Read Online A Way in the World by Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul - Free Book Online Page A

waiting—their food is being got ready somewhere on the station—and they are as passive and un-noticing as the Indians on the river. The cabin smells of tree-barkand sawn wood and dirt and oil and rotting leaves; and just as all the colours in a paint box if run together make a dead brown, so all these smells combine with the salty smell of the dead bush-fires outside to make a very deep smell of stale tobacco.
    After a wash in the river—the water is cool: the sun is going down fast—it is time for the narrator to go to the big cabin. There are eight people there, all of them passing as service volunteers, all of them foreigners from different countries, no Amerindians. So in spite of the jeans and the beards and the casual clothes, the big cabin has a colonial feel.
    They have a language problem. The heavy man with the rough manner, who is the head of the station, comes from Czechoslovakia. He doesn’t say so directly; it comes out from what other people say; there is some talk of the town of Pilsen. His wife or friend, the one woman at the table, and no doubt the mother of the boys, doesn’t speak English at all.
    She is a big woman, with very blond hair. She is not good-looking, and she says nothing; but she is the only woman at the table, and there is something about her that draws attention: this big woman with the shiny high cheekbones, the heavy twisted mouth, oily now with food, the big smooth hands, the big, ugly red feet.
    In this strange colonial setting where, as the narrator thinks, she has no competition, this woman radiates sexuality in a way she wouldn’t at home. There is something else. In this setting, where she is without language, the woman has become her sexuality: to look at her and her thin cotton dress is to be aware of nothing else.
    The narrator recognizes that the revulsion he feels is a way of fighting his fascination. With what? With appetite: this woman, newly out of her country, with all its disciplines and narrowness, has become all appetite. The same, he thinks, is true of her husband; and when he looks up at the big man he catches his assessing gaze.
    There is much talk at the table while the daylight lasts. Afterwards, in the yellow light of the hurricane lantern, which throws enormous shadows on the rough-sawn timber walls, everyone is more subdued; and the narrator feels isolated from everyone else.
    The dinner ends. To step out from the house and the light of the hurricane lamp is to step out into blackness that feels for a second or so like a blow. Little yellow lights in the cabins all around. The forest is singing: the noise is like something imagined, something in the head. It is only half past six. Ten or eleven hours of darkness before it gets light again. Using his flashlight to pick his way back to his cabin, the narrator gets the smell of stale tobacco as he enters. That was the smell of the food he ate; it was the smell of the river water; it is the smell of the forest; it is his own smell now. He wonders whether he will ever get used to forest life. But then, thinking of the big silent woman, and excited by that idea of appetite, he falls asleep.
    In the course of the next few days two of the infiltrators reveal themselves to him. There should be a third, the regional commander. He will not reveal himself to the narrator, but the narrator has a good idea who he is.
    The narrator finally gets his orders. He is told where he has to go. It is just a name to him. Indian guides will come to take him there.
    There will at the end be about a dozen agents like the narrator, and a dozen bases in the forest. On a given day there will be a dozen incidents; the rivers will be watched at strategic points; the few airstrips will be overrun; the forest area, the greater part of the country, will be effectively cut off from the African-ruled coast. The country doesn’t have the military resources to re-occupy the forest; elements of the foreign press will ensure that there is