by Robert Nye
The Indian’s voice had risen to a high pitch of excitement, as if he was seeing the scene that he spoke of, as if it were being enacted even now before his eyes and mine. Suddenly he broke off. He pointed to the moonlight on the water.
‘There is the truth.’
I don’t understand you.’
‘What does the water show? The moon’s shining reflected. What is the moonlight? The moon has no light of her own. Her face takes its light from the sun. So the Spanish priests taught me.’
‘Then you learned your lesson well,’ I said. ‘These things are all true. But what do they have to do with your Golden Man?’
‘They fit,’ said the Indian, his voice sinking to a whisper. ‘The Incas and then the Spaniards moved in darkness. They were like the moon. They had no light of their own. They came as tHicves to plunder the light of the Sun God, the gold of the Chibcha, the glory of our Golden Man.’
He turned. He was looking straight at me.
‘There are no gold mines in the lands that were once my people’s.’
‘But you spoke of gold dust—’
‘If there was gold dust then it was purchased. If there were golden images then we must have had them from trade. It is possible that the Chibcha sometimes traded the leaf for gold. Possible but unlikely. The leaf of the tree is sacred to us. Gold is mere trash. Gold does not live.’
‘If there were images? Then your tale of this Golden Man—?’
‘It is just that. A tale. A tale told by the Incas. Told by them to the Aztecatl, the people you call the Aztecs. Told by them to the Spaniards. And so on, and so on.’
‘But there must have been something—’
‘You need to believe so?’
‘Does the moon invent the sunlight?’ I demanded, reverting
desperately to his former image of the way this strange story had been passed on through time. ‘Are you saying there is no sun?’
The Indian shook his head. ‘The Sun God is not mocked. He laughs at us. I am telling you all that I know, and all that I don’t know. I don’t know why our enemies chose to inflict on my people this dream of the Golden Man. Perhaps the Zipa was anointed with a powder of gold dust obtained from trading. Perhaps what our priests blew through their pipes over his body was only the seed of the tree. Perhaps traders from other tribes watched some such scene of coronation from afar, took it to mean we were rich in gold, and the story spread that way. Perhaps it was all an illusion, bred in the minds of those traders by misuse of our leaf. Perhaps there was nothing at all….’
‘Nothing? Man, there must have been something?
The Indian smiled grimly. ‘Because Guattaral says so?’
‘Because Cortes found gold!’
‘Of course. But in the empire of the Aztecatl, in the empire of the Incas.’
‘Then there must be gold elsewhere.’
‘I agree. But it is not important. I tell you what I know. There is no gold in the mountains of my people. Not a jot, not a speck, not a crumb. There is not and there was not. There never will be. It must please the Sun God so. No El Dorado.’
‘I did not come in quest of El Dorado. I knew that story. I thought it fiction. But I had facts. I had evidence. I brought back specimens from Guiana. There was gold in them. God damn you, you and your Golden Man! Where were the Spanish mines up the Orinoco? There was one near San Thome, wasn’t there? Another in Mount Iconuri?’
The Indian shook his head slowly. ‘I know nothing of them.’
‘You lie! Keymis brought back ingots.’
‘The Spaniards got ingots by trading.’
‘Keymis brought documents also. From the house of your damned master, Palomeque. There were references in those papers to gold prospecting. On the banks of the Caroni river, in some barranca—’
‘I assure you,’ the Indian said, ‘Palomeque found nothing. His men tried in these places that you mention. And they tried many others. There was always a new drunkard who’d come out of the jungle to tell Don Palomeque, in return for cassava liquor, that he knew where the gold was. Off they’d go, the next morning. Over that hill there! Just at the end of this gorge - what a pity, night’s falling! Always one day’s march away. Always tomorrow. And then in the night before tomorrow the trickster, of course, would abandon them, melt away into the darkness, disappear. That is, if he was not too drunk on cassava or the wine of the Spaniards’ borracheras. The drunkest were the unlucky ones. Palomeque had them crucified on the sites of their imaginary mines.’
‘But before Palomeque. The Governor before him. Antonio de Berrio. I knew him. I talked with him. He believed there was gold in Guiana.’
The Indian shrugged. ‘Believed, yes. They all believed. I have heard of that Berrio. He went mad with belief. He marched his men everywhere, day and night, sun and storm, making them dig till they dropped. What did they find? Marcasite. Sand and marcasite. Never gold. In the end his own soldiers turned on him. They plotted to kill him. Berrio escaped. He died raving, they say. Hiding from his own men on an island in the middle of the Orinoco. Raving about gold that was not there!’
‘I am sorry to hear it,’ I said.
‘I thought him an honest gentleman. But that is not my point. Berrio built the fort at San Thome. He protected it with a palisade. He had ordnance installed there. Why choose that spot and go to all that trouble if it wasn’t near a gold mine?’
‘You know why,’ said the Indian. ‘You know why, but you don’t want to admit it. San Thome was built where it was because it was the outpost of this empty dream I tell you of. The south bank of the Orinoco, three miles east of the mouth of the Caroni. The nearest point upriver to the lands which were once my people’s!’
I remembered something I told Francis Bacon that evening in Gray’s Inn Fields. That Berrio saw the Orinoco as the road to Manoa, El Dorado, the golden city. I had only the river wrong. It had been the Caroni. But if what the Indian said was true - iß Christ’s sweat, I know it is true, in my heart of hearts, don’t I? - then even the Caroni is wrong. A river-road leading to nowhere. To less than a nothing. To a fiction compounded of a fiction. To a lie. To a hell. To the void. To the ultimate zero. My own!
‘Palomeque,’ I said desperately. ‘Did he know what he was doing?’
‘Oh, yes. Palomeque was not mad. Unless evil is madness.’
‘I didn’t mean that. I meant his going up into the mountains of the Chibcha. I meant his looking for gold there. And finding nothing.’
‘He found me,’ the Indian said. ‘Yes, he found nothing.’
I was silent. I watched the sails swell, the wind filling them. Then:
‘Did you tell him?’ I demanded. ‘Did you tell him the truth?’
‘No,’ the Indian answered. ‘I did not tell him.’ I thought of that bull-whip.
There was silence, broken only by the sound of the sails,
I knew that he knew what I thought of.
‘I have told you,’ the Indian said, as we paced the deck again. ‘Guattaral is the only one I have ever told. Guattaral is the only one I shall ever tell.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know. I thought I knew.’
‘The death of my son?’
‘Yes.’
‘Your shout?’
The Indian hung his head. He nodded miserably.
I muttered; ‘But now you don’t know I can make no
sense of you!’
‘You must make sense of yourself,’ the Indian said. ‘As for me - perhaps there’s no sense to be made.’
He shivered. I do not think it was only the cold night air which caused him to shiver.
‘You have changed,’ I observed.
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘You once seemed a man of much certainty.’ ‘The further I go,’ he replied, ‘the less I know.’ ‘Perhaps it is good to admit it?’ ‘Perhaps,’ he said.
We walked up and down without words. Once, twice, three times. Then the Indian said:
I was wrong. M
ay the Sun God forgive me my pride. The shout— It was all that I had. All I could offer in answer to this world where others dream me. I knew the shout. I thought that I knew it. Its meaning. Its source. Its great power.’
I heard your shout,’ I reminded him. It was incredible. Terrifying. And it did seem to drive your enemies mad.’
It did not drive you mad, Guattaral.’
I stared at him. ‘Does that make me a god then?’
‘No,’ said the Indian, unsmiling. ‘But it makes me a man.’
He turned aside. He took his leave of me. He bade me no goodnight. He stopped momentarily at the top of the flight of steep wooden steps which leads down from the quarterdeck.
‘A man,’ he repeated. ‘Not the Golden Man.’
‘But the voice of your god shouted through you?’
‘I don’t know. I think not. No. I’m sure not.’
I exclaimed: ‘But a shout of such power!’
His broad back still turned to me, he shrugged. For the first time, that shrug did not annoy me.
‘I shouted out of fear,’ the Indian said.
*
Eight bells. The end of the middle watch. My candle withers and decays in its shroud of wax. This cabin is a spindrift of tobacco smoke. My hand hurts from so much writing. Heart and head—
Heart and head. They hurt more.
I can clear and ease my head by going out in a moment to stand at the bow and watch the sun rise in the east. To sail towards the sun at its rising. To run on into the dawn in the morning. Small comfortless comforts. Not to be despised.
But to clear and ease the heart?
A different matter.
My heart can never forget what it learned this night. It must welcome each new sunrise now as a token of nothingness. O heart, can you learn how to live with this knowledge? That the sun is not there. That there never was and never shall be any sun, any gold in Guiana, any mine, any meaning. That the Indian spoke true. That the truth is the moonlight on the water. That I have wasted my life and sacrificed my eldest son in pursuit of this moonshine, this fiction cast into my mind out of other men’s fictions, this dream that is not even my own.
Heart, go out and watch yourself break.
Greet your certain damnation.
25
29 April
The wind gives us no quarter. I suspect it is from none.
So we run. We run on. East always. The right wrong direction. Always east. With the New World all over, put behind us, at our backs, rejected. And, ahead of this my Destiny, that my destiny. The Old World I must learn to accept again. The place of my beginning. Where I’ll end.
It is the trivial things that keep me going. I live by minutiae, by attention to the thousand minor details of a ship’s life at sea. This morning I spent with our carpenter, Mr Markham, making sure he used large-headed tacks to nail fresh leather to our worn pumps and scuppers. In the afternoon I went about with the cooper, to look to our casks, hoops, and barri cos. I stand with the boatswain at the chest to oversee the boys when they box the compass. I go the rounds with the corporal at the setting and relieving of the watch. These matters do not need me, strictly speaking. I need them. They serve to hold me in my wits.
Shearwaters blown before us. Wings like black bent bars of iron.
We are making 8 knots.
Some small rain this evening. Difficult to distinguish it from the incessant spray which the wind blows like smoke across the face of the waters.
I attend Robin where he attends poor Samuel King. The worst is undoubtedly passed. My old friend (please God) appears well on the way to recovery. Tonight he managed a dish of buttered rice with a little cinnamon; also a can of some of our precious fresh water brewed with sugar and a root of green ginger in it. Alas, as Sam grows stronger he wants only to engage me in conversation about the vile Head and his villains. The topic no longer interests me. I fear that in the end I was curt with him, said that the blow to his skull had left him obsessed with its perpetrators, and abandoned him to the company of my page.
Good kind complaisant Robin! He will listen to Sam’s monologue all night if necessary, pinching his own leg to keep himself awake. For all his occasional faults of uncivility, how much finer a spirit than I was at his age! Sweet Robin. I am lucky to have him aboard with me. As honest a lad as ever lifted a ladle.
*
Putijma must have lied, all those years ago. Lied to me. Lied to Keymis.
A casique? Was that Putijma even truly a casique? A prince? A cHicftain? (And what does it matter if he was? Princes can lie. Princes lie better than commoners. I, of all men living, ought to know that!)
The point, in any case, is that Putijma with his tale of the gold in Mount Iconuri fits in only too well with that rabble of scoundrels described by the Indian - drunkards who would tell you that the gold was always just one day’s march away, over the next hill, up that inaccessible cliff-face
For I have to admit it: Putijma drank well and deep at my expense. I feasted him too. While he, the trickster, feasted on my folly.
Others, too. Plenty. All of them liars. Damned liars.
Bloody damned liars to a man— What use to write of this? None.
What use even to recall my own fine discriminating distinctions drawn out for such as Francis Bacon? Spiderwebs spun to impress a king of spiders. That it was not El Dorado that I sought. That it was not Manoa I believed in any more. ‘Real mines,’ I said. ‘In the foothills of Manoa,’ I said. What self-deceiving sophistry! What art! What drivel! The wonder is I did not choke on my own innocence. The foothills of a madness are still madman’s ground. I made my El Dorado ‘real’, my Manoa ‘credible’, by reducing the size of the lunatic dream, that’s all. Not a city of gold. Just a few golden caves.
Open sesame! For Sir Walter Aladdin. That stupid Sinbad. This pathetic Old Man of the Sea.
*
I wanted and I didn’t want to talk to Samuel King about some of the things the Indian has taught me. How my ‘inland sea’ called ‘Parima’ probably corresponds to his Lake Guatavita, for instance. (No reduction there! On the map of my folly it was larger!) Now I know I never can and never shall talk to Sam about any of this. The sting is too sharp. My shames! My stupidities!
Better not talk to anyone. Not even myself. (Least of all: myself.) Not even you, Carew, my perfect unanswering listener. Should a son look upon his father stripped naked?
Better destroy this book. Drown it in the sea. In the pasture for fools. Where it belongs. Let the crabs turn its pages. Reading matter for mermen and mermaids. I deserve deliquescence.
Dear Christ!
Enough.
So others made a fool of Sir Walter Ralegh. Is this to be taken for news? How and why I made a fool of myself That’s the bone I must gnaw on.
Not now. Not yet.
I comb salt from my hair and my beard. The whiteness prevails. Some salt you shall never comb out. Not now. Not ever.
The wind shifts. Still rising.
Better see Mr Burwick and his mates about getting the starboard tacks aboard and settling our main topsail. Better instruct the younkers to smear a bucket of grease up under our parrels. Better sleep then, and pray Christ for something deeper than oblivion.
26
1 May
To accept my own incertitude. To make doubt my bread. No easy tasks for a man who once dined on his reason.
Yet the seas are uncertain. Only this wind is sure. And there’s an albatross which wafts along with us to leeward, wide motionless wings the colour of pitch, as if fallen asleep in the air. The bird puts itself at the mercy of the wind, and so flies without effort. Lord, teach me just a modicum of such faith. Not to soar on my pride, not to plummet through despair. Just to dwell in Thy mercy. Not to fly.
*
Another conversation with the Indian. I found him helping our quartermaster down in the hold. As our stock of food is depleted it becomes necessary to fill the empty casks up with salt water, to maintain our ballast
and give the ship good purchase in the sea. Once again I’m impressed by the strength of this Christoval Guayacunda. He tossed barrels as though they were bottles. He stacked the full casks as swiftly as he rolled out the empty ones. Watching, I remembered the way he’d killed those men.
When he’d finished, he came and sat beside me. I was resting on a bollard to ease my leg.
His right cheek bulged. He tapped it with his forefinger.
‘Good for work,’ he remarked laconically. ‘You want one?’
I shook my head. Thanking him, I said something to the effect that I was trying to live without dreams.
His reaction was angry. ‘The leaf clears the head, cleans the heart. As to dreams: it has nothing to do with them!’ He frowned, snapping his fingers. ‘I know what you’re thinking. You can’t get it out of your mind that I said that the dream of the Golden Man might have come from abuse of the leaf. Yes? Well, the Chibcha have never abused it. Remember: that dream is not ours. We know the leaf. We respect it.’ I said: ‘I have heard the same thing said about wine.’ ‘Wine makes a man less. The leaf makes more of him.’ ‘How can you be so sure?’ ‘You saw me work.’
I conceded that he had shown great strength in his handling of the barrels. But asked ironically if he attributed all of his strength to the khoka.
His answer surprised me. Once more it brought me up face-to-face with the unsophisticated streak in this Indian’s nature. For he did no more than refer my attention to certain narrow woven bands which he wears to restrict the muscles above his biceps, and also on each of his legs just below the knee. These tight-twisted bonds, he assured me, were to keep his physical vigour in check just where he wanted it
I said: ‘And your shout? And your fighting I will you tell me that they got their power from the rope you had tied round your neck?’
I spoke irritably. I suppose I had been infected first by his anger, then by his childishness. Also, no doubt, there is that in me which resents this Indian and all that he stands for. Without him, I might be a less broken man. Besides which, to descend to unimpeachable base banality, my bad leg was giving me hell. Lame excuse! Ha! It serves me right that I got back a most upright answer.
