by Robert Nye
‘I told you,’ the Indian said. ‘It was fear that made me shout. And fear is too small a word. It was terror. Guattaral does well to remind me of the rope. Yes, the rope inspired me. It struck terror into my soul, and my soul shouted.’
There was no shame in his voice. He spoke flatly, without a hint of emotion. Yet there was that in his aspect which made me regret my taunts, want to comfort him.
‘Then you must have a great soul,’ I said, ‘for its shout was like thunder.’
The Indian rose to his feet. He looked down at me calmly. There was patience in his eyes. There was also pity.
He said: ‘Just now, when I was working in the hold, I learned the lesson for a second time. It was the empty casks that made the most noise. Guattaral, you must understand me. It is the coward that shouts loudest. I am a coward! No god shouts through me, no power, no Golden Man. I, Christoval Guayacunda, shout out my cowardice. I shout like a coward, and I fight like a coward as well. Have you never seen the black rat fight when the snake has bitten it? The rat becomes a fury. Is this courage?’
‘But Palomeque—’ I protested. ‘When you killed him—’ ‘I attacked him from the back,’ the Indian said. ‘The act of the coward. A coward who never dared turn to try to stop that monster’s arm when he whipped me for his pleasure. A coward who waited for the dark, and for the coming of an army which he thought might be led by a god.’ ‘Why did you think I was a god?’
‘Because of your name. Guattaral. Guatavita. You begin to see? I tried to make meaning out of nothing. There is not so great a difference between us as you suppose I, too, have lived by follies. The matter of your godhead is a minor one. My thought that I knew my shout is far more foolish. I see now that when I shouted over Palomeque’s corpse it was a shout of pure panic. The shout of an empty man. The shout of a coward.’ He rapped with his knuckles against his breast. ‘A great soul? Guattaral, I know nothing about the size of my soul. I come of a mountain people. We Chibcha are born with big lungs, deep chests - that’s our stature. The natural shout of a coward, that’s all I have!’
I said quietly: ‘And the death of my son?’
The Indian did not answer.
He looked up at my ensign where it streamed in the wind.
‘I climbed the mast one morning to read the words,’ he said. ‘I could not understand them. Not Spanish. Not English?’
Amore et Virtute? I said. ‘Latin.’
He said nothing. He stood staring at the flag.
‘They mean,’ I said, ‘By love and by courage.
The Indian nodded slowly. He transferred his gaze back to my face.
‘You live by these words?’
‘Yes. I’ve tried to.’
The Indian said: ‘Your son died by them.’
*
Not by an Indian’s shout then.
By my whisper.
*
Love? Courage?
Wretched motto. Wretched knighthood. Wretched words.
Words less than what the gulls scream in the wind.
Have I ever known love? Have I ever shown courage?
My love for the Queen was a game, a long dangerous dance by candlelight, a way up the winding stair. If thy heart fail thee Elizabeth, chattering witty magpie, quick clucking hen, did it never once cross that virgin mind of yours (I swear now before God and the angels that are His Intelligence: you preserved it all your days and nights inviolate from a single real idea, an honest thought!)— Did it never occur to you, stupid Majesty, that I climbed so well because I had no heart at all? I could not fail. I had no heart to fail me. You played your game with me; I mine with you. They were different games. They only looked the same in the steps of the dance. Your game? Now known only to God, and I shall not presume The antics which Eros inspires in us make us strangers to each other. Lady Pembroke, they say, had a secret chamber built onto the stables at Wilton House, from which she could watch my Lord Pembroke’s stallions service his mares, while the servants of that happy household did the same for his wife. Is this comedy or tragedy? I say nothing. It is certainly not love. No more than what happened between us all those times when I danced through the door. And, in our case, how imperfect the lust! It was always the way that you liked it, the way of a bitch high on heat, not wanting the heat to be satisfied, getting pleasure from the howling of her dog, draining him to the dregs, giving nothing. That was your game, God knows why. I could play it. I played it till I bled. (How you laughed that night at Kenilworth when you had blood of me! Was that the ultimate of your desire, King Harry’s daughter? Would you have liked me on the block - but not my head ?) I go too far. Forgive me, sovereign mistress.
I will speak harder of the game I played with you.
It was a common game. The game of power. I rose by your hand. I had what I wanted of you. My knighthood, my monopolies, Durham House. That great house, with its mighty turret, once Leicester’s dwelling— The symbol of my ascendancy! A diamond to live in! More jewels, more jewels. The richest man in the world? Of course not, but the world thought so, or that world which is London. And I let them think, let them say, relished their envy, gloried in my game. They were right. I was proud. I took pride in my titles: Captain of your Guard, Lord Warden of the Stannaries, Lord Lieutenant of Cornwall, Vice Admiral of Devon, Governor of the Island of Jersey, all the rest of it. Not bad for a mere upstart. The crystal Thames at my door, swans like handfuls of pearls poured upon it, my white suit with its diamonds to the value of three score thousand pounds, my shoes so bedecked with gold that just one of them would have ransomed a prince. All this for a few dances. But I danced well. The galliard, the cinquepace, the coranto. The alle- mande, the volte or la volta. None could leap higher than
Sir Walter when they danced the lavolta. (Yes, I’m laughing as much as I weep just to write such a sentence!) And, all the while, of course, our secret dance. Your silk stockings, Elizabeth. Your dresses of dove-coloured satin. And the dancing which followed that dance. The dance for one dancer. I leapt high. I danced well in that too.
Humility was never much my style. I’m too old to start learning it now. Permit me the one final boast, then, bigger than those tracts of land (ten thousand acres) which you gave me in Ireland when the rebels were put down, taller than the tower of Durham House, more weighty than all the great ships I had built with the money which flowed from my monopolies in wine and in cloth and in mining. A boast which may seem like self-disgust, self-defence, self-abasement. But is none of these things.
This last boast is the truth.
I disliked you, Elizabeth.
You understand? There was never love. By the end, there was not even liking.
Worship, yes. Devotion, maybe. A little tumult now and then of infatuation. Those things come easy. Particularly to earthly divinities. I gave them to you as all England did. You were our substitute for the Virgin Queen of Heaven. It was not so very difficult or unpleasant to kneel before your pedestal. To adore. To pray to you - especially when my prayers were answered More titles! More power! A suit of silver armour! To represent my county in the Commons! An increase in my tax drawn from the vintners! Permission to found a colony! (And to call it Virginia, of course, all in your honour, my goddess.) More jewels! More estates to plant in Munster! ‘See, the Knave commands the Queen!’ as Tarleton said. And you: ‘When, Sir Walter, will you cease to be a beggar?’ To which I, with the deepest of bows: ‘Why, when your gracious Majesty ceases to be a benefactor.’ A few more ships now? A small pension for my friend, the poet Spenser? But your Majesty is too kind, too royal-hearted! Your Majesty would do well to beware of her own benevolence. There are those who lack grace to be grateful, young men of no experience, rash themselves, yet greedy for preferments, who mistake your many sweet favours shown towards me. No, no, it does not matter what they say! For myself, I care nothing if mad dogs snap at my heels where I walk in your service. Ah then, for your sake, since you command me, and it is my bounden duty to obey, only yesterday Secretary Cecil breat
hed it in my unwilling ear that one of his agents had overheard my Lord Leicester’s step-son, that puppy, Essex—
Play-acting. Self-seeking romance.
Not love, not affection.
A game of chess in which I let you win. Losing, I won each time. And I think you knew it. I think you knew it and you did not care. How could you care? You, who had no heart to care with. Your father had cut out your heart when he cut off the head of your mother. As for me, I have no such excuse.
You knew that too, Elizabeth: my heartlessness. It pleased you. You relied on it, in fact. You could not have coped with true feeling. In public, the pantomime: the Queen and the courtier, amour courtois, Courtly Love. In private? Why, yet another pantomime, a pantomime of the pantomime, more comic, more tragic, a parody passion in which the unattainable nature of the Queen was perfected by the courtier’s ejaculations. In public, sighs. In private, seed. Both wasted.
I never regretted the waste. Perhaps you guessed that? But over the years, I see now, the sick jest of your virginity made me sour. My fault. My most grievous fault. I got all I wanted from you. God knows, it was little enough! A brief space of bright glory, and then darkness. I do not blame you for the darkness. I blame only myself for glorying in the glory. I don’t hate you. I have nothing to hate you with. I dislike you, Elizabeth Tudor. Dislike, dislike. Which is worse than love or hate. Your stupid puns, your vanity, your tantrums. The way you pupped with your lips if your will was opposed. Spoiled ancient child, you bored me. Your conceit turned my stomach. And you never guessed that, did you, Majesty? I know you didn’t. How could you? I never knew myself until this minute.
Lovers do not dislike. We were not lovers.
Love sees—
Never mind what love sees. How should I know?
I know only what dislike sees clearly through its absent-hearted eyes. Trivial things, shabby details, the dust in the balance of our senses. Dislike is nice. It wears a turned-up nose. Dislike is hard to please. It can neither forget nor forgive the least speck of dandruff. A mean thing itself, it makes much out of others’ imperfections. It leaves a sediment in the soul, a small poison which corrupts the disliker.
You remember the lines I wrote for you after that quarrel in the rose-garden at Nonsuch in Surrey?
But when I found my self to you was true,
I loved myself because my self lovedyou.
You found the poem ‘pretty’. So it was. A pretty lie, a lying piece of poetry. The truth is that I wasn’t true to you then. The truth is I was never true to you. Not in any sense, and least of all in the obvious. In that same rose-garden, the night before, your maid Anne Vavasour gave me twice what her queenly mistress (and mine!) either would not or could not give just once to any man. And the night after, when you went off to Mitcham for the masque, it was my Lady Layton, niece of the Treasurer of your Household, who lay down on her back in a soft bed of rose petals to be pleasured by my eager sharpish thorn. There was no love in these acts. There was lust, and some liking. I call them now to mind without displeasure.
But when I found my self to you untrue,
I disliked my self, because my self dislikedyou.
Less pretty lines? Yes. Broken-backed with their burden of exactitude. I only just penned them, and I’m past licking honesty to make it smooth. We were liars, Elizabeth; we lived a lie. The truth about us will make no poetry.
The truth is I must have disliked you from the start. How else could I ever have started? And how else gone on? Dislike made it possible to use you, while you used me up.
From the start. From that first night in the Privy Lodgings. Dislike. Despair at my own duplicity. Dislike.
Those dainty feet that twinkled in the dance: there was a rank cheese of dirt between their toes.
Those hands you made so much of: milkmaid’s fingers.
Those precious, oh so spotless and never-to-be-penetrated private parts—
Elizabeth, the worms have your maindenhead now.
I trust those worms enjoy what I never wanted.
*
Amore….
By love….
Bess, my wife
27
15 May
Position Report. Latitude: 50° north. Longitude: 18° west wanting four minutes. Distance travelled: 1500 miles from the coast of Newfoundland. Distance to go: 300 miles to Kinsale.
As these figures indicate, the winds have been inconstant when not unfavourable. True, there were spells when we dashed ahead, all canvas billowing, and it seemed the long voyage would soon be over. Our spirits rose with the wind, only to fall again. For then would follow days and nights of stillness, not a breath of air, while we drifted becalmed. At such times even the Gulf Weed took on a sluggish look, as if it dragged at our keel, clawed us down. More like the Sargasso than the Atlantic. Then again, worst of all, about a week ago, a packet of storms from the north and east, which tossed us sideways and backwards, off course. In short, my Destiny goes by fits and starts. There is no sense or mercy to such weather.
Now we are back on course, but the breeze is feeble. We limp along. There’s scurvy among the men.
The Indian has a fever. Refuses medicines.
Sam King is himself again. I thank God for that safe return to taciturnity.
Hemmed in by horizons. The sea slow and dark, vile and sickly. I’d trade all my tobacco for a grassblade. The sight of one green growing thing.
Even the albatross has abandoned us. Our progress too bewildered for his liking.
Crabb the trumpeter died yesterday. Black vomit. Bloody flux. I kept him alive for a week on an elixir of vitriol and vinegar, with salt water, and an electuary of garlic and mustard. No doubt he is better off dead. Mr Jones could scarce recite the words of the burial service for choking on the stink of the wretched corpse. Now I have no one left but Robin to attend me.
I have seen to it that fishing lines have been cast out from the stern, in the hope that we might replenish our dwindling stock of comestibles.
*
Bess! My wife! Bess
I could not end that sentence I began two weeks ago. I do not know if I can end it now.
Amore et Virtute. The wind mocks my flag. One minute it flaps out, the next sees it hang down, limp, miserable, no more than a dishrag. The last time I looked it was wrapped round the flagpole, its colours no more than a blur of blue and silver, its motto tucked away and out of sight. An ill wind, but blowing some good to hide that boast away. The wind mocks my flag. My flag mocks me.
I wrote your name, Bess. I could not go on. I dug a line down the paper with my pen. That jagged savage mark says more than words can. Despairing new punctuation! A man biting his tongue off!
But I still have my tongue in my head, and my head on my shoulders. The tongue will not wag on this subject. It cleaves fast to the parched roof of my mouth. I write slowly and reluctantly, in other, words. And yet I must write, shall say something. I owe it to you, to myself, to us, don’t I? What I say, what I write, might well be wrong. If ever you read this, Bess, then remember that. I no longer speak of’the truth’. I cannot believe in it. There is no ‘the truth’. There are truths. I am trying to tell them.
This little, this much, I have learned by some study of my own confusion. During the fourteen days when I could not write, my spirit hanging skewered on that sentence which seemed unfinishable, I went back and read over all these pages. Having stopped myself from writing, I started reading. Incapable of speech, at last I listened. What I read, what I heard, I don’t like. In fact, I detest it. Every word.
It is not just the contradictions that dismay me. God knows, these are bad enough, and anyone who came to this book looking for a narrative would have gone away long ago, convinced that its writer was mad. Water is right, they’d say. Queen Elizabeth was inspired to call him that. This man has no shape, no form, no meaning. He doesn’t know his own mind from this day to that. In one breath he says he worshipped something (that same Queen, for instance); in another, he�
��ll be telling you he noticed her feet stank in bed. Or, to take a plainer matter, consider these damned gold
mines He starts out all assurance that he knows of their
existence; not belief, not supposition, he convinces me (though apparently not Francis Bacon) that he knows exactly where they are, that he can put his fingers on them on the map. He goes on and on about this. He damns and dismisses his companions as cowards and traitors because they fly from him, not sharing his faith in Guiana as a treasure-land of gold. But what happens eventually? Why, the old fool denies himself! He decides that there isn’t any gold; worse, he declares that in his secret heart he always knew it! Drunken Indians misled him, he says. They played upon his need to believe in these mines. And how does he arrive at this mighty conclusion? By believing (so he tells us) every word that drops from the lips of another Indian! Not a drunken one, this time. No, sir. Much better. One addicted to the chewing of some drug!
Very well. Never mind this imagined reaction of some imaginary reader. What about Carew? My son, is all that I have written no more than solid proof that your father is a fool, self-deluded when not deceived by others, credulous, querulous, a blind idiot, quite possibly a lunatic? No giant, I told you. Unnecessaary disclaimer! A mental and emotional dwarf….?
Listen carefully. I was always my own cruellest critic. If this were some mere story-book, some adventure, some fiction, some romance, I could go back and make it consistent. I could cut out contradictions, confusions, especially those that shame me, its principal ‘character’. But I let them all stand. I change nothing.
Not a sentence, not a word, not a comma.
Let it stand as it is. Right down to that long jagged line.
Neither pride nor humility dictates this. I detest what these pages reveal. I must learn to accept it.