“I asked him later. He said Miss McLurie was right: he wasn’t a colonel. He had called himself that after he had come to the island; he had military ambitions and was looking for an opening somewhere. I said he had misled me, and this could have been damaging. I had suffered enough from the Leander people, who had thought that service with me was only a matter of rations and plunder. My venture was likely to have its desperate passages. After my recent reverses I needed men not only with military experience but also with a record of proven luck: he should have known that.
“He hung his head and said he was sorry. But he didn’t think he had done worse than other people I knew, and no one criticized them. It was well known, for instance, that Archibald Gloster, the local attorney-general—another person I keep meeting all the time in various houses—wasn’t a lawyer. He had simply bought a lawyer’s licence from the Council secretary in the time of the first British governor, Picton.
“Bernard later told me it was true about Gloster. It was no secret that the attorney-general wasn’t a lawyer at all. And there was a further story about that, Bernard said. It came out during the enquiry into the slave rebellion that had nearly happened.
“Gloster had a personal servant called Scipio. People here often give their Negroes the better-known classical names—Hercules, Hector, Cupid, Caesar, Pompey, Agrippa, Cato, Scipio. At night—this was in the months during the preparing of the rebellion—Gloster’s Scipio would leave his quarters at the back of Gloster’s yard in the town, and go the five or six miles to the seaside village of Carenage. The Negro known as King Edward had his court at Carenage, and Scipio’s loyalty at night was to the convoi or regiment of King Edward. Edward’s courtiers had wooden swords painted white and green.
“When Scipio first joined the regiment, King Edward offered him a sword and a title: ‘My Lord St. John.’ Everybody who joined a regiment got a title which he had to use at night. Scipio said no, he didn’t want to be My Lord St. John. It didn’t mean anything. He wanted to be attorney-general, like his master. Edward said that wasn’t a proper title for a courtier in his regiment. In the end they decided that Scipio was to be clerk and secretary—the job Bernard now has in real life—and at night, at Carenage, while King Edward’s dauphins and dauphines and princes and princesses drank white rum and sang and danced and ate things that had been cooked for the party in the various estate kitchens during the day, Scipio sat in the light of a flambeau and turned over the pages of one of Gloster’s lawbooks and then for ten or fifteen minutes at a time made a pretence of writing. As secretary, though, he had a serious enough job: he became one of the organizers of the rebellion. He was one of those who got a hundred lashes and lost their ears.
“After he told me this story Bernard said, ‘Somebody out there is studying me. And somebody is studying you as well, I’m sure. At one time I used to think it was harmless. After what nearly happened to all of us, the mockery seems horrible.’
“So the world shrinks around me while I wait, Sally. I no longer want to go out. There is very little to go out for. I have heard everything they all have to say. I feel that, as the world around me gets smaller, I dwindle with it. I hope I don’t have to wait here much longer, and I hope the waiting has been worthwhile. I cannot hold on to large ideas in this setting. My instinct now, my passion, is to get away, just as it was in Caracas in 1770, thirty-seven years ago. It’s as if after half a lifetime I have made a circular journey back to what I was—though I do not remember Caracas being as small as this. The people cannot be blamed. The merchants mix only with their fellows in the very small town, and people like Bernard are tied to their estates. And it is Bernard now who, after his Council meetings, comes back in his calash with news of the bigger world both for his wife and for me.
“At one end of the front verandah of the estate house there is a projecting room, jalousied on three sides. On hot days Bernard’s wife moves there for the air, from her inner room, and she gets a girl to sit with her. As I read and write in the verandah—decorated down the length of its inner wall with a simple, bright pattern of flowers and curling ribbons, the work no doubt of the pastrycook who did the coat of arms on the calash—I sometimes hear Bernard’s wife talking to the girl with her.
“I hear intonations rather than words, the intonations of someone lying on her back. She is really trying to talk herself asleep, and the girl with her regularly says a few words to show that she is still there. The girl’s words are clearer, because she is sitting, and the girls—there are different ones—are amazingly affectionate. It isn’t always madame. It can be mamselle, mama, dou-dou, ma ’mie, mon enfant, ma petite. It is very strange and lulling, and on a hot day, in the wine-cask smell of sweating cocoa beans, I can listen to the rhythms of the talk and watch the long-tailed cornbirds weaving the long, sock-like pouches of their nests on the samaan or immortelle trees. Often the girl falls asleep before the mistress.
“One day I thought, This is practically all the society Bernard’s wife has.’
“Every day before nightfall, at about six or just before, Bernard goes and locks the mule sheds. He doesn’t want the Negroes to go wandering about on the mules at night, as they did before. And often, even after this, he gets a feeling that things are not right outside. It’s just a feeling, but it eventually makes him go and check the mule sheds and the Negro houses. He has said more than once to me, There are so many of them, and there are only two of us.’
“In the morning he is up very early, to check the yard and the houses and the stores and the kitchen, and to unlock the mule sheds. After morning tea—there are three estate meals: tea, breakfast, dinner—he has to give out the work in the cocoa sheds and cocoa woods, and after breakfast he has to go and check the work, and he often has to show how everything is to be done, because some of the people who did a job quite well the day before will now say they have forgotten how to do it. The recently arrived Africans, or new Negroes, as they are known here, are especially difficult that way. They believe that if they do their tasks badly often enough they won’t have to do them at all, and might somehow even be sent back home.
“So Bernard is as tied as any Negro to his estate. If he didn’t have the secretaryship of the Council he would be quite immured here.
“After the recent trouble he can take nothing for granted. Every morning when he makes his round he is hoping he isn’t going to find a corpse—a poisoning or a suicide. Even while I have been here Negroes have been poisoned or have committed suicide on estates quite close by. There have been a number of suicides on the La Chancellerie estate, which is another estate owned by a woman, Rose de Gannes de la Chancellerie, Marquise de Chaurras. They commit suicide by eating dirt over many days. The eating of dirt is something the new Negroes rather than the creoles do, and those suicides come in batches. They give encouragement to one another.
“When something like that happens, or when news of it comes to Bernard, I can see it on his face. He doesn’t like talking about it. He would prefer to keep it from his wife, but he knows that it’s something she will hear about from the girls when they go to sit with her in the room with the jalousies on three sides. Perhaps something has even happened here in the last few months. If it has, Bernard wouldn’t want me to know. When I hear the women talk, I hear only maman or madame or whatever, and the rhythm of their patois. Perhaps without knowing it I have been hearing the women talk about a death in one of the little houses.
“I don’t remember that it was like this in Venezuela. Was it because I lived in the town? When I visited the plantations or estates of friends, they seemed easygoing places. I took it for granted that they would have their own rules and customs; everywhere had its own rules. Of course, it was a long time ago, before the great revolutions, and perhaps there were things I would think differently about now.
“Twenty years ago, when I was in Russia, I went and spent an hour in a public bath. This was in Moscow, in 1787, in the early summer. A Russian I had got to know told me it was s
omething I should do. It was one of the sights for visitors. I found when I went that you could see the women from the men’s area. They were completely naked and you could see the lacerations and whip-marks on their bodies. The bath attendant allowed me to walk among the women. No one paid me any attention. It wasn’t arousing. The indifference and the damaged bodies were things I couldn’t ignore. I don’t think my Russian friend saw it like that. I kept my thoughts to myself, and very soon allowed myself to forget what I had seen.
“No one can ever read the eyes, Bernard says. There is no way of knowing who has begun to eat dirt or who has laid by a store of poison. A few years ago the poisoner on Dominique Dert’s estate, on the western boundary of the town, was the commandeur himself. He had formed a strong attachment to his master. Bernard says this often happens with trusted estate servants. The commandeur poisoned his fellows whenever he thought they were getting too close to Dert. When the commandeur was found out, he had the atelier assembled—as though he was still commandeur—and the story is that he made quite a speech to them. He became quite exalted. They didn’t know, he said, but for months he had had it in his power to poison them all. Then he spoke directly to Dert. ‘I could have poisoned all these Negroes of yours at any time. In one night I could have ruined you.’ That speech was the big moment of his life. It was like something he had been living for. The master, the atelier, the estate—this was his complete world. Nothing existed outside. A few days later he took some of his own poison.
“The poisoner on St. Hilaire Begorrat’s estate in one of the valleys to the west was the nurse in the estate hospital. This was a famous case, Bernard says. Begorrat was an early immigrant from Martinique, and he is very much like one of the old Venezuelan marquises of cocoa and tobacco, as we used to call them. Though Begorrat is a good deal more educated than they were.
“At the time of the hundred and twenty poisonings at Montalembert’s some of Begorrat’s people were also poisoned. The old marquis of cocoa didn’t like this at all. He thought it showed disrespect. Montalembert was a newcomer. He, Begorrat, was the senior planter in the place. He had established the style of the place, and even some of the institutions. Everyone deferred to him on estate matters.
“He pretended to be very angry. He lined up everybody on his estate, had one of the corpses brought out, and said he intended to find out who the poisoner was. The estate doctor cut the corpse open and he and Begorrat began to look at it very closely.
“It was too much for the poisoner, who was the hospital nurse. Her name was Thisbe. She broke from the watchers and ran through the cocoa woods to the neighbouring estate and asked there for sanctuary. Bernard tells me that this is what they do in certain parts of Africa: people from one village can claim sanctuary in another village nearby. She was handed back. Begorrat had pack thread tied around her thumbs and she was suspended by the thumbs until she gave the names of about twenty poisoners and sorcerers on other estates.
“It frightened people that there were so many. That very day they were all picked up and taken to Vallot’s jail in the town. They were kept apart from one another. They were chained or put in irons and some were shut up in the special hot chambers below the roof. Some of them were chained so that they couldn’t move. Some of those in the hot chambers quickly became demented. They were fed on plantains and water and over three weeks they were examined and examined in the jail by Begorrat and a poisoning commission of planters. Thisbe was repeatedly tortured. When it came to the judgements the planters followed Spanish forms. The people judged to be poisoners and sorcerers were heavily chained and made to kneel to hear their sentences. Some of them were hanged and decapitated. The new Negroes among them were first baptized; Africans are considered infants by the Church, and can be baptized without instruction. One man was burned alive. Thisbe was hanged and decapitated. Her body was burned and her head was staked on a pole in Begorrat’s estate.
“Begorrat tells Thisbe’s story like a story he has told many times. The pole on which Thisbe’s head was staked is still there, facing the Negro houses, almost on the spot where the corpse was cut open.
“He said with a smile, ‘There’s nothing there now. But they see the pole all the time and they know what they’re seeing. It’s magic against magic. I’ve told Bernard many times. It’s the only way. Here it’s my magic against theirs.’
“He told this story in the little grotto he has created in the hillside, and his current favourite—Bernard says he has had several—threw himself about with laughter whenever Begorrat smiled. He smiled often. He smiled especially when he talked about opening the corpse and pretending to look carefully at it, like a Roman reading the entrails, and when he said it was his magic against theirs.
“His lips are soft, but his speech is precise, biting and witty. The elderly cocoa marquis is much better educated than most people here, and he knows it. The people who defer to him tell you behind his back that when he came here from Martinique all those years ago he was bankrupt. All the Negroes he brought with him were mortgaged in Martinique; so the big tract of valley land he got free from the Spanish administration, sixteen acres for each Negro—the land that is today his little kingdom—was fraudulently obtained. I am sure he knows the stories. I don’t think he minds in the slightest. He has calculating, merry eyes. He is like a man who knows he can afford to laugh.
“It isn’t only Thisbe’s head-pole that’s still there at Begorrat’s. The old jailer Vallot is also there. He is the man who tortured Thisbe and many others. He would like to go to the United States, to Louisiana. He says he has relations there, and he might get a job. There is nothing for a free man to do here. But Hislop is not giving him a passport. It was Vallot who tortured the free man of colour in Hislop’s first week as governor here—the man of colour who used a love potion to get the black woman to sleep with him, and got people frightened all over again with thoughts of poison and sorcery. This is the case that has been tormenting Hislop ever since the Picton conviction last year. The free people of colour have raised a fund and retained a lawyer in Red Lion Square in London and are pressing the matter hard. Hislop is determined that if the case comes up, Vallot will bear responsibility as an official who exceeded his duty.
“Vallot is an elderly, pasty-faced Frenchman from Martinique. He came here in the Spanish time and acted as jailer for thirteen years. He has had no job for some years now. The local people decided to get rid of him at the time of Picton’s arrest. He has used up his savings and is dependent on Begorrat’s charity. He lives on slave rations in a Negro hut among people like those he used to flog and mutilate. Apparently they accept him. And he, curiously, has no feeling of humiliation or danger. Bernard says that no one at Begorrat’s will poison Vallot. Poison is a weapon only against the master. The man who is almost certain to be poisoned is Begorrat’s current favourite, and everyone knows it.
“Vallot doesn’t know anything about me—he doesn’t know much about anything outside the island. They had told him I was a general, and he had put on quite good clothes (possibly pawned in the old days by a prisoner, or offered instead of the jail fees) to come and tell me his story, and to ask for my sympathy and help. He talked a lot about the illness of his wife. She has a lovely name: Rose-Banier. He says that she used to serve all the paying prisoners with her own hand and used even to make coffee for them in the mornings. She was up and down the three floors all day, he said. Now she is old and ill and can hardly look after herself and their one-room hut.
“And all the time old Begorrat, in his pantaloons and buckle shoes, in this cool cocoa valley that is his kingdom, smiled with his soft lips at Vallot’s tale of hardship, and his favourite laughed and rolled about the floor of the grotto.
“There have been great revolutions on both sides of the Atlantic. There is a war in Europe that will further change the world. Great admirals and generals and new inventions are constantly altering the nature and scale of war. Even Mr. Shrapnel’s recent invention will in time be pa
rt of the general change; when it is taken up there will have to be new battlefield tactics. But here we might be on another planet, or in another age. Here they have their own heroes and histories and mythical events and sites: the hot chambers of Vallo t’s jail, the dismissal of Picton, the commandeur’s last address to the atelier, the poisonings at Montalembert’s, the opening of the corpse at Begorrat’s, Thisbe’s running through the cocoa woods to ask for sanctuary, the spiking of her head. Here they attach different events to years as they pass; it is almost as though, like the Indian nations of the continent, they have another kind of calendar.
“I dwindle, Sally. I sit in Bernard’s verandah and look at the cornbirds’ long straw nests hanging from the samaan and immortelle branches, and hear the women talk in the jalousied room, and I write essays about the liberation of South America for future publication, and compose this journal-letter to you.
“I mentioned Shrapnel in this letter yesterday. His name simply came to me as I was writing, one of the hundred London names I carry in my head. You will remember that four years or so ago he wrote to me at Grafton Street about his invention and asked me to a demonstration in some fields somewhere. It is strange to be where I am and to think about reading Shrapnel’s letter in the library at Grafton Street and arranging with others to go to his demonstration. It is as though it hardly happened, or happened to another man. I feel—with Vallot—that there is no room for me here. I have no function. I lose touch with myself, even with my ambitions.
“It was just a week ago that I met Vallot. Today—would you believe?—when Bernard came back from the Council meeting he brought me a letter from a Swedish sailor in the new jail in the town. Not the old jail—that was pulled down four years ago by the Council, to prevent anyone seeing what Vallot’s old arrangements really were like. You have to ask and ask before they even show you where it was. The Swede is in jail for disorderly behaviour—that means drunkenness. They feel here that drunken—or ‘disguised’—sailors are bad for local discipline. ‘Disguised’ is the word they use. The alguazils get a small payment for every disguised sailor they pick up, and they are very eager.
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