A House for Mr. Biswas (35 page)

The cedar floorboards came, rough and bristly, and impregnated the site with their smell. When Mr Maclean planed them they seemed to acquire a richer colour. He fitted them together as neatly as he had said, nailing them down with headless nails and filling in the holes at the top with wax
mixed with sawdust which dried hard and could scarcely be distinguished from the wood. The back bedroom was floored, and part of the drawingroom, so that, with care, it was possible to walk straight up to the bedroom.

Then Mr Maclean said, ‘When you get more materials you must let me know.’

He had worked for a fortnight for eight dollars.

Perhaps he didn’t pay seven dollars for the cedar, Mr Biswas thought. Only five or six.

The house now became a playground for the children of the barracks. They climbed and they jumped; many took serious falls but, being barrack children, came to little harm. They nailed nails into the crapaud pillars and the cedar floor; they bent nails for no purpose; they flattened them to make knives. They left small muddy footprints on the floor and on the crossbars of the frame; the mud dried and the floor became dusty. The children drove out the poultry and Mr Biswas tried to drive out the children.

‘You blasted little bitches! Let me catch one of you and see if I don’t cut his foot off.’

As the sugarcane grew taller the dispossessed labourers grew surlier, and Mr Biswas began to receive threats, delivered as friendly warnings.

Seth, who had often spoken of the treachery and danger-ousness of the labourers, now only said, ‘Don’t let them frighten you.’

But Mr Biswas knew of the many killings in Indian districts, so well planned that few reached the courts. He knew of the feuds between villages and between families, conducted with courage, ingenuity and loyalty by those same labourers who, as wage-earners, were obsequious and negligible.

He decided to take precautions. He slept with a cutlass and a
poui
stick, one of his father’s, at the side of his bed. And from Mrs Seeung, the Chinese café-owner at Arwacas, he got a puppy, a hairy brown and white thing of indeterminate breed. The first night at the barracks the puppy whined at being left outside, scratched at the door, fell off the step and whined until he was taken in. When Mr Biswas woke up next
morning he found the puppy in bed beside him, lying quite still, its eyes open. At Mr Biswas’s first gesture, which was one of surprise, the puppy jumped to the floor.

He called the puppy Tarzan, to prepare it for its duties. But Tarzan turned out to be friendly and inquisitive, and a terror only to the poultry. ‘The hens stop laying because of your dog,’ the poultry owners complained, and it looked true enough, for Tarzan often had pieces of feather stuck in the corners of his mouth, and he was continually bringing trophies of feathers to the room. Then one day Tarzan ate an egg and immediately developed a taste for eggs. The hens laid their eggs in bush, in places which they thought were secret. Tarzan soon got to know these places as well as the owners of the hens and he often came back to the barracks with his mouth yellow and sticky with egg. The owners of the hens took their revenge. One afternoon Mr Biswas found Tarzan’s muzzle smeared with fowl droppings, and Tarzan in great misery at this novel and continuing discomfort.

The placards in Mr Biswas’s room increased. He worked more slowly on them now, using black and red estate ink and pencils of many colours. He filled the blank space with difficult decorations and his letters became intricate and ornamented.

Thinking it would help him if he read novels, he bought a number of the cheap Reader’s Library editions. The covers were dark purple with gold lettering and decorations. In the stall at Arwacas they had looked attractive, but in his room he could scarcely bear to touch them. The gilt stuck to his fingers and the covers reminded him of funeral palls and of those undertakers’ horses that were draped with the colours of death every day.

The sun shone and the rain fell. The roof didn’t leak. But the asphalt began to melt and hung limply down: a legion of slim, black, growing snakes. Occasionally they fell, and, falling, curled and died.

Late one night, when he had put out the oil lamp and was in bed, he heard footsteps outside his room.

He lay still, listening. Then he jumped out of bed, grabbed his stick and deliberately knocked against the kitchen safe and
table and Shama’s dressingtable. He stood at the side of the door and violently pushed out the top half, his body protected by the lower half.

He saw nothing but the night, the still, colourless barrackyard, the dead trees black against the moonlit sky. Two rooms away a light was burning: someone was out, or a child was ill.

Then, making a lapping, happy sound, Tarzan was on the step, wagging his tail so hard it struck against the lower half of the door.

He let him in and stroked him. His coat was damp.

Tarzan, overjoyed at the attention, stuck his muzzle against Mr Biswas’s face.

‘Egg!’

For a second Tarzan hesitated. No threat appearing, he redoubled his tail-wagging, continually shifting his hind legs.

Mr Biswas embraced him.

After that he always slept with his oil lamp on.

He began to fear that his house might be burned down. He went to bed with an added anxiety; every morning he opened his side window as soon as he got up, looking past the trees for signs of destruction; in the fields he worried about it. But the house always stood: the variegated roof, the frames, the crapaud pillars, the wooden staircase.

When Shama came he told her of his fears.

She said, ‘I don’t think they would worry about it.’

And he regretted telling her, for when Seth came he said, ‘So you frighten they burn it down, eh? Don’t worry. They not so idle.’

Mr Maclean came twice and went away.

And every day the rain fell, the sun blazed, the house became greyer, the sawdust, once fresh and aromatic, became part of the earth, the asphalt snakes hanging from the roof grew longer, and many more died, and Mr Biswas worked more and more elaborate messages of comfort for his walls with a steady, unthinking hand, and a mind in turmoil.

Then one evening a great calm settled on him, and he made a decision. He had for too long regarded situations as temporary; henceforth he would look upon every stretch of
time, however short, as precious. Time would never be dismissed again. No action would merely lead to another; every action was a part of his life which could not be recalled; therefore thought had to be given to every action: the opening of a matchbox, the striking of a match. Slowly, then, as though unused to his limbs, and concentrating hard, he had his evening bath, cooked his meal, ate it, washed up, and settled down in his rockingchair to pass – no, to use, to enjoy, to live – the evening. The house was unimportant. The evening, in this room, was all that mattered.

And so great was his assurance that he did something he had not done for weeks. He took down the Reader’s Library edition of
The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
He passed his hands over the cover; deliberately he opened the book, broke the spine in a few places, destroying it completely in one place, and, pulling up his legs on to the chair so that he was huddled and cosy, and smacking his lips, which was not one of his habits, he began to read.

His mind was clear. He had pushed everything apart from the Victor Hugo to the boundaries. He had made a clearing in the bush: that was the picture he gave himself of his mind: for his mind had become quite separate from the rest of himself.

The image changed. It was no longer a forest, but a billowing black cloud. Unless he was careful the cloud would funnel into his head. He felt it pressing on his head. He didn’t want to look up.

Surely it was only a trick of the oil lamp, which stood directly in front of him on the table?

He huddled a little more on the chair and smacked his lips again.

Then he was so afraid that he almost cried out.

Why should he be afraid? Of whom? Esmeralda? Quasimodo? The goat? The crowd?

People. He could hear them next door and all down the barracks. No road was without them, no house. They were in the newspapers on the wall, in the photographs, in the simple drawings in advertisements. They were in the book he was holding. They were in all books. He tried to think of landscapes without people: sand and sand and sand, without
the ‘oses’ Lal had spoken about; vast white plateaux, with himself safely alone, a speck in the centre.

Was he afraid of real people?

He must experiment. But why? He had spent all his life among people without even thinking that he might be afraid of them. He had faced people across a rumshop counter; he had gone to school; he had walked down crowded main roads on market day.

Why now? Why so suddenly?

His whole past became a miracle of calm and courage.

His fingers were dusted with gilt from the pall-like cover of the book. As he studied them the clearing became overgrown again and the black cloud billowed in. How heavy! How dark!

He put his feet down and sat still, staring at the lamp, seeing nothing. The darkness filled his head. All his life had been good until now. And he had never known. He had spoiled it all by worry and fear. About a rotting house, the threats of illiterate labourers.

Now he would never more be able to go among people.

He surrendered to the darkness.

When he roused himself he opened the top half of the door. He saw no one. The barracks had gone to sleep. He would have to wait until morning to find out whether he was really afraid.

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 he saw, even at a distance, gave him a twist of panic. But he had already grown used to that; it had become part of the pain of living. Then, as he cycled, he discovered a new depth to this pain. Every object he had not seen for twenty-four hours was part of his whole and happy past. Everything he now saw became sullied by his fear, every field, every house, every tree, every turn in the road, every bump and subsidence. So that, by merely looking at the
world, he was progressively destroying his present and his past.