A Way in the World

by Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul

  “I know it’s an act of piracy he’s proposing. That’s the idea he has of me and my cause. It’s the idea the Venezuelans have spread, and it’s exactly the way some of the Leander men used to talk at the beginning. And, of course, I would be completely in his power. He could withdraw his force, he could hand me over to the Spaniards, he could do anything. But the insult! The insult!

  “Two days later. Nothing said in the interim. Now: ‘Have you thought it over?’

  “ ‘Angostura is better fortified than you imagine. An attacking force coming upriver would be very vulnerable.’

  “ ‘So your answer is no?’

  “ ‘I fear so.’

  “He was enraged, icy. He said, ‘The commandeur of my property here has been complaining to me. You have been making far too free with the mules and the Negroes. To the general prejudice of the place. The commandeur says he is not able to get on with his proper duties.’

  “I said, ‘You offered the facility. I have been transferring supplies from the Leander to a warehouse. You know that.’

  “ ‘I gave permission for one day. I didn’t give permission for a week. I think you should leave. I have in fact drafted a letter to Admiral Cochrane telling him that I feel compromised in my dealings with Spaniards and others by your continued residence here. In the circumstances you will understand that I have to decline your offer of the Leander. I think you should leave as soon as possible.’

  “I left the next morning. I was relieved to get away from the house. But I was sorry about the Leander. He had encouraged me to think that the deal was all but struck.

  “I went to McKay’s Hotel. It is next door to the military barracks, where for four weeks or so I drilled my men. Downstairs, McKay’s is a tavern with a billiard table for merchants’ clerks. Upstairs there are four or five rooms overlooking the parade ground.

  “McKay came here just after the British conquest. He had heard from someone that the island was empty and they were giving away land. He found when he came that they were indeed giving away land, but only in large acreages and only to people who could bring in a large enough Negro atelier. He said as a joke to the chief magistrate one day, ‘Suppose I start clearing five acres of forest for myself, what will happen?’ The chief magistrate said in the same spirit, ‘Vallot’s jail and Negro’s punishment, thirty-nine lashes.’ Vallot was the jailer at the time, a Frenchman from Martinique, a figure of terror to the Negroes. It is a tavern-keeper’s story, the way McKay tells it now, and of course he has done well with the billiard table and the dubious rooms upstairs, and has a few Negroes of his own. About the billiards: McKay says every table pays a tax, and the money goes straight to Hislop as part of his official fees as governor.

  “I have written down that story about McKay for you, Sally. What I will not write about is my mood. The fact is I don’t know what to do now about anything—not even about the Leander people—and I don’t see there is anything I can do. I have simply to wait until I hear from Rouvray in London. That will be three months at least. I know how to wait. It’s the one thing I have learned in the last twenty years. What I don’t know is how well I will get on here. I am among people who don’t really know who I am. They have their own ideas. They are ready enough to go by the regard of people like Hislop and Cochrane, but when that regard isn’t there they don’t know what value to put on me. I am not like anyone they know.

  “It’s strange, but I have never been in a situation like this before. In Caracas I was the son of a rich and prominent man. Even as a child I was known. I grew up feeling famous. Later in Spain I was an extravagant colonial, and then I was a captain in the Princess Regiment. I suppose I floundered for a while when I left the Spanish service and went to the United States. I had to pick my way, and I had to improvise all the time. But at the end of my time in the United States I had given myself a character that well-placed people could recognize. In England, France, Russia, I became known for my political cause. It is a very special cause. I have always been somebody. Here now, so close to home, I see no kind of recognition in people’s eyes, and I feel as though I am losing pieces of myself.

  “And then, Sally, after all that worry, I didn’t have to stay at the hotel. I was rescued. McKay’s people were bringing my boxes up when Bernard came, running up the rough plank steps in his heavy boots. He was in his planter’s working clothes, and looked quite different from when I had last seen him, on the verandah at Government House. He was in his London clothes then.

  “Bernard said he had just heard about Briarly, and he had come to take me to his estate house. My boxes were to be taken down again—he gave the orders. He spoke generally with great authority. We were to leave at once. I would be comfortable in his estate house. I would be looked after. I was not to worry about Briarly. I had lost nothing by the quarrel. No one cared much for Briarly and his ruffianly gang of midshipmen. The wonder was that I had stuck it out at Briarly’s for so long.

  “He had come in his calash, with the Gourville arms. I didn’t want to notice its condition now, didn’t want to look at the coachman’s alpargatas. I appreciated the style. I had been so cast down—for so many of those days at Briarly’s, as I now realized—that the regard I saw in the eyes of McKay and even the sickly young billiard-playing clerks downstairs was like balm.

  “Bernard’s estate was in one of the valleys to the north. So we had to drive right through the town, from south to north. It was like a public display of my worth, in streets where the Leander Americans still made trouble and the Spaniards and Venezuelans still sometimes remembered to hiss. And I knew that other people as well (in spite of what Bernard said) had begun to be uncertain about me.

  “It was an act of pure friendship on Bernard’s part. There is now nothing I can do for him. Friendship like this wasn’t something I had ever looked for from him, and I felt it was a correct instinct that had prevented me from treating him roughly when he came to see me at Government House. I had seen something like pathos in him: he had dressed with such care. My heart had gone out to him. Such emotions are often reciprocal, and it occurred to me as we drove that perhaps at that same moment six months ago, when my position here was unquestioned, when my headquarters were at Government House (not far away now) and my authority exceeded Hislop’s, Bernard had seen a similar pathos in me.

  “We left the town. We entered the narrow winding valley road. After a mile or so, we began to pass a new estate. It was Bernard’s, or perhaps the Gourvilles’. Cocoa and coffee grew together, and young shade trees, samaan and immortelle, perhaps no more than fifteen years old, both now in flower, rose above the low cocoa woods. The red-and-yellow immortelle flowers on the ground looked like bright paint. Heavy cocoa pods, all the colours from green to yellow to red to purple, grew directly out of the young black trunks and boughs and hung by short thick stems.

  “I got the very smell of damp earth and dead leaves of the cocoa valleys to the north of Caracas. But no vanilla. Instead, an acrid smell of fermenting fruit, which became more pronounced near the house: like the smell of maturing casks or vats of wine.

  “Bernard said he was so used to the smell he hardly noticed. He thought I was smelling the tonka bean, an acid, pulpy fruit used to give flavour and body to cocoa. Then he said no, he knew what it was: they were ‘sweating’ the cocoa beans in the cocoa house. We went out to the cocoa house and he showed me. Cocoa beans grow in a pulp inside a cocoa pod. When the pods are cut open, beans and pulp have to be sweated or fermented for a week or so until the pulp rots. Fermentation gives the cocoa bean its flavour; and that is why some people say chocolate has a slight narcotic effect. I used to hear as a child that certain people in the bush drank their cocoa cold and bitter.

  “I said, I always thought I knew about cocoa beans. And I’m sure I did at one time. I knew there were many processes, as with so many ancient foods. But I’d forgotten about the sweating. When I left from La Guaira in 1771, my father made me take eight fanegas of cocoa beans.’

&nb
sp; “Bernard said, That’s a lot of cocoa beans. Most of a cocoa pod is pulp.’

  “ ‘The beans were an extra form of currency, if all else failed. It was no trouble to me. The carts brought the cocoa from my father’s warehouse to La Guaira. The sailors stowed it in the hold of the Prins Frederik, and Aniño, our agent, took charge of it in Cadiz and some time later sent me the money. I don’t think I actually saw or smelled the beans.’

  “A little way from the sweating shed I saw a strange sight. About twelve women or girls moving very slowly, and in silence, hardly bending their knees, on four raised platforms. There were three girls on each platform. At the side of each platform was a pitched roof of wooden shingles that looked as though it had slipped away from its platform. The fully sweated cocoa beans were drying on those platforms. They took some days to dry. At the slightest sign of rain the seemingly slipped roofs were to be lifted over the platforms; the beans would rot if they got wet. From time to time the drying beans had to be turned over. That was what the twelve girls were doing. They were ‘dancing’ the cocoa, moving slowly, toes pressing down, through the beans. ‘Dancing’—that was the word used here, Bernard said. At the end of the dancing, after some days, the dried beans would have a slight shine. The girls were not all moving in the same direction, and the slowness, and the different positions of the girls on the raised platforms, the seeming self-absorption of each girl, did suggest a strange, subdued dance.

  “One girl was lame. I asked Bernard about her.

  “He said, ‘Marie Bonavita. She was one of the queens when they were planning the rebellion last year. At night she was a queen. She would take one of the estate mules and ride off to their meeting place. When she was there she was not allowed to walk. She was carried everywhere. Her courtiers wore wooden swords painted blue and yellow. Her king was Samson, a carter on Luzette’s estate. He had his own uniform, with blue facings. Once she had a big loaf baked here in our oven, and she gave a piece to all her followers. They paid two bits each for that. People were very upset when they heard about that mock communion.’

  “ ‘Marie Bonavita. Mary of the Good Life, Mary the Pure.’

  “ ‘My wife gave her the name, and always cherished her. After they had killed everybody, she was going to be one of the Negro queens. It came out at the enquiry. Quite a few of these girls were in it. Most of them got away with a whipping. Twenty-five lashes. Marie Bonavita got a little more than that, and she has to wear that ten-pound iron ring on her right ankle. The blacksmith made it for her. She is all right now. She’s not dangerous. She’s calmed down. She always asks after my wife.’

  “ ‘How long will she have to wear the ring for?’

  “ ‘Forever.’ ”

  “MY EVER dear Genl, Your rebuke gratefully accepted, your good words about friendship striking straight into my Heart. Mr. Turnbull heartbroken by your news, after all the High Hopes, and he came here to sit in the Little Library for a quiet half hour he said and to think of his old dear Friend far away. He exprest Sorrow and Regret for the unkind Words he had passed in my Presence. He said he had since gone into the matter and only three booksellers Accounts not paid up Dulau, White, Evans, and he had told them that if they pressed Gen M too hard their Goods wld be returned to them without any Thanks. He said there was still Hope, all the Manufacturing Towns of England were ready to send supplies to my dear G for a new attempt. But this time with an adequate force of reliable men. So my Gen must be patient.

  “Both Mr. Turnbull and Colonel Rutherfurd are keeping an eye on the politics here with the new ministers. My Gen can imagine the to-ing and fro-ing, and Mr. Rutherfurd says that being on the spot as my dear Sir is and ready to move is more than half the battle. Mr. Turnbull sends a messenger with fifty pounds the first of every month from the money you left with him I never have to ask. It was Mellancolic my dear Sir the old greyhaired man angry with the Gen when things were going well and now grieving for my dear Sir’s misfortune. Colonel Rutherfurd came with Colonel Williamson in a post chaise, such a commotion in Grafton Street, Leander thought it was his Father coming home as he continuly dreams and he was Overjoyed. He stared all the time at Colonel Williamson and the colonel said he was affected seeing the face and actions of my Gen in the boys every movement. I find much Conciliation in my boys in the absence of my dear Sir who must learn to find Patience as we do here.”

  “AFTER ALL these weeks Bernard is still friendly and protective. His estate is like a private domain, and the Leander people and others have to keep their distance. No one hisses me here. I haven’t heard from Rouvray in London. I don’t know what the new politics are like there now. I am ready to wait. It is something I have learned, but I have less to do here than I have ever had, and it is hard to be idle in the middle of this very busy estate routine. Bernard is on his feet from morning till night.

  “Bernard’s wife sometimes has dinner with us. There is something wrong with her bones—Bernard doesn’t say what, and perhaps no one knows. She doesn’t move easily, and it is a strain for her to sit with a stranger and make conversation. She has a pretty young-woman’s face on an old, heavy body. Bernard is devoted to her. They have no children. He loves serving her and looking after her. He loves everything about her—her name, her estate, her fragility, her old-fashioned French. When I first met Bernard in Paris he was a firebrand. That was why I thought him good for my purpose. I never thought of him as a tender person. The tenderness I have seen in him here has probably been brought out by this lady.

  “I have not seen any member of the lady’s family in the house. Nor have I seen anyone like the Baron de Montalembert. The story here is that Bernard’s head was turned by these people of title and he didn’t press at the time of the marriage for all that he might have got. They say that among the Gourvilles he is a kind of subordinate, hardly more than the manager of his wife’s estate. There is more to his position than that, but there is nonetheless something in the story.

  “The people who tell me these things are people to whom Bernard introduced me. Bernard would think of such people as his friends. I don’t think they can see the effect they are having on me when they tell me these stories. I cannot conceal from myself—and I wish the idea hadn’t occurred to me—that through my association with Bernard I have fallen among the second rank of people in this place. That’s not my judgement alone. That’s the way they judge themselves. They instinctively put themselves in the second rank. So far as they are concerned, Hislop and Cochrane and even Briarly are people of authority, way above, out of reach. They tell bloodcurdling stories about Briarly and Cochrane and absurd stories about Hislop’s gluttony, and they think they are being very frank and critical. But, really, they never question the authority of these people.

  “The people they try to damage are people like themselves. As soon as they get you alone—and you have just met them—they tell stories against their friends. So I am nervous of their welcome now. They are so very warm when they meet you; and then you see the other side so soon. I feel that when they offer friendship it is a way not only of claiming me, but also of pulling me down, and when they appear to be sympathizing with my misfortunes they are speaking as good and proper people who have never got above themselves.

  “I feel they will soon start telling stories about me. Sometimes when I am with them I find it hard to remember that when I first came here, and was staying at Government House, I looked upon Hislop as a minor local official.

  “I have been out of touch, on a tour in the countryside, but have now come back and still find no news from London. It was a month-long tour of English-owned estates with Colonel Downie and Miss McLurie and some others. It was good to get out for a little. It was Downie’s idea—he has hopes of serving in my army when the time comes, and his interest makes me feel that things may not be as hopeless in London as I sometimes think. The English are very recent immigrants here, and some of the newer places we went to were very rough. In one place on a Sunday afternoon the whole atelier were
mustered in clean brown-linen clothes in front of the house and they sang English hymns. I couldn’t of course show any interest and this caused a certain amount of bad feeling.

  “When I was on the Leander coming south from the United States I made a point of not showing myself too often to the men, for the sake of discipline. On this small island you see the same people all the time. It is like being on a ship, and I began to feel half-way through the tour that I had shown myself too often here and was getting a little too well known. I felt that my reputation was dwindling, and that people were already criticizing me, as they criticized their friends.

  “At the end of the tour, at a dinner at Miss McLurie’s, Colonel Downie presented me with the journal he had made of the tour. I was touched by the gesture—I had grown so melancholy towards the end of the tour, yet never able to show anything—but as soon as I opened the roughly bound book I saw that the journal was the work of an uneducated man. I saw that I had been taken in by Downie’s manner and accent, having very few British people of quality here to set him against.

  “I looked up. Miss McLurie (who was in her famous transparency, showing her bosom perfectly) was waiting to catch my eye. She said, ‘You know, of course, that he’s not a colonel.’ I didn’t know—I had been cherishing him because of the shine he gave to my own hopes. And I had always thought that he and Miss McLurie were special friends. And he was right there still, one of the guests, at the other end of the table.