“It was the end. And in spite of all that the general said he could do, he decided quite simply, when the time came, to head for home, and his doom at the hands of his king.
“When the poor commander—a very frightened man, as I now understood—had dressed me for a joke in Don Palmita’s very big clothes at San Thomé, and had sent me down river in the launch, I had found a picture, in my head, for my own doom. I had felt I was falling into the sea, falling into the sky. I had focussed on that picture and found a comfort in it, because the doom it contained was so complete that it took away meaning from grief and the life of men and the world itself.
“Now, a few days after leaving the Gulf, leaving emptiness where our own ship had been, I found that the world had become like that picture in my head. Just a few days after leaving so many things that were familiar to me, familiar not only from the journeys I had made with the Berrios, but also from what I had heard from so many people: the rock called The Soldier, where the strong-winged pelicans settled down to die; the lake of pitch on the island of lere, which the Spaniards had called Trinidad; the high solitary hill of Anaparima, a marker for all who travelled in the Gulf; Guanaganare’s territory of Conquerabo or Cumucurapo, where my father’s father had founded the City of the Spaniards; the high island of Chacachacare and the other islands and islets in the Dragon’s Mouth. Familiar places, with clouds and sky and wind and sea as they had always been, but all now in a world changed forever, for me and for everybody else.
“A few days out of that, I was in the world of my old dream, an infinity of water and sky. But there was no terror for me. The ship was its own little world. The shipboard days had their rhythm. The old man was calm in his cabin. He did a certain amount of writing; he talked to the surgeon; he spent a fair amount of time teaching me English. As for emotion: he grieved a lot for the tortoise, which had died: it was too hot on the ship, and there was no fresh green for the creature. With that kind of activity and emotion—teaching me English, worrying about the tortoise—the old man could trust himself. But for the most part he was like a man who had ceased to feel, separated from the rest of us, as I thought, putting myself in his place, by his idea of his own doom.
“His regard for me never faded. More than once the surgeon told me what other people were to tell me. I was an Indian from Guiana and his servant: ordinary enough on the other side of the ocean, but now every day more precious as a human being. When we got to England people would look at me and think better of the old man. I would be like a remnant or proof of the kingdom of gold in his head. So I was part of the vanity that remained to him, part of his idea of the world going on beyond the emptiness of the sea.
“The day came at last when we landed and put that emptiness behind us. Everyone was relieved. Everyone wanted to walk on firm land and drink clean water and eat fresh food. But the old man’s authority as general ended as soon as we touched land. As soon as we touched land he was the prisoner of his king. No chains were put on him. No one was waiting to take him away. We went to stay at his house, and there, with all the sorrow, he was still master. But everyone knew that his life was forfeit. Everyone was waiting for the king to act, and the king was in no hurry.
“For days after we landed I felt the ground move below me, as though we were still on the ship. And it was strange that though I was on land again and had that safety, for which I had longed, though the sky pressed low on me and I was once again with small views and small distances, there had come to me something of the mood with which I had travelled down the river from San Thomé to the Destiny. It had begun to come on me for a few days before we had arrived at land. It had come to me when I had heard people talking about arriving. I didn’t like that idea of arriving. I was nervous about it.
“When we came to the land and travelled to the general’s house I was seized by a great melancholy. It overpowered me. It ran through me like a cold fluid. It broke into my sleep. It was at the back of everything I did. It was like a spirit on my shoulder. Just as, on the launch coming down river, the dream of falling into the sea and the sky had lifted me above men, so this grief now cut me off from everything and everyone. I wanted to die. In the room the general’s people had given me in his house I tied a cloth around my forehead to feel that tension above my eyes, as though I was a child again, and I turned my face to the wall. I wanted to turn away from all that was around me. I looked at the wall and never closed my eyes. It was like looking at the sky I had seen as a child. I looked hard at that and longed to cease to feel and think.
“Sometimes from far away, as it seemed, I would hear the general and the surgeon calling me, ‘Don José, Don José.’ If I heard that clearly enough, it would make me think of the general and his own doom, and sometimes after a while the emptiness would leave me. When that happened I would feel my tongue getting furred and my breath getting very bad. It was as though the unhappiness in my head and heart and stomach had turned to that smell inside me.
“At last the messengers from the king came. We left the house and got into a big heavy coach. The surgeon and I travelled with the old man. There was another coach in front, and soldiers on horseback behind. It was warm. The sun came up much earlier than I had known and set much later. In all the villages we passed people were waiting to look at the general. They wanted to look at me too. The soldiers on horseback didn’t let them get too close. The surgeon and the general talked a lot sometimes.
“All the time we were getting nearer to the capital and his doom. We came one afternoon to a town where the houses were arranged as in a big square or plaza. The whole of one side of the square was occupied by a very big church with a very tall tower. The old man was in a very playful mood. ‘Look, Don José. You will never see anything so tall again. Would you like to go up there?’ I thought he was joking, but he said there was a way right to the top, inside the tower. The thought of climbing up so high made me feel giddy, roused me from my own grief a little. This pleased the old man, made him light-headed, I thought.
“We were to stop here for dinner. But when we got out of the coach the old man complained of having a headache. He walked into a post as the soldiers were taking him up to the room where we were to dine. He began to howl with pain, and he had to be supported into the room. He lay down in all his clothes. When food was brought up for him he sent it away. He said his headache was very bad and he felt he was going blind. The soldiers and officials were worried. The surgeon prepared something for him to drink, and immediately after that mixed an ointment for his bruises. All the time the general was groaning. At last he said he wanted to sleep. They took him to another room. They posted a soldier at the door.
“I was helping the old man to undress when he began to vomit. I went outside to get a bowl. That took some time. When I came back I found him half naked, crawling about the floor, chewing at the dried reeds spread there. The ointment the surgeon had applied had caused the bruises to come out in a rash that made me think of the effects of poisoned arrows. I called out to the soldier at the door, and when he saw he began to shout for people to come and help.
“The surgeon looked very serious. He said that the old man would become quite unbalanced if he didn’t rest. So the king’s officers decided to spend the night where we were. They had the old man’s chest brought up to the room. When we were alone I began to unpack what was needed for the night. The old man said, Taper, Don José, paper.’ He was standing, in his shirt, and smiling at me. I gave him the paper he asked for, and he sat at the table and began to write at great speed, as he had written that day in the cabin on the Destiny, after the death of the commander in the room above us. From time to time as he wrote he looked at me and smiled. I asked him what he was writing about. He said, ‘About the gold mines of San Thomé. What else?’
“He wrote until it was dark. He filled many pages. He said, ‘My wrist is hurting, Don José. I must stop.’ When it was dark the surgeon came. He was in his travelling cloak. The two men smiled at each other. From belo
w his cloak the surgeon brought out, wrapped in cloth, pieces of the dinner the old man had refused earlier. The old man gave the surgeon the letter or the document he had been writing. The surgeon folded the sheets and put them in a pocket.
“The old man said, ‘Don José must eat with us.’ He lit a rushlight, and we ate off the wooden platters that were in the room. The old man was in a good mood. I had never seen him in such a good mood. It was like the time in San Thomé when the commander had insisted that the imprisoned Indian in the dead governor’s house and I should sit and eat boiled maize with them, with the two dead men lying in the next room, and the three dead men lying outside in the sun in the trenches they had dug the day before.
“The old man’s mood lifted my spirits. But I felt at the same time that death was close to all of us.
“His own death came quite soon, when we got to the capital. The prison was on the river. He wanted me to put on my best clothes to witness what they did to him. And I did. I could hardly bear to go back to the room afterwards. I turned my face to the wall and looked at the sky in it.
“There was an English nobleman who wanted me to join his household. The old man had known of this and had liked the idea. But my grief was too great. After getting to feel for the Berrios, and then that afternoon for Don Palmita, and afterwards for the English commander, and then for the old man, moving on in a chain of death from one man to his enemy; after the journey in the great ocean; I felt I would die if I couldn’t get back to the beginning, to the first world I knew.
“The English behaved well. They could have kept me and made me wear feathers. But they told the Spanish ambassador. He was a relation of Don Palmita. The ambassador made arrangements to send me to Spain. Before I left they gave me English clothes, including some of the old man’s that I had already worn. In Spain I went to the great city of Seville, where the galleons filled the river, and from there I travelled in one of the galleons to Cartagena. And now I am here.”
FRAY SIMÓN said, “You’ve crossed the ocean twice. You are back here in New Granada, in the very town where you were born. You didn’t get lost. The ships always knew where they were going. When you consider the great fear you used to have of the oceans, what do you think now?”
“I’ve thought a lot about that. And I think, Father, that the difference between us, who are Indians, or half Indians, and people like the Spaniards and the English and the Dutch and the French, people who know how to go where they are going, I think that for them the world is a safer place.”
CHAPTER 7
A New Man
WHEN I BEGAN to write of it, the Trinidad landscape that was present to me was the landscape I had known as a child and felt myself part of—the western parts of Port of Spain; the forested hills to the north-west; the sugar-cane plains to the south, with the neat fields coming right up to the huts and houses and bare yards of villages lining the narrow and very black asphalt roads; the coconut estates on the muddy Atlantic coast, where the tall grey coconut trunks made a constant criss-crossing pattern as you drove by: a simple small-island geography.
Later, in London, when I was writing a book of history, I studied for many months the historical documents of the region. The documents (the early ones were copies of Spanish originals stored in Seville) took me back to the discovery. They gave me a sense of a crowded aboriginal Indian island, busy about its own affairs, and almost without relation to what I had known. A sense, rather than a vision: little was convincingly described in those early documents, and few concrete details were given. In my mind’s eye I created an imaginary landscape for the aboriginal peoples living—on what was to become my own ground—with ideas I couldn’t enter, ideas of time, distance, the past, the natural world, human existence. A different weather seemed to attach to this vanished landscape (like the unnatural weather in an illuminated painted panorama in a museum glasscase), a different sky.
The landscape I had grown up in, and felt myself part of, had been wiped clean of this other past. I had always known that, but I hadn’t been able to feel it as something that had really happened. In the first book of Nelson’s West Indian History, by Captain Daniel of the Trinidad Education Department, a textbook we used at the elementary school in Port of Spain, there was a short early chapter about the Caribs and the Arawaks. Perhaps very little was known about those people; perhaps Captain Daniel didn’t have much to play with. I remember nothing of what he wrote—except that the Caribs were fierce and the Arawaks gentle—and have no memory even of the illustrations he used. Because they had ceased to exist, and were not real, the aboriginals of our own island offered less to the imagination than the still living people we read about in Homes Far Away in the geography class: Kirghiz in shady black tents on their boundless, empty steppes, Eskimos crawling in and out of their warm ice igloos, Africans in their stockades at night, safe against marauding lions and other wild animals.
The idea of a recent wiped-out past was too big for a child in an elementary school to grasp. Later it became difficult in another way. As soon as you tried to enter that idea, it ramified. And it ramified more and more as your understanding grew: different people living for centuries where we now trod, with our own overwhelming concerns: different people, with their own calendar and reverences and ideas of human association, different houses or huts, different roads or paths, different crops and fields and vegetation (and seasons), different views, speeds, reasons for journeys, different ideas of the ages of man, different ideas of the enemy and fellowship and sanctity and what men owed themselves.
In this way, leaving aside the primary notion of cruelty, the idea of a wiped-out, complete past below one’s feet quickly became almost metaphysical. The world appeared to lose some of its substance; reality became fluid. It was more natural to let go, to let the mind spring back to an everyday, ground-level vision that took in only what could be seen.
It was easier in London, separated by many years and some thousands of miles from that ground-level view, and while I read in the British Museum and the Public Record Office, to feel the truth of the other, aboriginal island. From that distance, from that other side, as it were, the landscape of the aboriginal island became fabulous. And it was that landscape—which I wrote about without actually seeing—that I half looked for whenever afterwards I went back to Trinidad.
I found it mainly on the coast, and sometimes in glimpses of the Gulf and the North Coast from certain hills above Port of Spain. I found it inland once, after a highway had been driven through the lower hills of the Central Range. The land here, too broken for fields and roads, would always have been covered by forest or woodland or bush. Now it was stripped, shaved down to a kind of rough grass, and all its ridges and hollows were revealed. It looked unused. It was like another landscape; it was like a bit of the past just revealed and still fresh.
Over land like this, perhaps over this very spot, an Elizabethan nobleman, with thirty soldiers from his ship, all in armour, had gone one night on a long march looking for Indian gold. The hills and ravines and the vegetable debris of the tropical forest—near here, on land now shaved to grass—made marching very hard. To terrorize the Indians, the intruders blew trumpets and fired off their muskets. The Indians ran from their houses; in one village they even left food cooking (“seething”) on fires. The soldiers ate the food. They found no gold, though the nobleman thought he saw gold-dross at the bottom of an Indian pot. Later—to complete this New World romance—the soldiers thought they heard Indian war-pipes in the forest. No misadventure befell them, however; and in the morning they marched back to the coast and their ship.
What the food in the Indian village was, whether maize or cassava or potato or meat or fish, how it was seasoned, the pots it seethed in, what the fireplaces were like, and the houses—none of this is known. Captain Wyatt, who wrote an account of the expedition, had no eye for that kind of detail. He had strong literary tastes, and had his own idea of what should be written about. He knew parts of The Spanish Tragedy
, a new London play, by heart; in the New World, on the Gulf shore of Trinidad, or in the forests, he saw his general and himself and the soldiers (and the Spanish enemy, and the Indians in the forest) as figures in a romance of chivalry.
The expedition itself—which took back loads of marcasite sand to England as “gold ore”—was an absurdity; and Wyatt’s account was too inflated. It wasn’t published. It was forgotten, and, with it, Wyatt’s account of the night march which, remarkably, provides the only witness—the houses, the fires, the cooking pots, the war-pipes in the night—of the still autonomous aboriginal life of the island. When Wyatt’s account was at last published, in London in 1899, a scholarly series, three hundred and four years after the event, the aboriginal Indians had ceased to exist for almost a century; and their grounds had become home for other people.
Three centuries for Wyatt’s witness to be disinterred; and seventy years or so after that for the aboriginal land, hidden below bush, to be exposed.
Once exposed, the land quickly altered. People from agricultural villages near and far began to squat on it. Many of these squatters were Indians, Hindus and Muslims, descendants of nineteenth-century immigrants from India. The huts or shacks they put up were on low stilts. The sloping roofs were of corrugated iron; the walls were of hollow clay bricks or timber, sometimes new timber, sometimes old, with irregular patches of old paint. Banana trees grew around these huts. Outside the Hindu houses there were prayer flags or pennants on tall bamboo poles. These were put up after certain religious ceremonies: emblems of piety (sometimes competitive, hut against hut): pleas for good luck.
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