A Bend in the River: Part Three

In spite of the corrupt physical ways our passion had begun to take, the photographs of Yvette that I preferred were the chastest.

With these photographs in my drawer, the view from my shop had a different feel: the square with the bedraggled trees, the market stalls, the wandering villagers, the unpaved roads dusty in the sun or running red in the rain.

His role as the adviser of the man who had recently made himself President was supposed to be secret, but his eminence was generally known and he had been invited to lecture at the university where Yvette was.

He said the Africans had prodigious skills as wood-carvers and that the country could supply the whole world with high-quality furniture.

He said he wanted to give dignity to those dances that Hollywood and the West had maligned.

I was close to him and I said something perfectly banal about the skill of the dancers.

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.

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.

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..."

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.

Every pavement huckster got a little stock—five or ten: it depended on the commissioner.

He saw himself as his woman saw him; and that was why, though he was my friend, I thought that his devotion to Shoba had made him half a man, and ignoble.

She had never liked Africans and had come back raging about thieving and boastful politicians, the incessant lies and hate on the radio and in the newspapers, the bag-snatchings in daylight, the nightly violence.

And every familiar detail of street life at night—the cooking fires gilding the thin, exhausted-looking faces of the people who sat around them, the groups in the shadows below the shop awnings, the sleepers and their boundary markers, the ragged lost lunatics, the lights of a bar fanning out over a wooden walkway—everything had a different quality.

The floor was just a few inches above the ground; the door was open, and chickens were scratching about in the bare yard. But rough and homely and full of afternoon light as it was, the room hinted at the jail.

My own feeling—my secret comfort during this time—was that the officials had misread the situation and that their frenzy was self- induced.

So I prevaricated and didn't pay, seeing no end to paying if I should start.

No explosion came, no cataclysm such as I had been expecting at the beginning.

The businessman who came in from the capital by air or by the steamer and put up at the van der Weyden, and went to the better-known restaurants and nightclubs and asked no questions, would not have guessed that the town was in a state of insurrection, that the insurrection had its leaders and—though their names were known only in their own districts—its martyrs.

The insurrection added to his confusion; and after the madonna statue in the Domain had been smashed he became very nervous.

I might have been a complaisant father or husband, or even a woman friend, watching her prepare herself for a lover.

She settled her fluffed-out head on the pillow, turned her back to me; and the encyclopaedia magazine, which had remained on that side of the bed, fell to the floor with its own little noise. And that was how, at this time of farewell, in this parody of domestic life, we stayed for a while, oddly reposed.

Her body had a softness, a pliability, and a great warmth.

She was looking at the big photograph in the shop, which showed the President holding up his chief’s stick, carved with various emblems. In the distended belly of the squat human figure halfway down the stick the special fetish was thought to be lodged.

She sat, in the extra light, on the modern settee—shiny tubular metal frame, chunky padded armrests—and asked me to sit beside her.

She went sad, resigned.

I saw everybody on the edge of a precipice.

To this was added a new sympathy for the rebellion Indar had spoken of to me, the rebellion he had discovered when he had walked beside the river of London and had decided to reject the ideas of home and ancestral piety, the unthinking worship of his great men, the self- suppression that went with that worship and those ideas, and to throw himself consciously into the bigger, harder world.

Artificial birds, like the lovely celluloid things of my childhood, wouldn’t have been out of place.

It was so easy for people like us to think of great cities as natural growths. It reconciled us to our own shanty cities.

He was walking the regulation ten paces ahead of his mistress, who was fat in the way Arab women like to be, with blue markings on her pale face below her gauzy black veil.

He, too, had mistaken me for an Arab, and when we crossed he had dropped the burdened-down expression and given me a look of wistful inquisitiveness, like a puppy that wanted to play but had just been made to understand that it wasn't playtime.

He was happy to be my guide in these matters; and indeed, after years of that Portuguese stuff in Africa, white and meaningless or red and acrid, the range of wines in London was a small daily excitement for me.

They wanted to raise a hundred thousand dollars, everybody putting up ten. The authorized capital, though, was to be more than that, and the arrangement was that if we struck oil the geologist was to buy the rest of the shares at nominal rates. That was fair. It was his stake, his work.

He had linked the two companies in some way, borrowed a million dollars for our company on the strength of our oil, and transferred the money on some pretext to his own company. He left us with the debt.