A Way in the World

by Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul

  Miranda says, “I asked for letters to be sent here.”

  “You have quite a few. Some have been sent on from Tortola, some from the Leeward Islands station. And Mr. Turnbull has sent me boxes of leaflets and samples for you. You are to distribute them when you land in Venezuela. With your recommendations. Some people have a very simple idea of military operations.”

  Government House is in need of repair. Hislop apologizes. He says the Treasury of the island is empty. The previous administrator had very grand ideas of the style in which he and his family and his secretaries should live. He stayed for only six months, but he left a hole. After that there was the expense of fortifications, some of them now abandoned. The few public works Negroes that are now employed about the Government House grounds—mud-stained, in ragged brown linen clothes: the standard slave wear: Miranda has seen it on Negroes during the drive through the town—have been bought from the dealers on credit.

  “They are not carpenters or craftsmen,” Hislop says. “A carpenter would have cost a hundred pounds. These cost sixty. And they’re new Negroes. From Africa. No good for anything except in a field gang, and they don’t speak English or French. The story is that the trade is going to be stopped next year, so the merchants are bringing in as many new Negroes as they can now. That’s creating its own problems. If you stay here long enough, that’s all you start thinking about. Negroes and land.

  “It will be no surprise to you, General, that you are in demand here. Miss McLurie wants to meet you. She’s one of our ladies. She came in 1802 and is suffering from the lack of society. She wears a transparency. That’s what she calls it. It shows her bosom. Apparently it’s the latest fashion. She wants to hear from your very own lips about Lady Hester Stanhope and Catherine the Great. These stories have preceded you. That’s the way it is with famous people, and you are the most famous man to have come here. Before you came, I suppose Commodore Samuel Hood was the most famous man we had here. Nelson’s second-in-command at the Battle of the Nile.”

  Miranda says, “I met Hood before he came out here.”

  “And Be’nard wants to see you. He has been very pressing in the last week.” Hislop pronounced the French name in an English way, making it sound like “Bennard.” “He is a planter, courtesy of de Gourville. He is married to de Gourville’s daughter. This makes him a relation by marriage of Baron de Montalembert. Be’nard doesn’t let you forget it. The baron is one of our biggest planters. He will be a good man to get on your side. He came here from Santo Domingo five or six years ago. His estate is just around the corner from here. Just after he came here he lost a hundred and twenty of his Negroes by poison. It is a famous story. I am sure Be’nard will tell it again. He is going to call very soon.”

  “Bernard. I knew a Bernard in Paris. He later came to London. I sent out a Bernard here from England seven years ago. To keep an eye on things for me. He came and I never heard a word. Not a word. Will this be the same man? Worried that I’m turning up? Or deciding that there is something I can do for him? What do you think, General?”

  “General Miranda, you asked just now about your letters. They are in your room. But there is another. It was thrown into the sentry box yesterday morning. It is anonymous. It may be abusive of me. It is what I’ve had to live with here. I am not Sure that honour applies here, but I pass that letter on to you as a matter of honour. My request is that you will handle it in the same way. You have been the object of calumny and persecution yourself, General. It is very easy to be vilified in a place like this.”

  The men separate. Dinner is to be at three. Miranda goes to his section of the house, henceforth his headquarters. He sees the satchels with the Tortola and Leeward Islands mail. And the folded dingy anonymous letter Hislop mentioned.

  The room is at the back of the house. The grass and trees outside are wet from the recent rain. A hill rises up not far away. The air is damp, and the very smell of rain and earth and dead leaves brings back to Miranda the smell of the cocoa valleys to the north of Caracas, and reminds him of the sacks of cocoa beans his father had sent with him on the Prins Frederik in 1771, to be changed for money in Cadiz.

  The room is full of small, yellowish lizards; their droppings are everywhere. There is a muslin canopy over the bed, to protect it from dust and termite wood-dust and things like lizard droppings. The canopy is discoloured and in its folds or wrinkles grey with old dust; it sags in the damp air.

  Outside there is movement, talk. The slaves are not speaking Spanish or French or English, but an African language.

  He begins to shape a letter in his head: “My dear Sally, this is a kind of homecoming for me, after thirty-five years. It is quite amazing: I know this rainy-season smell. Soon I suppose the rain and the wind will bring the smell of the vanilla vine. I feel I know this place very well. It is my own. It exists in my mind. But it is now full of strangers. I don’t like the sensation. I feel a great gap. Without the thought of you I would be quite lost.”

  He opens the Tortola satchel and soon, among the official, secretary-written letters, sees the broad, irregular, awkward handwriting he has been looking for.

  “27 Grafton Street, Fitzroy Square, London. April 15th. My ever dear General, I embrace this opportunity of writing to you my dear Sir for wile I am a night and the two babies are asleep it seames as if I am talking to my dear Friend Himself and can hear his own voice. Leander has set down his drum and sword and gun, we have had a fair in the Road, and he makes such a noise my dear Sir saying Mamy I am going to the war to fight for the General—”

  Miranda thinks, partly framing his reply, “Querida. My dear Sally, I love every misspelt word you write and every mistake you make. These words you wrote four months ago come to me now with your own voice. I can see my house and the library and the books again. I think without you, my dear Sally, I would become quite dizzy here, in this place I don’t know any longer, and try not to see too clearly or find out too much about, where the Negroes talk in an African language, and I can still smell the cocoa estates all around …”

  “Leander sleeping is the picture of my dear Sir. My uncle from Yorkshire is with us to keep us company and to get some London portrait work. He sets Leander down in the G’s library, I must tell you I light a fire there one day every week winter and summer, and my uncle draws his picture but he doesnt set still a moment. And I am very flatter that everybody says he has the Wisdom of twice his years. My dear Sir I have followed all your Instructions and I now propose to give you the regular Budget of news Mr. Rutherfurd says I should give you to keep your Spirits up in all your trying circumstances. I talk in my mind every night to my dear G, but I don’t have news every day.

  “My dear Sir your second son and mine Francisco was born on the 27th of February. All that day my thoughts were of you and your danger on the High Seas. You wished this son to have your own name, and Francisco and Leander were both of them Baptised as agreed on the 23rd of March. Mr. Rutherfurd came in the morning with Mr. Longchamp and they took us to St. Patrick’s Soho Square in a Coach. Mr. Longchamp responded for both babis. Father Gaffey wrote Mr. Longchamps name wrong in the Register and had to scratch it out both times. I give here the copy of the Baptismal Certificate for Francisco that Father Gaffey gave me for my dear Sir it’s all in Latting so the G. must forgive errors. Die 23a Martii 1806 baptisatus fuit Franciscus filius Francisci Miranda et Sarae Andrews. Natus die 27a Februarii praecedentis. Patrinis juit Joannes Michael Jean du Longchamp. Per Daniel Gaffey.

  “When we went back to Grafton street Mr. Rutherfurd told me that not a few Eyebrows had been raised by the Roman Catholic Baptism with certain people we well know saying that you said one thing but in your heart of hearts were another. But I kept my peace about my dear Gen’s intentions, and I thought hard of him and his dangers that day and the next when as agreed I knew that after the Baptism of our sons my G would be making his Officers swear to serve the people of South America and their new Flag. I think about that Flag my dear Sir the h
ours I spent making it here in Grafton Street spreading it out sometimes on the floor of the library, with Leander tied to the table leg so he couldn’t get too close—”

  “Sarah, I will never find the courage to tell you. The flag that carried so much of you was lost five weeks after you wrote that, when the Bee and the Bacchus were lost, with all the landing party. I waited until the 12th of March before I took the flag out of my trunk and showed it to the men on the Leander. I thought that Francisco would have been born by then. I know now that he was two weeks old. The Bee and the Bacchus were both unarmed sloops. The other ships we were expecting all the way down never came. After that long voyage, with those unruly, mocking Americans, butcher boys, I had to try to land. I couldn’t just go away without doing anything. The Spaniards will dishonour that flag. They will find special ways …”

  “First of May 1806. I wait for news of my dear Sir and try to guess what other people know. Mr. Holland the print-seller sent to my uncle for a Picture of the Gen, and my uncle sat down all morning at the small library table and drew one of my dear Sir in Profile with his long white queue hanging down his back tied up at the end with a little ribbing and with his silk cravat below his chin, all in Profile, very serious and stern, and my uncle says that in the Print the Engraver will show clouds and a Crown above the Gen’s head. I thought this was a good sign, because as my uncle says Mr. Holland wants to sell his prints and he knows when to expect good news. But then Mr. Turnbull came and walked through the house in a way he wouldn’t have dared if my Gen was here. Standing up in the library and Ex-Claiming when are those Volumes going to be paid for, they cost Thousand’s, the booksellers and binders are sending their bills to the firm of Turnbull and Forbes, I never authorized that. Walking through the house as though I wasnt there, no bowing and no my good lady now, Leander and Francisco and their mother not much thought of now that you are not here. My dear Sir they are all snake’s in the Grass as long as I live I will encourage Leander and Francisco to look for their Deseat. I was mighty sick after he left and my heart allmost broke. Take yourself out of their power my dear Sir, I nightly pray in the silence of the house for you soon to claim your own, and for that Crown to be sett on your head.”

  THERE WAS a disturbance outside. A number of men talking at once, an irregular hollow stamping on the ground, the sounds of harness, more talk, shouts, and then a slow, heavy crash.

  Miranda was roused from the sound of Sarah’s voice, from the flow of his own unspoken reply, from thoughts and pictures of his library, his sleeping sons, the London night, the silence of his house.

  It was darker in the room than he had thought, as though time had shifted with his thoughts and it was nearly night here too. It was only the rainy-season weather of the estuary and the Gulf: one brief, violent downpour recently over, a remnant of its drizzle still about, another downpour about to come.

  He went to the window. It was in the local style, the shutter roughly jalousied, hinged at the top (the better to keep out the rain), and propped open with a stick. Water dripped from the sloping sides of the shutter. The paint had long ago peeled, the timber had weathered grey; the sill had begun to rot.

  The grounds at the back of the house were a mess of mud and rubble and bush, like a clearing in the forest. To one side—near the separate little cook-house, whitewash fallen off grey, soaked boards, smoke coming out of blackened open windows: dinner for the governor and his guest being got ready—there were old compacted mounds of kitchen ash.

  In the mud directly in front, a mule had been unharnessed from a cart. The badly distributed load of rubble had fallen forward, breaking the front flap of the cart and pressing the shafts into the mud.

  The three or four mud-stained black men around the mule and cart were talking in a language Miranda had never heard before. He supposed it to be a language of Africa.

  If the men had been talking English or French or Spanish Miranda would not have noticed them as he now did. He would have seen only Negroes and he would not have been able to recognize them later. But the strange private language, and the whole internal, unknowable world it implied, made him consider the faces of the men.

  They noticed him, too, almost at the same time, the old man with the long white pigtail appearing below the sloping jalousied shutter against the darkness of the window. For a while, waiting for they knew not what, looking at him, they stood still, and for those moments it was as if in their bewilderment—men who seemed not to have any idea what they were doing or why, or even where they were—Miranda saw something of his own disturbance, called away from London and his house and Sarah and her panic, to focus all at once on that piece of bush and those men.

  He noticed their frailty. It was strange in people expected to do physical labour, but (and this was plantation lore, in Venezuela as well) the sturdiness of the plantation worker was grafted on to this kind of stock over later generations. Many Africans when they arrived were as frail as these men. A certain number were expected to die in the first year, from the water, the food, the new insects. On the established plantations there were ways of “seasoning” new arrivals and seeing them through their dangerous first year. These Africans in the grounds of Government House looked neglected. In the hollow red eyes of one man could be seen signs of a rainy-season fever. He was doomed, and so perhaps was one of the men with him.

  That idea of doom, of another kind of life, coming to Miranda even while he was looking at the eyes of the Africans, re-established distance between him and the men he saw, and returned him to himself and the setting: the downpour coming, the wet, rotting window sill with disagreeable drifts of black-and-white lizard droppings in the eaten-away parts of the wood: the lizards now seen to be active everywhere around him, pale yellow creatures, almost transparent, like little crocodiles but with enormous lidless eyes.

  He saw in a corner of the room now the three new deal chests, like seamen’s chests, with the Turnbull and Forbes samples General Hislop had mentioned. The chests were painted with a style of lettering—thin horizontals, very thick verticals—that brought back the signboards and street signs of London: Brig.-Gen. Thos. Hislop, Headquarters, Trinidad. For General Miranda. From Turnbull and Forbes, London.

  He didn’t go back to Sarah’s letter. It was an hour or so to dinner, time enough to consider other correspondence. The heavy roaring rain that came soon, beating on the ground and trees and the roof, helped his concentration.

  Not long after the rain stopped a servant came and told him he had a visitor.

  He went out to the verandah. He recognized his visitor as Bernard, last seen seven years ago in London. There was a mud-spattered calash with a wet black coachman in the drive. Though the rain had stopped, the drive was running with yellow water that came off the surrounding hills and made a general gurgling noise all around.

  The calash made a good first impression; but then Miranda saw that the hood, which was up, was cracked and worn in the folds, the bodywork was dented and scratched, and the emblem on the low door was crudely painted. The wet coachman was wearing alpargatas, peon’s footwear, a cheap kind of slipper with a very thin leather sole with woven cotton straps for the toes and the heel. The heel-straps of the coachman’s alpargatas had long ago been flattened below the man’s heel.

  The verandah was wet and every little breath of air felt chill. The rain had blown in on three sides.

  Miranda didn’t ask Bernard inside. Both men remained standing in the verandah.

  Bernard said, “General.”

  Miranda didn’t speak.

  “I never wrote. I know.”

  “There are so many letters,” Miranda said. “You never wrote at all? Are you sure?”

  “I put it off and put it off. Year after year. And then it was too late. Governor Hislop would have told you that I’m married. My wife is the daughter of the Chevalier de Gourville. Dupont Duvivier de Gourville. He’s a relation of the Baron de Montalembert. No finer connection is possible in these parts. It wasn’t s
omething I would have thought possible for myself. I had to set aside thoughts of the revolution. You’re a man of the world, and I feel I can offer you this explanation. I won’t call it an excuse.”

  Miranda said, “I’ve heard of the baron. He came here in 1801 with a hundred and fifty Negroes, and he lost a hundred at one blow.”

  “A hundred and twenty. In the first month. After losing everything in Santo Domingo and Martinique. And there’s no bitterness in him. He simply started up again. General, I don’t want to take up more of your time. I thought it was my duty to make this call on you, to see you as soon as possible, and to declare myself. Times change, General. And though at one time I had to set aside thoughts of the revolution, I have these past few months been serving you in ways you don’t know. I think it is important for you to know that. Of course, French people of standing here know of our old connection, and I have been able to reassure them—especially those who have volunteered for your new expedition—that there was never any political quarrel between us. Friends and foes have spread all kinds of stories about you here, General. The stories haven’t been all about the court of Catherine the Great. Some have been about the French Revolution. You were a general in the army of the Revolution. But I’ve always told people that you will honour property rights in land and Negroes, that there is nothing to fear. People worry about these things here, and you can’t blame them, after recent history. I hope you think I’ve done well.”

  “You’ve done well.”

  “Now I must go.”