“After that I couldn’t appear with him in public. But of course that wasn’t why he broke with Raymond. In fact, he was friendlier than ever with Raymond afterwards. He broke with Raymond when he decided that he didn’t need him, that in the new direction he was taking the white man was an embarrassment to him in the capital. As for me, he never spoke to me. But he always made a point of sending me his regards, of having some official come to ask how I was getting on. He needs a model in everything, and I believe he heard that de Gaulle used to send personal regards to the wives of his political enemies.
“That was why I thought that if Indar made some inquiries about Raymond’s book in the capital, it would get back to him. Everything gets back to the President here. The place is a one-man show, as you know. And I was expecting to get some indirect word. But in all these months he hasn’t even sent me his regards.”
She suffered more than Raymond appeared to. She was in a country that was still strange to her and she was dangling, doubly dependent. Raymond was in a place that had become his home. He was in a situation that he had perhaps lived through before, when he was a neglected teacher in the colonial capital. Perhaps he had returned to his older personality, the self-containedness he had arrived at as a teacher, the man with the quiet but defiant knowledge of his own worth. But I felt there was something else. I felt that Raymond was consciously following a code he had prescribed for himself, and the fact that he was following this code gave him his serenity.
This code forbade him expressing disappointment or envy. In this he was different from the young men who continued to come to the Domain and called on him and listened to him. Raymond still had his big job; he still had those boxes of papers that many people wanted to look through; and after all his years as the Big Man’s white man, all those years as the man who knew more about the country than any man living, Raymond still had a reputation.
When one of these visitors spoke critically about somebody’s book or a conference that somebody had organized somewhere (Raymond wasn’t invited to conferences these days), Raymond would say nothing, unless he had something good to say about the book or the conference. He would look steadily at the eyes of the visitor, as though only waiting for him to finish. I saw him do this many times; he gave the impression then of hearing out an interruption. Yvette’s face would register the surprise or the hurt.
As it did on the evening when I understood, from something one of our visitors said, that Raymond had applied for a job in the United States and had been rejected. The visitor, a bearded man with mean and unreliable eyes, was speaking like a man on Raymond’s side. He was even trying to be a little bitter on Raymond’s behalf, and this made me feel that he might be one of those visiting scholars Yvette told me about, who, while they were going through Raymond’s papers, also took the opportunity of making a pass at her.
Times had changed since the early 1960s, the bearded man said. Africanists were not so rare now, and people who had given their life to the continent were being passed over. The great powers had agreed for the time being not to wrangle over Africa, and as a result attitudes to Africa had changed. The very people who had said that the decade was the decade of Africa, and had scrambled after its great men, were now giving up on Africa.
Yvette lifted her wrist and looked carefully at her watch. It was like a deliberate interruption. She said, “The decade of Africa finished ten seconds ago.”
She had done that once before, when someone had spoken of the decade of Africa. And the trick worked again. She smiled; Raymond and I laughed. The bearded man took the hint, and the subject of Raymond’s rejected application was left alone.
But I was dismayed by what I had heard, and when Yvette next came to the flat I said, “But you didn’t tell me you were thinking of leaving.”
“Aren’t you thinking of leaving?”
“Eventually, yes.”
“Eventually we all have to leave. Your life is settled. You’re practically engaged to that man’s daughter, you’ve told me. Everything is just waiting for you. My life is still fluid. I must do something. I just can’t stay here.”
“But why didn’t you tell me?”
“Why talk of something you know isn’t going to come off? And it wouldn’t do us any good if it got around. You know that. Raymond doesn’t stand a chance abroad now anyway.”
“Why did he apply, then?”
“I made him. I thought there was a possibility. Raymond wouldn’t do a thing like that by himself. He’s loyal.”
The closeness to the President that had given Raymond his reputation, and had made people call him out to conferences in different parts of the world, now disqualified him from serious consideration abroad. Unless something extraordinary happened, he would have to stay where he was, dependent on the power of the President.
His position in the Domain required him to display authority. But at any moment he might be stripped of this authority, reduced to nothing, with nothing to fall back on. In his place I don’t think I would have been able to pretend to have any authority—that would have been the hardest thing for me. I would have just given up, understanding the truth of what Mahesh had told me years before: “Remember, Salim, the people here are malins.”
But Raymond showed no uncertainty. And he was loyal—to the President, to himself, his ideas and his work, his past. My admiration for him grew. I studied the President’s speeches—the daily newspapers were flown up from the capital—for signs that Raymond might be called back to favour. And if I became Raymond’s encourager, after Yvette, if I became his champion and promoted him even at the Hellenic Club as the man who hadn’t published much but really knew, the man every intelligent visitor ought to see, it wasn’t only because I didn’t want to see him go away, and Yvette with him. I didn’t want to see him humiliated. I admired his code and wished that when my own time came I might be able to stick to something like it.
Life in our town was arbitrary enough. Yvette, seeing my life as settled, with everything waiting for me somewhere, had seen her own life as fluid. She felt she wasn’t as prepared as the rest of us; she had to look out for herself. That was how we all felt, though: we saw our own lives as fluid, we saw the other man or person as solider. But in the town, where all was arbitrary and the law was what it was, all our lives were fluid. We none of us had certainties of any kind. Without always knowing what we were doing, we were constantly adjusting to the arbitrariness by which we were surrounded. In the end we couldn’t say where we stood.
We stood for ourselves. We all had to survive. But because we felt our lives to be fluid we all felt isolated, and we no longer felt accountable to anyone or anything. That was what had happened to Mahesh. “It isn’t that there’s no right and wrong here. There’s no right.” That was what had happened to me.
It was the opposite of the life of our family and community on the coast. That life was full of rules. Too many rules; it was a prepacked kind of life. Here I had stripped myself of all the rules. During the rebellion—such a long time ago—I had also discovered that I had stripped myself of the support the rules gave. To think of it like that was to feel myself floating and lost. And I preferred not to think about it: it was too much like the panic you could at any time make yourself feel if you thought hard enough about the physical position of the town in the continent, and your own place in that town.
To see Raymond answering arbitrariness with a code like the one he had worked out for himself seemed to me extraordinary.
When I said so to Yvette she said, “Do you think I would have married someone who was not extraordinary?”
Strange, after all the criticism, or what I had seen as criticism! But everything that was strange in my relationship with Yvette quickly stopped being strange. Everything about the relationship was new to me; I took everything as it came.
With Yvette—and with Yvette and Raymond together—I had acquired a kind of domestic life: the passion in the flat, the quiet family evening in the house in the
Domain. The idea that it was my domestic life came to me when the life itself was disturbed. While it went on I simply lived it. And it was only when the life was disturbed that amazement came to me at the coolness with which I had accepted a way of living which, if it had been reported to me about someone else when I was younger, would have seemed awful. Adultery was horrible to me. I continued to think of it in the setting of family and community on the coast, and saw it as sly and dishonourable and weak-willed.
It was Yvette who had suggested, after an afternoon in the flat, that I should have dinner with them that evening in the house. She had done so out of affection, and a concern for my lonely evening; and she seemed not to see any problems. I was nervous; I didn’t think I would be able to face Raymond in his house so soon afterwards. But Raymond was in his study when I arrived, and remained there until it was time to eat; and my nervousness disappeared in the novel excitement I felt at seeing Yvette, so recently naked, corrupt with pleasure, in the role of wife.
I sat in the sitting room. She came and went. Those moments were utterly delicious to me. I was stirred by every housewifely gesture; I loved the ordinariness of her clothes. Her movements in her house were brisker, more assertive, her French speech (with Raymond now at the table) more precise. Even while (all anxiety gone) I was listening to Raymond, it was a thrill to me to distance myself from Yvette, to try to see her as a stranger, and then to look through that stranger to the other woman I knew.
On the second or third occasion like this I made her drive back with me to the flat. No subterfuge was necessary: immediately after eating, Raymond had gone back to his study.
Yvette had thought I had only wanted to go for a drive. When she understood what I had in mind she made an exclamation, and her face—so mask-like and housewifely at the dinner table—was transformed with pleasure. All the way to the flat she was close to laughter. I was surprised by her reaction; I had never seen her so easy, so delighted, so relaxed.
She knew she was attractive to men—those visiting scholars drove home that message. But to be desired and needed again after all that had happened during our long afternoon seemed to touch her in a way she hadn’t been touched before. She was pleased with me, absurdly pleased with herself, and so companionable that I might have been an old school friend rather than a lover. I tried to put myself in her place, and just for a while I had the illusion of entering her woman’s body and mind and understanding her delight. And I thought then, knowing what I did of her life, that I had been given an idea of her own needs and deprivations.
Metty was in. In the old days, following old manners, I had taken care to keep this side of my life secret from him, or at any rate to appear to be trying to do so. But now secrecy wasn’t possible and didn’t seem to matter. And we never worried about Metty in the flat again.
What was extraordinary that evening became part of the pattern of many of the days we were together. The dinner with Raymond in the house, or the after-dinner gathering with Raymond, occurred in a kind of parenthesis, between the afternoon in the flat and the late evening in the flat. So that in the house, when Raymond appeared, I was able to listen with a clear mind and real concern to whatever he had to say.
His routine didn’t change. He tended to be working in his study when I—and visitors, if there were visitors—arrived. He took his time to appear, and in spite of his absent-minded air his hair was always freshly damped, nicely combed backwards, and he was neatly dressed. His exits, when they were preceded by a little speech, could be dramatic; but his entrances were usually modest.
He liked, especially at after-dinner gatherings, to begin by pretending to be a shy guest in his own house. But it didn’t take much to draw him out. Many people wanted to hear about his position in the country and his relations with the President; but Raymond no longer talked about that. He talked instead about his work, and from that he moved on to general intellectual topics. The genius of Theodor Mommsen, the man Raymond said had rewritten the history of Rome, was a favourite theme. I grew to recognize the way Raymond built up to it.
He never avoided making a political comment, but he never raised the subject of politics himself and never became involved in political argument. However critical our guests were of the country, Raymond allowed them to have their say, in that way he had of hearing out an interruption.
Our visitors were becoming increasingly critical. They had a lot to say about the cult of the African madonna. Shrines had been set up—and were being set up—in various places connected with the President’s mother, and pilgrimages to these places had been decreed for certain days. We knew about the cult, but in our region we hadn’t seen too much of it. The President’s mother came from one of the small downriver tribes, far away, and in our town we had only had a few statues in semi-African style, and photographs of shrines and processions. But visitors who had been to the capital had a lot to report, and it was easy enough for them as outsiders to be satirical.
More and more they included us—Raymond and Yvette and people like myself—in their satire. It began to appear that in their eyes we were people not of Africa who had allowed ourselves to be turned into Africans, accepting whatever was decreed for us. Satire like this from people who were just passing through, people we weren’t going to see again but did our best for, people who were safe in their own countries, satire like this was sometimes wounding. But Raymond never allowed himself to be provoked.
To one crass man he said, “What you are failing to understand is that this parody of Christianity you talk so warmly about can only make sense to people who are Christians. In fact, that is why, from the President’s point of view, it may not be such a good idea. The point of the message may be lost in the parody. Because at the heart of this extraordinary cult is an immense idea about the redemption of the woman of Africa. But this cult, presented as it has been, may antagonize people for different reasons. Its message may be misinterpreted, and the great idea it enshrines may be set back for two or three generations.”
That was Raymond—still loyal, trying hard to make sense of events which must have bewildered him. It did him no good; all the labour that went into those thoughts was wasted. No word came from the capital. He and Yvette continued to dangle.
But then, for a month or so, their spirits appeared to lift. Yvette told me that Raymond had reason to believe that his selections from the President’s speeches had found favour. I was delighted. It was quite ridiculous; I found myself looking in a different way at the President’s pictures. And though no direct word came, Raymond, after being on the defensive for so long,and after all the talking he had had to do about the madonna cult, began to be more argumentative with visitors and to hint, with something of his old verve, that the President had something up his sleeve that would give a new direction to the country. Once or twice he even spoke about the possible publication of a book of the President’s speeches, and its effect on the people.
The book was published. But it wasn’t the book Raymond had worked on, not the book of longish extracts with a linking commentary. It was a very small, thin book of thoughts, Maximes, two or three thoughts to a page, each thought about four or five lines long.
Stacks of the book came to our town. They appeared in every bar and shop and office. My shop got a hundred; Mahesh got a hundred and fifty at Bigburger; the Tivoli got a hundred and fifty. Every pavement huckster got a little stock—five or ten: it depended on the commissioner. The books weren’t free; we had to buy them at twenty francs a copy in multiples of five. The commissioner had to send the money for his entire consignment back to the capital, and for a fortnight or so, big man as he was, he ran around everywhere with his Land-Rover full of Maximes, trying to place them.
The Youth Guard used up a lot of its stock on one of its Saturday-afternoon children’s marches. These marches were hurried, ragged affairs—blue shirts, hundreds of busy little legs, white canvas shoes, some of the smaller children frantic, close to tears, regularly breaking into a run to
keep up with their district group, everybody anxious to get to the end and then to get back home, which could be many miles away.
The march with the President’s booklet was raggeder than usual. The afternoon was overcast and heavy, after early morning rain; and the mud in the streets, drying out, had reached the nasty stage where bicycles and even footsteps caused it to fly about in sticky lumps and pellets. Mud stained the children’s canvas shoes red and looked like wounds on their black legs.
The children were meant to hold up the President’s book as they marched and to shout the long African name the President had given himself. But the children hadn’t been properly drilled;the shouts were irregular; and since the clouds had rolled over black, and it looked as though it was going to rain again soon, the marchers were in a greater hurry than usual. They just held the little book and scampered in the gloom, spattering one another with mud, shouting only when the Youth Guard shouted at them.
The marches were already something of a joke to our people, and this didn’t help. Most people, even people from the deep bush, understood what the madonna cult was about. But I don’t think anyone in the squares or the market had any idea what the Maximes march was about. I don’t think, to tell the truth, that even Mahesh knew what it referred to or was modelled on, until he was told.
So Maximes failed with us. And it must have been so in other parts of the country as well, because shortly after reporting the great demand for the book, the newspapers dropped the subject.
Raymond, speaking of the President, said: “He knows when to pull back. That has always been one of his great virtues. No one understands better than he the cruel humour of his people. And he may finally decide that he is being badly advised.”