Sir Vidia's Shadow by Paul Theroux Read Free Book Online

did hate music. He hated most sound, whether it was music or the human voice; he regarded all of it as noise. Loud laughter appalled him too, although he himself laughed a good deal. He had come to the wrong place.
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    Out of the blue, on one of those early days he said, “May I see your hand, Paul?”
    He studied my palm, holding it to the light, squeezing it gently to make the lines more emphatic. He pressed his lips together and blew out his cheeks. He nodded, said nothing, but I had the feeling he liked what he had seen.
    I was his interpreter, his guide, his companion. I was, most of all, his student. After a month or so he bought a car, a tan Peugeot, but at the beginning, when he had no car, I was his driver, and we went out every day. He had a sort of visiting professorship, courtesy of that dubious American foundation which was rumored to have links with the Central Intelligence Agency. He hated the foundation. He disliked his duties. He refused an office. He gave no classes. He ignored the other lecturers, though when they asked him his opinion of the university, he said, “It’s pretty crummy, but you know that, don’t you?”
    It was largely a waste, he said; it was a farce. Here were these overpaid expatriates patronizing Africans and giving the impression of imparting an education. But it was theater. They were going through the motions, flattering themselves with notions of their own importance. The worst of it was the tameness of it all, the absence of criticism, the complacency, the extravagant way African effort was praised.
    â€œDid I hear someone say ‘parliament’? ‘democracy’? ‘socialism’?” Naipaul made his disgusted face and repeated a bit of literary criticism he had just read. “The words are all wrong. These fraudulent people are trying to prettify this situation. It’s a huge whitewash, man. No—” The laughter began to tumble in his lungs. “It’s blackwash, that’s what it is. Blackwash.”
    He avoided the Senior Common Room. He made one visit to the Staff Club, and mainly for his benefit, one of the jollier members told jokes that all of us had heard before. Naipaul sat stony-faced. Afterwards he said he hated jokes. He hated the English when they tried to be colorful characters.
    â€œYour infies,” he called them. And he was remembered in the Staff Club for having referred to Britain as “that socialist paradise.”
    â€œI’ve been a socialist all my life,” Haji Hallsmith said.
    Hallsmith’s apartment revolted Naipaul. “It smells,” he said. “And have you noticed the way Hallsmith dresses? Those African shirts he wears are ridiculous. I had always thought of a university lecturer as someone rather grand. Why, he’s just a common infy.”
    In an almost constant state of niggling annoyance, incessantly judgmental, he developed the notion that nearly all the expatriates were homosexual, living out a fantasy of sexual license in Uganda. He believed that their political views were insincere and mocking, merely a transparent justification for chasing boys. He laughed at the thought that they regarded themselves as liberals and intellectuals.
    We were driving when he told me this. He was holding a cigarette—he tamped them and played with them as though fine-tuning them, packing the tobacco, smoothing the paper with his thumb, before he smoked them.
    I said, “So I guess you would agree with George Wallace in thinking of them as ‘pointy-headed intellectuals.’”
    He loved that. He repeated it twice, saying it was true.
    â€œThis place is absolutely full of buggers.”
    â€œPlease, Vidia,” Pat said from the back seat.
    â€œAnd pointy-headed intellectuals.” He was smiling grimly out the window. He lit the cigarette and smoked it awhile, tapping the Sportsman pack on the back of his hand.
    â€œHow do you stand it,