The enigma of arrival: a novel - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,146

you must stay in this Saturday and listen to The Critics. I’ve slaughtered you.’ Ha-ha.”

But there were not many people like that, people to whom Alan expressed open hostility. The public objects of Alan’s dislike were mainly certain kinds of buildings, paintings, gardens, flowers. And here even my landlord was not exempt. My landlord liked gladioli. Pitton grew them for him in the garden. Alan hated them for their gaudiness and size. He said, closing his eyes, a shudder going right through him, “They should be that high”—bending and holding his open palm down to the level of his shin. He could shudder with distaste like this when he spoke of these things—flowers, pictures, buildings—as though making up, in the violence of his aesthetic responses, for all the coyness he imposed on himself with other people, all the talk about “notes” and the writing he was preparing to do about them (“All this is going down in the diary,” he would say, or, personalizing it, “This is for Diary,” or, “Diary will take due note”), all the sweets he offered the world to buy peace. It was this aesthetic violence—at bottom quite genuine, reflecting a genuine sensibility, a true concern for the life of the mind—that gave his radio talks and discussions their bite and attack and suggested that they were the merest glimpse of a fuller life and more prodigious personality.

It happened sometimes that months passed without our meeting—he might not come down, or I might be away when he did come down. One day, quite unusually, he telephoned me from London; and I was aware only then that I hadn’t seen him for perhaps a year or more. There were the sounds of music in the background. The music was very loud; it made me ask where he was telephoning from. It was from his flat. He said, “You talk like my neighbors. Of course I am blasting away.” And he gave his great choking laugh.

The old Alan, it would have seemed. But it wasn’t. He was drunk; and as he began to speak, it became clear that he was very drunk. Alcohol and music: the supports of solitude. This was new to me: not the solitude, but the drinking. I had never thought of Alan as a drinking man. But even drunkenness didn’t alter Alan’s character or show the other side of the man; drunkenness didn’t liberate him. It exaggerated, made ludicrous, his appeasing public character. Hardly able to control his words, he was seeking only to send messages of love, to flatter, to speak to me about my work.

And he was asking nothing in return. For there was, as it were, no means of getting back to the person from whom all this issued. The person that wished to buy peace from the world was beyond the reach of the world, was hardly known, it might be said, to Alan himself. It didn’t matter how much one flattered back; it didn’t matter how much love one sent back; one could never touch the true person.

Some months later he reappeared at the manor. He had greatly changed. His eyes, once so seemingly unreliable and shifty, had become dead, lackluster; there was a very old sadness there. The knobby little face had become white and soft; it had become like the face of a frail old woman. And it was as if this transformation gave a glimpse of the ambiguity in the personality, perhaps just one of the many ambiguities that had tormented Alan.

Especially noticeable to me was the skin of his cheeks. It was very white and seemed to have become very thin, seemed to flutter above the flesh (as though there was some vacancy between skin and flesh) whenever Alan spoke or closed his mouth too firmly. This thin, delicate skin made me think of the outer petal of a blown rose; it seemed to have something of the texture. It made me think also of the faded black plastic sheeting that covered the old cottage-shaped hayrick on the droveway, plastic sheeting so beaten about by wind and rain that it had not only lost its luster and snap but appeared also to have developed within its thinness little blisters and air pockets.

The man had changed. And—he was in my cottage, sitting in my wing chair, half reclined, looking small, the upholstered wings above his head, his knees neatly together—it was a little as if (this was the idea that came to me) the man that