the horse called Tamango disappeared.

The reaction at school was strange. The correct thing to say was of course that it was a pity or, if you wished to use a newspaper word, an outrage. But there were undercurrents. It was at once assumed that the horse would not be found; and it was also assumed that Deschampsneufs had in some way become vulnerable to further loss. His loss was tragic, but it made him ridiculous; and within two days the loss itself became something that could be justified. Boys who had put up with Deschampsneufs’s brutality became retrospectively irritated; the merit of the horse was questioned; and the very name Tamango, to so many a cause for pride, was now seen as a provocation and an insult.

After about a week we heard that the horse had been
found. It was dead. That was all we heard at first, and the news surprised no one. But what I next heard chilled and sickened me and gave me more strongly than ever the sensation of rawness and violation: rubbery raw flesh, tainted holy oil. It was more than a death. A charcoal burner had found the animal, garlanded with marigold and faded hibiscus, on a freshly prepared platform of beaten and plastered earth. Heart and entrails had been torn out; but there were flowers on the animal’s mane, flowers woven into its tail; and the coat had been brushed as though by proud grooms. At the centre of the platform, on a smaller, shallow platform of its own, were the remains of a fire, still fragrant with burnt sugar, pitchpine, butter and coconut. Banana suckers had been planted at each corner of this smaller platform; and at each corner a swastika had been traced out in flour.
Asvamedha:
to myself alone I spoke the word. It filled me with unexpected awe and horror. An ancient sacrifice, in my imagination a thing of beauty, speaking of the youth of the world, of untrodden forests and unsullied streams, of horses and warrior-youths in morning light: now rendered obscene. My mind, at once literal and fantastic, created a picture of a deepening, endless tunnel: into this I felt I was ever descending, when all I wanted was to return to the light.

The killing of Tamango was inevitably linked with my father and his followers. The newspapers were outraged and called for action. But nothing could be established. The newspapers called for the destruction of my father’s camp and his eviction from crown lands. The administration ignored this unbalanced and ill-timed advice; the governor continued to be cool. At school it was hard for me, though. I was at one with those who abused me. Their abuse was touched with fascination, but their sense of sacrilege was not greater than my own. I could not ridicule; I could not defend. I was sorry for Deschampsneufs’s sake: the vindictive
current still ran against him. I shared his anger, hurt and disgust. But when he challenged me to fight I fought.

I had never had a fight before and I was certain it would go against me. We were about the same height but Deschampsneufs was heavier. I thought that whatever I was going to do had better be done quickly; and I was as surprised as anyone when at the end of our first clinching I found that Deschampsneufs was on the floor and I was on top of him. That, I knew, was the limit of my success; through our unscientific tangling of arms and legs I could sense that he was recovering fast. I had a moment of alarm, and for an added reason. At the back of my mind was the thought that I had supporters. Now I saw that the battle was mine alone. And the defeated were always wrong. But our form-master was on the alert for just such a fight; the silence, unusual in a free period, warned him. He came and separated us. I was relieved. The boys who had offered me devotion before became more devoted now, they who were willing for me to have been alone.

In the history books, as I say, my father’s movement is now made to appear just another part of a recognizable pattern of events in one region of the world. The mood is seen to have created both the leader and the special event associated with him. That event was not the exodus from the city, the march away from the troubled docks of both strikers and volunteers. It was the killing of Tamango, That was the movement’s most famous deed, as central to it as the racecourse suicide was to the suffragette movement in England, They are both events which, becoming history, lose their horror and obscenity and appear the natural, almost logical, expression of a mood; they are events which now seem oddly
expected
and dramatically right. In Jamaica, the regional history books now say, dealing with the disturbed prewar period, there were strikes and riots; in Trinidad there was an oilfield strike during which three people were
shot dead and a policeman was burned alive; in Isabella they killed a racehorse belonging to an old French family.

So the deed becomes a crystallization of an existing mood. But my memory of those days tells me that the deed in such a situation is necessary; that without it a mood is useless and burns itself out. After this deed our island changed, though change was not to show for fifteen years. It was like the loaders’ insulting of Cecil’s father, the gesture which suddenly reveals society as an association of consent and teaches, dangerously for the future of all, that consent can be withdrawn. And I go back to the leader and the deed. The leader intuits the necessary deed. The killing of a racehorse, a favourite for the Malay Cup, was outrageous and obscene to everyone on that sport-crazed island. Yet it became an acceptable rallying point of righteous, underground emotion. The successful leader works by intuition; such is the degree of self-violation he imposes on his followers, whom he must never cease to surprise.

But for me there was something more. Primitive, bestial, degraded: these were some of the words used by certain sections of the island. I shared their horror, but I had my own reasons.
Asvamedha.
I had read the texts, I knew the word. The horse-sacrifice, the Aryan ritual of victory and overlordship, a statement of power so daring it was risked only by the truly brave; purified by the tender Asoka; revived by those who came after; and performed, memorably, by the grandson of the general of the last Maurya to celebrate the expulsion of the Greeks from
Aryavarta,
the Aryan land. How had my father arrived at it? Was it simply the intuition of the leader? Was the act no more than what it was, accompanied by simple Hindu ritual which anyone might have observed and copied? Or was it an attempt at the awesome sacrifice, the challenge to Nemesis, performed by a shipwrecked man on a desert island?
Asvamedha.
Tainted oil,
raw flesh. Chieftaincy among mountains and snow had been my innermost fantasy. Now, deeply, I felt betrayed and ridiculed. I rejected the devotion that was offered me. I wished to fly, to begin afresh, lucidly.

I
WAS
relieved when the war came and my father was interned under some wartime regulation. In this internment he was fortunate. He disappeared almost as soon as he had made his mark. He left behind a reputation which memory could heighten; he was spared the slow neglect, leading to derision, which would certainly have come. With the war, with the arrival of the Americans in Isabella, the building of bases, with the money and prosperity and the urgency it created, with that new sense of nearness to great events, my father’s movement would have died of its own futility. When he was released after the war he was no longer required. He was like a man who had been dead six years. This suited him. He wished to be alone; and after a week or so of mainly newspaper fuss he was allowed to live in quiet retirement. But he bequeathed me certain relationships.

With Deschampsneufs, in the first place. We had never been close. I remembered him on the beach pulling in the seine with the three corpses; I had tried then, for a reason I could never give, to hide from him. At Isabella Imperial there had not been anything like the belching competitions we used to have in our earlier school; the invitation to see his vine and Meccano set had not been repeated and possibly now lived in my memory alone. Our fight had only been an untidy scramble in a cleared space between desks; all I
remembered of it was a confusion of limbs, the look of surprise on Deschampsneufs’s face when he found himself on his back, and the dustiness of the oiled floor. But the cliché occurred: we were more friendly afterwards. He became less flippant with me. He told me some of his secrets. He too wished to leave Isabella. He intended to go to Quebec and paint. That he painted was news to me. He said he thought it was an interest which would be considered effeminate in Isabella; in Quebec, which was French and marvellous, they would understand. He also wished to get married, the sooner the better; he wanted to have ten children, so that he could ‘sit down and watch those buggers eat’. I suspected this ambition: I heard the words coming from an older and more foolish person, some harassed poor relation at a Sunday lunch. I entered Deschampsneufs’s world tremulously. I was not interested and I did not wish to offend. I felt I had little to offer in return. After all that had happened, his friendship embarrassed me; or perhaps I was embarrassed by what, on Isabella, his offering of friendship implied.