Then, as though rewarding me for filling in his disembarkation form and not asking difficult questions, he showed me the new records in the plastic bag. They were of Hindi devotional songs. Some had been done by a Trinidad group, some by a woman singer, Dropati, from Surinam, the former Dutch Guiana.
It was his way of saying that he was an Indian from Trinidad—and at the same time letting me know I wasn’t to ask him any more about it. So, once again, his appearance subtly altered; he became what I had been told he was. But though he wasn’t the stranger I had thought, he was in some ways still strange, far from me, because of his religious needs, which I didn’t have, and his mangled idea (hard to imagine) of the old gods of India, and their due rites.
When the steward offered a snack-tray, Manuel Sorzano refused to have it. He didn’t eat meat, he told me, and he didn’t drink. I was surprised. I hadn’t thought of him as that kind of Hindu. But I didn’t really believe him. I thought he had the face of the Trinidad Indian drinking man—the soft, pressed-down lips, the sagging cheeks, the aggressive, watery eyes. But then it occurred to me that he might be doing a penance of some kind; he might have made a religious vow. Perhaps the abstemiousness of which he was making such a show was connected with the funeral rites for someone in his family. Perhaps he had gone back to Trinidad for those rites.
He certainly knew about Trinidad rums. He said he had been hoping to take back some white rum to Venezuela, but his mind had been “so hot” in the last few days he had forgotten about it. Trinidad white rum was the best thing for a cold.
He said, “You sap a little bit on your head”—he made a delicate sapping gesture with his fingers, and I saw more of his gold-coin bracelet—“and you dab a little bit on your forehead, and the next morning the cold gone.”
We had left the Gulf behind. For some time now the Venezuelan Caribbean coast was passing below us, outlined as on a large map, blurred green land, stretches of white or red or brown beach, dark sea, little muddy stains at the mouths of little rivers. Just as space satellites show us a seemingly untouched world, where great cities are mere smudges, so, from the height of this Aeropostal plane, the Spanish Main was still like a new place.
In his earlier life, in Trinidad (his name there not given me, but I thought it would have been a name of the Asian sub-continent), he had had four children. In Venezuela, as Manuel Sorzano, he had nine children, and they all had Venezuelan names.
“It was like choosing names out of a hat. One call Antonio, another one Pedro. The first girl call Dolores. The mother love that name.”
Who was the mother of the nine? He said she was an Indian. He meant an Asian Indian. “She talk only Indian.”
Hindi had ceased to be a living language in Trinidad or Guyana, and this meant that the mother of Manuel Sorzano’s Venezuelan children came from Surinam, the homeland of the Hindi singer Dropati.
Manuel Sorzano said, “I only talk Spanish at home, and the children only talk Spanish.”
A new land, a new name, a new identity, a new kind of family life, new languages even (Surinam Hindi would have been different from the Hindi he would have heard in Trini dad)—his life should have been full of stress, but he gave the impression of living as intuitively as he had always done, making his way, surviving, with no idea of being lost or in a void.
But just as it was strange that, with all the travelling he said he did, he didn’t know the dollar value of Venezuelan money; so it was strange that, with all his peasant need of what had survived in him, after a century of separation, of the religion of India, and the difficult concept of the deities, and the food and the music, and the reverences, he didn’t know that the language the mother of his nine children spoke was Hindi and not “Indian.” But perhaps it wasn’t strange: living intuitively, he was possessed by what had remained of his ancestral culture. He couldn’t stand back from it or assess it; he couldn’t acquire external knowledge about it; and it would die with him. He would have no means of passing it on to his children. They had Spanish names and spoke only Venezuelan. These Sorzanos would be quite different; there would be no ambiguities about them; they would be the kind of Venezuelan stranger I had in the beginning taken their father for.
I wanted to look at his gold-coin bracelet. He took it off and showed it to me. The coins were Victorian sovereigns. He opened his shirt and showed me more: he was wearing a heavy gold necklace with a big gold-coin pendant.
He had found gold in Venezuela: a gold hoard. And he had found it years before, not long after he had got to Venezuela, when he was working as a mixture of carpintero and day-labourer, and was one of a gang of twenty-five pulling down an old building in central Caracas. This was part of the great tearing down and rebuilding of old Caracas—rebuilding with motorways—after the oil. In one room, in a hollow in the mud-brick wall, he and two others had found the hoard, many sovereigns like those on his bracelet, and many coins like the one he now wore around his neck. That coin had been cast in 1824. It was big, intended to be historical, a statement of certainty, commemorating an event in 1818, the first Congress of the independent South American state that Simón Bolívar had tried to set up. It wasn’t a date I carried in my head: the coin was the first token I had seen of the grandeur of the ambition.
From the date of the English sovereigns it seemed that the hoard would have been hidden some time in the 1860s. So just thirty years or so after the coin had been struck, to mark the end of an old empire, an old order, and to bless the new, the coin had to be hidden away. In Venezuela and elsewhere in South America a century of disorder had followed the destruction of the Spanish empire. In 1869 the English writer Charles Kingsley, a great naturalist, in Trinidad for the winter, reported that there were no ships going up the Orinoco; that only one verminous vessel went from Port of Spain to La Guaira, the port for Caracas; and that after all the years of conflict life and property were still not safe in Caracas.
And just as the buriers of treasure at the time of the break-up of the Roman empire could have had no idea of the twists of history, the further great migrations, that would one day lead people unknown to them, people beyond their imagining, to turn up the treasure they had laid up for brighter days; so those people in old Caracas, at a time of darkness, amassing (almost certainly by plunder) a secret hoard of sovereigns and gold coins, could have had no idea of the twists of history that would lead Manuel Sorzano, whose ancestors in the 1860s had not yet left India, to come upon their gold.
He said, “Is how I buy my own house. I don’t have to put up with anybody bossing me around.”
I began to wonder whether that piece of luck—his wish to keep it or renew it or not to lose it—wasn’t bound up with his abstemiousness now, following perhaps upon some religious vow (marked, it may be, in Trinidad or Venezuela, by prayer flags in a garden).
I passed my thumb again over the coin commemorating the Angostura Congress. It was still so new, the raised letters of its vainglorious legend still sharp.
By a strange coincidence, the year in which it was struck, 1824, was the year in which, in that same Orinoco river town of Angostura, Dr. Siegert first produced his aromatic bitters. Some years afterwards the Venezuelan chaos, sweeping away the promise of the Congress, drove Dr. Siegert and his secret formula across the Gulf to Trinidad. As a British colony, Trinidad provided peace and commercial opportunity; at the same time, as a geographical outcrop of Venezuela, it provided all the tropical herbs and plants and fruits of Dr. Siegert’s formula. The town of Angostura in Venezuela was renamed after Bolívar; and now Angostura lived on as a name in the world not because of the Congress which the coin commemorated, but because of the bitters, made elsewhere.
I hefted the necklace again, to feel the weight of the gold, and gave it back to him.
I said, “I would be worried to carry that around.”
He made a little bow, and slipped the necklace over his neck with the swift practised gesture of a priest assuming a ritual upper garment. He gave two or three pat
s over the scattered twists of grey-black hair on his loose-skinned, old man’s chest, to settle the coin below his singlet; and he buttoned up his shirt.
“Is only like a souvenir for me. It safer like this than in the bank. If I take it to the bank, they would put me in jail. Is what happen to the two other fellows with me. Negro fellows, not from the islands, but from a place called Barlovento. A lot of old-time plantations there, and a lot of Venezuelan black people.”
It was one of the places in Venezuela where I had found again the vegetation of the little cocoa valley of my childhood. The old plantation barracks and the community of very black people (many of them working in the town now) had been a surprise. But Barlovento—the word meant “windward,” and to me was of the Caribbean—was also where one day I had driven for miles beside an unkempt cocoa estate with tall shade trees, through a smell of vanilla.
Manuel Sorzano said, “As soon as those black fellows see the coins, they just want to stuff their pockets and run. I tell them no, they will get catch. At first they listen to me, but then they begin to feel that I want to deny them something. So they just stuff their pockets and run. I stay behind, taking my time. I prise out a few more bricks, looking for a little more, and even finding a little more. Very quiet I start fulling my food-carrier. Three round enamel bowls one on top the other, in a metal frame or cage, with a handle on the top. I full that, the rice and bread and other food keeping the coins very quiet, and I keep my eye on it and went on working in another room, with other fellows, till it was time to knock off. When I leave the site with that food-carrier I was like a man walking on glass, I was so frighten of falling. In the evening I take the coins somewhere else. In the morning I went back to work, very quiet, making no fuss, and that same day we knock down the room where we find the coins. I just keep on doing my work, and sure enough in the afternoon five or six Guardia Nacional men come. They start going through the site like crazy ants. They not saying what they come for, but I know they looking for a room that already knock down. It was because of the black fellows. You wouldn’t believe what they do. They feel that all the gold make them important, and they take the coins to one of the biggest banks in Caracas, where everybody wearing suits. Imagine. Black fellows from Barlovento, dress the way they dress, talking with their twang, and going into this big quiet air-condition bank and saying they have gold coins. Of course the people in the bank call the Guardia, and the fellows get lock up and beat up, and they lose everything.”
I said, “I hear the Guardia can be rough.”
“Well, yes.” But then Manuel Sorzano appeared to change sides. “They have a lot of rough people to deal with. And if you want to answer back like a man, you have to take what you get.”
A little while later he said, “My son Antonio is in the Guardia. Ever since he small, he want to be in the Guardia.”
I said, “The uniform, the gun, the jeep.”
“And the accommodation. You mustn’t forget that. They can have very nice quarters. Antonio always particular about that kind of thing. I remember an incident that happen some years back. This was in Puerto La Cruz. I was working on a hotel there. I went out in the car with the children and their mother one Saturday afternoon. They was having some kind of fair on the sea road. Suddenly I hear a siren, and this Guardia Nacional jeep start pushing me off the road. When I stop, one of the Guardia men jump in the car with a revolver in his hand. As soon as he see the mother and the children, this man—who was ready to hit me with the butt of the revolver—get very bashful and confused. He say, ‘Disculpe, disculpe, señora. Pardon, pardon, lady.’ And he jump out again. For some weeks Antonio make that into a kind of game. Running about the yard and the house, pretending he have a gun and saying, ‘Disculpe, disculpe, señora.’ ”
We were flying lower now over the coast.
Looking out of the window, showing me his profile with the pigtail, Manuel Sorzano said, after a silence, “The boy a lot in my thoughts these days. He having a little trouble.”
“The boy in the Guardia?”
“Yes. Antonio. I don’t mean ‘trouble’ trouble. But it serious. And is not something where I can help him. Two years or so ago he start living with a young girl. First woman I know him to have. He was very bashful about it, but after a while he wanted me to know, and I went up to see them. This was in a town on the Orinoco. The girl was very young and small, fair-skin Venezuelan type. About fifteen or sixteen, that’s what I thought. She was full of respect when I was there and didn’t say too much, and I was too shy to look too hard at her, to tell you the truth. When the time come for me to leave them, she come and kiss me on my cheek and I put my hand on her shoulder. No, not her shoulder. The top part of her arm. That give me a surprise. She wasn’t soft at all. She was hard like a man, and she was so small. Was what I remember more than anything, and I think about it all the way back, thinking, ‘What kind of hard life they put that poor girl through? What kind of hard work they make this little child do?’ When I get home the mother ask me, ‘What you think of the child? The child all right?’ She mean the little girl. I say yes. She say, ‘What type?’ I say, ‘’Pagnol type.’ I didn’t want to tell her anything else.
“And then the usual thing happen. I say usual, but it not usual when it happen to you. Antonio was on a murder case one day. He had to go out to a ranch far out of town. Cattle ranch. Foreign people. Antonio hate that place. They build those big concrete sheds, and with all that land, and in all that heat, they keep the cattle pen up tight, and they feeding them chicken-shit and molasses. It had to end in murder. Antonio should have been out the whole day, but something happen and he come back early in the afternoon.
“Let me tell you now that there was a Syrian store in this town. The Syrian man live upstairs, but he also have a little quinta, a house with a little land, just outside the town. As he was coming back to the town Antonio see the little girl leaving the quinta with the Syrian man. He get ’basourdi when he see that. As though somebody drop a sack of flour on his head.
“He couldn’t bear going home. He went to the station and spend a couple of hours there. Then he went home. The girl was there now. She was in the yard. She was in a little open shed, with a concrete floor, with ferns in hanging baskets and plants in pots. A nice, cool place where she do her washing, and where they also sit out sometimes. She was doing something with the plants. He didn’t say anything to her. He just stop in the yard, in the sun, and look at her, only at her face, and not at what she was doing. And as soon as she look at him she know she was in trouble.
“She left the plants and went to the house, to the kitchen. He went there too, and he sit down in the kitchen and now he look at the table. She leave the kitchen. He get up and draw his revolver and follow her. He follow her from room to room, from kitchen to drawing room to bedroom to gallery, waiting for when his finger would pull the trigger. She didn’t try to run out of the house. Thank God. Otherwise the finger would have pulled the trigger. Then she stop walking. He come right up to her and she scream at him, ‘You don’t know how these Syrians like to take advantage of little girls? Why you don’t go and kill him?’
“The words cut him like a knife. ‘Taking advantage,’ ‘little girls’—the words cut him up. He get sad and foolish. He know he can’t bear to kill her. He go to the little bedroom and lie down on the bed, in his uniform. The window open, the half-curtain hardly blowing. It still hot. He feel very peaceful, and he start sleeping right away. It nearly dark when he wake up, and he feel he come from far away. He stay lying down, smelling a neighbour frying fish, and he feel very peaceful, smelling that smell, and hearing the little noises from the houses all around. The noises sound as though they come from very far away. As he wake up a little bit more he know he feeling peaceful because he don’t have to spoil his life or anybody else life. He don’t have to do anything.
“It very dark when he get up. The house dark. He just seeing the few lights from the neighbours. It dark in the yard, dark in the shed ou
tside, with the ferns in the hanging baskets, and the plants, and the chairs on the concrete. Nothing cooking in the kitchen, nobody outside. He alone in the house. The girl not there. She gone. He start walking through the house, round and round. He don’t put on the lights. He walk in the dark.
“He go to the toilet. Then he go out in the dark yard. He walk about a little. Then he straighten himself, straighten his uniform, and pat the revolver in his holster. He get into his car and drive to the centre of the town, to the big park on the riverside.
“The river run on one side of the park. The Syrian shop is in a road on the other side. The road have a covered sidewalk with concrete columns at the side and a lot of advertisements one on top of the other on the columns. Is a long shop, with two wide doorways, but this evening one of the doors close. When Antonio go in he see the Syrian man at the far end of the counter, standing like a policeman in front of the shelves with the bolts of cheap cloth. He standing below a very dim hanging bulb, chatting and laughing with the people he cheating.
“Antonio study the laughing man and say to himself, ‘Go on and laugh now. You going to stop laughing soon.’ He check that the revolver there at his waist. He don’t take it out, because this time he not going to wait for it to go off. This time when he take it out he going to use it. He start moving down from the open door. The Syrian man turn, and when he see the Guardia uniform he look a little respectful.
“In his own mind Antonio start talking to the Syrian man: ‘Good. You showing respect. But is not enough to show respect. I want to see the fright in your eyes. I want to see your eyes when you start begging. That is when I will send you home.’
“The Syrian man recognize Antonio. He don’t look shocked. He don’t look frightened. He look vexed. Then he look at Antonio with hate. That throw Antonio. Is as though the Syrian man don’t understand how serious the moment is. The people in the shop understand, though. They stop talking, and they stand aside for Antonio to walk between them. He walk up to the counter, and the Syrian man now look at him with scorn. All this time the Syrian man don’t move.