Free A Way in the World by Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul Page A

the boys is standing in the darkness outside. He says, “Can Lucas and I come here, sir?”
    They come in, and the narrator is enveloped in the smell of stale tobacco, enveloped in the idea of appetite: appetite the antidote to stress.
    He lets his hand fall on the body next to him, not knowing to whom it belongs. The boy is passive. Appetite grows on the narrator; and even while his fallen hand opens, against the hardness of the body, a finer version of a body like his own, a body therefore more than half known, the narrator’s thought is of the grossness of the big blond woman at the station now a day’s march away. Appetite, appetite: the passivity of the boy feeds it.
    When he gets up in the morning the narrator finds himself alone in the little leaf-and-branch shelter. He has a moment of alarm. But the boys are higher up the river, preparing for the day. The narrator still doesn’t know which of the two had been beside him.
    The time comes to leave. With their machetes Lucas and Mateo—following some forest rule, perhaps—cut down the little shelter. So protecting during the night, but so flimsy, really.
    The march begins. The narrator is no longer at ease, no longer the man he had been. The path moves away from the upland river to the forest. Such beauty there; but something of the safety and wholeness of the previous day has left the narrator. Something nags; he never has to search far for the reason. As often as he rejects it, as often as he applies his mind to it, unease returns, to come between him and the moment; and below all of this now, and adding to his agitation, there is the idea of his cause, the starting point of the journey.
    Tossed about, sickening inwardly in a familiar way asthe day wears on, he ceases to look about him. He walks mechanically between the two boys, fixing his eyes on the heels (in dirty canvas shoes) of the boy in front of him.
    The boys, on the other hand, are today more animated, cutting switches with their machetes, flicking leaves and small insects from the path, sometimes using their machetes to cut, very swiftly and neatly, light trail-marks on trees, talking loudly in their own language over him, as it were, as though it is important to make a human noise in the forest. There is a different swing to their gait; it is as if they were alone. They call out from afar to the people they see on the path; and sometimes, seeming to follow abrupt hunches of their own, they leave the path and—holding themselves still at a particular spot, as though they wish not even to disturb the air just then—they stand looking at something or for something.
    In mid-afternoon they halt for the day. Today, though, the boys make no sign of building a shelter. Instead, they leave the narrator in the camp-site and they wander off—always the two together—and come back and wander off again. The day before, the narrator hadn’t expected a shelter; today he does. He feels disregarded; it spoils the moment, the view, the yellowing light.
    For the first time that day he asserts himself. When the boys come back he says, “Lucas, build the hut.”
    And it is really very easy. The boys obey, with no change of mood: they might have been waiting for his order. Talking in their language, in their new loud way, as though it is important to make noise, they cut and trim branches. The sharp blades ring as they slice through sappy wood, and in no time the timbers are ready, the uprights forked at the top, and sharpened at the end where they are to be buried in the soft forest earth. Quickly then, almost without searching—as though in their wanderings they have taken stock of everything and now know exactly where they have to go—theboys fetch the wild-banana fronds and the big, hollow-ribbed, heart-shaped leaves to hang on the roof frame.
    When they are finished they lay the narrator’s pack in the shelter. It is like a delicate attention; but then the narrator sees them get their own packs and set them