Collected Short Fiction by V. S. Naipaul Page A

said, ‘I go have to sell the brown and white cow, the one I buy from George.’
    Edward said, ‘Is God work.’
    Boyee said to me, ‘I go give you your six cents tomorrow.’
    I said, ‘Six cents
tomorrow
? But what you think I is? A millionaire? Look, man, give me money now now, you hear.’
    He paid up.
    But the crowd was laughing, laughing.
    I looked at the ring.
    Big Foot was in tears. He was like a boy, and the more he cried, the louder he cried, and the more painful it sounded.
    The secret I had held for Big Foot was now shown to everybody.
    Hat said, ‘What, he crying?’ And Hat laughed.
    He seemed to forget all about the cow. He said, ‘Well, well, look at man, eh!’
    And all of us from Miguel Street laughed at Big Foot.
    All except me. For I knew how he felt, although he was a big man and I was a boy. I wished I had never betted that six cents with Boyee.
    The papers next morning said, ‘ PUGILIST SOBS IN RING. ’
    Trinidad thought it was Big Foot, the comedian, doing something funny again.
    But we knew otherwise.
    Big Foot left Miguel Street, and the last I heard of him was that he was a labourer in a quarry in Laventille.
    About six months later a little scandal was rippling through Trinidad, making everybody feel silly.
    The R . A . F . champion, it turned out, had never been in the R . A . F ., and as a boxer he was completely unknown.
    Hat said, ‘Well, what you expect in a place like this?’

8 THE PYROTECHNICIST
    A STRANGER COULD DRIVE through Miguel Street and just say ‘Slum!’ because he could see no more. But we who lived there saw our street as a world, where everybody was quite different from everybody else. Man-man was mad; George was stupid; Big Foot was a bully; Hat was an adventurer; Popo was a philosopher; and Morgan was our comedian.
    Or that was how we looked upon him. But, looking back now after so many years, I think he deserved a lot more respect than we gave him. It was his own fault, of course. He was one of those men who deliberately set out to clown and wasn’t happy unless people were laughing at him, and he was always thinking of new crazinesses which he hoped would amuse us. He was the sort of man who, having once created a laugh by sticking the match in his mouth and trying to light it with his cigarette, having once done that, does it over and over again.
    Hat used to say, ‘Is a damn nuisance, having that man trying to be funny all the time, when all of we well know that he not so happy at all.’
    I felt that sometimes Morgan knew his jokes were not coming off, and that made him so miserable that we all felt unkind and nasty.
    Morgan was the first artist I ever met in my life. He spent nearly all his time, even when he was playing the fool, thinking about beauty. Morgan made fireworks. He loved fireworks, and he was full of theories about fireworks. Something about the Cosmic Dance or the Dance of Life. But this was the sort of talk that went clean over our heads in Miguel Street. And when Morgan saw this, he would begin using even bigger words. Just for the joke. One of the big words I learnt from Morgan is the title of this sketch.
    But very few people in Trinidad used Morgan’s fireworks. All the big fêtes in the island passed – Races, Carnival, Discovery Day, the Indian Centenary – and while the rest of the island was going crazy with rum and music and pretty women by the sea, Morgan was just going crazy with rage.
    Morgan used to go to the Savannah and watch the fireworks of his rivals, and hear the cheers of the crowd as the fireworks spattered and spangled the sky. He would come in a great temper and beat all his children. He had ten of them. His wife was too big for him to beat.
    Hat would say, ‘We better send for the fire brigade.’
    And for the next two or three hours Morgan would prowl in a stupid sort of way around his back yard, letting off fireworks so crazily that we used to hear his wife shouting, ‘Morgan, stop playing the ass. You make ten