A Way in the World

by Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul

  “Your calash?”

  “My wife’s. What you see on it are the Gourville arms. Roughly done, but it was painted by a Negro born and bred in Martinique and—you wouldn’t believe—trained as a pastrycook.”

  “Pastrycook! The things you can get people to do these days!”

  Bernard began to go down the steps. Miranda (never forgetting, with a remnant of shame, how, thirty-five years ago, eight fanegas, four hundred and fifty pounds, of Venezuelan cocoa had been converted in Cadiz into nothing more than a silk handkerchief and a silk umbrella) noticed how carefully, even with all the rain, the chevalier’s son-in-law had dressed for the occasion: the pale yellow pantaloons, the white ruffed shirt, the blue silk jacket. Before he got to the bottom of the broad, semi-rotting wooden steps (the driver of the calash getting ready, shaking the wet off the reins), he turned and looked at Miranda. It was the moment Miranda—wondering about the purpose of the call—had thought would never come.

  Bernard said, “General. The clerk of the Council died last week. Did Governor Hislop tell you? It means there is a vacancy. The fees are small. Over a month they wouldn’t purchase you a dinner in London. But it’s a position of some local dignity. It matters to me, to be something in my own right. You’ll understand. I hope you’ll feel able to recommend me for it.”

  AT DINNER Hislop said, “I know what he wants. You don’t have to tell me. So far, when the messages have come I’ve pretended not to hear. Let’s leave it like that. Let’s have some wine now, to celebrate your homecoming. Because that’s what it is: a homecoming after thirty-five years. And that’s what I hope it will turn out to be in a lasting way.”

  Miranda said, “No wine for me, General. Just sugar and water. It’s all I’ve had for years. It’s what we used to drink in Caracas as children.”

  “Almost the only commodities we’re not short of here. But sugar-and-water isn’t the kind of story we hear about you.”

  “It’s strange about those stories. I started some of them, or at any rate encouraged them. Now they’re like stories about someone else. When I went to Spain in 1771, wine was one of the things I was travelling to know. It was something the poets wrote about. The wine of Europe, not the brackish church stuff we had in Caracas. I thought a lot about wine on the Prins Frederik. I expected nectar. As soon as I got to Cadiz I started to make notes about every wine I had, as I made notes about the women, the churches, the pictures. I don’t know now how much I was acting for the sake of my journal. Acting being a man of culture. I was twenty-one.”

  “So the chevalier’s son-in-law came in his calash. A famous calash. With its shop-sign coat of arms. I hope he was friendly.”

  “I don’t know. He threatened me. He said I had a revolutionary past. He said he knew more about that past than anyone here, and some people might easily be made to feel that property wasn’t safe with me.”

  Hislop said, “Unfortunately, he’s right. It could be very damaging. The Spaniards have also been spreading rumours. The local Spaniards are already keeping out, and unless these stories are checked, your French volunteers might also drop away. They’re refugees from the islands, aristocrats without money, and they’re going into this business for the sake of property. Land and Negroes. To re-establish their fortunes. We all know that. I wish it were otherwise, but in this part of the world it always comes down to land and Negroes, as I told you. We have to take Be’nard’s threat seriously. I’ll find ways of letting him know that you’ve spoken to me, and that I’ve agreed to let him have the clerkship, but that I won’t be making the appointment for a month. That should keep him out of mischief and give you enough time. Ah, the calash! Be’nard will feel it did the trick again.”

  “I couldn’t really afford the money I gave him when I sent him out here in 1799. And yet when I saw him this morning I had to pretend to be stiff with him. It was strange. I felt no animosity towards him. And right at the end, as he was going down the steps and he turned and I saw how carefully he had dressed, my heart went out to him. He looked so vulnerable, so easy to hurt. It would have been so easy to call his bluff, to laugh at the calash and the barefoot Negro driving it. And simply because it was so easy I didn’t want to do it. There’s always a touch of pathos in someone like that. He’s so exposed. I felt I was looking at a younger version of myself.

  “I too had a coat of arms at one time. You need one to get a commission in a Spanish regiment. There are people in Spain who do these things. The man my father employed was called Zazo y Ortega. Zazo’s method was simple. He linked the Mirandas of Caracas and the Canary Islands to the twelfth-century Mirandas of Old Castile. And although I knew precisely who I was, and was proud of my father, and very proud of our money, I also passionately believed when I got on the Prins Frederik at La Guaira that I was another kind of person, and that I was travelling to Spain to claim my rightful inheritance, of which the coat of arms was a part. The Prins Frederik was a Swedish frigate. It was utterly foreign. It helped me to feel that I had undergone a transformation. For years I lived like this, knowing who I was and at the same time believing myself to be somebody else. Holding those two different ideas in my head at the same time, even drawing the Miranda arms on the expensive books I bought.

  “I will tell you something even more absurd. When I was twenty-five—just two weeks after my twenty-fifth birthday—I wrote to the king of Spain asking to be invested with the red cross of the Order of Santiago. This is a very grand order. The king himself appoints a commission to look into the nobility of your descent. The painter Velázquez was admitted to the order when he was sixty, and at the height of his reputation. I knew who we were, what we had come from in Caracas and the Canary Islands. I knew exactly how Zazo had gone about creating that genealogy for me. But I also thought quite seriously with another part of my mind that Zazo had turned up the truth, and I was worthy of the king’s investigation. I thought there was something wonderful within me, and I felt that the king would discover this. I was twenty-five, a captain in the Princess Regiment in Africa.

  “Later I became ashamed of all of this. I was glad there was no reply from the king. I even forgot about it, until the other day. And now I can look back on that whole business with calm. But I can still see the logic of the young man and understand why he did what he did. Something of that came back to me when I saw Bernard go down the steps, about to splash his delicate shoes and to spot his very expensive silk jacket with the drips from the old calash hood.”

  Hislop said, “It’s easy to look back at the past. It’s not so easy to be clear-sighted about the present. We don’t always know what we are doing now. We can just get dragged along.”

  “General, you’re frightening me. Of course I know it’s strange to be going on a campaign of liberation with these French aristocratic adventurers who only want land and Negroes. But that’s looking at it from the outside. I know the logic of what I’m doing. I know how I’ve got here. You know. You and I know all the twists and turns of events that have brought me here.”

  “I was thinking of myself. I intended no rebuke to you. I am a military man. That has been my ambition since childhood. My last active service was in Gibraltar. That was twenty years ago. I have been becalmed in these parts for ten years. I still think of myself as a military man, still think I have a future. But really I no longer know what I’m doing. They put you in a place called Government House and they call you the governor, but you’re really only a jailer for these planters. I would much rather be with you. There, General. I’ve said what’s been on my mind these many months. I have longed for this meeting. For the last four months I have been learning Spanish. Learning Spanish one hour a day, and for the last year or two I’ve been dreaming of an elegant society, with fine houses and polished floors and beautiful Spanish ladies, where I might one day practise this Spanish. I have not seen action recently. But I could be on your staff. I could smooth things for you with our admirals and generals. I know many of them. I know their characters. I would kno
w the words to use. The correct words are important with military people. That could be of value to you.”

  It grew dark, and the rain came again beating on the ground outside and the roof and making conversation difficult while the first onrush lasted.

  Hislop said, “This is the kind of weather that can carry you off. Make you a banquet for the blue crabs, as they say here. Put on a jacket and you start sweating. Take it off and you shiver. After ten years in these parts my health has broken down. I dream of a June day in England. But to get to England in June a lot of planning is necessary. You have to be in Tortola in the Virgin Islands by March, for the convoys. I don’t want to land in England in November.”

  “Caracas will be better for you. The seasons don’t matter there.”

  “General.”

  “The Caracas valley is known as the land of eternal spring. The flowers have a deeper hue and the fruit are sweeter and bigger.”

  Miranda showed the anonymous letter that Hislop said had been thrown into the sentry-box. The seal was still unbroken. He put the letter to one side and said, “I thought it would be better to read it in your presence. Not now. A little later.”

  Hislop was moved. He said, “General.”

  The servants began to bring in the dinner, stamping with bare feet on the solid planks, bringing with them a smell of rain and leaf-mould, woodsmoke and charcoal fumes, from the kitchen hut Miranda had seen.

  Hislop said, “No banquet, General. It’s like living on a ship here. We’ve got twenty thousand Negroes working on the plantations from five in the morning to six in the evening, six days a week. But the scarcest thing here is food. All they do on the plantations is cocoa and cotton and sugar-cane and coffee. The Negroes in their free time grow some ground provisions, cassava, yams, sweet potatoes. But they’re not allowed to sell anything. The peons—the ’pagnols, as they call them here—bring in a little wild meat from the forest sometimes, and some of the free people of colour sell a little poultry when they have it. But we’re nearly always close to a famine. Nearly everything we eat here is smoked or salted and comes in a box from Canada or the United States. Beef, mackerel, salmon, cod, herring. Even tobacco comes in a box. Butter is orange-red with salt and costs six shillings a pound. No one thinks of churning it locally.”

  “You don’t have to apologize, General. I know this food. I’m at home, remember. What’s happening in your grounds? Do those men know what they’re doing?”

  “I doubt it. As a military man you must know that if you can’t gauge what a group of men are doing, it is because they themselves don’t know. They’re just doing as they’re told. We’re trying to make the land slope away from the hills, to take off the flood water. At the same time we’re digging in drainage trenches, with rubble at the bottom. It should have been done years ago, when they made this house Government House. You dig a ditch, you put in the rubble, and then you cover it up. It’s to prevent water stagnating. As soon as water stagnates here you get mosquitoes. If you get mosquitoes, you can’t live here. I tell the commandeur of the gang what to do, and he pretends he knows, but he doesn’t really know why I am asking him to bury stones. Plantation people would have some idea, but these new Negroes know nothing about anything. I don’t think they even know that they’re working, doing something called work. They probably just think they’re being punished. These Negroes believe that during the day they’re in hell. Literally. Did you know that? A strange kind of hell, where it doesn’t matter what they do or what is done to them. When the sun goes down the real world begins for them. Everything changes then. As soon as night falls, and you know that in these parts night comes in five minutes, things balance out for them. We become ghosts. They become kings and queens and dauphins and grand judges. They wear the crowns and have the whips. That’s what their sorcerers tell them. And it’s what they believe. It doesn’t matter what you do to them or how much you try to break their spirit. They believe that in the night the power is theirs. It was one of the things that came out at an enquiry we had earlier this year. You live in a place for ten years, you think you know it, and then you find out that all the time you’ve been standing on quicksand.”

  “In Venezuela we always knew that the Negroes liked dressing up and playing games. They were great mockers. I don’t remember anyone thinking of holding an inquiry into it.”

  “We had to. I don’t know whether they told you in Barbados, but last December we had a scare here. We were very close to a full-scale rebellion. They were all in it.” He jerked his chin towards the servants. “Everybody’s Negroes were in it, whether they belonged to white people or people of colour. It had been building up over some years, under our noses, and we didn’t know. One day they were going to kill all the white people. And then, when there was only one colour—that was the way they talked at the enquiry—they were going to go to church to take communion and then they were going to eat pork and dance. That was as far as they had thought in three years. They were going to eat pork and dance and live happily ever after. You might say it’s a game, but they were going to kill people and burn the houses and fields. Before, I never looked at a Negro. You know what I mean. I don’t want to look now, but I find I do all the time. And I am not sure what I am seeing. Anyway, in a month or two all this is going to change. These people in the grounds will go to the galleys and proper public works, and other people will be working on the grounds here. No one here knows as yet. We have to keep it secret. We are getting some Chinese.”

  “From China?”

  “Not strictly. From India, from Calcutta. But they’re going to be the first Chinese ever in this part of the world. It was such a desolation around Government House when I came here three years ago. I thought we should have a botanical garden. They have them in the other islands. It isn’t something the Negroes know about, and the planters wouldn’t like it anyway. They don’t want Negroes to do any agricultural work away from the estates. I wrote to London about the Chinese, and the wheels slowly began to turn. It’s all taken nearly two years. The East India Company recruited the Chinese in Calcutta. You won’t be here when they arrive, and I must say that I have lost interest. Mi cama aquí …”

  “General!”

  “Let me practise my Spanish, General. Mi cama aquí …”

  “My bed here … Your accent is very good.”

  “… no ha sido …”

  “… has not been …”

  “… una de rosas.”

  “… one of roses. ‘My bed here has not been one of roses.’ It has not been a bed of roses for you.”

  “Absolutely. I was hoping the Chinese would also grow vegetables. The Negroes don’t really know, and the planters won’t allow them to sell anything they grow. They say that after Haiti they don’t want their Negroes to get any ideas. But I think they just want to grind the Negroes down, and they don’t know where to stop. In my three years here I have seen more of human turpitude than in the rest of my life.”

  Miranda said, “Turpitude. I know the word. But I’ve never heard anyone use it in conversation.”

  “I suppose it’s because I’ve spent three years framing that sentence. I constantly speak it in my mind. It comforts me. The French aristocrats we’ve assembled here have tainted everybody. You’ve been to France, you’ve been a general in their army. I am not telling you anything you don’t know. The French aristocracy don’t come out well, General. I can’t understand them. They feel rich only if everybody else around them is in rags. They feel secure and well-bred only if everybody else is degraded. I understand now why they had the revolution in France. Then they had the same revolution all over again in Haiti, but a much nastier one. And now they’ve almost had one here. And they’ve involved me in it.” Hislop struck his breast, and then struck it regularly as he spoke. “I had to get the troops out at midnight and go around picking up the ringleaders. If there is an investigation I will have to bear the responsibility. I and I alone. That’s what Gourville and Montalembert and Luzette an
d the others think. They think they will simply stand aside, as they did with Picton. But I don’t intend that to happen. I’m a military man. I’m responsible for the defence of this territory and for public order. I know nothing about the management and care of Negroes. I am not required to know anything about that. Garrow, the London lawyer, made it pretty clear at the Picton trial. I have the full transcript. I have studied it. An official who exceeds the law, Garrow said, is responsible for his action. So the planters of the Council and the jailer and everybody else have to take their share. They don’t like what I am saying, but I have made my position clear. If you stay here long enough, General, you will find that I am not the most popular man on the island.”

  Miranda said, “Is there going to be an investigation?”

  “Who can tell? There may well be. The news from London has been very strange.”

  “Is there a lot to be investigated? Was it very bad?”

  “Three hanged. The heads spiked, the bodies hung in chains in the square.”

  “The bodies of pirates hang from gibbets on both banks of the Thames, half-way up to London.”

  “A lot of people mutilated. It’s what they do in the islands.”

  “How do you mutilate them?”

  “You cut off the ears. I’ve seen it in other places. In some of the very small islands they slit the nose, but here they just do the ears.”

  “I never saw that in Venezuela. But I can’t trust my memory now. But if a punishment is customary, it’s customary. You’re too nervous, General. A rebellion is a rebellion.”

  “It’s what I tell myself in my better moments. And Lord Castlereagh, the colonial secretary, sent his approval. He said he knew that that class of the community had to be watched. But if there’s an investigation, what’s that approval worth? If I am asked to state what law I was following when those men were given a hundred lashes and had their ears cut off, I wouldn’t be able to say. All I would be able to say is that I followed the Council and the planters, and the jail staff seemed to know what to do. I never looked for the laws. I don’t even know what laws we are operating here. The territory was Spanish until nine years ago. It might go back to Spain at the end of the war, or it might be given to the French in exchange for something somewhere else. No one knows. If you say that the laws should be Spanish, there is no one here to tell me what those laws are. The lawbooks and the lawyers are all on the other side of the Gulf. A military governor can only follow the advice of responsible citizens. That’s what Tom Picton did, and that’s what I did after him. And you know the full bill against Picton. Thirty-seven charges. Execution without trial, false imprisonment, torture, burning alive. Bail set at forty thousand pounds. The man ruined, his life darkened these last three years.”