The Mimic Men (25 page)

I said, feeling that he was seeking to drag me back into his world, where he walked with security, ‘I am not coming back.’

He wasn’t put out. ‘It’s what I always say. You fellows from the Orient and so on, ancient civilization etcetera, you are the long-visioned types. You give up too easily. Just the opposite of our Afric brethren. Short-visioned. Can’t look ahead, and nothing to look back to. That is why I am sorry to say I can’t see our Afric friends coming to much. Lot of noise and so on, but short-visioned. I’ll tell you. You know those fellows in the South American bush, when they kill something, say a deer or something like that, you know they just sit down and eat out the whole damn thing, man. They not putting aside any for the morrow, you know.’ He gave a little laugh as he broke into the popular accent.

I said, ‘You mean the bush-Negroes?’

‘Indians.’ He gave another laugh. ‘Amerindians. Bucks, you know. But a similar short-visioned type.’

He was launched on what was clearly a favourite theory. The example he had given, of the South-American deer-feast, had that feel, of a fact polished to myth by its frequent use in argument. In his own way he was a racial expert. His knowledge ranged wide and in some places touched my own, which I had thought personal and sufficiently recondite. The names of books he mentioned revealed him as an addict of racial theory. He rejected simple racial divisions as a crudity. Instead he divided nations into the short-visioned, like the Africans, who remained in a state of nature; the long-visioned like Indians and Chinese, obsessed with thoughts of eternity; and the medium-visioned, like himself. The medium-visioned were the doers, the survivors.

‘No great philosophy and so on, but we’ve survived.
Goodness, how many revolutions?’ He pretended to count. ‘The French Revolution, for one. What happened? We came over to this part of the world, to Santo Domingo. And then there was that revolution there. Let’s not talk about Haiti. Ten glorious years of revolution etcetera etcetera, but never mention the hundred and thirty, forty, years afterwards. Let’s not talk about Haiti. Anyway, then we came here.
Tonnerre!
No sooner here than our friends the English take over. Look at the result. Listen to me talking English in my low Isabella accent. Champ here can scarcely talk French.’

It was true. Champ’s French was dreadful.

‘But we’re still around. That lady you see there’ – he pointed to the shiny and terrible oil portrait – ‘was an ancestor of this boy.’

‘Not of yours,’ Champ said. It seemed a family joke.

‘She was born in Santo Domingo. It wasn’t too bad with old Toussaint in the beginning. Then of course we all came here. She was still a child. When she was about fifteen she went to Paris. To be educated, to get to know people. You know. She was very pretty, as you can see. She was a little bit wild too. I think you can see that too. Very popular and sought after and so on. She used to stay in the house of a woman called Clémentine Curial.’

I didn’t know the name.

‘Her husband was a general, a count. What I call Napoleon brand. There was a man who was in and out of the house. Ugly little fellow, full of talk. And not too well off either. He was about forty, and writing a lot of rubbish nobody wanted to read. Biographies and travel books and so on. Fat little fellow. And you know what? She’ – he pointed to the portrait – ‘fell for him. His name was Henri Beyle.’

I gave a start.

Mr Deschampsneufs lifted the palm of his hand, applauding my knowledge but asking to be allowed to go on.
‘When she came back to Isabella she had a stack of letters from Henri Beyle. Of course nothing had happened. The trouble with that fellow Beyle was that he was better at talking love than making it. One day, I think it was in 1831, nothing like Abolition or anything like that yet, she got a book from Paris. It was called
Le Rouge et le Noir.
On the fly-leaf Beyle had written the number of a page. She turned to this page and saw that two short paragraphs had been marked. When she read the paragraphs she tore up all Henri Beyle’s letters and destroyed the book.’

We had studied
Le Rouge et le Noir
in the sixth form. I hadn’t liked it. The language seemed to me crude, and I thought the story was simple and unreal, more like a fairytale than a story about real people. I said this to Mr Deschampsneufs.

‘Well, it must seem like that to us out here. We don’t have people like marquises and so on here or anything like their society. And we can’t see the point of a man like Julien or the Marquis de la Mole. But still, they tell me it’s a great book.’

‘I know. I had to write essays about it. What were the paragraphs Stendhal marked?’

‘The paragraphs. You know the story well? You remember when Julien climbs into Mlle de la Mole’s room at night?’ He went to the bookcase and took out a book. It opened easily at the place he required. ‘Julien has just thrown the ladder and the rope down on the flowerbeds. You remember?’

‘That was the sort of fairytale thing I couldn’t appreciate.’

‘Yes, yes.’ He began to read from the book:
‘Et comment moi m’en aller? dit Julien d’un ton plaisant, et en affectant le langage créole.’
Mr Deschampsneufs’s accent was suitably broad. ‘Suddenly, you see, that fellow Beyle throws in a reference to creole French. For no reason at all. It’s a big moment in his story, and he goes and does a thing like that.
And then he puts in, in brackets, mark you:
Une des femmes de la maison était née à Saint-Domingue. – Vous, vous en aller par la porte, dit Mathilde, ravie de cette idée.
For no reason at all. That bit of dialogue in creole French. Just for a private joke. And the joke was that he had exchanged those very words in the house of Clémentine Curial with that woman whose picture you see there.’

I was deeply impressed. I felt that Mr Deschampsneufs’s story had brought the past close. It was possible to believe in the link between our island and the great world. My own dreams were rendered absurd. The outside world was stripped of its quality of legend and reduced to the comprehensible. Grand figures came near. A writer accounted great had been turned into a simple man, fat and middle-aged and ironic. And nearness exalted; it did not diminish.

‘A whole life. And that is all that remains. A little aside in a novel, a sentence in brackets. A little affectionate, a little mocking.
Femme de la maison.
Not true, not nice. What do you think? I don’t know about you, but I feel it’s more than I’m going to leave behind. This immortality is a funny thing. You can never tell who is going to get it. How many people who read that book would stop and think about what I’ve just told you, you think? She tore up all the letters. Do you think she was right to feel insulted?’

Another familiar topic, clearly. And, as with the first, I took no part. Shortly afterwards I left. Champ walked part of the way with me. I asked him whether it was true about his ancestor and Stendhal. He said, ‘My father would kill himself if it wasn’t true. I believe
Le Rouge
is the only novel he’s read.’

It was the end of another of our Isabella days, the sun gone, the wind cool, the sky ablaze in the west with red-tinted clouds, and against this swiftly passing splendour the tall palmistes and branching saman were black, but with a suggestion of deeper, warmer tints. With Stendhal and the
ancestor and the creole language of Santo Domingo in my head, I saw the scene as though I had already been removed from it and it was occurring in memory, in a book.

‘The painting of the lady, is that old?’

‘Don’t try to be too polite with me. It was done by a man in Florida or Minnesota or some such place. He paints from photographs and my father sent him a sketch of some sort. There is another one, if you want to know, in my parents’ bedroom. I made them put it there. Done on a dish, and glazed.’

I was carrying away more than a story of Stendhal and the lady. I was carrying away a memory of the absurdity with which the meeting had ended. Did old Deschampsneufs genuinely not see when I attempted to shake hands? I attempted twice, and when he did give me his hand it was only two fingers. The pointlessness of the insult had taken me by surprise. It was as if an unknown, unnoticed man whom I was passing on the pavement had suddenly attacked me and walked on. So private! So much a thing to keep! And walking back through this horribly man-made landscape of which Browne had spoken, I thought, above Champ’s talk: You do not care for what they stand or what they are and they have nothing to offer you. You are about to leave, you have left: the mother saw that. Why, recognizing the enemy, did you not kill him swiftly?

We underestimate or overestimate our strength always. We refuse to wound and thereby throw away our hand. We create problems for the future.
Le Rouge.
Our attention in class had been drawn to Stendhal’s cleverness in making Julien, right at the beginning of the book, mistake water on a church floor for blood. This had seemed to me crude. But now, full of the closeness of Stendhal, I looked at the red sky and saw blood. And yet was glad I was leaving. Do not dismiss melodrama and style: they are human needs. How easy it is to turn that landscape, which we make ordinary by
living in it and becoming part of it, into the landscape of the battlefield.

One journey had to be made before I left. It was to my father. Some months after the end of the war he had been released. For a few days the newspapers were interested. So too were some of our new-style politicians the Royal Commission had brought into being, businessmen and contractors who saw in politics a potentially rewarding extension of their private affairs. These men thought my father’s approval was still important. But my father had not responded and they had gone away. My father did not go back to his camp in the eastern hills. He selected a wooded site in the southwest, near the sea. This was also on crown lands. But the government, I was glad to see, did not molest him.

I went with money in my pocket. I had a debt to repay. His camp was in a clearing off a track. It was an ugly clearing, a disfiguring of the woods. He, or the disciples he still had with him, had turned the ground between the tree stumps into mud; and on the mud they had laid passageways of planks and coconut trunks. The land was not cleared all the way down to the sea. A thin screen of woods hid the sea, as though that was a tainted view. At one end of the clearing was his hut, with mud walls and a thatch of carat palms. On a tree stump on a mound was what looked like a toy replica of this hut. The mound had been scraped clean of weeds and grass and had been plastered. The toy hut was obviously a shrine of some sort. Such childishness was not what I had expected from Gurudeva. Better the leader of the mob than this wasted, scruffily bearded man in a yellow robe who now, ignoring me, went to his shrine and rearranged his little bits and pieces, his stones and shells and leaves and roots and his coconut. The coconut seemed especially important.
He had invented so much. His inventions had been so brilliant. Had the gift now been withdrawn?

I went to the larger hut. A woman dressed in white greeted me. She recognized me and I knew who she was. The embarrassment was mine alone. I said, ‘I am leaving the island for good. I have come to see him before I go.’ She spoke to me in Hindi: ‘Have you come then for a sight of him?’ She used a word with strong religious associations:
darshan.
I did not wish to lie. I said nothing, surrendering, as I had surrendered at the Deschampsneufs’, to the woman’s idea of herself, her concept of the holiness of her charge and the holiness of the ground. She was beyond the reproach of sex: this was the reproach I had feared to sense. She said: ‘It is his day of silence. He has given up the world. He has become a true
sanyasi.’

Sanyasi,
yellow-robed, among woods! Woods hymned endlessly in Aryan chants and found here on an island surrounded by a brown-green sea. It was his day of silence. When he came back to the hut from his shrine he greeted me without recognition at first. But then he put his arms around me. I remembered the embrace of his arms before, the day he towed me on the crossbar of his bicycle. He was gentle and silent. He went to the inner room of the hut. The sympathy that remained was for the idea of him. Gurudeva,
asvamedha:
these were the inspired moments, the fulfilment in a few weeks of a promise that had festered long.

But I had also come to repay a debt. It couldn’t really be repaid, but the gesture was necessary. I said to the woman, ‘I would like to leave this for Gurudeva.’ I gave her a prepared wad of a hundred dollars. Then I gave her three ten-dollar bills. ‘My father borrowed this from your son Dalip.’ Clad in white, the colour of purity, she took the money, showing no surprise.

Afterwards I went for a walk on the beach. The coast here was wild and untidy. The water at times frothed yellow with mud. The beach was littered with driftwood and other debris from the mighty South American rivers which, in flood, pushed their discolouring fresh waters as far north as this. The sand was black and pebbly and sharp. Another cloudy day, the clouds as dirty and ragged as the sea and the beach. I walked. The woods of crown lands gave way to the mangy coconut grove of a rundown estate. The trunks of the trees had orange blotches; beyond them were the white wooden houses of the labourers, white distemper streaked with the running salt rust of old tin roofs. There was a car on the beach. And in a little huddle in the shallows, as though in the vastness of sky and sea and sand they had come together for protection, was a white family, made up it seemed only of women and girls. A man, clearly of the party, was standing on the beach. A man burdened by women. We walked towards one another.

He said, as one sharing a joke, ‘You went to Gurudeva’s camp?’

‘I’ve just been to see him. I am his son.’

‘Oh! Deschampsneufs told me you went to see him.’

‘His son asked me to tea.’

He was not more than forty, but he had the used-up look of a man who had found his niche early and could already look back to a stupendous twenty years’ experience.

‘How did you like old Des?’ he asked.