Authors: V.S. Naipaul
It never occurred to me that the writing of this book might have become an end in itself, that the recording of a life might become an extension of that life. It never occurred to me that I would have grown to relish the constriction and order of hotel life, which previously had driven me to despair; and that the contrast between my unchanging room and the slow progression of what was being created there would have given me such satisfaction. Order, sequence, regularity: it is there every time the electric meter clicks, accepting one more of my shillings. In fourteen months the meter has swallowed hundreds of my shillings, now with a hollow sound, now with a full sound. I have seen the putting green in all weathers, preferring it best in winter, when our middle-aged ladies, mutton dressed as lamb, as our barman says, cease to sunbathe, and our homeless men no longer appear on it at week-ends in sporty clothes and make hearty conversation.
I know every line on the wallpaper above my table. I have seen no deterioration, but there is talk of redecorating. And the table itself: when I first sat at it I thought it rough and too narrow. The dark surface was stained and scratched, the indentations filled with grit and dirt; the drawer didn’t pull out, the legs had been cut down. It wasn’t part of the standard hotel furniture. It had been provided specially;
it was a junkshop article, belonging to no one, without a function. Now it feels rehabilitated and clean; it is familiar and comfortable; even the scratches have acquired a shine. This is the gift of minute observation which has come to me with the writing of this book, one order, of which I form part, answering the other, which I create. And with this gift has come another, which I least expected: a continuous, quiet enjoyment of the passing of time.
I have fitted into the hotel; the fact has been remarked upon. Suspicion has disappeared; it had nothing to feed on since I learned to fill my day. I have breakfast. I work in my room. I walk to the public house for lunch. The beermats never change.
Who comes here? A Grenadier.
Sometimes in mid-afternoon I go to a restaurant where frying oil hangs in the still air like a mist; beyond the streaming glass the lorries, buses and motorcars pass ceaselessly in their own blue haze. I have tea and read an evening paper. On Sundays we all have tea in the lounge; it is the custom then for the ladies to serve the men. The older folk play cards; the rest of us read the newspapers. I read the characterless hand of a lady, lower-middle-class but nice, who was in India until 1947; now, after Kenya and Northern Rhodesia, her husband dead, her family scattered, she has given up the Empire. Like me. I frequently go down to the bar before dinner to have a drink and watch television. It is a private bar; postcards and souvenirs from residents who have gone abroad are reverentially displayed. I have my own table in the dining-room. It is behind a square pillar, clad with varnished pine. I like being behind the pillar. It is as wide as my table and gives me privacy of a sort. It also enables me, without giving offence, to observe the hands of the man I think of as Garbage.
Garbage also sits behind a pillar. His hands are all I can see of him. They are long, middle-aged, educated hands: and their primary concern appears to be to convert a plate of
meat and vegetables into a plate of acceptable garbage. While chaos comes swiftly and simultaneously to other plates; while meat is hacked and pushed around and vegetables mangled and scattered on a spreading, muddy field of gravy; while knives and forks, restlessly preparing fresh, mixed mouthfuls, probe the chaos they have created, and cut and spear and plaster; those two hands are unhurriedly, scientifically, maintaining order, defining garbage, separating what is to be eventually eaten from what is to be thrown away. What is to be thrown away is lifted high and carefully deposited on that section of the plate, a growing section, which is reserved for garbage. It is only when the division is complete – most of the other plates abandoned by this time and ready for surrender – that the eating begins. This is the work of a minute; the plate is ready for surrender with the others. The waitress passes. Stiffly, dismissingly, the outstretched hands offer up their labour: a neat plate of garbage. I feel I have witnessed the first part of some early Christian ritual. For this is not all. After the plate of garbage comes the slaughter of the cheese. The big left hand arches high over the block of cheddar; thumb and middle finger find their hold and press lightly; the right hand brings down the curved, two-pronged knife. But at the last moment the hands pretend that the cheese is alive and getting away. The cheddar shifts about on the oily slaughter-board; there is a struggle; thumb and finger release their hold, but only to press down more firmly; instantly, then, the knife falls, in a strong clean stroke that continues until the cheese is truncated and still. And I almost expect to see blood.
So the time passes. There are occasional incidents. Someone objects to the way a deaf diner scrapes and taps his plate with his knife; he, unlike Garbage, likes to offer up a clean plate. The barman gets drunk; a waitress leaves after a quarrel. Sometimes I have to endure a difficult week or two when the double room next to mine is taken by male
employees of a nearby factory which, I believe, ceaselessly converts American maize into glucose; then I have to listen to a constant stream of churlish chatter, pre-public house, post-public house, always vapid, always punctuated by that even, mirthless, four-beat laugh which I detest.
But such people come and go and are quickly forgotten; they form no part of the life of the hotel. When I first came here I used to think of this life as the life of the maimed. But we who belong here are neither maimed nor very old. Three-quarters of the men here are of my age; they have responsible jobs to which they go off in their motorcars every morning. We are people who for one reason or another have withdrawn, from our respective countries, from the city where we find ourselves, from our families. We have withdrawn from unnecessary responsibility and attachment. We have simplified our lives. I cannot believe that our establishment is unique. It comforts me to think that in this city alone there must be hundreds and thousands like ourselves.
We have our incidents. But we also have our events. The most important is of course Christmas. That truly separates the faithful, who stay on, from those who, steadfast throughout the year, at last reveal other, saddening loyalties. Among the faithful the event is spoken of weeks before. A subscription list circulates: we exchange presents with our lord and lady on the day, just as they exchange presents with the staff. There is much half-bantering, half-serious talk of precedence; for on the day the tables are joined together to form an E, and we eat together, lord and lady and faithful, and he who is the newest among us finds himself farthest from the centre.
I have moved up year by year, but I know I will never sit at our lady’s right hand. That position is reserved for a man who has been here twenty-three years, a shy, gentle, delicately-featured man, still quite young-looking, so unassertive
in hall and bar and putting green that his eminence on the day comes as a surprise to many. It is a sincere occasion. Nothing is skimped, and no extra charge is made even for the wines and liqueurs which are liberally served. But we are grateful for more than the dinner. We are celebrating our safety, and our emotion is profound. It is intolerably moving when the kind and aged waitress who represents the staff on these occasions comes out from among her uniformed colleagues at the kitchen entrance and, in silence, makes her way to the centre with a large cellophane-wrapped bouquet which, after a brief, faint, stumbling speech that contains not one false word, she presents to our lady. I must confess that last year when, for the first time, the toast was made by our lady to ‘our overseas guest’ and all heads turned towards me, tears came to my eyes. And I was among those who, unashamedly weeping, stood up at the end and applauded our lord and lady all the way out of the hall. And really, I thought, in the French patois of the cool cocoa valleys of Isabella,
je’ens d’lué.
I had come ‘from far’, from the brink.
So this present residence in London, which I suppose can be called exile, has turned out to be the most fruitful. Yet it began more absurdly than any. I decided, when I arrived, not to stay in London. It had glittered too recently; and I wished to avoid running into anyone I knew. I thought I would stay in a hotel in the country. I had never done this before, in England or anywhere else; but after recent events the conviction was strong that I was again in a well-organized country. I made no inquiries. I simply chose a town I had visited as a student in a British Council party. My imagination, feeding on the words ‘country’ and ‘hotel’, created pictures of gardens and tranquillity, coolness and solitude, twittering hedgerows and morning walks, spacious rooms and antique reverences. They were what I required.
But it was holiday time, as I quickly discovered: the season of ice-cream tubs and soft-drink bottles, pissing children and sandwich wrappings. Hotels were full and squalid or half-f and very squalid; they all buzzed and shrieked with the urgent sound of frying. Ceilings were decayed, cramping partitions paper-thin, forty-watt light bulbs naked; and always in tattered sitting-rooms there were tattered copies of motorcar magazines, travel magazines, airline annuals. Country roads were highways and gardens car-parks. Tall hedgerows, which prevented escape from packed holiday motorcars, turned narrow lanes into green tunnels of death and destruction; broken glass was crushed to powder at intersections. And there were the inns of death itself, areas of complete calm, where the very old had gathered to die. Here food was liquid and medicinally tinctured, each aged eater sat with his transistor radio linked, like a hearing-aid, to his own ear, and the tiny plastic extractor fans were propelled, in gentle silent spasms, by warm air alone.
Daily, by erratic bus services, making difficult connections, I travelled from small town to small town, seeking shelter with my sixty-six pounds of luggage, always aware in the late afternoon of my imminent homelessness. I consumed the hours of daylight with long waits and brief periods of travel. Money, of which I was at last aware, was leaking out of my pocket. Laundry was about to be a problem. At the end of a week I was exhausted. Even then I did not give up my quest; I was too dispirited to make that difficult decision. I did so on the eleventh day, when laundry had become a problem. I decided to go back to London. But again I did not take into account the holiday, which had apparently reached its climax on the day of my decision. I did not take into account the irregularities and excisions which on such a day turn railway timetables into guides to nightmare.
I made an early start. Afternoon found me at an unknown
empty country station, hours from London. The tall trains went by and did not stop for me. They were long trains, and packed; people stood in the corridors. Tomato sauce and gravy and coffee stained the tablecloths in the restaurant car. I knew. Hours before one such train had brought me to this station. I was waiting for another to take me away. Early impatience had given way to despair, despair to indifference, indifference to a curious neutrality of perception. The concrete platforms were white in the sun, the diagonal, lengthening shadows sharp and black. Heatwaves quivered up from the rails and their level bed of dry, oiled gravel. In the bushy field beyond, pale green blurred with yellow, white and brown, junked rusting metal was hot to look at.
I was fighting the afternoon alarm of homelessness, an inseparable part of the gipsy life that had inexplicably befallen me. But this was the limit of desolation. The moment linked to nothing. I felt I had no past. Nothing had happened that morning or yesterday or the last eleven days. To attempt to explain my presence in this station to myself, or to look forward to the increasingly improbable search that awaited me in a London to which I was drawing no nearer, to attempt to do either was to be truly lost, to see myself at the end of the world. The green doors of the buffet were closed. Three circular sticky tables, a very narrow sticky counter, a sticky floor; the glass cases empty, even the plastic orange at rest in the orange-squash vat of cloudy plastic.
The tall magenta trains passed, summer clothes above, black, busy metal below, and blinded me with their racing, rippling shadows, that fell on me, on the platform. “Standing by himself on Swindon station.” They were the words of Mr Mural, breeder of boy scouts. Poor emperor, I had thought, subject to such witness. I had seen him, though, standing on Swindon station as he had stood in the photograph in Browne’s house: in his cloak, his head thrown back,
dignified, aloof. Such was the exile of Mr Mural’s witness; and dignity and aloofness implied an audience. It wasn’t like this: a man sitting at the limit of desolation with sixty-six pounds of luggage in two Antler suitcases, concentrating on the moment, which he mustn’t relate to anything else. And who will later give me even Mr Mural’s proof of this moment? It was a moment of total helplessness. It occurred on an afternoon of sunshine, while the holiday trains passed.
That was a long time ago. Such a moment cannot return. It is the moment which really closes that section of my life which I have been chronicling these past fourteen months. An absurd moment, but from it and by it I measure my recovery.
Je vens d’lué.
It does not worry me now, as it worried me when I began this book, that at the age of forty I should find myself at the end of my active life. I do not now think this is even true. I no longer yearn for ideal landscapes and no longer wish to know the god of the city. This does not strike me as loss. I feel, instead, I have lived through attachment and freed myself from one cycle of events. It gives me joy to find that in so doing I have also fulfilled the fourfold division of life prescribed by our Aryan ancestors. I have been student, householder and man of affairs, recluse.
My life has never been more physically limited than it has been during these last three years. Yet I feel that in this time I have cleared the decks, as it were, and prepared myself for fresh action. It will be the action of a free man. What this action will be I cannot say. I used to think of journalism; sometimes I used to think of a job with the UN. But these were attractive only to a harassed man. I might go into business again. Or I might spend the next ten years working on a history of the British Empire. I cannot say. Yet some fear of action remains. I do not wish to be re-engaged in
that cycle from which I have freed myself. I fear to be continually washed up on this city.