Miguel Street by V. S. Naipaul Read Free Book Online Page A

present rate.’
    ‘You does write a lot, then? ’
    He said, ‘Not any more. I just write one line a month. But I make sure it is a good line.’
    I asked, ‘What was last month’s good line?’
    He looked up at the sky and said, ‘The past is deep.’
    I said, ‘It is a beautiful line.’
    B. Wordsworth said, ‘I hope to distil the experiences of a whole month into that single line of poetry. So, in twenty-two years, I shall have written a poem that will sing to all humanity.’
    I was filled with wonder.
    Our walks continued. We walked along the sea-wall at Docksite one day, and I said, ‘Mr Wordsworth, if I drop this pin in the water, you think it will float? ’
    He said, ‘This is a strange world. Drop your pin, and let us see what will happen.’
    The pin sank.
    I said, ‘How is the poem this month?’
    But he never told me any other line. He merely said, ‘Oh, it comes, you know. It comes.’
    Or we would sit on the sea-wall and watch the liners come into the harbour.
    But of the greatest poem in the world I heard no more.
    I felt he was growing older.
    ‘How you does live, Mr Wordsworth?’ I asked him one day.
    He said, ‘You mean how I get money?’
    When I nodded, he laughed in a crooked way.
    He said, ‘I sing calypsoes in the calypso season.’
    ‘And that last you the rest of the year?’
    ‘It is enough.’
    ‘But you will be the richest man in the world when you write the greatest poem?’
    He didn’t reply.
    One day when I went to see him in his little house I found him lying on his little bed. He looked so old and so weak that I found myself wanting to cry.
    He said, ‘The poem is not going well.’
    He wasn’t looking at me, He was looking through the window at the coconut tree, and he was speaking as though I wasn’t there. He said, ‘When I was twenty I felt the power within myself.’ Then, almost in front of my eyes, I could see his face growing older and more tired. He said, ‘But that-that was a long time ago.’
    And then -I felt it so keenly, it was as though I had been slapped by my mother. I could see it clearly on his face. It was there for everyone to see. Death on the shrinking face.
    He looked at me, and saw my tears and sat up.
    He said, ‘Come.’ I went and sat on his knees.
    He looked into my eyes, and he said, ‘Oh, you can see it, too. I always knew you had the poet’s eye.’
    He didn’t even look sad, and that made me burst out crying loudly.
    He pulled me to his thin chest and said, ‘Do you want me to tell you a funny story?’ and he smiled encouragingly at me.
    But I couldn’t reply.
    He said, ‘When I have finished this story, I want you to promise that you will go away and never come back to see me. Do you promise?’
    I nodded.
    He said, ‘Good. Well, listen. That story I told you about the boy poet and the girl poet, do you remember that? That wasn’t true. It was something I just made up. All this talk about poetry and the greatest poem in the world, that wasn’t true, either. Isn’t that the funniest thing you have heard?’
    But his voice broke.
    I left the house and ran home crying, like a poet, for everything I saw.
    I walked along Alberto Street a year later, but I could find no sign of the poet’s house. It hadn’t vanished, just like that. It had been pulled down, and a big, two-storied building had taken its place. The mango tree and the plum tree and the coconut tree had all been cut down, and there was brick and concrete everywhere.
    It was just as though B. Wordsworth had never existed.

VII
THE COWARD
    Big Foot was really big and really black, and everybody in Miguel Street was afraid of him. It wasn’t his bigness or his blackness that people feared, for there were blacker and bigger people about. People were afraid of him because he was so silent and sulky; he looked dangerous, like those terrible dogs that never bark but just look at you from the corner of their eyes.
    Hat used to say, ‘Is only a form of showing off, you