Away from the coast, it was hard to hold on to the idea of the aboriginal and fabulous. What was familiar, the small-island colonial geography one had grown up in, was stronger.
IT WAS different when I crossed the Gulf to Venezuela. Geographically, Trinidad was an outcrop of Venezuela; for three hundred years they had been part of the same province of the Spanish empire. The book of history I had written about Trinidad was also to some extent about Venezuela. When I wrote the book I hadn’t been to Venezuela. I did that not long afterwards, and the land I saw then remained touched with fable; no personal memories or associations got in the way.
The Orinoco remained the river of my story. Even in the Araya Peninsula on the Caribbean coast—a desolation of eroded red earth and scrub, where the modern road simply crumbled away to nothing at a certain point (no one had told me, and the Venezuelan driver was also surprised)—I found something of the special atmosphere I had hoped to find.
In the late sixteenth century the salt-pans of Araya were famous, and Dutch and French and English ships were always here, illegally, though with the quiet approval of local Spanish officials. Every kind of Spanish suggestion was made for stopping the trade in Araya salt. One governor wanted to poison the salt-pans, and wrote to the king of Spain to ask for poison. In 1604, to survey these waters and say what might be done, there appeared a Spanish nobleman with a very famous name: the Duke of Medina-Sidonia, entrusted with this minor task (among others) sixteen years after the defeat of the great Spanish Armada, which he had commanded.
Pelicans—only sign of life and community in the desolation—flew in fishing groups not far above the sea. They would have flown in that kind of formation four hundred years before, or a thousand years before. Their awkward, prehistoric shape, their power, their grey-brown colour, which was the colour of the beachless sea, the light, the unstable colours at midday of water and sky and barren earth, all this seemed to take me back to the beginning of things.
In other parts of Venezuela I found tropical woodland like the woodland I had got to know as a child and thought very special.
During the war, for two years or so after my eighth birthday, we moved from the town to the forested hills to the north-west of Port of Spain. This was an area of old cocoa and citrus estates, half derelict after various kinds of plant disease and the long Depression. At that time I thought of myself as a town boy; I didn’t like the idea of the country. But this wasn’t the kind of country I had known, and I liked it as soon as I saw it: the cool green hills, the narrow valleys, the emptiness, the general feeling of forest and bush.
The bush was full of surprises, found objects, remains of the old estate: avocado and citrus trees, coffee bushes and tonka-bean trees (the tonka bean used for flavouring cocoa) and cocoa trees that in spite of disease and choking bush still bore fruit. Somewhere in the cocoa woods was the old concrete cistern of the estate house. It was useless now, clogged with compacted dirt and sand and dead leaves; but the clear-water spring that had fed the cistern still ran, though in its own rippled channels now, over clean brown sand and between dead leaves. The samaan trees that had been planted years before to shade the cocoa trees were now aged, branching giants, themselves overgrown with moss-hung parasites: wild pines, lianas, ferns, vines. When you walked below the trees you could feel a dust, from dried moss and other dead vegetable matter, drifting down.
We lived disordered, deprived, and uncomfortable lives; we were like campers in someone else’s ruins; and we were glad to go back to the town when the time came. But then I grew to understand that those months in the cocoa wilderness had given me my most intense experience of the beauty of the natural world. They had fixed for me the idea of the perfect tropical landscape.
The place itself soon changed. We ourselves had been there at a moment of change. We had been part of the change, and this change speeded up after we left. The area—which we had known as an area of ’pagnols, patois-speaking Spanish mulattoes connected with the old estates—began to be settled by poor blacks, many of them illegal immigrants, from the small islands to the north. It became crowded and noisy and confused, like the hillside slums to the east of Port of Spain.
That was what was presented to me—suddenly, completely—when I went there again after my first six years abroad. The tops of the green hills, too steep to be damaged, were as I remembered them; the bush on one side of the road was still there; but on the other side of the road, where there was no bush or woodland, only settlement, I could no longer work out the contours of the land and couldn’t tell where old things, even the old estate house, or the formal gardens, or the cistern in the woods, had been. Half the landscape I had cherished was still miraculously there, on one side of the road; but that only added to my memory of what had been erased. I took care after that to stay away. I didn’t like even getting near the road (itself much changed) that led to the valley.
And now in Venezuela in many places I found again the vegetation and colours of that Trinidad valley. In Venezuela at that time, with its oil boom and city-property boom, estates and plantations were being neglected; and I was able to rediscover the very atmosphere of the cocoa woods I had known. Once for many miles I drove beside such a cocoa wood. There had been nothing in Trinidad on this scale; and nothing like the smell of vanilla—from the vanilla vine—which was now added to the damp cocoa-wood smell of earth and leaf and mould.
Trinidad was an outcrop of the South American continent. Venezuela was part of the continent, and everything was on a continental scale. The geography that at one time in Trinidad had seemed logical and complete—and had then, because of the growth in population, begun to feel like a constriction—was here immeasurably magnified: the mighty Andes for our little Northern Range, now built up on its lower slopes for many miles, and scaffolded with immigrant shacks around Port of Spain; the empty Venezuelan llanos, a country in itself, for our sugar-cane plain, which from certain high points could be taken in at a glance; the wonder of the many-branched Orinoco for the single channel of our narrow Caroni.
Because I had written about it, because for many months Venezuela had existed for me as an imaginary country, created in my mind from the documents I read in London, I felt I had a claim on it. Over a number of journeys I began to think of Venezuela as a kind of restored homeland.
I went on week-long drives along the coast and across the llanos. On my second or third journey I went in an open boat on the Orinoco at a point near the estuary. This landscape had existed for so long in my imagination that even now, when I was seeing it for the first time, it seemed to have a half-imagined, formal quality. The river was wide, full, without turbulence. The banks were worn and denuded: no forest. It was the rainy season. The sky was grey and dark grey, with many layers of cloud, but there was almost a dazzle on the water because of the openness. The river surface (though muddy close to, and oily near the bank) was as grey as the sky, and smooth.
The air was heavy: more rain was going to come. It came sooner than I thought—with a roar, and with a noticeable river swell. Big drops spattered on the water as though on concrete, and the boatman turned back to the bank.
It would have been like the rain, constant violent bursts alternating with damp heat, that tormented Raleigh when he was on the river in 1595. In the documents of the region, he is the first man to write in a modern way—or in a way that brings him close to us—of the many small physical discomforts of this kind of exploration. Spaniards before Raleigh had made journeys twenty times as hard on this river, but in their matter-of-fact accounts, plain to the point of being abstract, physical sensation is missing; landscape is missing. The endurance of these earlier men goes with a narrower way of seeing and feeling.
Not far away from here was an abandoned oil camp. It was like a little ghost town. The bush that some years before had been cut down and regulated was now growing fast again (with here and there a vigorous flower shrub from the settlement) over half-stripped derricks, oil pipes, roofless wooden barracks
and roofless concrete-pillared bungalows. Concrete-and-metal bases, and a concentrated mess of old oil, dulled to sepia, showed where the pumps had been. For years, while there had been oil to extract, the big metal arms or shoulders of those pumps would have done their measured, creaking see-saw, night and day, with a plunging, sighing sound at the end of each movement.
Oil had turned out to be the true gold of the region. In the beginning, in the 1920s and 1930s, many people from Trinidad were recruited to work as labourers and artisans and clerks in the Venezuelan oilfields. I don’t know whether this was because Venezuelans simply didn’t want to work in camps in the bush; or whether, after a full century of destructive civil wars, they were without the skills; or whether—as in the Trinidad oilfields, or, earlier in the century, in the building of the Panama Canal—the contracting companies preferred to deal with an immigrant workforce that it could more easily control. But Trinidadians were recruited, and in the oil camps of Venezuela (even with their colonial atmosphere) many of these Trinidadians got their first taste of freedom and money, their first glimpse of possibility.
Until this time Venezuela had a bad reputation in Trinidad, as a South American country of war and poverty, lawlessness, uncertainty, overnight revolutions, dictatorships and sadism. Refugees were constantly coming over; the British laws of the colony offered political asylum. Now, with the oil, Venezuela became a country of opportunity. That was how it was thought of in the 1940s, when I was growing up. But by then Trinidadians were not recruited to work in Venezuela. Venezuela was looking to Europe for its immigrants; there were immigration laws to keep Trinidadians out.
Still, they went. They went illegally. As a boy I used to hear of people going over in this way. With my Port of Spain ideas of our small-scale colonial geography—in which the Gulf of Paria was little more than what I could see of it from the city—I used to think that the people going over illegally would have crossed the few miles to Venezuela at the north of the Gulf, just to the west of Port of Spain. I imagined them getting into their rowing boats at dusk or at night and drifting with the strong currents to the Venezuelan shore.
That was fantasy. But I never asked how the crossing was made, and it was only now, half a life later, and long after I had written my book, and after my own Venezuelan travel, that I began to see that the illegal-immigrant way to Venezuela would have been the old aboriginal way, which in the late sixteenth century became the way used by explorers and traders: down to the far south of the Gulf, and then up the intricate channels of the immense Orinoco estuary—never easy to police.
One afternoon, not long after my short adventure on the Orinoco in an open boat, I came to an estuary town. It had been raining; the main street was sodden, with water in puddles, as though river water had risen up through the earth itself; the air was full of moisture. “The drowned lands of the Orinoco”—the words of an old document came to me. Behind the damp concrete fences flower plants and shrubs and small trees I had known in Trinidad made little jungles around the low houses.
Here and there along this street there came, unexpectedly, through all the damp, the smell of a heavy meat curry. Indians from Trinidad lived here; they were an important part of the local population.
Once aboriginal Indians were masters of these waters. They no longer existed; and that knowledge of currents and tides had passed to their successors. On the south-westernmost point of the long Trinidad peninsula that almost ran into the river estuary there had been an aboriginal port or anchoring place called Curiapan. Curiapan was known to the early Spaniards, and known to Raleigh and others. There was still a fishing village there. But Curiapan no longer existed as a name; the village had a Spanish name, Cedros, the Cedars. Many of the fishermen of Cedros were Asian Indians, descendants of agricultural people from the Gangetic Plain. In less than a hundred years the geography of their new home had remade these Asian Indian people of Cedros, touched them with old aboriginal aptitudes, and given them sea skills which their landlocked ancestors had never had.
I had seen from the air the confusion and the great extent of the waters and the drowned lands of the estuary, and had marvelled at everyone who had come there in the old days, without maps. Because—on the ground, as a traveller—I had approached the estuary from the other side of the Gulf, from the interior of a country that for very long had been for me only an imagined place, I had arrived at a way of looking that contained both the fabulous past and the smaller scale of what I had grown up with.
I had grown up with a small-island geography in my head. But the Gulf I had looked out on as a child was far bigger than the island. The Gulf, with its confused currents, between an island and the estuary of a continental river, had always been part of the fabulous New World. Columbus had found salt water and fresh in it, and—thinking himself only between two islands—had never known why. It had other, and now mysterious, names: Golfo de las Ballenas, the Gulf of Whales, and—like a name that goes back to the beginning—Golfo Triste, the Sad Gulf.
Now I could without disturbance fit Raleigh’s 1595 map of the Gulf to what I saw. His map was the wrong way round. South was at the top of the page: it made more sense that way, to a man looking for a way down to the Orinoco. You can look at the map and see what was real and what—from the formality of the shapes: hard in maps absolutely to lie or to invent—he was making up.
USUALLY, WHEN I made these trips to Venezuela, I went first to Trinidad. From there after a few days, in a plane with a more local atmosphere, I did the hour-long flight across the Gulf and over the Venezuelan Caribbean coast to Maiquetía, the airport for Caracas.
It was on one such flight, on a Venezuelan aeroplane, that I met Manuel Sorzano. This was about fifteen years ago.
He had the window seat. I had the aisle seat next to him. Though he had gone aboard only a couple of minutes ahead of me, he looked quite established when I saw him. There were a number of parcels disposed about his feet, in spite of the regulations, and a few more in the locker above. Unusual, this sign that he had been shopping in Trinidad. In those days, of the oil boom, when there was money on both sides of the Gulf, the shopping traffic usually went the other way, to Caracas, with its skyscrapers and glittering commercial centres.
He was a small, elderly brown man, perhaps in his late fifties. His face, carefully shaven, was broad and wrinkled, with a closed expression that held just a hint of aggression. My first quick assessment—while I put away my own things—was that he was an out-and-out Venezuelan, a coastal mestizo, a product of a racial mixture that had started with the Spanish settlement, someone who had known only his own landscape and limited language and his own way of life, and was cut off from everything else.
Later I took in an unexpected touch of style in the old man: his curly hair was plaited and tied at the back into a tight little pigtail about an inch long. It gave him a piratical, eighteenth-century appearance. And I thought, though I hadn’t actually noticed it before, that the pigtail might have affected my first reading of his face, and made me see an aggression that perhaps wasn’t really there. But no: the pigtail was part of something a little too assertive about the man: below the buttoned cuffs of his shirt I could now see heavy gold or gilt bracelets, of linked big coins.
What was he taking back to Venezuela? I could see some long-playing records, in a plastic shopping bag; and, in a plaited raffia basket, label-less bottles and jars of Trinidad Indian pickles. Those pickles looked home-made. Had I misread him, then? Was he, after all, an Asian Indian from Trinidad, with ideas and assumptions I could intuit—and not the Venezuelan stranger I had taken him for? I considered his appearance. He was unusual. He could be one thing or the other: it depended on what you thought he was.
I asked him, “Are you from Trinidad?”
“No. Venezuela.” He was firm. But his accent was of Trinidad.
We were now airborne, and in a few minutes were flying low over the Gulf, so much bigger than I had thought thirty or forty years before, a little sea, with f
or some time no sight of land on either side. The water was of different shades of olive, in wide, distinct, irregular bands, sometimes frothing white or yellow at the edges: Orinoco and Atlantic in eternal conflict, mighty volumes of water pressing against each other.
I asked, “Where in Venezuela do you live?”
“All over. My work take me all over. Presently I am in Ciudad Guayana. But I know all over. Barquisimeto, Tucupita, Maracaibo, Ciudad Bolívar. Even Margarita for a time.”
He seemed to love the sound of the place names: it was as though to speak the names was to have a claim on the places.
I said, “Ciudad Bolívar used to be called Angostura. It was where they first made the bitters.”
I thought the fact romantic, and thought it would appeal to him. He paid no attention. I let go; I didn’t try to think of new things to say.
We had then to fill in disembarkation cards.
He said, “You have to give me a little hand with this. I don’t have my glasses.”
He took out his passport. It was Venezuelan, reddish brown, and he handled it very carefully (the way I handled my own British passport, always nervous, when I was travelling, of losing it, and doubting whether, if I lost it, I would be able to explain myself to anyone in authority). He passed it to me, and I saw his photograph, and his name, Manuel Sorzano. I knew the name Sorzano from the late eighteenth-century Venezuelan records. It was a good solid Venezuelan name then; but perhaps Venezuela was full of Sorzanos. The occupation of this Sorzano was given as carpintero, carpenter.
He took the passport back and put it away. He said he had to get it renewed every year. He did a lot of travelling. The previous year a new passport cost thirty-five bolívares, thirty-five “b’s”; this year it was going to cost seventy-five b’s. There were two b’s to the dollar. He was wrong there; the dollar was worth less than half that; and I thought it strange, in a man who did much travelling and wore heavy gold bracelets, that he didn’t know this basic fact about the Venezuelan currency.