Sir Vidia's Shadow Read Online Free Page A

thinking, I’m going to meet the real man.

2
“I’m Not Everyone”
    H IS SMILE was not a smile but his laugh was more than a laugh, especially when he—
    Wait, wait, wait. You know I’m lying, don’t you? This is not a novel, it is a memory.
    The man is not “U. V. Pradesh.” It is V.S. Naipaul, and the book I mentioned in the previous chapter is
The Mystic Masseur
, and the hero is Ganesh Ramsumair of Trinidad, who turned into G. Ramsay Muir in London. Yomo is Yomo, and Hallsmith is Hallsmith, but the young man is not Julian Lavalle. It’s me, Paul Theroux, and I am shining my light upon the past. I cannot improve on this story, because Naipaul always said,
Don’t prettify it
, and
The greatest writing is a disturbing vision offered from a position of strength—aspire to that
, and
Tell the truth
.
    It is a morning in June on Cape Cod, bright and dry—hasn’t rained for more than a month—and I have set myself the task of putting down everything that happened thirty years ago in Africa, when I first met him, because it all matters. I cannot change any of this. I am writing with a ballpoint on a pad at my desk. How can this be a novel? This narrative is not something that would be improved by the masks of fiction. It needs only to be put in order. I am free of the constraint of alteration and fictionalizing.
    You would say “Isn’t that V.S. Naipaul?” in any case.
    There is so much of it. This was going to be a short memoir, but now I see it will be a book, because I remember everything. Where was I? Yes. He was laughing.
    â€”especially when Naipaul was laughing at one of his own pointed remarks. It was a surprised bellow of appreciation, deepened and made resonant by tobacco smoke and asthma. It made you wonder whether he saw something you didn’t see. I learned all this within seconds of our first meeting, at Hallsmith’s party. With a disgusted and fastidious face, Naipaul had commented on how dirty Kampala was. Having just read
The Mystic Masseur
—a better title than
The Part-Time Pundit;
I will stick to the facts—I said, quoting his shopkeeper in the book, “It only looks dirty.”
    With his deep, fruity smoker’s laugh booming in his lungs, he showed me his delight and then gave me the next line, and the next. He recited most of that page. He could have given me the whole book verbatim. I was thinking how he knew his work well. He told me later that he knew each of his books by heart, storing them during the slow process of writing and rewriting them in longhand.
    After he was introduced to more people, his martyred smile returned. He was soon in distress. When Yomo said, “Your characters in your books talk like Nigerians,” he merely stared at her and frowned.
    â€œReally.”
    To someone with no sense of irony, his tone was one of shimmering fascination. He was thrown by Yomo’s innocent statement, and perhaps by Yomo herself, who was very dark with high cheekbones and those drowsy eyes; in her stiffly wound turban she towered over him. She had the effect of making shorter people seem always to be ducking her. Naipaul behaved that way, moved sideways, nearer to me, dodging her, as if he were unused to discussing his work with such a tall, self-assured black woman.
    â€œWhere are you staying?” I asked.
    â€œHere, I’m afraid,” he said, clearly intending to say more when his wife interrupted him.
    â€œVidia,” she said in a cautioning voice. That was the first time I heard his name, a contraction of it, which was Vidiadhar.
    â€œPatsy,” he said, acquiescing, smiling in misery.
    His wife, Patricia, was a small pale woman with a sweet face, premature gray hair, lovely pale blue eyes, and full lips with the sort of contour and droop that even in repose suggests a lisp. She was pretty, about ten years older than me, and though she was assertive, she seemed