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

down next to his: the three packs lying, quite formally, side by side, in a repetition of the previous night’s arrangement: as though that was also contained in the narrator’s orders.
    They light a fire. The flame hardly shows in the afternoon light. They separately prepare their food, the boys theirs together, the narrator his. The light fades fast, the fire shows, and then, abruptly, night comes. The forest begins to sing. Soon it is like a noise in the head.
    Lucas whittles at his toy paddle. He asks the narrator, “Where you come from?”
    “England.”
    Mateo asks, “Why you come here?”
    The narrator gives the reply he has been trained to give: “I will tell Alfred. He will tell you.” Alfred is the headman of the village where they are going.
    Lucas says, “You want to build houses here?”
    “Alfred will tell you.” And to cut the questioning short the narrator asks, “How did kanaima kill your father, Mateo?”
    The faces of both boys, tanned, shiny, reflecting the fire, become very serious, resigned.
    Lucas speaks first. “Kanaima was looking for him. He had a sign.”
    “But then he forget,” Mateo says. “One day a cloth-seller come. My father
want
to look at the cloth. He don’t know that kanaima come with the cloth-seller. When my father was looking at the cloth kanaima hide in his room. When my father come back with the new cloth kanaima kill him. That is all. Afterwards we burn the cloth.”
    They all look at the fire.
    Lucas says, “You live in a
house
in England?”
    There is such an emphasis on the word the narrator wants to say no, he lives in a flat; but that would be confusing. So he says yes.
    Lucas says slowly, as though he is repeating a lesson, “I want to live in a house.”
    Such a simple ambition, but so far away, and at the moment so unlikely: the narrator finds himself moved by these boys in a way that goes beyond his political cause.
    Mateo says, “You know that kanaima come for Lucas, sir?”
    The narrator says, “Lucas?”
    Lucas shaves with his sharp knife at his paddle, and throws the shaving into the fire. “I was walking. From very far I see something on the track that didn’t have to be there. But I don’t think. I go on, and see the thing that wrong. Was a little white flower. By itself. I turn and run. But was too late.”
    It is on Lucas’s body—lying beside him—that the narrator’s hand falls later that evening in the hut. He is moved now by more than appetite, the excitement of the earlier evening: the passivity of the boy adds to the narrator’s mood, builds up to tenderness, made deeper by a feeling of being unable to help, tenderness that turns to a melancholy like the melancholy he had seen earlier in Lucas’s face in the firelight.
    Some time later Mateo sits up abruptly. He says, “Sir, you must take Lucas with you to England.”
    It is something that would have just struck Mateo, the narrator thinks: it is a way Lucas might be saved. The narrator doesn’t answer.
    A long time later Mateo says, “Sir?”
    The narrator says, “Yes.”
    The word has no meaning. It is just a sound, an acknowledgement. But Mateo gives a contented sigh and settles down to sleep.
    The boys are all friendliness the next day. They do not talk loudly over the narrator as on the day before; they do not abruptly leave the narrator and the line of march; they try to bring the narrator into all that they do. Their faces are brighter, less resigned-looking. One of the things the narrator has come out to do is to win the trust of people like Lucas and Mateo. But this trust is of another sort. He feels undermined by it; at the same time he doesn’t see how he can reject it. And it is as if some exchange has been made, as if something of the oppression that has left the boys now sits on the narrator’s shoulder.
    He begins to feel, too, that the journey is lasting too long. They are meeting fewer people on the forest path now, and there are fewer tins and printed