What he was hearing was Congolese music, trumpets and drums and marimbas, blaring from a radio in a hut.
“Music,” I said.
“I hate music,” he said as we walked on. “All music. Not just that shit.”
“Really.”
He looked sideways at me, and when I glanced over at him I saw he was still peering at me, intensely but obliquely, as though watching to see what I would do next.
He said, “You didn’t react. Good. I once told someone that and he burst into tears.”
It was not a pose. He really did hate music. He hated most sound, whether it was music or the human voice; he regarded all of it as noise. Loud laughter appalled him too, although he himself laughed a good deal. He had come to the wrong place.
Out of the blue, on one of those early days he said, “May I see your hand, Paul?”
He studied my palm, holding it to the light, squeezing it gently to make the lines more emphatic. He pressed his lips together and blew out his cheeks. He nodded, said nothing, but I had the feeling he liked what he had seen.
I was his interpreter, his guide, his companion. I was, most of all, his student. After a month or so he bought a car, a tan Peugeot, but at the beginning, when he had no car, I was his driver, and we went out every day. He had a sort of visiting professorship, courtesy of that dubious American foundation which was rumored to have links with the Central Intelligence Agency. He hated the foundation. He disliked his duties. He refused an office. He gave no classes. He ignored the other lecturers, though when they asked him his opinion of the university, he said, “It’s pretty crummy, but you know that, don’t you?”
It was largely a waste, he said; it was a farce. Here were these overpaid expatriates patronizing Africans and giving the impression of imparting an education. But it was theater. They were going through the motions, flattering themselves with notions of their own importance. The worst of it was the tameness of it all, the absence of criticism, the complacency, the extravagant way African effort was praised.
“Did I hear someone say ‘parliament’? ‘democracy’? ‘socialism’?” Naipaul made his disgusted face and repeated a bit of literary criticism he had just read. “The words are all wrong. These fraudulent people are trying to prettify this situation. It’s a huge whitewash, man. No—” The laughter began to tumble in his lungs. “It’s blackwash, that’s what it is. Blackwash.”
He avoided the Senior Common Room. He made one visit to the Staff Club, and mainly for his benefit, one of the jollier members told jokes that all of us had heard before. Naipaul sat stony-faced. Afterwards he said he hated jokes. He hated the English when they tried to be colorful characters.
“Your infies,” he called them. And he was remembered in the Staff Club for having referred to Britain as “that socialist paradise.”
“I’ve been a socialist all my life,” Haji Hallsmith said.
Hallsmith’s apartment revolted Naipaul. “It smells,” he said. “And have you noticed the way Hallsmith dresses? Those African shirts he wears are ridiculous. I had always thought of a university lecturer as someone rather grand. Why, he’s just a common infy.”
In an almost constant state of niggling annoyance, incessantly judgmental, he developed the notion that nearly all the expatriates were homosexual, living out a fantasy of sexual license in Uganda. He believed that their political views were insincere and mocking, merely a transparent justification for chasing boys. He laughed at the thought that they regarded themselves as liberals and intellectuals.
We were driving when he told me this. He was holding a cigarette — he tamped them and played with them as though fine-tuning them, packing the tobacco, smoothing the paper with his thumb, before he smoked them.
I said, “So I guess you would agree with George Wallace in thinking of them as ‘pointy-headed intellectuals.’”
He loved that. He repeated it twice, saying it was true.
“This place is absolutely full of buggers.”
“Please, Vidia,” Pat said from the back seat.
“And pointy-headed intellectuals.” He was smiling grimly out the window. He lit the cigarette and smoked it awhile, tapping the Sportsman pack on the back of his hand.
“How do you stand it, Paul?”
I was about to say how happy I was, living in Uganda with Yomo. It seemed a dream at times, to be in such a beautiful place with someone I loved. She was brave; she mocked the men who leered at her or who made remarks because she was holding hands with a white man. She didn’t mind the long dusty drives or the spiders or the snakes or the little crawling dudus. Even the thought of living in the bush behind Bundibugyo did not faze her. I liked my job. I found my students vague but teachable.
But before I could say any of this, Naipaul piped up, “Your writing, of course. If you didn’t write, you’d go out of your mind.”
He had read only a small amount of what I had written, but he seemed to see that it stood for more. I had written many poems and published some in American and British literary magazines. “Little magazines,” Naipaul called them, making a face. “Lots of libido,” he always said of my poems, but it was not a criticism. He liked one I had published in the Central African Examiner about an old car I had seen rotting in the bush. He quoted it word for word to me a few days afterwards. It was a trenchant comment about colonialism, he said; it was about Africans letting things go to ruin. I reread it and thought: Maybe.
My writing project at the time was an essay on cowardice, inspired by Orwell’s clear-sighted and confessional essays. I had been writing it for the American magazine Commentary. Naipaul had approved; it was not a little magazine, but the essay needed work. “I warned you, I’m brutal,” he said. “Forget Orwell for the moment.” I was on my fifth or sixth revision with him. It was like whittling a stick, but I was learning.
“It’s true, Patsy. You know that. He’d go out of his mind.”
I kept driving, heading back to town, wondering whether it was true. I had been content for two years at a bush school in Malawi. I had been writing the whole time. Had the writing kept me sane?
“More bongo drums,” Naipaul said as we passed a roadside market.
There was noise, for sure, but no bongo drums. I said, “The only bongo in Uganda is an animal that looks like a kudu. They’re hunted with dogs by wealthy tourists who go on safaris here. When the bongo turns to battle the dogs with his horns, the hunters shoot him. They’re mostly in the Ruwenzoris. In the bundu.”
“I want to see the bush,” Naipaul said. “The bush is the future.”
We were on the outskirts of Kampala, passing a row of Indian shops, where on the verandahs some African men sat at Singer sewing machines, working the treadles with their bare feet, running up missionary-style dresses. Another African was squatting at a box, looking serious and intent, writing a letter in clear copperplate script for a customer, a woman who knelt, wringing her hands.
“And the president of Gabon is called Bongo,” I said. “Omar Bongo.”
“Omar Bongo! Did you hear that, Patsy? Omar Bongo. Oh, how I don’t want to go to Gabon.”
He brooded for a moment, then asked me to slow down at the next row of Indian shops.
“It is hopeless for them,” he said. “They should leave. You know that Indian boy, Raju? I told him to go away, to save himself. Of course I didn’t say it so simply. I asked him, ‘What is the message of the Gita?’ The Bhagavad-Gita. You’ve read it, Paul, of course you have.”
From the back seat, Pat said, “You were too hard on Raju.”