Guerrillas by V.S. Naipaul Page A

this vision. He was a doer; his book and his life proved that; and she assumed that his old life was claiming him, that it was to some new and as yet unsuspected center of world disturbance that he was going, when, suddenly, not stopping to enjoy such reputation as his book had given him, he had decided to leave London, to take this unlikely and not well-paid job on the island with a firm that sounded like a firm of colonial shopkeepers.
    She had already committed herself to him and to what she conceived to be his kind of life. She had already committed herself to following him out as soon as she had arranged for her house to be let. Then one day something happened that awakened doubt. Roche laughed; until then she had only seen him smile. Roche laughed, and the corners of his mouth rode up over the receding gums on his molars, which showed long, with black gaps between them. It was like a glimpse of teeth in a skull, like a glimpse of a satyr; and she felt it was like a glimpse of the inner man. She had thought him distinguished-looking, and had begun to find him beautiful. This was like a glimpse of a grotesque stranger. She allowed the irrational moment to pass; she was committed. Butthen, at the moment of arrival, doubt had come to her again. In these relationships some warning, some little hint, always was given, some little sign that foreshadowed the future. And now the thing foreshadowed was with her.
    She knew now, after four months, what she had known on that first day: that she had come to a place at the end of the world, to a place that had exhausted its possibilities. She wondered at the simplicity that had led her, in London, to believe that the future of the world was being shaped in places like this, by people like these.
    The Ridge was self-contained, shut off from the city; and at first the hysteria in which her neighbors lived had interested her. Here, where she had come as to the center of the world, the talk was of departure, of papers being fixed for Canada and the United States: secretive talk, because departure was at once like betrayal and surrender. No one was more of a Ridge man than Harry de Tunja, no one seemed more local and settled. But overnight these virtues became alarming, and offensive, after it had accidentally come out that, during his many business trips to Canada, Harry had also been securing his status as a Canadian landed immigrant.
    Harry’s air-conditioned den, fitted up like a bar, with a little illuminated sign on the shelves that said
Harry’s Bar
, with a collection of Johnny Walker figures and other bar objects, was an established meeting place. The temperature was low enough for cardigans and pullovers; the lights were dim; psychedelic bar advertisements from various countries created the effects of shifting circles or bubbles or fountains. Here, in an atmosphere of extravagance and holiday rather than of crisis, with Harry standing behind his bar, people were used to talking about the air conditioning and the degree of coldness achieved that evening and also about the local situation.
    Jane had at first waited for details of that situation to become clear, for the personalities of whom people talked, the doers and demagogues down in the city, to define themselves. But the personalities were so many, the principles on which they acted so confusing, and the issues so evanescent, that she had soon lost interest, had closed her mind to talk of new political alliances thatso often seemed to come to nothing anyway, and to analyses of new political threats that could also quickly disappear. Nothing that happened here could be important. The place was no more than what it looked. And Roche didn’t occupy in it the position she thought he did when—it seemed so fresh—she had given his name to the Americans in the customs hall of the airport and had awaited their astonishment.
    She saw that Roche was a refugee on the island. He was an employee of his firm; he belonged to a place