It can only be the Spanish governor. Is he a captive? Has some act of war therefore occurred? Or is he coming to parley, to offer a deal, nobleman to nobleman?
In the general’s cabin, hot in the afternoon, with the smell of the sea and the estuary mingling with the smell of sickness, and the small bleached curtains glowing in the light, the old man bestirs himself and begins to dress, to receive the governor. The surgeon helps him. A clean shirt for the general: it smells of the brackish water in which it has been washed. Then the two men go out together to the light on the deck.
The launch gets nearer.
“Is it Palomeque?” the old man asks.
“It’s an Indian,” the surgeon says. “They’ve dressed him up in Spanish clothes. The governor’s, or some other nobleman’s. The clothes are far too big for him.”
The old man falls silent. The sails slacken, the launch pulls alongside. The Indian looks up, all face in the too-big clothes. A soldier from the launch climbs half-way up the ship’s ladder. A second soldier passes him things from the launch.
The man on the ladder says, “For the admiral. Captain Keymis’s compliments. A basket of oranges and lemons.” He passes the fruit, already shrivelling, to a musketeer on the deck. “A roll of tobacco. A parcel of papers.”
The surgeon takes the papers and glances at them. He says, “Spanish papers.”
“A tortoise,” the man on the ladder says, as that creature, its shell warm from the sun, its lower part cool from the bilge water where it’s been resting, is passed up. “And Don José himself.”
This is the Indian. He is pushed up the ladder. The clothes are the clothes of a man a foot taller, and they are not as fine as they appeared from a distance. They are flecked with mud and stained in places with old blood and bilge water; sweat stains under the arms show purple on the blue silk. The Indian is uncertain. He fixes frightened eyes on the old man with the white beard.
WE STAY with those Indian eyes. When we next consider them they are calmer, even self-possessed. Let us stand back a step or two. We see then that the possessor of those eyes is now wearing English Jacobean clothes that fit. He is sitting at a heavy dark table in a high, bare room. It is cool in the room, though it is sunny outside. The solid walls are unevenly plastered and the sloping projections catch the dust here and there.
A year has passed. In spite of Don José’s English clothes, we are in New Granada, back in the New World and South America, and Don José is giving evidence to a priest, Fray Simón, who is writing a history of the Spanish New World.
Fray Simón is reading back from his notes.
“ ‘And witness says that after these gifts were handed over, the surgeon asked for news. A letter was handed over to the general. And when the letter was half read, the general, whose name at that time witness thought to be Milor Guaterai, looked at the deck and the sea and the sky, and then at the birds flying above the rock known as The Soldier, and then he looked at the deck again and began to cry silently, in the presence of all, for the death of his son.’ And so?”
Don José says, “The surgeon came forward to support the old man, and the old man allowed himself to be held.”
EYES ALONE now, we will go down the fast-flowing channel from the Gulf to the main river. The water and the banks are all that we will see. We are travelling at the speed of the ships, and we are seeing (without interference, with the help of this camera’s eye) the once aboriginal waters down which Captain Keymis’s four ships passed a full year before, with four hundred heavily armed men, among them a section of pike commanded by the old man’s son. Big forest birds fly ahead. The white sky yellows, then glows red; the muddy water turns violet in the fading light. Night falls on the river and the banks; the bush begins to sing. We slow down. The expedition has drawn near to the Spanish settlement.
Here we begin to fit pictures to the words of Don José. The narrative is now his.
“When the people of San Thomé heard that the English were coming they were frightened. When they heard that all those ships had anchored outside the river they began to take away their goods from their rancherías to the island in the middle of the river.”
“Rancherías?” Fray Simón said. “Shacks, huts? Do you mean that? Were they living in huts?”
“Only the governor lived in a house, and everything was in that house. The jail, the Royal Treasury, everything. The Treasury was full of people’s goods. The governor, Don Palmita, was a very hard man.”
“Palomeque. Pa-lo-me-que.”
“The governor took people’s goods when they broke the law. The people didn’t have money to pay the fines. Don Palomeque didn’t like people trading with the foreigners.”
“Don Diego. Don Diego Palomeque.”
“Don Diego said this kind of trading was against the king’s laws, and he was determined to put an end to it. So he took people’s goods. He was no respecter of persons. In the Treasury in his house in San Thomé there was a lot of silver plate belonging to the wife of the previous governor. I mention this because I used to work for the family. In fact, the previous governor was my father. Don Fernando Berrio. You can look at my face and see that I am Spanish.”
Fray Simón said, “Not especially.”
“I am just telling you what people say. My mother was an Indian woman, of course. People didn’t like this new gov ernor, Don Diego, and if he didn’t have those soldiers from Puerto Rico with him, they would have killed him in Trinidad or San Thomé. He was coming and going between the two places and, even with the soldiers, there were many places on the river where he could have had an accident. I am not giving away any secrets if I say that some people were happy to hear that the English were coming. One Indian servant actually said so in Don Diego’s hearing. The governor had the foolish man whipped in the open ground we called the plaza and then had him chained up in the jail in the governor’s house. This happened about four days before the English came.
“The next day news was brought of the size of the English force. People said four hundred men, five hundred, seven hundred men were coming. At nightfall all the vecinos or people of the little town left their rancherías and took all the food they had and went to the island in the river. My people did that too. They left me behind just in case something happened when the English came and I was in a position to recover the silver plate from the governor’s house. The next evening, or the evening after that, the soldiers from Puerto Rico deserted. There were about fifty of them. More than enough to frighten the vecinos of San Thomé, but not enough to face the English. They went to the island where the townspeople had gone.
“There were only twelve people in the town the next morning. I counted them. There was the chained Indian in the governor’s house. There was myself. There were three Indian servant women. Two Negroes, left by their owners to fend for themselves. A crippled priest, and a Portuguese boy. There was the governor, and there were two captains with him, Captain Monje and Captain Erenetta.”
Fray Simón said, “Arias Nieto. That was the name that came out at the official enquiry.”
“The governor, Don Diego, behaved like a man. I have to say it. There were only the three of them who were soldiers, and he behaved as though they were three hundred. He was a big, stout man, the biggest Spaniard I had seen. I had never seen him do any manual work. Now he showed how much he could do. He and the two captains worked from first light to fortify the redoubt the soldiers from Puerto Rico had begun to create around some rocks just outside the plaza. He and the captains dug. They got the two Negroes to dig with them, and they made me dig with them as well. So there were six of us digging. Six men can dig a lot in a day. They had about a dozen muskets and they were preparing three lines of defence. We cut down branches and created barricades in front of each musket position. In the outer line the musket positions were far apart, about forty yards. In the second line they were closer, and in the last line they were very close, just inside the plaza. They set up rests for their muskets, and in so
me rests they placed primed muskets.
“They didn’t have a chance, but they were going to do all that they could. And they were working with such a will that it was only in the afternoon, when it was very hot and quiet, that I began to think that they were really dead men, that this was the last day of their life. I must tell you I admired them then, and I began to work with a will like theirs. The Indian women prepared food for us and brought us water, and the governor didn’t forget the crippled priest. We worked right through the day. A silent day, a deserted plaza, and we were all so active. The Portuguese boy acted as scout and watched the river.
“When there were two hours of daylight left, the governor said they had done as much as they could do. For an hour or so he and the two others practised running from musket position to musket position, and withdrawing from one line to another. Then they ate their last meal, and the fires were put out. The sun went down, and after the silence of the day the forest began to roar. We waited. I don’t know how long. I don’t think it would have been possible for the whistles or signals of the Portuguese boy to be heard with all that forest noise. And then we heard four musket shots. Just four, very close together. There was nothing more after that. Just the forest. In the morning, when it was silent again, the English soldiers came into the square. They carried very big lances.
“I was in the Berrios’ house. The soldiers had no trouble finding me. They found the three Indian women, too, hiding in one of the rancherías. And the Portuguese boy, and the two Negroes. They began to drive us very roughly to the governor’s house, shouting at us in English and what they thought was Spanish.
“ ‘You,’ they said to me. ‘Castellano’? I wanted to tell them that my father was the previous governor, but I didn’t know how to say that. So I just made signs to say yes. This made them very angry. One of the soldiers unhooked a coil of rope from his belt, and I think they would have hanged me there and then if the Negroes hadn’t said, ‘No castellano, no castellano. Indio, indio. Indian, Indian.’
“There were many soldiers in the governor’s house. In one room, the office, we saw a man with bandages and blood on his torn clothes. He had been wounded by a musket shot. In another room, the one with the Royal Chest, we saw two dead men laid out. We were taken to the main bedroom. There we found the English commander. He was an old man, very tall, as tall as the Spanish governor, but very thin. He had a bad eye. As commander he carried a polished stick about a yard long. He said through an interpreter to the women, ‘Some Spanish men died during the night. We want you to tell us who they are.’
“They took us to the redoubt, where we had done so much digging in the red earth the day before. The ground had been scuffed by the English soldiers’ feet, but you could still see the branches we had cut and where we had dragged them on the ground. Don Palmita, Erenetta, and Captain Monje had died at musket positions in the outer line. All that work, and the fight had lasted only a minute. Four musket shots. One man had fired twice. With those four shots they had killed two English soldiers and wounded one. Only one shot had missed. And then all three of them had died. You could see where the big English lances had thrown aside the branches. I don’t think they were expecting the English to come so far up the river with those lances. Erenetta and Captain Monje still had their clothes, but they had already stripped the clothes off Don Palmita. He was naked and dirty and the blood was black on him and there was a gash from the top of his head down to his teeth.
“I told the commander who the dead men were. He changed colour when he heard that the naked man was the governor. The women were crying at the sight of the dead men, and when the English commander asked them to bury the dead men they said they didn’t know how to bury people. I don’t know what rule the commander was following. I don’t know why he wanted the women to bury the dead men. He didn’t ask me. He didn’t ask the Negroes. When the women said they didn’t know how to bury dead men, he looked as though he didn’t know what to do. Then he said to the women through the interpreter, ‘All right, all right. Cook for us. If you cook for us, nothing will happen to you. What can you cook for us?’ The women said they had only maize, and there wasn’t much of that because the vecinos had stripped the fields and taken most of the maize to the island.
“They cooked the maize, boiling it with some herbs, and the commander asked me and the other Indian, the one chained up in the house, to eat with them in the governor’s house. They treated us with a lot of honour. I wasn’t expecting that. The man who had been chained they called Señor Don Pedro. It wasn’t his name. It was like a joke with them.
“All the time there were those two dead bodies in the Treasury room. One of them was the son of the English general. And outside were those three other bodies. When people die they should disappear. A dead body is like a weight on the earth, a weight on the soul. Later that day, when everyone was less tired, some of the English soldiers went out to the dead men, tried to compose their limbs, tied the bodies together and buried them in one of the holes we had dug the day before. That felt better. The crippled priest said some prayers in his house.
“The next day they buried the two men stretched out in the governor’s house. They brought shrouds from the ships and wrapped the bodies in them. They placed the bodies on planks and some men carried the planks round the open bare ground of the plaza, in front of the shacks and the thatched adobe church. The commander walked alone just behind the planks. It looked strange, but again I didn’t know what rule they were following. Some of the soldiers marched in formation with their flags pointing down. Others held their big lances in their right hands, the points sloping up, the wooden hafts dragging on the ground behind them. Twice they walked round the plaza. Then the bodies were buried in another hole we had dug the day before, not far from the other.
“After this, the commander began to look for gold. He dug up the ground in every ranchería. Once for a whole morning he had the Portuguese boy whipped back and forth through the settlement. He thought the Portuguese boy knew where the gold was. It might have been because of the boy’s accent. Then he left the poor boy alone. Day after day he had the soldiers dig. One night he went out of the settlement. In the morning he came back with some sand. He showed it to me. ‘Is this gold, Don José?’ He became demented. His bad eye flickered out of control more and more. He went up and down the river. Once he went too near the island and the soldiers from Puerto Rico opened up and killed six of his soldiers.
“Every day now, in little incidents like this, he began to lose men. Every day there were burials, and not always with their rules. Once for many days he went up the river in a launch. He travelled in this way for two hundred miles. He took me with him. He had said before we started that he knew this stretch of the river well, but it soon was clear that the river here was quite new to him. He was terrified that the people on the banks might shoot poisoned arrows. Every time he saw a rock or coloured earth or sand he wanted to know whether it contained gold. But he never wanted to stay too long on the banks because of his fear of the arrows. When we came back to the settlement we found that one of the ships had gone away.
“It was strange. I had hated Don Diego, the governor. Then I grieved for him. Now I began to grieve for the man who had killed Don Diego. He was frightened and unhappy. He held on to his polished stick but he no longer knew what to do. The soldiers were sick and dying. We had no food. His men had no regard for him. He was frightened that more ships might desert. That was when he decided to send me in the launch to the river mouth to meet the general.
“He sat in the bedroom of the governor’s house and wrote a letter. He said I was not to tell the general about the death of his son. The general should read it first in his letter. Then he began to put things in the launch. A lot of papers from the Treasury, where the general’s dead son had lain for two nights and a day. The oranges and lemons. The only gold things in San Thomé. There were some trees in the settlement. The roll of tobacco. There was tobacco everywhere. That was what p
eople grew to trade with the foreign ships. If only it was food no one would have gone hungry. Then he thought of the tortoise. He would have liked to send the general an armadillo, he said. On the river one day in 1595 he and the general and everybody else had feasted on armadillo. The tortoise wasn’t food, but the general was interested in these strange animals. I was to keep the tortoise cool.
“And then, just before I left, the idea came to him to dress me up in the clothes they had stripped off the dead governor. They were pretty clothes, but they were too big for me. That made him laugh. I thought it was a strange time for a joke like that. But he was probably following some rules of his own. It was like the time he and his officers unchained the Indian in the governor’s house, dressed him up, and called him Señor Don Pedro, and then wanted him and me to sit and eat boiled maize with them in the governor’s house, while the three dead men were unburied outside, and the two dead men were lying in the other room.”
EYES ALONE again, we move down river. But now we are looking at what the launch is leaving behind. We are never far from the northern bank, and we are moving fast, at about four or five miles an hour. At a certain stage we leave the main river and turn into a channel that flows north. We slow down. The current no longer drives us. We depend on wind and tack from side to side, until the banks vanish. We are out in the wide Gulf again, and soon we see the heavy brown pelicans and the slender frigate birds flying over The Soldier.
Half-way through these pictures, as we consider water and flat land, green and brown and yellow, we hear the voice of Fray Simón, the historian.
“You are now a well-travelled man. Better travelled than most people in the world. You’ve been to England. You’ve seen some of its great cities and great buildings. You’ve seen things I haven’t seen. The spire of Salisbury, the great cathedrals of Winchester and Southwark, the Tower of London that they say Julius Caesar built. You’ve met important men. You’ve been to Spain, too. You’ve been to Toledo and Salamanca. You’ve been to Seville. You’ve seen the galleons from the Americas on the river there. And now you’re back here, in New Granada, where you were born. Don José in name and deed.”
A Way in the World Page 19