A Way in the World

by V. S. Naipaul

  Miranda is interested in the news from Spain, and Meléndez passes on the Cadiz newspapers as soon as he gets them. In them Miranda reads of the war against the French in Spain. He reads of the battles and growing reputation of the Duke of Wellington and General Picton, the former governor of Trinidad. The old man must suffer, thinking of his own fall, but he shows no emotion to Level or Meléndez.

  He drinks his tea in a special way. He squeezes half a lemon into a cup of tea, and while he drinks this mixture he nibbles at the hull of the lemon, taking care (almost as if he is racing against himself) to finish both drink and lemon hull at the same time.

  He says one afternoon to Level, “Why are you staring? You remind me of the Chinese in Trinidad. They thought I had come to take them home. Did Hislop tell you about that?”

  Level knows the reference. He worked for some time in Trinidad as an adviser in Spanish law to Governor Hislop.

  He says, “I’m not staring, General. I’m looking, to remember. I was thinking that one day I would be telling people that General Miranda turned his tea into a lemonade.”

  “It’s what my father used to do on hot afternoons in Caracas. I began to do it when I came back.”

  “When I’m with you I think of all the places you’ve been to, and all the people you’ve seen, and I can begin to feel that I myself have entered history a little. It is a feeling so precious I can hardly hold on to it. General, I’ve been trying for some time to put this to you. It is something I know I shouldn’t put to you. But, equally, I will not forgive myself later for not doing so. I want to know about Catherine the Great. If you think the question is wrong, please forgive me. If you think it is too intrusive, please consider it as never having been spoken.”

  “It was one of the stories I encouraged, almost something I spread myself in the beginning, in my thirties, after I had left the Spanish service. Like so many of the thoughtless things I did then, it came back later and did me much harm. It exposed me to a lot of jealousy. Not in the way you might think. Venezuelans loved the story. They didn’t see it as a tribute to me. They saw it as a tribute to themselves. Some of them behaved as though I had taken away something from them. They felt that I had misused something that belonged to them. I had come between them and the arms of the empress. And then they extended this to my whole career. Whatever I had done in the world I had done, according to this way of thinking, only because I was like them, my critics. Whether in Russia or England or France or the United States, there was nothing personal about my achievement. If they had been where I had been they would have done what I had done. I had gambled nothing of myself, taken no risks, exercised no personal will. And this was extended even further. They had done it for me. I had done nothing. I was nothing.

  “I told Hislop in Trinidad—I don’t know whether he told you—how Picton had damaged me in 1798, nearly thirty years after I had left home. He had written to the ministers in London that though I was important, I was nothing, the son of a Caracas shopkeeper. Of course he had got that from Caracas—and even at all the removes I could detect the voice of the Venezuelan who felt I had sullied the empress’s arms and spoilt what was his due.

  “Something like that happened again when I came back. I had been called back by Bolívar, as you know, and I was going to stay in his house in Caracas, because after forty years I had none of my own. I didn’t go there directly. I thought I should behave formally and show respect to the revolution. When I landed at La Guaira I wrote to Roscio, the junta’s secretary for foreign affairs, asking for permission to go to Caracas. His reply was insulting and extraordinary. He said that I should never forget that I owed more than most to the country, because I had been unusually privileged and had spent many years abroad in the courts of Europe. What he was saying was that during my forty years abroad I had actually been exploiting the country, living off the national patrimony, and now should pay back a little of what I owed. And I knew at once that, though we were talking about the revolution, it was the old Catherine-the-Great jealousy at work on Roscio. That story did me much harm. I should never have come to Caracas after receiving that letter of Roscio’s. I should have known that the situation had been misrepresented to me. I should have stayed at La Guaira and gone back to Curaçao on H.M.S. Avon. I should have made them wait, for a year, if necessary. That’s how I should have handled it.”

  Level says, “Our hate, General, our hate. It isn’t like the hate of other places.”

  “The Spanish empire damaged us in that way. It kept us backward, gave us very little to do. It gave us as men no way of proving ourselves. It never made us believe in human achievement. It made us believe only in luck and birth and influence and theft and getting patents from the king. It made us cringe before authority and mock it at the same time. It made us believe that all men at bottom were worthless. Many of the stupid things I did in the early days were because of that. It was ten years before I understood that things were different in other countries.”

  Level says, “At one time I used to think the jealousy you talk about was harmless, like the jealousy of a grocer for a man who comes and sets up a shop next door. After the revolution this jealousy turned to hate. We’ve all surrendered to this hatred. People won’t” stop now until they see the white bones of the enemy. I never thought it would happen. I thought people would be too frightened. I remember the early revolutionaries, Gual, España, in the late 1790s. They sent people to our estates and to others and tried to get us interested. They said they were going to have a republic and the flag was going to have four colours, for the different races. White, blue for the Negro, yellow for the mixed, red for the Indian. The four colours would also stand for the four aims of the republic. Liberty, equality, security, property. Property for the white, liberty for the Negro, equality for the mulatto, security for everybody. They were going to give everything to everybody. How were they going to do it? When you asked them they couldn’t answer. They hadn’t worked it out. They had thought only about the flag and the colours. Sometimes they got angry. ‘You’re an americano. You should be a proud man. How can you talk in this low way? Don’t you care about your country?’ I would say, ‘It’s wrong of you to put it like that. You can’t tell me that my country is your flag. The question to ask when you talk about independence is: “Who is going to rule over us?” That’s the question everyone will ask, and that is where the war will begin.’ And, actually, that’s how it happened. Now that we are launched on that four-colour war I don’t see how it can stop. There will always be someone looking for a final victory, and someone wanting revenge.”

  Miranda says, “I don’t think anyone can work out a constitution for a place like Venezuela. It’s the Spanish legacy to us. Those people you mention, Gual, España, and the others—they suffered too much to think more clearly. I can also tell you now that the constitution I worked out for Venezuela was absurd. And yet I spent so much time on it. It was half Roman and half British. I didn’t have consuls. I had officials I called Incas. A local touch, you see. I persuaded myself that I believed in my constitution, but I also know I had devised it to impress people abroad. Perhaps there is a genius somewhere who can work out a constitution for us. But he certainly isn’t Venezuelan, because no Venezuelan will be calm enough to manage things wisely, and he can’t be an outsider because he wouldn’t begin to understand the divisions and the passions.”

  “In all your years of writing about Venezuela and South America, you simplified it, General. You talked about Incas and white people. You talked about people worthy of Plato’s republic. You always left out two of the colours. You left out the black and you left out the mulatto. Was that because you were far away?”

  “No. I did it because it was easier for me intellectually. Most of my ideas about liberty came to me from conversation and reading when I was abroad. So the country I created in my mind became more and more like the countries I read about. There were no Negroes in Tom Paine or Rousseau. And when I tried to be like them I found it
hard to fit in the Negroes. Of course, I knew they existed. But I thought of them as accidental to the truth I was getting at. I felt when I came to write that I had to leave them out. Because of the way I have lived, always in other people’s countries, I have always been able to hold two or more different ideas in my head about the same thing. Two ideas about my country, two or three or four ideas about myself. I have paid a heavy price for this. You mustn’t rebuke me now.

  “I got to know William Wilberforce when I went back to England from Trinidad. I admired him greatly. I thought of him as a philanthropist, a protector of the oppressed. I knew he wanted to talk to me about Negro slavery, but the first time I dined with him at Kensington we quickly got on to the subject of the Inquisition, and that led to a wide discussion about South American liberty. I felt I had to get him to understand the humiliations someone like my father had had to live with. And someone like poor Manuel Gual whom we’ve been talking about—after thirty-three years of service, only a captain in the Veteran Battalion, poor Gual, because higher ranks were reserved for Spaniards from Spain. About the constant, humiliating obedience in all matters required from us. Obedience to the Church, obedience to the king and his officials, the humiliation in which we felt we walked. I had to get Wilberforce to understand those things—they are not easy things to explain—and I felt that to go into the Negro question with him would have been to waste his interest in us. It would also have added an element of confusion to what I was telling him about South America. I knew how important Negro emancipation was to Wilberforce, and I made it clear that I accepted his views without question. But I felt he was talking about other places. I felt I was dealing with another matter altogether. I wasn’t the only one to think like that. You will know how badly Hislop wanted to leave Trinidad and serve the South American cause.

  “And then many months later, when I remembered, I wondered what that very fine man Wilberforce would have thought if he had known that after the siege of Pensacola I had in a matter-of-fact way bought three Negroes as a speculation, and that just a few years later I had had to leave the Spanish service because I had tried to smuggle two boatloads of Negroes from Jamaica to Cuba.”

  “There was that story,” Level says.

  “It was true. But it isn’t a fraction of the truth about me. It occurred at the very beginning, thirty years ago. I was starting out. That was the world I found. There was a whole life after that. That later life was what I was responsible for. I didn’t feel I had defrauded Wilberforce. Though again, when I took Bolívar and the others to meet him, and he was so gracious, saying how fortunate he was to be in London just then, I wonder what he would have thought if he had known that my fear of Spanish jails and the Inquisition—and a lot of the politics I talked to him about—had begun with that smuggling incident. I would have had to do ten years in Oran in North Africa, if I hadn’t deserted.

  “For many years after I deserted I visited jails wherever I went. It’s one of the things travellers in Europe do. But I was also testing myself. The jail at Copenhagen was the worst. Some of the prisoners were chained. Some of them were only debtors. The excrement wasn’t removed from the latrine for months. I was so frightened by that I wrote to the authorities about it. And now I’m here. So I suppose that score’s been settled all round.”

  Level says, “Hislop and I talked a lot about your time in Trinidad. I myself felt when I was there that I was in Venezuela. Didn’t you feel at all when you were there that you had been given a glimpse of what lay on the other side of the Gulf?”

  “Again, I knew it and didn’t know it. There were two moments when I knew, very clearly. The first was on the day I arrived, after Puerto Cabello and the Bacchus and the Bee. My homecoming, you might say. I heard some Negroes talking in the grounds outside in an African language, and I went to the window. We were all surprised, all momentarily lost. It was in the middle of the day, but it was raining and dark. The Negroes looked at me as though they had seen a ghost—my white hair and long pigtail. I saw it clearly in their eyes. I felt very far away from the world. The second moment came about two or three months after I had come back from the Coro venture. A man called Downie and a lady called Miss McLurie and some others took me on a little tour of the island. One of the places we went to was an Indian reserve. There were a few places like that where the Spaniards had settled the remnants of the Indian people. Little missions, clearings in the forest, with the Indians in carat-palm huts and the priest in a little wooden house, and the church sometimes of adobe. All very rough and depressing. The Indians had become alcoholic. Miss McLurie and Downie and the other English people in the party became very angry on my behalf when we were in this mission. They thought the Spanish priest was a scoundrel, using the Indians as very cheap labour, getting them to cut down cedar trees and saw up the timber, and making an extra profit out of them by selling them rum. They wanted me to make a scene. They wanted me to abuse the priest. I thought it was strange, their concern, and then I realized that they were treating the Indians as my own people. I had a glimpse of the place as from a distance and I felt I had trapped myself there and would never leave. But then I put it out of my head.”

  “You had a bad time in Trinidad. I know. I talked to people. It could have ended for you there. People in that little place were so full of their own hatreds they hardly had time for you. If you had stayed for another year or so you might have lost the few protectors you did have. The amazing thing is that, having had the luck to get away, you so quickly decided to risk it all again and come back. I don’t know what Bolívar told you about the state of the country. I don’t think he could have told you that the royalists held both the east and the west.”

  “He seemed to be using my own words. He made me feel that what I had been prophesying had come true. The trouble I had, to get permission to leave England! It was almost as hard as leaving Venezuela the first time. It was much harder than leaving Trinidad. The ministers didn’t want it. They didn’t want their Spanish allies in Cadiz to think that they were encouraging the break-up of the Spanish empire. In the end we compromised. I would leave England on a warship and they somehow wouldn’t notice. But they insisted that for appearances’ sake Bolívar and I should travel on different ships. So Bolívar went ahead with my papers. I tell you this so you would understand I had complete faith in him and his family. I had had my papers beautifully bound the previous year by Dulau. Sixty-three volumes in three new boxes, with a brass plate with my initials on each box.”

  “If you had known that at the end the whole country was going to be against you, would you have come out?”

  “After thirty years I couldn’t have stayed away. I had to see it through to the end. Even to that moment you talk about. I had to see all my ideas turned inside out, as it were. That became a kind of release, in fact, right at the end. For years I used to tell people that if I could be set down on the Venezuelan coast with two hundred men, or fewer, the whole country would come over to my flag of liberty. It didn’t happen like that to me. It happened to the other man, the rough naval officer the royalist authorities sent against me. He was blessed with luck. He landed with a hundred and twenty sailors and everybody began to go over to him. In twelve weeks he overwhelmed us. He could do nothing wrong. The Indians went over to him. The mulattoes, the pardos, the dark people, were with him. The mulattoes fought like demons at Valencia. Even when the white people surrendered they fought on. I had five thousand men. The mulattoes fought on even when there were only five hundred of them. For them, as you say, the question of the revolution was: ‘Who is going to rule over us?’ And they simply didn’t want to be ruled by the people on my side. I had to make two assaults on Valencia. Eight hundred people were killed in that little siege, and fifteen hundred people were wounded. I remembered, too late, what Hislop had told me about the free people of colour on the other side of the Gulf—and I had never begun to think that that might have anything to do with me.

  “I thought later, when things be
came hard, that I should enrol Negroes in my army. I offered them freedom if they served for ten years. I don’t know what Wilberforce would have thought of that—this was just a year after our meetings in London. But at this stage everything I did was going to be wrong. The offer to enrol Negroes didn’t get me suitable soldiers, and it turned everybody else against me. The royalists at Curiepe in revenge turned the Negroes from their plantations on me. They sent them marching to Caracas to loot and burn the place down.

  “This was the end. I was quite encircled. After Bolívar lost Puerto Cabello we were absolutely without resources. People were leaving me every day. I could depend on no one. I couldn’t carry on the war. At the beginning people like Roscio wanted me to keep out of their revolution. Now they left me alone with it. Everybody focussed his resentment or fear or hate on me—republican, royalist, all the four colours. I saw then what you have said, that the war was unwinnable, that if somehow the revolution could be reconstituted and we could go back to the beginning, it would all unravel again, and in almost the same way. I realized in those last days that for all those years abroad I had been speaking only for myself, that the revolution I had been working for would have come about only if all Venezuelans were like me, coming from a family like mine, and having a career like mine. It was what the Spaniards had always said, that my revolution was a personal enterprise.

  “The knowledge was a kind of release. I wouldn’t have arrived at it if I had stayed in London or if I had left the war half-way through. I would have been nagged by the feeling that there might have been something I could have done, that in spite of the four colours and the marquises of cocoa and tobacco and everything else I had always known about Venezuela, the ideas I had worked out might have proved right. Perhaps the philosophers were right. Perhaps below all the accidental things about people—birth, character, geography, history—there was something truer. That was what I had always felt about myself. Perhaps all men, if they were given a wise or rational liberty, became worthy of Plato’s republic.