A Way in the World

by Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul

  “I had no half-feelings or misgivings now. I knew I had seen things through as far as they could go. The unimaginable moment came when I realized that I no longer had a side, and that apart from personal dependants there was no one with me. My thoughts then were all of Grafton Street. The territory I controlled or was safe in was shrinking day by day. Soon it was reduced to the city of Caracas and the mountain road to the coast, to La Guaira. A few square miles. Think of that! Two or three years after I deserted I used to present myself to foreign governments as the potential controller of a territory stretching from the source of the Mississippi, all the land to the west of the river, down to Cape Horn.

  “A British warship was waiting at La Guaira for me, to take me to the British island of Curaçao. I sent my three boxes of papers ahead with a loyal follower. I took the precaution to address those boxes not to me, in case they were captured, but to a British firm on the island. I did the same with the twenty-two thousand silver pesos and twelve hundred ounces of gold I took from the Caracas Treasury. It was with a perverse pleasure that right at the end I assumed the character my enemies gave me. My feeling was that this was owed me, for all that I had done for the country, and for the forty years I had been cut off from my family fortune. But I didn’t manage to board H.M.S. Sapphire, as you know. It sailed with my possessions to Curaçao. My information is that the firm to which they were addressed claimed the money as their own, and were very happy to recover this fraction of what they had advanced through me to the revolutionary government in Caracas. So that account, too, has been settled all round.”

  Miranda makes a signal to someone outside. Captain Lara, the head of the special guard, comes and stands outside the open door, and Level de Goda knows it is time to leave.

  • • •

  LATER THAT night, when the town was quite asleep, Level was awakened by Meléndez, the captain-general, in whose quarters he was staying. The captain-general was formally dressed, with his officer’s jacket, and he carried the polished baton of his rank.

  He said, “It’s very hot, Andrés. Put on some clothes and come and walk with me by the sea.”

  They walked a short way along the sea wall and stopped by a pier. Ships’ lights were reflected in the water of the harbour and masts were dark against the sky. A night breeze blew off the sea. The sails of one ship were bent for sailing. A small boat rocked near the pier steps. It wasn’t empty: there were two oarsmen and two soldiers in it. The soldiers got out now and stood to attention on the steps. Along the sea wall then appeared Captain Lara and Miranda arm in arm. Behind them walked a Negro carrying a small wooden trunk on his head. Level recognized the Negro: he came from the inn that for five months had been preparing Miranda’s meals.

  Meléndez said, “The ship is waiting, General. It only remains to say goodbye. Lieutenant Ibáñez has given his word that no restraint will be placed on you during your voyage to Cadiz.”

  Miranda said, “No chains?”

  “You will be treated with honour.”

  Miranda said, “I give thanks to God that I am going to Europe. Captain-General, I will never forget this kindness you have done me.”

  He embraced Meléndez and then, before being handed down into the boat by the soldiers, he embraced Level. Level remembered the embrace as the embrace of a friend.

  LEVEL WROTE his memoirs—and gave that little formal farewell speech to Miranda—thirty-eight years later, when he was seventy-four. This was in 1851, when, as Level said, the Venezuelan revolution or civil war was still going on after forty-one years, and seemed set to go on for another forty-one. The memoirs might have been one of the casualties of the war. They were never absolutely finished, and (perhaps also because of Level’s politics) were not published until 1933, and then only in a Venezuelan learned journal.

  Level would have known that Miranda had died in jail in Cadiz just about thirty months after he left Puerto Rico. He wouldn’t have known that Miranda had died painfully, over four months, racked by one affliction after the other, violent fits, typhus, and towards the end by an illness that made him haemorrhage from the mouth. He was buried unceremoniously, lifted away from the hospital of the jail in the mattress and sheets of his deathbed, and in the clothes in which he had died, and set down with it all in his grave. The men who took him away then came back and gathered up his other clothes and possessions and burnt them. Knowledge of the spot where he was buried was soon lost.

  Miranda’s second son, Francisco, was seven when Miranda was in Puerto Rico. Level might not have known that this Francisco, his father’s namesake, left London when he was grown up and went to fight in the South American civil wars. He was executed in Colombia in 1831 (the year after Bolívar’s death), when he was twenty-five, in one of the many purges of the war.

  Level remembered, very delicately, Miranda’s concern about a lady in London, to whom he would have liked to send money, and to whom, through Meléndez, he sent a letter about household matters. Level would not have known that in 1847, four years before he began to write his memoirs, Sarah had died in the house in Grafton Street. She was seventy-three. She had lived in the same house for forty-eight years, and for the last thirty-seven of those years she had been without Miranda. The census of 1841 records two women servants in the house, and it is possible that Miranda’s library—valued at nine thousand pounds in 1807, with debts to booksellers of five thousand pounds—provided her in the end with a fair income.

  It would have been a slow fading away for her. At the time of her death Miranda, once so important and busy in London, was hardly a name. His three boxes of papers had apparently been lost; and, as with the corpses at Pompeii, where Miranda should have been in historical accounts there was a void. Sarah vanished with him. The date of her death, and even the fact that she had kept on living at Grafton Street, was uncovered by a researcher from the Venezuelan embassy in London only in 1980.

  Miranda’s papers were found more than a hundred years after his death. In the second decade of this century an American scholar, William Robertson, had the idea that (though the money and the gold had been seized) Miranda’s papers might have been sent on from Curaçao to London, to the appropriate British minister; and that they might subsequently have become part of the minister’s own archive. The appropriate minister in 1812 was Lord Bathurst, secretary of state for war and the colonies. In 1922 the sixty-three volumes of Miranda’s papers were identified by Robertson in the Bathurst library in Cirencester in Gloucestershire. Perhaps a speck or two of Venezuelan dust still adhered to them from the two three-hour journeys they had made more than a hundred years before on the cart road between Caracas and La Guaira. The papers were acquired by the Venezuelan government, and then made their last journey to Caracas.

  The first volumes, heavily edited, with many things suppressed or omitted, were published in Caracas in 1924. The final volumes were published in Havana in 1950 for the bicentenary of Miranda’s birth. These Havana volumes, in which the papers appear just as Miranda preserved them, the ephemeral mixed up with more formal things, without editorial gloss or interference, seem still warm with the life of the man.

  CHAPTER 9

  Home Again

  THE FIRST black African country I went to was in East Africa. I was in my early thirties. I was loosely connected with the local university, and I lived in a little low bungalow in the landscaped grounds of a government compound on the edge of the town. Most of the people in the compound were expatriates—mostly British, with a few Americans—serving the government in various ways. Some were directly employed by the government; others had been sent out (like me) by foreign foundations or aid agencies.

  The country was newly independent and was thought of as revolutionary, but the compound still had a colonial feel. It made me think of the expatriate compounds of the Trinidad oilfields, and it probably had been laid out at about the same time, between the wars.

  The bungalows and flats in both places were quite modest. It was the setting—the m
any acres of landscaped grounds—that made them special, suggesting separateness and privilege. The land seemed to have been scraped clean of haphazard local bush. There were no internal fences, no middens that showed, no junk, no obvious patches of waste ground. The open spaces between houses were grassed. Every local tree and shrub, however common outside, cassia, coconut, flamboyant, hibiscus, seemed in this stripped enclosure to have an extra, exotic beauty.

  The idea of privilege—or protection: almost the same thing—was not wrong. The East African compound was like a little welfare state within the country. There was a whole side of life we didn’t have to worry about. A special department looked after the flats and bungalows. It did repairs and replacements and attended to complaints. And though it wasn’t part of the official deal or issue, nearly everyone who came soon got a servant or houseboy who was used to the ways of the compound.

  I was self-conscious with these servants in the beginning. I was embarrassed by the idea itself: African servants in East Africa—settler country in parts, still, and safari country as well—came with too many associations from books and films. But then I saw that most people on the compound, even the servants, were living unnatural lives. Everyone had been presented with a style—in some ways as formal as that of an Oxford college—that couldn’t exist outside. After a time the idea came to me that it might have always been like that on the compound, even in colonial days.

  Because the compound was on the edge of the town and there were no buses or taxis, I had to have a car. And because I couldn’t drive, or didn’t trust myself with a car, I had to have a driver. It would have been convenient if one man could have done the driving for me and the cooking and the looking after the bungalow, but in the compound it didn’t work like that. I had to have a professional driver.

  Just after breakfast the man would come, respectable and neat in creased trousers and clean shirt and shining shoes, and ask about the day’s programme. Most of the time I didn’t have a going-out programme. I was working in my bungalow. So he would sit in the kitchen and wait, at first looking up whenever I passed the open doorway, then conscientiously looking down. He took later to bringing comic books, magazines, and then proper books to the kitchen; he wrote letters. Sometimes in the morning I sent him home for the day, and then a few hours afterwards I wanted to get out. Compound life, with all its privileges, had its complications.

  The servant and the driver had been found for me by Moses Lubero, who worked as a houseboy for a young English couple some houses away. Lubero was a heavy, slow man with bright, rolling eyes. I sometimes saw him with clothes-pegs in his mouth hanging out baby clothes. Baby clothes! Lubero was more important than that. He was said to control the houseboys on the compound. When he was out and about and he heard or saw my car coming he did a slow swivel of the neck and a very slow roll of his eyes to consider the car and me and the driver. It was as though there was something wrong with the muscles of his neck; but it might just have been his way of letting us know that he was keeping an eye on things.

  He wore the standard houseboy whites: a short-sleeved shirt and shorts. From a distance they made him look like a fat boy. As you got nearer, his appearance changed: the fat boy wasn’t a boy at all. He was a middle-aged man who had seen much; there were deep lines from his cheekbones to the corners of his mouth, and frown lines on his forehead. The paunch—creasing the waistband of his white shorts—didn’t suggest softness. It suggested strength, authority, self-regard. Close to, he didn’t look friendly; he had an air of tribal authority. His surname indicated that he came from the centre of the continent; a grandfather or someone further back might have followed an Arab or Indian trader down to the coast and become beached there.

  To control the houseboys on the compound was to have power. The jobs were better paid than comparable jobs in the town, and every bungalow or flat had well-maintained “quarters,” a servant room; many people in the town would have liked those quarters. There was also, with expatriates coming and going, a whole system of trade in the cast-off goods. The houseboys were controlled in other ways. It was Lubero who arranged everything when my own servant bought a broken-down old bicycle (borrowing through Lubero to do so, and also buying ill-fitting white-rimmed plastic shades to go with his new bicycle style).

  THE COUNTRY was a tyranny. But in those days not many people minded. Africa had just begun to be independent, and the reputation of the president was that of a good man using his authority only to build socialism.

  There was a section of the expatriates who saw themselves as serving this cause. It was one of the things that had attracted them to the country. They liked their closeness to power, and their simple but protected lives on the compound; though it worried them that they had to have the houseboys—they talked about that. Some of them even liked the idea of the shortages and austerity outside, and the disciplining of the people. They thought it was what had to come before things became better. They thought it right that people in the villages should be prevented from migrating to the capital. In this way the town didn’t grow, people were protected from the corruptions of town life, and it was easier for villages to be collectivized and returned to the socialism of traditional African ways. I think now that for these expatriates compound life would have provided something of what ashram life or the life of the religious commune provided for others elsewhere: liberation, new rigidities, a new self-awareness and self-cherishing.

  Moses Lubero controlled the houseboys, and Richard kept an eye on the expatriates. Richard was English, a slender man in his thirties who used an ivory cigarette-holder. He invited people to dinner in his apartment when he felt they were straying. He worked for the planning department, but he was better known on the compound for the letters he wrote to foreign newspapers and magazines when they published critical things about the country and the president. He wrote not as an official but as a private person. He wrote of socialism as of an austere faith that was its own reward. He might say, “Why shouldn’t a poor African country be allowed to develop its own brand of socialism?” And he might say of the president: “He may not leave his country richer than he found it. But there isn’t only one way of measuring success, and this new man of Africa will have the satisfaction of having ruled according to his own high principles.”

  Richard had an easy, self-mocking manner which made you feel that he was half on your side and that you could joke with him about what he had written. You couldn’t. He was humourless; he simply couldn’t take in a point of view that was different from his own.

  One afternoon—I had sent the driver away for the day—I took the car out, to practise. I went on the airport road. It was the least busy of the roads around the capital. It went through no villages and it had a nice long straight stretch. On this stretch after some miles I saw a black-uniformed man on a motorcycle coming down towards me. And then I saw another uniformed man on a motorcycle. The men on the motorcycles were gesticulating. They appeared even to be half standing up on their bikes. When they came nearer I saw they were gesticulating at me. It became clear that they were furious with me, and it also became clear that they intended to drive me off the road. I pulled over on to the verge, without accident. Behind the motorcyclists was a big black car, and in the back seat were two men in off-the-shoulder African cloths. One of the men was the president. There was a smaller car behind, and behind that another motorcycle.

  A few days later I saw Richard walking in his usual brisk way in the compound.

  I said, “The other day the president drove me off the road.”

  The fixed, meaningless smile left his face. He became severe. “You are making this up. You know you are making this up. The president doesn’t do that sort of thing.”

  “That’s what I thought. But then I had never met him on the road before.”

  “You can write what you want, of course. You have that freedom and you know it. The South African exiles here will certainly be grateful to you for your satire.”

 
; He spoke satirically himself. The country offered ready asylum to political exiles from South Africa, and in the compound we had a number of them. They made a distinct, depressive element. A few of them were black; many more were white. The whites were unhappy, damaged people. They might have been damaged by defeat, or it might have been that exile had brought out the melancholy or incompleteness that had always been there in their natures, below their political cause. I had never known revolutionaries before, and I suppose I had theatrical ideas of what they would be like. These people on the compound—whom I saw from a distance, and whom I found hard to get to know—were not defiant or fierce or full of faith. They were more like people who had been dealt a bad hand, had taken a wrong turning, and who would somehow always be out of reach, always dealing with their private demons.

  THE COUNTRY was full of a special hate. It was for the small Asian or Indian community who, as elsewhere in East Africa, were mainly traders and shopkeepers and made a closed group.

  There would have been ancient connections between the coast and India. It was an East African pilot who showed Vasco da Gama the way to India. The Victorian explorer Speke even published a map, said to be based on old Hindu texts, giving Sanskrit names for the rivers, lakes and mountains of Uganda. There would have been an Indian element in the mixed Swahili culture of the coast But people didn’t carry this kind of history in their heads; and the Asian community that was hated was the more recent one that had come over and settled in the half century or so of British rule.