His smile was not a smile but his laugh was more than a laugh, especially when he –
Wait, wait, wait. You know I’m lying, don’t you? This is not a novel, it is a memory.
The man is not ‘U. V. Pradesh.’ It is V. S. Naipaul, and the book I mentioned in the previous chapter is The Mystic Masseur, and the hero is Ganesh Ramsumair of Trinidad, who turned into G. Ramsay Muir in London. Yomo is Yomo, and Hallsmith is Hallsmith, but the young man is not Julian Lavalle. It’s me, Paul Theroux, and I am shining my light upon the past. I cannot improve on this story, because Naipaul always said, Don’t prettify it, and The greatest writing is a disturbing vision offered from a position of strength – aspire to that, and Tell the truth.
It is a morning in June on Cape Cod, bright and dry – hasn’t rained for more than a month – and I have set myself the task of putting down everything that happened thirty years ago in Africa, when I first met him, because it all matters. I cannot change any of this. I am writing with a ballpoint on a pad at my desk. How can this be a novel? This narrative is not something that would be improved by the masks of fiction. It needs only to be put in order. I am free of the constraint of alteration and fictionalizing.
You would say ‘Isn’t that V. S. Naipaul?’ in any case.
There is so much of it. This was going to be a short memoir, but now I see it will be a book, because I remember everything. Where was I? Yes. He was laughing.
– especially when Naipaul was laughing at one of his own pointed remarks. It was a surprised bellow of appreciation, deepened and made resonant by tobacco smoke and asthma. It made you wonder whether he saw something you didn’t see. I learned all this within seconds of our first meeting, at Hallsmith’s party. With a disgusted and fastidious face, Naipaul had commented on how dirty Kampala was. Having just read The Mystic Masseur – a better title than The Part-Time Pundit; I will stick to the facts – I said, quoting his shopkeeper in the book, ‘It only looks dirty.’
With his deep, fruity smoker’s laugh booming in his lungs, he showed me his delight and then gave me the next line, and the next. He recited most of that page. He could have given me the whole book verbatim. I was thinking how he knew his work well. He told me later that he knew each of his books by heart, storing them during the slow process of writing and rewriting them in longhand.
After he was introduced to more people, his martyred smile returned. He was soon in distress. When Yomo said, ‘Your characters in your books talk like Nigerians,’ he merely stared at her and frowned.
‘Really.’
To someone with no sense of irony, his tone was one of shimmering fascination. He was thrown by Yomo’s innocent statement, and perhaps by Yomo herself, who was very dark with high cheekbones and those drowsy eyes; in her stiffly wound turban she towered over him. She had the effect of making shorter people seem always to be ducking her. Naipaul behaved that way, moved sideways, nearer to me, dodging her, as if he were unused to discussing his work with such a tall, self-assured black woman.
‘Where are you staying?’ I asked.
‘Here, I’m afraid,’ he said, clearly intending to say more when his wife interrupted him.
‘Vidia,’ she said in a cautioning voice. That was the first time I heard his name, a contraction of it, which was Vidiadhar.
‘Patsy,’ he said, acquiescing, smiling in misery.
His wife, Patricia, was a small pale woman with a sweet face, premature gray hair, lovely pale blue eyes, and full lips with the sort of contour and droop that even in repose suggests a lisp. She was pretty, about ten years older than me, and though she was assertive, she seemed frail.
‘They’ve promised us a house,’ he said. ‘Mr Bwogo. Have I got it right? Mr Bwogo.’ He nodded and seemed to recite it, giving it too many syllables: ‘Bah-wo-go.’ ‘It seems nothing can be done without Mr Bwogo.’
‘He’s the chief housing officer,’ I said.
‘Chief housing officer,’ Naipaul said, and just saying it, reciting it again in his gloomy voice, he made the title ridiculous and grand and ill suited to describe Mr Bwogo.
‘I’m sure he’ll take care of you,’ I said.
With sudden insistence, as if demanding a drink, he said, ‘I want to meet people. Tell me whom I should meet.’
This baffled me, both the question and the urgent way he made me responsible for the answer. But I was flattered too, most of all because of the intense way he waited for a reply. Nerves of concentration tightened in his face, and even his muscles contrived to make his posture more than just receptive – imploring. On that first meeting I had an inkling of him as an intimidating listener.
‘What is it you want to know?’ I asked.
‘I want to understand,’ he said. ‘I want to meet people who know what is happening here. People who read books. People who are still in the world. You can find them for me, can’t you? I don’t mean only at Makerere.’
He smiled, making a hash of the university’s name, pronouncing it ‘Maka-ray-ray.’
‘Because I suspect a lot of fraudulence,’ he said. ‘One hears it. One has vibrations.’
Pat had winced at ‘Maka-ray-ray’ and said in an exasperated way, ‘He has no trouble at all with the most difficult Indian names.’
‘Do you know Rajagopalachari’s translation of the Mahabharata?’ Naipaul said, and laughed hard, the laughter in his lungs like a loud kind of hydraulics.
I introduced him to my head of department, an expatriate Englishman named Gerald Moore, who was an anthologizer as well as an evangelizer of African poetry. Having spent some time in Nigeria, Gerald occasionally attempted a Yoruba salutation upon Yomo, whose way of replying was to mock his mispronunciation by repeating it in a shriek, opening her mouth very wide in Gerald’s pink face. But he was a friendly fellow, and he had hired me. He mentioned his African anthology to Naipaul.
‘Really,’ Naipaul said, mocking in his profoundly fascinated way, and now I understood his tone as utter disbelief and dismissal.
The irony was not lost on Gerald, who fidgeted and said, ‘Some quite good poems.’
‘Really.’
‘Leopold Senghor.’
‘Isn’t he the president of something?’
‘Senegal,’ Gerald said. ‘And Rabearivelo.’
‘Is he a president too?’
‘Dead, actually. Madagascan.’
‘These names just trip off your tongue.’
‘I could give you a copy,’ Gerald said. ‘It’s a Penguin.’
‘A Penguin, yes,’ Naipaul said. ‘You are so kind.’
‘I also do some writing. I’d like to show you. See what you think.’
Naipaul smiled a wolfish smile and said, ‘Are you sure you want me to read your poems? I warn you that I will tell you exactly what I think.’
‘That’s all right.’
‘But I’m brutal, you know.’
Gerald winced, and later on the verandah he said to me, ‘He’s different from what I expected.’
‘In what way?’
‘Rather patrician.’
But I thought: I want to show him my work. I want to know exactly what he thinks. I had never shown anyone my novel. I wanted him to be brutal.
I saw Naipaul talking to Professor Dudney, an authority on the pastoral Karamojong people of Karamoja, one of the northern provinces of Uganda. The Karamojong went mother-naked, and the men were often photographed posing unashamed, letting their penises hang as impressively as prize aubergines. Dudney had married a Karamojong woman, who was just as attracted to Kampala cocktail parties as Dudney was to Karamojong rituals during which the blood of cattle was guzzled.
At about five o’clock, Haji Hallsmith started turning the knobs of a large wooden radio. He urged the guests to be seated, to listen to the program, one he had made himself with his African students. I knew the producer, Miles Lee, an authentic Gypsy whose training for Radio Uganda consisted of working for many years as a fortuneteller at the Goose Fair in Nottingham. He too had become a Muslim, changing his middle name, Allday, to Ahmed, and could be found drinking with Haji Hallsmith. He was another one who said, ‘Of course Muslims can drink. But not during prayers.’
The radio program was called In Black and White, and its subject was African writing. After some music, the pluckings of a seven-stringed instrument called a nanga, Hallsmith, suffering mike fright, began to introduce the poets in a shrill old-auntie voice.
Naipaul settled into his chair, his face darkening as the program continued. It was a look of intense concentration, or perhaps of desperate boredom. Poems were being read on the crackly radio, Africans reciting African poems, muffled by the cloth on the grille of the big speaker. Naipaul might not have realized that the hour for this welcoming party had been chosen because it was also the hour for the weekly In Black and White.
– And now Winston Wabamba is going to read his poem ‘Groundnut Stew.’
Naipaul’s face hardened into an expression of extreme impatience. I could see it was also a martyr’s death mask. When Hallsmith smiled at him, Naipaul’s eyes went out of focus, for it was a hot afternoon, the sun blazing through the windows over the tops of palms and tulip trees. There were jeers and curses from the low brick warren of huts where the servants lived.
Everyone else in the room was attentive, gathered around the radio, our heads cocked to one side or bowed in a meditative way. Gerald Moore massaged his eyes with his fingertips in concentration. We were mocked by the parrot squawks and cockcrows out the window, and as the sun dropped there was another sound, almost unearthly, like a riot of radio waves in a Martian invasion, a squealing and a mad ripping of the air.
Naipaul was startled.
‘Bats,’ I said.
He looked wildly at the bats streaking past the window and slumped again.
I had never before heard the whole radio program. It was broadcast at the time of day when I was usually headed to the Staff Club. Now that I was compelled to listen to the entire thirty minutes, I was reminded of how sentimental and inept the poetry was. It did not look so bad on the pages of the university’s literary magazine, but when declaimed on Radio Uganda, under the supervision of Miles Ahmed Lee, it sounded hollow and clumsy, and the clichés were the feebler for being spoken aloud with an attempt at feeling.
Was I also hearing it with Naipaul’s ears? He was a newcomer. He had never heard it before. The poems sounded awful to me. The room was hot with the exhausted air of the day, the last blaze of the low sun, the dust and humidity and bird complaints, the servants’ curses and bus horns.
When the program was over Naipaul got to his feet and, staggering slightly because of his mood, said, ‘Splendid, splendid.’
‘Can we go home now?’ Yomo said, reaching into my front trouser pocket.
Naipaul was surrounded by party guests, but by the time we got to the door he had broken away from them, and he called out, ‘Find me some people – I want to meet people.’
‘It was a pleasure to meet you,’ I said.
He followed us through the door to the verandah.
‘I read Miguel Street last night,’ Yomo said. ‘The whole thing.’
Naipaul stared at her pityingly, shaking his head. He said, ‘You must sip it like good wine.’
‘Ha! I don’t sip wine!’ Yomo was laughing. ‘I drink up the palm wine! I’m from Nigeria.’
‘Really.’ Naipaul looked indifferent. ‘Uganda must fascinate you.’
‘These Uganda people are primitive.’
Naipaul’s mask slipped and he laughed. Then, sizing me up, he asked me what I thought of the radio program.
At first I hesitated to tell him I really had not liked it, because it seemed too unkind to Hallsmith, the host. And when he’d been seated in his armchair, Naipaul had looked enigmatic, if not disapproving, and afterwards hadn’t he said ‘Splendid’?
But I liked him, I liked his writing, I wanted to take a risk, I wanted to be truthful.
‘I thought it was awful,’ I said.
‘Yes!’ he said, and he laughed his deep, appreciative laugh. ‘Dreadful! Dreadful!’
He looked happier saying that, less lonely and less tormented than he had appeared in the room. With conviction and a solemn friendliness, he touched my arm.
‘We’ll meet soon. We’ll talk.’ It meant everything to me. Then he said, ‘Do you have a motorcar?’
‘He doesn’t talk like the people in his book,’ Yomo said on the way home.
That was true, but I was thinking how I wanted him for a friend. I mentioned this, but Yomo said he was just an ugly little Indian man, and what was the point in talking so much about him?
‘He’s a wonderful writer,’ I said.
‘You are a wonderful writer,’ she said. We were home now, and she was saying ‘I want a baby. Give me a baby!’ as she pulled off my clothes.
Within a few days I knew him much better. I showed him some of my poems, one of which began ‘Mirrored images of bitches’ murderous beauty,’ and another, ‘The girl who came with doves to sell will die.’
He said, ‘Lots of libido.’
That made me smile.
He said, ‘But I have given up sex, you see.’
We were alone, driving to the market.
‘What about your wife?’
‘I give her a chaste kiss at night.’
That was not my question, but I left it, because my car was now surrounded by market traders showing us baskets of fruit.
‘I hate food that is uncovered,’ he said. ‘I have a horror of dirt.’
The Kampala Central Market was the wrong place for someone with a horror of dirt.
‘The Italians make cheese out of dirt,’ he said. ‘But you knew that, didn’t you?’
Flayed, stringy goat and sheep carcasses hung from iron hooks among buzzing flies, and some hacked-apart chunks of meat and cracked bones were stacked on plates under the sign Boys’ Meat. He liked that sign. He lingered, murmuring the expression. He said he was a vegetarian. I asked him why.
‘The sinew. I could never chew through it.’
He would go without eating rather than touch meat, he said. He had had arguments in restaurants after being served vegetable soup made with meat stock. He gave me a running commentary on his health and digestion.
‘Meat is nyama,’ I said, instructing him.
‘Yes.’
‘The word for animals is nyama.’
‘Yes.’
‘Prostitutes – the slang. Same word. Nyama.’
‘Really.’
We passed the locust stalls, where behind bulging sacks of locusts fried in hot mafuta fat, men and women sat measuring out single portions of the greasy insects on squares of newspaper. The wood-colored locusts gleamed, looking freshly varnished, and the locust sellers called out, ‘Nzige!’
It was the season, I said. They gathered the locusts under streetlamps all night.
‘Nzige, nzige.’ Naipaul said ‘Nah-zeegay’ and chuckled and greeted a locust seller who was making up a large package for a man. ‘Chap’s absolutely mad about them, I imagine.’
He frowned at the baskets stacked around the basket sellers. He found the fish flyblown. He said that some vegetables, plantains especially, reminded him of his childhood.
‘What sort of a family did you have?’
‘I couldn’t even begin to tell you.’ He smiled helplessly, appealing to me, raising his hands to indicate that this was not a fruitful line of inquiry.
‘I come from a large family,’ I said, hoping to interest him.
‘We’ve done the market,’ he said. He had not heard what I said. He wanted to leave. And later: We’ve done the bus station. And: We’ve done the park. And: We’ve done the museum. And: Churches depress me, man. He was able to size a place up fairly quickly, and then he was ready to go. He had an inspector’s gait, hands clasped behind his back, moving fast yet looking at everything. He was inquisitive, he was brisk. I think we’ve done this.
He seemed eager for me to know him. He said he slept badly, he was abstemious about alcohol, he got headaches, he had asthma. He claimed to have an explosive temper. He liked playing cricket and wanted me to help him find a pitch where he could practice bowling. He asked me about Gerald Moore, and when I said that Gerald had found him patrician, he seemed pleased.
‘Jerry said that, did he?’
We never called the department head ‘Jerry.’
‘What about Dudney?’ he said. ‘His wife is incredibly ugly, which of course is why he married her. Unbelievably ugly.’
I said that in most parts of Uganda she was considered a beauty – plump and loud and fertile and maternal, and probably circumcised, with big lips and quarter-inch gaps between her teeth.
‘That’s precisely what I mean.’
The whites he had met in Uganda so far were most of them degenerate, he said. They drank too much. They were intellectually dead. They were low class. Sometimes he used that expression, but more often he said, ‘They are common.’ They were inferior.
‘Infies’ was his usual name for them. ‘Listen to the infy,’ he would say while one of the expatriates held forth in the Senior Common Room. ‘Most of them are buggers, too.’
He found Swahili unpronounceable and was especially lost in nasalizing sounds, as when a consonant, following the rule of all Bantu languages, was softened or rubbed down by an initial m or n. He could not nasalize words such as mbuli (folly) or its opposite, mwambo, and while the meanings of more complex words, such as mkhwikhwiziri (b.o., the smell of an unwashed body), interested him as much as they did me, he found them impossible to say. Yet he sometimes made attempts, and it was difficult to know whether in garbling the words he was mocking them or simply making mistakes. ‘Mahboya’ he said for the name Mboya. ‘Mah-zee’ he said for mzee. An expatriate noted for his effeminacy and for patronizing African boys he called ‘Mah-bugga’ and sometimes succeeded with ‘Mbugga.’
Looking for clues to his writing, I asked him what he read.
‘One is reading the Bible. It’s frightfully good, you know. And Martial – delicious. You read Latin, of course you do.’
He quoted salacious epigrams and poems, many of which were about buggery. He said they were lyrical. ‘And so concise.’
He said frankly that coming to Uganda had been a great mistake, which he regretted. Although his trip had been financed by the American Farfield Foundation, he said he was losing money. But he had a book to finish.
Sure of himself and very direct, he commanded attention. He strode through Kampala, assessing it all, ‘being brutal,’ as he said, like a man sent from headquarters to inspect a lagging field office. His conclusions: Mass sackings were called for. Eliminate all funding. Shut it down. Seal it off. Say goodbye.
And that was after only two weeks or so. I had never met anyone so certain, so intense, so observant, so hungry, so impatient, so intelligent. He was stimulating and tiring to be with, like a brilliant demanding child – needy, exhausting, funny, often making a po-faced joke just to please me, and who was I? But he seemed to like me. He asked to see more of my writing. Watching him evaluate it, I could hear the crackle of the circuits in his brain, a succession of satisfying clicks, and the fastening of synapses, like buckles being fixed, as he processed information. ‘Keep it up’ was all he said. He had no small talk, and he pounced on incidental remarks.
‘This is a pretty prosperous country,’ I said casually.
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘I mean a successful agricultural economy. The tea, the coffee, the sugar –’
‘Define the difference between success and achievement,’ he demanded.
And he listened closely to all answers. It was hard to drive a car and hold this sort of conversation, but I did my best.
‘We see the institutions that exist here,’ he said. ‘What matters most is how they are maintained. Maintenance of a civilization is the proof that it has meaning and is coherent. Here in Uganda, other people are doing it for them. Outsiders are the key. Take them away and Uganda will go back to bush. All this will be jungle.’
On one of those early days in my car he plucked at the plastic seat cover and said, ‘American writers always know the names of these.’
‘That’s a grommet,’ I said.
‘And these.’
‘That’s a gusset.’
‘And this.’ He ran his thumb and forefinger along a seam.
‘That’s called piping.’
A laugh had been building in his throat from the moment I had said ‘grommet,’ and now he was laughing hard. No sound, except that of a lifelong smoker, was more satisfying than the dense laughter of an asthmatic, forcibly compressed, struggling and echoing through thickets in his lungs.
‘You see? But they are silly words. They are purely technical. There is no picture. They say nothing. Don’t be that kind of writer. Promise me you won’t use those words.’
He was sure of everything he said, like a leader or a teacher, a man with no obvious doubts. So I listened, and I promised.
‘Tell me what to read. I want to read something about this place.’
I recommended The White Nile.
‘If only Alan Moorehead knew how to write.’
I told him I liked George Orwell.
‘I have been compared with Orwell. Imagine. In a review. It was meant to be a compliment.’ And he laughed again. ‘It was lost on me. I have a very low opinion of Orwell’s writing.’
I was reading Camus, I said.
‘His collected fiction is a very slender book. I wonder about the achievement.’
He knew his own mind. He knew what he wanted. It was clear that he would not find what he was looking for in Uganda – anyway, he had already given up on us. He had impossibly high standards. He said there was no point in having standards unless they were high. He did not compromise. He expected the best, in writing, in speaking, in behavior, in reading. Martial? The Bible? Surely there were other books and writers he admired.
‘It would be easier for me to tell you who I don’t like,’ he said, and then listed, with a sour-taste-in-the-mouth expression, like the visible memory of a bad meal, the giants of literature: Jane Austen, Hardy, Henry James. ‘People tell me I should read James. I tried. I couldn’t see the point. There’s not much there.’ He had not read widely in American literature. I was reading Emily Dickinson. He borrowed my book. The next day he said, ‘I’m afraid I don’t share your enthusiasm. Not much there for me.’
‘What about African literature?’
‘Does it exist?’
‘Wole Soyinka. Chinua Achebe.’
‘Did they write anything?’
‘Novels,’ I said.
‘Mimicry,’ he said. ‘You can’t beat a novel out on a drum.’
Naipaul was thirty-four but seemed much older, almost aged. He was opinionated and dissatisfied and restless, hard to please but still searching. This was a bad place for the search, however. For one thing, the whites were seriously unhealthy.
‘Don’t be an infy, Paul,’ he said. ‘I know I don’t want to be an infy.’
Africans were not infies. Most whites were. Some Indians in town he liked. Others he despaired of. He interrogated them, demanded to know their backup plans. He predicted that they would be thrown out and their businesses taken over. Some of them were infies.
To battle inferiority in the equatorial heat, he came with me to the sports field. He would practice bowling the cricket ball while I ran around the track, six times usually, sometimes more. He tried to do the same but his lungs gave out, and he ended up panting and sweating. ‘Must not be an infy!’ The exercise gave me an appetite and a sweet tooth, and after each session we went into town and had tea and cakes. Stuffing myself, wolfing them down, I apologized, yet kept at it.
‘The body knows,’ he said. He was truster of instinct and hunches and cravings. ‘Keep it up. Your body needs it. Let’s get some more off the trolley. Waiter!’
To vary my craving for sugar, he introduced me to Indian sweets: laddu, kachowri, rasgullah, gulabjam.
‘These gulabjam are made from broken milk.’ He repeated it. He liked saying ‘broken milk.’
In time he adopted, article by article, a mode of dress – first the bush shirt, then the bush trousers, the walking stick, and finally the bush hat. It was a floppy hat, the brim pulled down all around. Indians in Uganda never dressed that way, though tourists did. We saw them at the hotel entrances, climbing into zebra-striped safari vans or Land Rovers, heading west into the bush.
‘Those African drivers tell me that the women tourists are always after them,’ I said.
‘That must make them frightfully happy.’
In his safari outfit, perspiring heavily, he walked in a district of Kampala called Wandegeya, where, following several steps behind him, I called out directions. I wanted to show him the colony of ten thousand bats.
He was not impressed by the bats. Instead, he said, ‘Notice how there are footpaths everywhere – across every lawn, crisscrossing the campus, up and down. There are paths, but Africans don’t keep to them. They make their own. Have you noticed that? They ignore the proper paths.’
I had not noticed, but it was true: a town of obvious shortcuts and trampled footpaths. I wondered why.
‘Because,’ Naipaul said, ‘the Africans did not make the proper paths in the first place. This society was imposed on them.’
A six-foot circular medallion in bronze, at the top of the arched gateway in front of the Uganda Parliament building, depicted the prime minister, Milton Obote, his toothy frown, his bushy hair, a likeness of his disapproving face and gappy teeth. The medallion was crude enough to seem satirical. It had been put there after Uganda’s first election, and the idea was that it would remain there forever, though no one ever questioned why. It was customary for African politicians to put up statues of themselves and give their names to colleges and main roads. We were, in fact, standing on Obote Avenue when Naipaul saw the Obote medallion.
‘That is what is wrong with the country,’ he said. ‘That is the reason Uganda will go back to bush.’
Until Naipaul arrived I had not paid much attention to these details. I was grateful to be here teaching rather than in Vietnam fighting. Kampala was a small, friendly town with no society to speak of. The Kabaka kept to himself, in a regal way, inside the stockade that surrounded his palace on Kabuli Hill, one of Kampala’s seven hills. Naipaul asked what I knew of the king and whether I had met him. It seemed an odd question, for the Kabaka of Buganda was much more remote than any American president, and in a place where each hilltop was occupied by an important structure – the main mosque on one, the cathedral, the university, the broadcasting service, the barracks, and so forth on others – the Kabaka’s was just another bushy and inscrutable hilltop.
Obote was the Kabaka’s main antagonist, but no one cared much about that. No one cared that Obote named streets after himself. No one paid much attention to politics. What was the use? In spite of Naipaul’s misgivings, Kampala was a prosperous place, busy on weekdays, full of picnickers on weekends, strolling Africans, promenading Indians. The villages were sleepy, the townships were drunk. The city’s bars and cafés were meeting places, and when I was not with Yomo at the Staff Club, I was with her at City Bar on Kampala Road. It was not a town of dinner parties or social functions, except among politicians and diplomats. It was movie theaters and nightclubs, restaurants and brothels. But I was happy with Yomo and she liked Kampala, although she always enjoyed pointing out how backward it was.
Into the green town of tall trees and friendly faces and natural wonders – the road carpeted with white butterflies, the tree branches full of bats, the marabou storks standing watch on the road to the dump, hungry for garbage, the crested cranes in the parks, and in many of the low-lying watery places masses of papyrus that had somehow crept on sodden roots up the White Nile from Egypt – into this drowsy place, where the locusts’ whines were as loud as machinery, came the forbidding figure of V. S. Naipaul, with his hands behind his back, doing calculations. He could be severe. He could also be funny. But his style of conversation was mainly interrogatory. He had many questions. He demanded answers.
‘What is the name of that valley?’
We had gone for a drive. He had liked the view. He had got out of the car and stopped a passing African.
‘I am not knowing the name, sah.’
‘But what do you call it?’
‘We are calling it just “the valley,” sah.’
‘How long have you lived here?’
‘I am born here, sah.’
‘What do you do?’
‘I am wucking, sah.’
‘Where do you work?’
‘Wucking in shamba, sah.’
‘He has a garden,’ I said.
‘Matoke, sah.’
‘Bananas,’ I said.
‘Bwana. Mumpa cigara.’
‘He wants a cigarette.’
And when the man had moved on, Naipaul waved his walking stick in a generalizing way over the lovely landscape and said, ‘Nothing has a name. They don’t name things.’
‘They name some things.’
‘Tell me.’
‘The hills in Kampala.’
‘That’s very much a colonial thing. The Africans were told those names – wait. What’s that noise?’ He lifted his hat brim and winced. ‘You see? Even here. Bongo drums!’
‘Bongo drums’ was an all-encompassing term for the sound of a radio, for people singing or dancing, or for drums, which were never bongo drums but usually hollow logs that were beaten with sticks or tall upright cylinders that were thumped at sundown.
What he was hearing was Congolese music, trumpets and drums and marimbas, blaring from a radio in a hut.
‘Music,’ I said.
‘I hate music,’ he said as we walked on. ‘All music. Not just that shit.’
‘Really.’
He looked sideways at me, and when I glanced over at him I saw he was still peering at me, intensely but obliquely, as though watching to see what I would do next.
He said, ‘You didn’t react. Good. I once told someone that and he burst into tears.’
It was not a pose. He really did hate music. He hated most sound, whether it was music or the human voice; he regarded all of it as noise. Loud laughter appalled him too, although he himself laughed a good deal. He had come to the wrong place.
Out of the blue, on one of those early days he said, ‘May I see your hand, Paul?’
He studied my palm, holding it to the light, squeezing it gently to make the lines more emphatic. He pressed his lips together and blew out his cheeks. He nodded, said nothing, but I had the feeling he liked what he had seen.
I was his interpreter, his guide, his companion. I was, most of all, his student. After a month or so he bought a car, a tan Peugeot, but at the beginning, when he had no car, I was his driver, and we went out every day. He had a sort of visiting professorship, courtesy of that dubious American foundation which was rumored to have links with the Central Intelligence Agency. He hated the foundation. He disliked his duties. He refused an office. He gave no classes. He ignored the other lecturers, though when they asked him his opinion of the university, he said, ‘It’s pretty crummy, but you know that, don’t you?’
It was largely a waste, he said; it was a farce. Here were these overpaid expatriates patronizing Africans and giving the impression of imparting an education. But it was theater. They were going through the motions, flattering themselves with notions of their own importance. The worst of it was the tameness of it all, the absence of criticism, the complacency, the extravagant way African effort was praised.
‘Did I hear someone say “parliament”? “democracy”? “socialism”?’ Naipaul made his disgusted face and repeated a bit of literary criticism he had just read. ‘The words are all wrong. These fraudulent people are trying to prettify this situation. It’s a huge whitewash, man. No –’ The laughter began to tumble in his lungs. ‘It’s blackwash, that’s what it is. Blackwash.’
He avoided the Senior Common Room. He made one visit to the Staff Club, and mainly for his benefit, one of the jollier members told jokes that all of us had heard before. Naipaul sat stony-faced. Afterwards he said he hated jokes. He hated the English when they tried to be colorful characters.
‘Your infies,’ he called them. And he was remembered in the Staff Club for having referred to Britain as ‘that socialist paradise.’
‘I’ve been a socialist all my life,’ Haji Hallsmith said.
Hallsmith’s apartment revolted Naipaul. ‘It smells,’ he said. ‘And have you noticed the way Hallsmith dresses? Those African shirts he wears are ridiculous. I had always thought of a university lecturer as someone rather grand. Why, he’s just a common infy.’
In an almost constant state of niggling annoyance, incessantly judgmental, but also playful, he liked to tease the other expatriates with the notion that they were all homosexual, living out a fantasy of sexual license in Uganda. He believed that their political views were insincere and mocking, merely a transparent justification for chasing boys. He laughed at the thought that they regarded themselves as liberals and intellectuals.
We were driving when he told me this. He was holding a cigarette – he tamped them and played with them as though fine-tuning them, packing the tobacco, smoothing the paper with his thumb, before he smoked them.
I said, ‘So I guess you would agree with George Wallace in thinking of them as “pointy-headed intellectuals.”’
He loved that. He repeated it twice, saying it was true.
‘This place is absolutely full of buggers.’
‘Please, Vidia,’ Pat said from the back seat.
‘And pointy-headed intellectuals.’ He was smiling grimly out the window. He lit the cigarette and smoked it awhile, tapping the Sportsman pack on the back of his hand.
‘How do you stand it, Paul?’
I was about to say how happy I was, living in Uganda with Yomo. It seemed a dream at times, to be in such a beautiful place with someone I loved. She was brave; she mocked the men who leered at her or who made remarks because she was holding hands with a white man. She didn’t mind the long dusty drives or the spiders or the snakes or the little crawling dudus. Even the thought of living in the bush behind Bundibugyo did not faze her. I liked my job. I found my students vague but teachable.
But before I could say any of this, Naipaul piped up, ‘Your writing, of course. If you didn’t write, you’d go out of your mind.’
He had read only a small amount of what I had written, but he seemed to see that it stood for more. I had written many poems and published some in American and British literary magazines. ‘Little magazines,’ Naipaul called them, making a face. ‘Lots of libido,’ he always said of my poems, but it was not a criticism. He liked one I had published in the Central African Examiner about an old car I had seen rotting in the bush. He quoted it word for word to me a few days afterwards. It was a trenchant comment about colonialism, he said; it was about Africans letting things go to ruin. I reread it and thought: Maybe.
My writing project at the time was an essay on cowardice, inspired by Orwell’s clear-sighted and confessional essays. I had been writing it for the American magazine Commentary. Naipaul had approved; it was not a little magazine, but the essay needed work. ‘I warned you, I’m brutal,’ he said. ‘Forget Orwell for the moment.’ I was on my fifth or sixth revision with him. It was like whittling a stick, but I was learning.
‘It’s true, Patsy. You know that. He’d go out of his mind.’
I kept driving, heading back to town, wondering whether it was true. I had been content for two years at a bush school in Malawi. I had been writing the whole time. Had the writing kept me sane?
‘More bongo drums,’ Naipaul said as we passed a roadside market.
There was noise, for sure, but no bongo drums. I said, ‘The only bongo in Uganda is an animal that looks like a kudu. They’re hunted with dogs by wealthy tourists who go on safaris here. When the bongo turns to battle the dogs with his horns, the hunters shoot him. They’re mostly in the Ruwenzoris. In the bundu.’
‘I want to see the bush,’ Naipaul said. ‘The bush is the future.’
We were on the outskirts of Kampala, passing a row of Indian shops, where on the verandahs some African men sat at Singer sewing machines, working the treadles with their bare feet, running up missionary-style dresses. Another African was squatting at a box, looking serious and intent, writing a letter in clear copperplate script for a customer, a woman who knelt, wringing her hands.
‘And the president of Gabon is called Bongo,’ I said. ‘Omar Bongo.’
‘Omar Bongo! Did you hear that, Patsy? Omar Bongo. Oh, how I don’t want to go to Gabon.’
He brooded for a moment, then asked me to slow down at the next row of Indian shops.
‘It is hopeless for them,’ he said. ‘They should leave. You know that Indian boy, Raju? I told him to go away, to save himself. Of course I didn’t say it so simply. I asked him, “What is the message of the Gita?” The Bhagavad-Gita. You’ve read it, Paul, of course you have.’
From the back seat, Pat said, ‘You were too hard on Raju.’
‘“The message of the Gita,” I said to him, “is action.”’
‘It’s just as bad for him to go as to stay here,’ Pat said.
‘Action. He’s got to take action. These people’ – Naipaul was gesturing at the little shops and the people on the verandah, who were baffled by the gesticulating Hindi in the bush hat in my car – ‘will be dead unless they read the Gita and take action.’
‘No, no!’ Pat Naipaul cried out from the back seat. ‘How can you say that?’
A growling in my guts told me that a quarrel was starting. I had never been in the presence of a husband and wife having an unselfconscious quarrel. I felt fearful and helpless.
‘They should forget England. The bitches will lie to them. India is the answer. It is a real country. A big country. They make things in India. Steel. Paper. Cloth. They publish books. What do they make here? Nothing, or some rubbish that no one wants, while the infies tell them how wonderful it all is.’
‘It would be worse for them in India. You’ve seen it,’ Pat said with passion, and she seemed to be sobbing. ‘They’d be licking the shoes of those horrible people.’
Coolly facing forward, Naipaul said, ‘You always take that simple senseless path.’
‘India would destroy them,’ Pat said, and I could see in the rearview mirror that she was wiping tears from her eyes and trying to speak.
‘I was offering him a real solution,’ Naipaul said.
Pat replied, but her weeping made it difficult for her to speak, and while she faltered, saying how unfair he was, Naipaul became calm, rational, colder, and did not give an inch.
‘Stop chuntering, Patsy. You’re just chuntering, and you have no idea of what you’re talking about.’
The tears kept rolling down Pat’s cheeks, and though she dabbed at her face she could not stanch the flow. There were tears on her pretty protruding lips. I was shocked, but there was something in her tear-stained face and her posture that aroused me.
‘I think we’ve done this,’ Naipaul said, tapping the cigarette pack.
After I took them home, I told Yomo about the Naipauls’ argument. She said, ‘Did he smack her?’
‘No. Just talked, very coldly.’
Yomo laughed. ‘Just talked!’ She was not shocked in the least. She shrugged, pulled me to the sofa, and said, ‘I want to give you a bath.’
The next afternoon, in the blazing sun, Naipaul and I were on the sports field again, being watched by urchins from the mud huts in the grove of trees beyond the field’s perimeter. They jeered at the perspiring runners — it was so odd for them to see white people run or sweat or suffer. They mimicked the movements of the cricketers. I ran around the track while Naipaul flung cricket balls at a batsman. Naipaul seemed to know what he was doing. He knew cricket lore. He had told me it was a fair game – that it was more than a game, it was a whole way of thinking. ‘There is no sadder sound of collapse than hearing a wicket fall,’ he said. ‘The best aspect of cricket is that no one really wins.’
He did not say anything about the argument with his wife until we were on our way into town afterwards for tea and cakes. He lit a cigarette and faced away from me, looking out the window – the same posture as the day before, the same time of day, the sun at the same angle, him smoking, me driving.
‘I hate rowing in public,’ he said, and nothing more.
At the teashop I had chocolate cake, he had cucumber sandwiches.
‘These are cooling, but you need your cake. The body knows.’
He clutched the empty teacup.
‘They warm the cups at the Lake Victoria in Entebbe. That’s nice. But not here.’ He poured the milk, he poured the tea, he added sugar, he stirred, he sipped. ‘We’re moving into our house tomorrow. Do you know those houses?’
‘Behind the Art Department, yes.’
‘They’re pretty crummy.’
He was more restless than usual. When he had gone without sleep his eyes became hooded and Asiatic. He looked that way today. He began talking about the Kabaka again, asking questions. People in Uganda, even expatriates, seldom mentioned him. He was an institution, a fixture, a symbol. No one ever saw him.
I said, ‘He is fairly invisible, but people say that he knows what’s going on. He has his own prime minister, the Katikiro, and even his own parliament, the Lukiko. He takes an interest in things.’
‘He has taken no interest in me,’ Naipaul said.
I smiled to show my incomprehension. Why should the Kabaka, the king of Buganda, even be aware of Naipaul’s existence? The Kabaka was forty-two, handsome, androgynous, aloof, a drinker, the ruler of almost two million people. He had been a thorn in the flesh of the British. He was a thorn in Obote’s flesh. The Kingdom of Buganda belonged to him.
‘I sent a little note to the palace. I had a letter of introduction. He hasn’t replied. Not a word.’
What a good thing it was that we were alone. Any local person overhearing him go on about not receiving an invitation from this king would have found the complaint absurd. And a more delicate aspect was that the Kabaka was never discussed in public; his name was not spoken. It was bad form to do so if you happened to be in the presence of one of his subjects, and politically unwise if you were in the presence of one of his enemies.
‘He has other things on his mind,’ I said.
Naipaul chewed his cucumber sandwich and faced me, as though challenging me to give him one good reason why the Kabaka could not reply to the note informing him that V. S. Naipaul had arrived in Kampala.
‘They want to kill him,’ I said, lowering my voice in this crowded Kampala teashop. ‘Obote wants to overthrow him.’
This was news to Naipaul, who I felt had mistakenly lumped the king together with the clapped-out maharajahs and sultans he had come across in India – men down on their luck, feeling wronged and dispossessed, grateful for a sympathetic hearing. The Kabaka was strange but he was vital, and he had a palace guard and a whole armory of weapons.
‘It’s not a good idea to talk about him,’ I said.
‘Excellent. I have no intention of doing so. I have lost all interest in him.’
Leaving the teashop, we bumped into Pippa Broadhurst, a lecturer in history, who had been at Hallsmith’s party. A feminist, hating the prison of marriage, the jailer husband, the life sentence, clucking ‘I am a human being too,’ Pippa had found in the smoky bowl of the Ngorongoro crater in Tanzania a hospitable manyatta (village) and had had a brief affair with a spear-carrying moran (warrior) of the Masai people – another blood drinker, like Dudney’s Karamojong missus. The upshot was Flora, a brown long-legged daughter, with whom Pippa went everywhere. The warrior was still in his thornbush kraal in Masailand.
‘Hello, Vidia,’ said Pippa. ‘And congratulations. I understand Mr Bwogo’s found you a house.’
‘The house is pretty crummy.’
‘Everyone gets those houses,’ Pippa said, snatching at Flora.
‘I’m not everyone,’ Vidia said.
The house, one of a dozen just like it, was newly built and raw-looking, set on a hot, rubbly slope of baked earth above a brick warren of ruinous servants’ quarters. The afternoon sun struck the house and heated it and made it stink of risen dust. The small brick buildings down the slope, too close together, were jammed with squatters and relatives, and I could hear music and chatter coming from the area of woodsmoke. Cooking fires and laughter: it was life lived outdoors, people eating and cooking and washing themselves. The clank of buckets and basins and the plop of slopping water reached me as I tapped on the front door.
‘Come in,’ Naipaul called in an irritated voice.
I could see what he disliked about the house. It was new and ugly, it smelled of fresh concrete and dust, it had no curtains.
‘Paul,’ he said in an imploring way, ‘do sit down.’
Pat said, ‘Go on, Vidia, please.’
‘Listen to the bitches!’
‘Vidia,’ she said, trying to soothing him.
He continued to do what he had been doing when I entered, which was to read aloud from closely typed pages a scene about a farewell Christmas party in London, a meal at which presents were being given and toasts proposed. It was something from his novel, I supposed, the one he had brought to Uganda to finish. He went on reading, speaking of the tearful meal and the emotion, of people weeping.
Pat pressed her lips together when he finished, pausing before she spoke. The last time I had seen her was in the back seat of my car, when she had been sobbing openly and trying to speak (‘Stop chuntering, Patsy’), her face contorted, her hair a mess, her cheeks and lips wet, her large breasts tremulous with her grief.
But today she was cool and very calm. In the most schoolmistressy way she said, ‘Too many tears.’
I was seated by a small table on which there lay a carefully corrected paragraph of small type, which I glanced at. The first words, in boldface, read Naipaul, Vidiadhar Surajprasad. It was his Who’s Who entry, with meticulous proofreader’s marks in the margin in black ink, Vidia’s precise handwriting, deleting a semicolon, adding a literary prize and a recent date.
He had only briefly interrupted the reading of his novel when I entered. I felt he wanted me to hear it, to mystify and impress me. I was impressed. He was admitting me to this ritual of reading; he trusted me.
He turned to me and said, ‘Do you hear those bitches and their bongos?’
No bongos, but I knew what he meant.
‘Do you suppose we could flog them?’ He knew it was an outrageous suggestion, but he wanted to gauge my reaction. He took a harmless pleasure in seeing people wince.
We went to the window and looked downhill at the roofs of corrugated asbestos, moldy from the damp, at the woodsmoke and the banana trees, at barking dogs, crying children, all the elements of urban poverty in Uganda.
‘That’s what they need, a good flogging.’
‘Vidia, that’s quite enough of that,’ Pat said, strong again, no sign of the tears and sobs of the other day.
His reading from the typescript and his unembarrassed candor in allowing me to hear it encouraged me to ask him again about writers he liked. So far, all I knew was that he disliked Orwell and that for pleasure he read the Bible and Martial. I had Nabokov’s Pale Fire with me and told him how much I liked it.
‘I read Pnin. It was silly. There was nothing in it. What do people see in him?’
‘Style, maybe?’
‘What is his style? It’s bogus, calling attention to itself. Americans do that. All those beautiful sentences. What are they for?’
His interest, his passion, was located solely in his own writing. He saw it as new. Nothing like it had ever been written before. It was an error to look for any influences, for there were none; it was wrong to compare it with any other work; nothing came close to resembling it. It took me a little while to understand his utter faith in this conceit, but the day I did, and acknowledged that his writing was unique, and that he was a new man, was the day our friendship began.
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 toward 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.’