Free Guerrillas by V.S. Naipaul Page A

made to give up nails and other pieces of metal that had somehow, during their bewitchment, been absorbed into their flesh. But Jane had soon regretted the encouragement she had given Adela; for Adela, when she understood that Jane and Roche were not married and were living “in sin,” became permanently annoyed. In her white uniform, on which she insisted, she walked through the large house like a Friday night woman preacher, filling the rooms with her annoyance, and looking for fresh signs of sin.
    Jane, going out to the front gate to get the newspaper, heard Adela shriek. And she knew the cause: the lager bottles on the metal table in the back porch.
    “The an-amount of rum!” Adela shouted. “Rum! Rum! Oh my God, but the an-amount of rum they does drink in this house!”
    After breakfast—Adela back in her room, the radio going again: music, commercials, government announcements—Jane said to Roche, “What would you say if I told you I was going back to London?”
    He was reading the police news in the newspaper: the events of the previous day and early evening: the raids, the shootouts, the slum brawls: for many people down there in the city life had reached crisis in the last twenty-four hours.
    He said, “I would say I wish I was going back with you.”
    “But if I was going for good. If I wasn’t coming back.”
    He didn’t put the paper down. He continued to read; and then, as he unfolded the paper and turned the page, he said, in his precise way, “That would be more complicated.”
    He said no more. His calm robbed her of impatience or combativeness. Mood, emotion, events, led her to action. So it had always been with her; so it was going to be now. She had decided; the time for acting on that decision would come. When Roche returned for lunch they talked of other things; it was as though the crisis had passed.

THIS MAN fills my whole mind to the exclusion of all other trivial concerns and I don’t know how I can get to see him again. He’s suffered so much in England, I don’t believe he will want to see someone like me. Over here they see him only as a hakwai, but a woman of my class can see what he really is, I can understand what all those other people in England saw in him. They say he was born in the back room of a Chinese grocery, a half black nobody, just a Chinaman’s lucky shot on a dark night, that’s a good laugh, but I can see that he is a man of good blood, only someone of my class can see that, to me he is like a prince helping these poor and indigent black people, they’re so shiftless no one will help them, least of all their own
.
    He’s the leader they’re waiting for and the day will come, of that I’m convinced, when they will parade in the streets and offer him the crown, everybody will say then, “This man was born in the back room of a Chinese grocery, but as Catherine said to Heathcliff, ‘Your mother was an Indian princess and your father was the Emperor of China,’ we knew it all along,” and that was in the middle of England mark you, in the days when they had no racial feeling before all those people from Jamaica and Pakistan came and spoiled the country for a man like him. They will see him then like a prince, with his gold color
.
    I drive past his solitary forbidding house many times and often
late at night I see the lamp burning in his study, he’s wrapped up in his thoughts and I have no wish to intrude and aggravate his impatience because I know he’s writing that book he has a contractual obligation to write. One day I summoned up the courage to telephone him, my heart was beating when he answered, I put the phone down, though I’m dying to hear that soft and cultivated voice, that dark brown voice as it has so aptly been described by many …
    Jimmy put aside the pad and considered Bryant, sitting on one of the furry chairs and trying to read the newspaper without making the sheets rustle.
    Bryant wasn’t a reader. But Stephens made a point of