A Way in the World

by V. S. Naipaul

  “It was the doing of Sir Guateral, the English general. He could have condemned me with a word.”

  “Why did he like you?”

  “He never said.”

  “Did he see in you some resemblance to the son he had lost? Was it because you were among the last people to see his son?”

  “We never talked about it. He never asked me about his son.”

  “Did you know the general was going to die in a few months?”

  “I didn’t know, and I’m glad I didn’t know. It would have been too much for me after all that had happened. And I was full of my own grief.”

  “Because of all the dead men? Or grief because you were being taken away?”

  “It had been with me for some weeks. But it was only on the launch that I began to understand what I was feeling. I wasn’t a Guiana man. I was from New Granada, and had made that long journey down the river with the Berrios. I always had the hope that I would be able to pick my way back home from Guiana. When the settlement was abandoned, and the vecinos took refuge on the island in the river, I felt the world had changed for me. I felt I had lost touch with things. On the launch this grief grew and grew. Sometimes a child playing in a puddle after rain gets suddenly frightened by the reflected sky. I was like that. I felt I was falling into the sky, falling into the sea. I hardened my heart. And then, from being frightened by that idea of falling into the sky, I began to hold on to it. It was the only comfort I had. The thought of my doom lifted me above people. I thought I would acknowledge no one. Even if people laughed at me, or smiled at me, because of the clothes I was wearing, I wasn’t going to smile back.”

  “Was this the face you showed to the general when you went aboard his ship?”

  “Yes.”

  “You were a lucky man. He had fallen out of love with the Indians. He thought they’d let him down.”

  “As I said, he could have condemned me with a word.”

  “It may be your demeanour impressed him. Perhaps he saw his fate in yours.”

  “He didn’t look at me at first. And I was thinking about the birds above the rock they called The Soldier. Then he began to read the letter, and he cried for his son, and the surgeon held him. It was only after this that I felt his eyes fall on me.”

  “Of course, you were the only thing from Guiana he was taking back to England.”

  “That was what people said later. At the time I just felt his old man’s eyes falling on my face, and I felt at ease with him.”

  “I was hoping to get something else from you, I must confess. My feeling now is that as an historian I should deal as simply as possible with the moment of news. I should present only the facts.”

  We consider again the frigate birds floating high over The Soldier, and, lower down, flying in well-spaced lines above the sea glitter, the awkwardly shaped pelicans (like miniature airborne caravels), heavy-bodied, heavy-beaked, with no balancing length of tail.

  Over this comes the voice of Fray Simón, reading aloud as he writes his history.

  “So their joy at the death in battle of the valiant Don Diego Palomeque de Acuña was well watered by the weeping that began in their ships for the death of their own general’s son.”

  WE FOCUS again on Don José: his confident face, his fine Jacobean tunic. He takes up his narrative again.

  “When the general was a little restored, he gave orders that I was to be taken to his cabin and given some of his own clothes. So at once my position on the ship changed. People who had looked at me with irony stopped doing so. Even my name they pronounced in a different way. The general’s cabin was small, but the hangings were richer than anything I had seen. The attendant who took me to the cabin opened a chest that was battened down to the floor, took out some clothes, and asked me to choose. The general was closer to my size. It was a relief to get out of the Spanish governor’s clothes. They were the fine clothes he had put on for the battle. The blood had turned black on them, and the red San Thomé mud, from that night of the battle, had dried to powder. They gave off the smell of death and the forest, river water and wet old leaves, and, faintly, as if from a long time before, the smell of the sweet root the governor had kept in his own clothes chest to perfume his clothes and keep out insects. I folded the clothes as neatly as I could and placed them on the lid of the chest.

  “I dressed in my new clothes, with the help of the attendant, and was wondering about going outside when the general and the surgeon came in. They made me understand that I was to sleep in the cabin. A hammock would be set up for me. I was to be the general’s personal servant. The general asked whether I knew about waiting on people, and I told him that I had been in the household of the previous governor of Trinidad and Guiana. I didn’t tell him that the governor was my father.

  “My first duty was to serve him his dinner. His cook had died on the voyage out, and he ate what the ship’s galley provided. It was a maize gruel that day. He hardly touched it. Later he and the surgeon walked, and he played with the tortoise. In the cabin in the evening we didn’t talk. He didn’t want to be alone. He wanted my company, but he wanted me to stay a stranger. At some time in the night he got out of his cotton hammock. He wanted to eat something. He ate a stewed prune, from a barrel he had brought out from England. I didn’t like the way the prune or the barrel looked, after he had taken out the cover, and I thought the smell very unpleasant. He said it was the only thing he could eat easily, after his sickness on the voyage, and he had very few left. He said the last few apples he had brought out from England had been stolen by the men. He looked very thin in his shirt. It was pitiful to see him.

  “He was old and sick and thin, but he could be very rough with people, especially with people who served him. He wanted them to know that he didn’t think much of them; he could be a shouter. For some reason he wasn’t like that with me, and this gave me some standing among the English on the ship. I have to say that I had never in my life been shown anything like that regard, not in New Granada, not in San Thomé when I was with the Berrios. At the same time I saw that this good fortune of mine wasn’t going to last, that the position of the general here in the Gulf was almost like the position of his commander on the river.

  “He was a doomed man. Everyone knew it. The surgeon, the mariners, the soldiers, the men who cooked his meals in the galley. He had lost many men, many friends, many noblemen. He had lost his son. And he had Spanish blood on his hands. He shouldn’t have allowed that to happen. He had promised the English king there would be no fighting with the Spaniards. That battle at San Thomé shouldn’t have taken place. I understood about that later. What I understood at the time was that he had not found gold, and that as soon as he went back to England he would be arrested by orders of the English king, and after that he would be executed.

  “That was his future, yet in the meantime he was the general. He had ships and men at his disposal. He could order men to do what he wanted. He could shout at the mariners and the serving people. And of course it was still possible that if he found gold everything would be reversed. He would live and be honoured. If he could find the gold that he had made people believe only he knew how to find. But the gold didn’t exist. To the people of San Thomé it was a joke when we heard that the English were coming to seize our gold mines.

  “I don’t think anyone on the Destiny or the other ships believed in the gold either. And yet they were all there in the Gulf, under the orders of the general whose life was more or less over. They were waiting, doing nothing. Like the general. Some of them found it hard. A few days after I arrived, a couple of the general’s ships slipped away, heading north up the Gulf to the Dragon’s Mouth and the Caribbean Sea. The general appeared not to notice.

  “The surgeon came to the cabin three or four times a day. The general talked a lot to him. In fact, he was the only one the general talked to. He talked about attacking Trinidad and holding Port of Spain to ransom. He had done it twenty-three years before, he said, and he could do it again.
This time he would ask the Spaniards for twenty thousand pounds, and he would burn the city, a street a day, until the Spaniards paid. He talked about attacking Cumaná and Puerto Cabello, and then establishing a base in Florida.

  “At first I took what he said seriously, and then I saw that he stood no chance at all, had nowhere in the world to hide, that whatever luck he might have the first time or the second time in those ventures he was outlining, the ships from England would come after him again and again. The way the Spanish ships had come again and again to our part of the world. Then I understood that he was talking just to impress the surgeon and even a little to impress me. He would tell me in Spanish what he had been telling the surgeon, and then he would say, almost as though it was a joke, ‘What do you think, Don José?’

  “When the surgeon left and we were alone in the cabin, the old man would go silent. In daylight and in darkness I could feel him grieving for his son and thinking of his own death. Once or twice he took out a book and sat down to write in it. But he didn’t write anything. They told me later it was the journal he had kept since he had left England with his ships and men. Even when he had been very ill he had written in that book. But he had written nothing in it since the launch had come from San Thomé with the news.

  “He was waiting for his commander from San Thomé. It was really all we were doing there in the Gulf, waiting for that defeated man with the bad eye. He talked about it many times a day, as though it was the one thing that was still clear to him.

  “At last one day, about thirteen or fourteen days after I had arrived, the commander’s ship appeared in the south, coming up the channel to our left. The sentinel ship signalled, the mariners and soldiers shouted the news, and people ran to the deck to wait. Not the general, though. I had been helping him to get ready to go out for a walk on deck, but when he heard the news he said he didn’t think he was well enough. He wasn’t making it up. His face changed. It seemed to shrink. It became older, full of creases. He said he would stay in his cabin. But he wanted me to go out and see what was happening.

  “I went outside. It was just before noon, and the decks felt hot below the soles of my new shoes. The sky was full of big moving clouds, and the choppy sea was all glitter. The ship came up slowly, the light from sea and sky dancing about it, the shape and colours of its masts and sails coming and going. The birds from The Soldier floated high above. When the ship came nearer I saw that it was flying two white flags. I don’t know what that meant.

  “The ship anchored a little distance away. A boat was lowered. Rowers climbed down the rope ladder into the boat. The commander appeared on the deck of his ship, tall, dressed in the same clothes I had last seen him in, holding his polished stick of office. With that stick always in his right hand, he climbed down the ladder. He was rowed over to us. He was still the commander of the river force at that moment, but as soon as he held on to the ship’s ladder and began to come up to the deck that authority left him. And I thought how strange it was, that just a few weeks ago the English pikemen at San Thomé were within two or three minutes of hanging me. The Negroes saved me then, and after that for many weeks my life depended on this man. Now I was on the general’s ship, and with everyone else was studying every movement of this condemned man coming up the ladder with his now useless commander’s stick.

  “He had grown very thin. We didn’t have much to eat on the ship. He would have had less on the river. His clothes were dirty. So were his hands. They were discoloured with old dirt, and full of scratches, some fresh, some healing. I suppose a campaigning soldier’s hands are very rough, but I had never thought about it until that moment. One eye was very quiet, almost dead; the other eye, the bad one, was jumping about madly. He didn’t look at me. There was nothing in his face to show that he even recognized me as the man he had dressed in the Spanish governor’s clothes and sent as a prisoner to the general.

  “He went up to the general’s cabin. He knew the way. Everyone looked at him. The surgeon followed him, and I followed the surgeon. The general’s door was open. There was no reply when the commander knocked, but he went in, still holding his stick, and bending—a very tall man, a small doorway—in order not to strike his head. The general was in his hammock. Since I had left him he had become very ill. His shirt was wet with sweat. His face was white above the hollows of his eyes and cheeks. He didn’t talk. And yet, as I had learned, these two old men were very old friends.

  “The commander began to talk. The old man didn’t reply. The commander talked on. I felt his words didn’t matter. I felt after a time that even the commander wasn’t paying attention to what he was saying. I think that all of us in that cabin were waiting for an explosion from the sick man in the hammock. And that explosion did come, and it went on for a long time. It was as though the waiting and the disappointments and the grief of many weeks now, and many years before that, had been gathered up into this moment, as though this was the moment that the general had been waiting for, the one clear thing he had felt he had to do, after he had understood his doom.

  “The old commander, already bending below the low ceiling, bent lower before the general’s words. The commander had ruined everything, the general said. The commander had come out at the general’s expense many years before to look for the gold mines, and he had said he had found the gold mines. There were three people in San Thomé who operated gold mines, the general said. He even knew their names. Don José knew their names. Francisco Fashardo owned a mine. Hermano Fruntino owned a mine. Pedro Rodrigo Paraná owned a mine.

  “When I heard my name mentioned, I looked up and caught the surgeon’s eye. He translated what the general had said into Spanish. I wanted to say that it wasn’t true, that there were no gold mines in San Thomé, that none of those names the general had spoken were real, that Paraná was the name of a river, and that hermano meant brother. But the surgeon looked hard at me and made a slight gesture with his head, and I knew that I was to say nothing, that we had to bear with the general in his madness, that this madness was all that remained of his life now, that this rage had given the sick man who had lost his son a kind of life.

  “The old man raged and raged at the commander that afternoon. The sun shone through the green curtains. The heat was too much for me, and the anger of the old man, and the grief of the tall half-starved man with the bad eye and the very dirty clothes and hands. I went outside, and found everyone quiet and hushed and unhappy. Nothing that had happened was hidden from anyone on the Destiny or in the other ships.

  “At length the commander left, without his stick, and went to his cabin. It was above the general’s. The general called for me, and I found him trembling in his hammock, his face thin and white, his shirt very wet, and he was complaining of feeling cold. He said, ‘I am sick, Don José, very sick.’ The commander’s polished stick was on the lid of the general’s clothes chest. We could hear the commander moving about in his cabin overhead, and the general behaved as though every noise, every sign of life from his commander, was an insult.

  “Later, just before sunset, the general summoned the commander and went at him again.

  “The commander had taken off some of his clothes. His shirt was undone. This time he didn’t listen for very long. He said something which I didn’t understand, and after that he didn’t try to talk. Not long after, he left and went up to his cabin.

  “The general was like a man possessed. He got out of his hammock, got out his book, took some sheets of paper from it, and began to write by the light of a candle. It was the first time I had seen him use a candle since I had got on to the ship. There was a sound of a shot from above. The general made a face. It was dark, even with the candle. If it wasn’t dark, I would have said that the general smiled when he heard. After the shot the general wrote and wrote, this man who had not written in his journal since I had come to be with him.

  “The surgeon came, and he and the general talked. We all three then went to the cabin above, the cabin of the commander
. There he was, in the clothes he had arrived in, fully dressed again, on the floor. They were the clothes I had seen on him when he had put me on the launch at San Thomé and sent me to the general, with the gifts of the tortoise and the papers and the roll of tobacco. The commander’s face was turned towards the floor. The general turned him over, like a man anxious to see what other men would have preferred not to see. We could see where the shot had torn the shirt and damaged his ribs over his very thin chest. But there was also a knife, a long, thin knife. It had been thrust in between the ribs. What had come first? The knife or the shot? I think the shot.

  “The cabin was soon full of people. The general wanted everyone to see, and no one liked what he had seen. I was told later that they didn’t like the idea of a man putting an end to his own life. It was like a judgement the dead man had made on himself. Though among us who are Indians or partly Indian it is better to do away with oneself than to live with dishonour.

  “For hours that night, like a man inspired, like a man drawing energy from some unknown source or soul, the general wrote. The next day the commander was buried, without ceremony, his body tied in a shroud, for the sake of decency, rather than for religion, and thrown out into the Gulf, he who had walked according to the rules behind the shrouded corpses of the general’s son and the other dead English nobleman at San Thomé.

  “That was the end. There was nothing more to do there. The captains of the other ships came to the general and asked what they were to do. He said that he was a doomed man, very sick and very old, a man who had lost his son, a man who had been betrayed by everyone, even his oldest friend, and that they should leave him, because he brought misfortune to all who followed him. When the captains did as he said, and left us, and there was nothing in the Gulf where we had been used to seeing their ships, the general complained about their ingratitude. He complained to me and the surgeon and to other people. But not with any great passion. He didn’t believe what he said. He was a tired-out man, drained of feelings, trying to play with feelings.