Read Online Guerrillas by V.S. Naipaul - Free Book Online

that almost no one had read (and how far away that seemed, how much belonging to another life), and because of his job, was the man to whom some more positive view of the future was attributed. He was called upon to defend himself. But he never said much. He seemed indifferent to satire, indifferent to the looks that were exchanged when someone tried to get him to talk about his activities.
    So Jane saw that on the island, which in her imagination had once been the setting of action that would undo the world, Roche was a refugee. He was a man who didn’t have a place to go back to; he was someone for whom room had been made. His status on the Ridge was that of an employee of a big firm, high enough to be given a house, and as such he was accepted. He could be boisterously greeted in Harry’s bar; he passed as a kind of Ridge man, odd but solid. And he seemed to accept this role.
    It was his passivity that disappointed and repelled Jane. In the early days of their relationship his unwillingness to explain himself, his calm, had encouraged her to think that he had some long view, some vision of the future. There were still moments now when she thought, considering not her disappointment but his life, that he might be a saint, looking down from a great height on the follies of people and being limitlessly forgiving. But there was his satyr’s laugh, the glimpse of those long molars, black at the roots and widely spaced. Nothing escaped him, no look, no comment. That she had learned; and there were times when she thought that he was bottling up resentment, resentment at what had happened in South Africa, resentment at a life that had gone awry, and that one day he would speak and act. But she no longer believed him capable of passion. All that he seemed capable of was a cheap sarcasm, directed mainly at her. She had decided that there was no puzzle, that he was a man with nothing to revenge, that some part of his personality, some motor of action, had been excised.
    While she had expected something of him she had never asked about his experiences in the South African jail, not wishing to get him to talk about his humiliations. But one day, when in her ownmind she had given him up and put an end to their relationship, she asked him whether he felt no bitterness about what had happened to him in jail; and she had been astonished by his answer. He said, and he might have been exposing a wound or speaking of a virtue or simply stating a fact, “You must understand I have always accepted authority. It probably has to do with the kind of school I went to.”
    SO THIS morning Jane awakened, as she had awakened in the middle of that first day, to the darkness of the room with the redwood louvers and to the knowledge that she had made an error, that she had once again seen in a man things that were not there.
    She went down the parquet passage past Roche’s room, his door, like hers, left ajar for the sake of air. In the big and almost empty room at the back, a room without a function, part of the unfurnished spaciousness of the company house, she unlocked the folding doors that opened onto the raised brick porch. The metal table and the lager bottles and glasses were wet with dew; the empty cigarette pack was soaked and swollen; dew had collected like water in the seats of the metal chairs.
    The sun had not yet risen; and down below, beyond the brown hills, the plain and the silent city were blurred by mist, which was white over the swamp. She walked round to the front of the house. The lawn—or lawn area—was wet; dew was the only moisture it received these days, since the drought had set in and the watering of gardens had been forbidden. The wall of earth on one side showed what had been cut away from the hill to create this level place: grass and grassroots in a thin layer of topsoil, a kind of sandstone, red clay. The lawn surface near the earth wall was rubbled with little clods of clay.
    Jane thought how lucky she was to be