Sir Vidia's Shadow (16 page)

I said I was up to it.

“Come to London. I will introduce you to some people.”

I said I would try to visit, perhaps at Christmas.

“These people are infies. They know nothing. Their leaders—Ian Smith, for example—”

Ian Smith had recently issued a unilateral declaration of independence in Rhodesia, and a minority of whites were governing the country.

“—Ian Smith is an infy. He is qualified to mend bicycles in Surrey. Nothing more than that.”

Vidia had been looking into the distance as he had been talking. After we finished lunch, he suggested we walk down the adjacent road. When we were on it I realized he had been looking at a sign that said
R.J. Patel
, and that evangelism was on his mind.

“Hello,” the Indian shopkeeper said, smiling at the Indian in the bush hat who had just entered his shop. “You are not Congo people. I am knowing.”

“We're from Uganda,” I said.

Vidia got to the point. “How is business?”

“So-so. Not bad. People are needing. I am exclusive stockist for a large variety of goods.”

“Do you have a family?”

“That is my daughter,” Mr. Patel said, gesturing at a young woman near the shelves whose back was turned. Mr. Patel was standing before a large basin heaped with salt. “She is running shop. I am attending to so many other businesses.”

“What sort of businesses?”

“Too many to tell you,” Mr. Patel said. He opened his mouth wide and the approximation of a laugh came out of it. “This is just a simple shop. My other businesses occupy my time. Properties also.”

“But the money here is worthless,” Vidia said. “How do you manage?”

“I am managing. I have many ways.”

“So you're not worried?”

“Ha! I am doing very well.”
Wery vell
was what he said.

He began filling a paper bag with scoopfuls of salt, murmuring with each scoop.

“What will you do when the crunch comes? The crunch is coming, you know.”

“I have my ways,” Mr. Patel said. He had grown solemn under Vidia's questioning. He was still scooping, murmuring, crinkling the brown paper bag. “I will be okay.”

“And your daughter?”

“She will be all right.” He then went silent. He said, “Excuse me,” and turned his back on Vidia.

“So what do you think?” I asked.

We were out of the shop, swinging along the empty Goma road, Vidia marching like a soldier.

“He's lying.”

He had not believed a single word the man had said.

“He can't move his pence. The Africans will take his shop and all his goods. He's lying about those other businesses. And look what he's doing to his daughter, forcing her to work there.”

Lake Kivu was dull silver under a gray equatorial sky that sagged with humidity. The grayness gave the trees along the lakeshore a dark, impenetrable look. People on the street stared at us, though the soldiers in their faded uniforms did not glance our way but walked heavily past, stirring up the dust in big clomping boots. Their boots and their rifles were old-fashioned and indestructible-looking. Music played, the Congolese songs that sounded Brazilian, with marimbas and blaring trumpets. Soldiers, waifs, dogs, chickens, and broken signs in this distant corner of the Congo.

“He's a dead man,” Vidia said of R. J. Patel. “They're all dead men.”

I had heard him say that before, in Kampala and Nairobi. But I had believed Patel when he said he would be all right. And I had been excited at being in the heart of Africa. It seemed to me that if you put your finger on the middle of a map of the continent it would be on this place, Goma, this muddy lakeshore. I tried to see it with Vidia's eyes, but I could not. I had neither lived his life nor written his books. He made up his mind quickly: observation for him was about drawing conclusions. I knew that whatever I wrote would be different from his view. It was probably a good thing that he did not ask me what I thought.

“I'm glad I saw this,” he said. “Now I think it's time to go.”

Another night at the Miramar, among the squabbling Belgians and the food-strewn dining table and the overbright lamps, and then we were off to Ruhengeri again and the Uganda border. We stopped only to snap pictures at a dramatic curve, dangerous for its being unprotected, over an abyss called the Karnaba Gap. I was wearing my tweed jacket and my horn-rimmed glasses that gave me a scowling expression.

“I think you will do well,” Vidia said. He was upbeat, cheerier now that we were heading home.

I had turned twenty-five in April. I had not published anything outside Africa. I ached to have a publisher for my novel. In a halting way, I told him so.

“Don't worry,” he said. “The most important thing is to avoid making an enormous amount of money before you're forty. Promise me you won't do that.”

I made this promise, that I would not make my fortune in the next fifteen years.

“Concentrate on your writing. After you're forty, fine—make all the money you like.”

Vidia was well under forty, yet he seemed older than my father.

We drove on, up and down the Kigezi hills, squeezing the car around corners, into the savannah again, past the big game and the long-legged herons and the marsh of papyrus, under the vast African sky. It was all familiar now.

Back in Kampala, at my house, where he was still a guest, I was full of his talk and of ideas I wanted to write down. Even before I had a bath or washed off the dust of the safari, I hurried to my study and sat and began to write.

Passing the room, Vidia looked in and exclaimed, “Yes!” He was delighted. “I used to do that. Sometimes at night, after we got home from a party I would go to my room and write, just like that, without even taking my coat off.”

He stepped into the room and glanced at the pages. He was looking at them upside down. I was about to turn them so that he could see, but he said, “No, I'm not reading. I'm looking at your handwriting.”

He looked closely.

“Yes. Yes. Yes.” He nodded. “It's not American. It's distinct. Hasty. Intelligent. It's you.” This was more of his approval.

For weeks he had been speaking eagerly of leaving Uganda, of going back to London. Before he left, he gave me a necktie he had brought from England. “I knew I would meet someone to give this to. I want you to have it.” It was new and very narrow—that was the style—and orange. It was still in its shallow box. I never wore ties, but I was grateful for the gift. He gave me another gift the day he left. He told me in detail a dream he had had, which concerned his brother and a murder he had committed. I listened closely, and when he was gone I wrote the dream down in my notebook.

I was sorry to see him go. I was losing my teacher, and he had also become my friend. It mattered to me that he took me seriously, that he treated me like a fellow writer. No one else did, but that did not matter, because I had him.

Then an unexpected thing happened. I had never been homesick in Africa, nor had I despaired at what I saw. I was there to work and was grateful for the job. I liked my life. I was self-sufficient. Some days I was Albert Camus, a schoolteacher in remote Algeria. Some days I was George Orwell, preparing to shoot an elephant. There were days when I was myself, writing something that I believed had never been written before, that would surprise the world. But when Vidia left on the plane from Entebbe, I drove back to town feeling lonely, and my loneliness stayed with me. From then on, I liked the place less. I had begun to see it with his eyes and to speak about it using his words.

He had believed in me. He had talked about how in writing you served an apprenticeship. He said we were freer than any writers had been in the past. “We are free from dogma, religious and political dogma. Use that freedom.” I remembered the many times that he had peered into my face (“a man's life is in his face”) or traced my palm and said, “You're going to be all right, Paul.” What did he see?

A note of comedy crept into my writing. It was an effect of my loneliness, and it startled me, but it gave me vitality. And it seemed more authentic than the solemnity it had displaced. I began to understand that the truest expression of life was humor, especially at its most disturbing. Much of what happened in Africa was not tragedy but farce. It was the influence of Vidia.

Friendship is plainer but deeper than love. A friend knows your faults and forgives them, but more than that, a friend is a witness. I needed Vidia as a friend, because he saw something in me I did not see. He said I was a writer. He spoke about it with his customary directness. That meant everything to me, because I had no idea what I was going to do next.

And I certainly had no idea that my meeting with Vidia would loom so large in my life, or his. But long after this, in an introduction to one of Vidia's books, the English critic Karl Miller wrote, “The novelist Paul Theroux was with Naipaul in a disrupted Uganda, rather as one might once have been said to have been with Kitchener at Khartoum.”

 

 

 

 

PART TWO

5

J
UST BEFORE
he left Kampala, Vidia released me. He looked one last time at my much-slashed and -amended essay on cowardice, which was already scheduled to be published. He said that it was finished, though I guessed that it still did not seem quite right to him.

Move on to something new, he said; the new thing would be better for what I had learned from him. I was sorry to see him go. I had come to depend on his reading and his friendly advice. Needing him to put his whole philosophy into a sentence, I mocked myself by thinking of the man who asked Christ, “Good Master, what good thing shall I do that I may have eternal life?” Christ gives him a quick summary of the essentials, beginning with “Do not kill” and ending with “Sell everything you have.”

I found a way of framing the question and managed to stammer it to Vidia.

Vidia's answer was “Tell the truth.”

And there was his dream, the one I had written down. It went this way.

Vidia and his brother, Shiva, were staying with a family in which there were two other children, a boy and a girl. Shiva hated the boy, and one day when Vidia, his brother, and the boy were on an outing, an argument started. Shiva set upon the boy and killed him.

“Look what you've done—you've killed him!” Vidia said.

Vidia and Shiva dug a hole and hid the corpse of the boy in it.

Now it so happened that the boy was to have been away for several days; there were no questions or suspicions when Vidia and Shiva returned to the family. They were feeling horribly guilty for the murder, however; they could not screw up their courage sufficiently to tell the truth. They knew that the body would be found and that they would be blamed.

A few days later the newspapers were full of the story of the disappearance, and the body was soon found. During this time the child's father underwent a severe change—he remembered various petty cruelties he had inflicted on the boy, and he began blaming himself for the crime. He said, “I know what happened ... I made him cut his throat.” Naipaul and his brother remained silent—guilty but so far not blamed. They did not speak of the crime, and yet they were not off the hook. End of dream: night sweats, terror, anxiety, guilt.

I was impressed because it revealed so much. It amazed me that a dream that reflected no credit upon him, that showed him as guilty and sneaky, depicting his brother as a killer, was one he told me coldly and in detail.

 

Vidia was in London, and I was alone in a land that now seemed dustier and flimsier and fictitious. I had grown used to being alone in Africa: the solitude had sharpened my concentration, and this intensity served my writing. But for the first time I was lonely and felt listless with disappointment. Africa had once seemed limitless and powerful and liberating. Vidia had left me with doubts. He had belittled the politicians, ridiculed the currency, sneered at the newspapers, and Africa now seemed tiny, self-destructive, and confining. It was full of crooked opportunists and it was dangerous. It was ruinous and random.
Do you notice how they make their own paths everywhere?

In the Senior Common Room and the Staff Club and the Kampala Film Society, the word “infies” rang in my ears. On Sundays I went for long bird-watching walks up the Bombo Road and in the bush.
Nothing has a name here—it is always “hill,” “tree,” “river,” “bird.” They don't differentiate. There is no drama. They don't see
.

My habits were the same: work in the morning in my office, do some teaching, eat lunch at home or at the Hindoo Lodge. After a nap, writing in the afternoon, then into town through the big iron gates under the Makerere motto,
Pro Futuro Aedificamus
. At the gates and in the road and in Bat Valley and in town I heard:
This will go back to bush. The jungle will move in. Look, already it has started
.

At the Staff Club people inquired insincerely about Vidia.

“What do you hear from your friend Naipaul?”

Their insincerity was tinged with sarcasm, because for the whole period of Vidia's stay in Kampala I had been his shadow. He had been my friend, not theirs. They saw it as my abandonment of them—I had rejected them and become Naipaul's friend. It was true: I
had
rejected them, but I thought it was my secret. In being Naipaul's shadow I had revealed myself, revealed my literary ambitions most of all. Until then I had been seen as a village explainer, indulging myself. I knew, even then, that a writer lives in his writing. I suspected I had given myself away, perhaps had shown my ambition, certainly had exposed my wound. That was all right with the Staff Club. It was okay to be a local writer, but in befriending Naipaul it appeared that I was getting above myself, looking to London for approval. Expatriates both hated and hankered for London. I had ignored them. Naipaul had ignored them. They knew his contempt, his indifference; they knew his insulting word for them.