“And now a funny thing happen. In his mind Antonio stop talking to the Syrian man, and he start talking to himself. ‘Why this man scorn me so? Somebody tell him something. I can’t send this man home when his heart so full of scorn for me. The girl tell him something, to give him this strength over me. What she tell him?’ All kinds of private things pass through his head. The power flow out of him, and he begin to feel cold, standing there in the shop. He begin to feel he want to cry. The Syrian man say, ‘Yes, Pepe?’ Calling him Pepe to insult him, in front of the other people, even though he wearing his uniform. And Antonio could only turn and leave.
“Somehow he live through the next few days. He send a message to me, asking me to come and see him. I find him in a state, and the house in a state. Is only the second time I see the house. The first time they had it so nice for me. The girl was in her nice clothes, and she was respectful. Now she not there, and everything that I see make me think of her. The little shed in the yard, with the plants and the ferns, make me think of her. It was there that we sit out and take tea.
“So when Antonio tell me the story I feel in my own self a little bit of what he feel. He say he think he will have to leave the Guardia—he too mash up inside to do that kind of work now. He start crying. I don’t know what to tell him. Though I miss the girl and feel a little bit of what he feel, I don’t have the experience to tell him anything. I can’t tell him what to do to get people to like him or to stay with him.
“I grow up in the old days, with different ways. The older people used to look after that side for you. When I was twenty-two—it was the war, and I was working on the American base at Cumuto—my father just say to me one Friday when I come home for the weekend, ‘You getting too damn big. Is high time you get married. I have my eye on one or two girls for you. I will go and talk to the families.’ And that was that. I was a big man on the base, working with the Americans and everything, but I wasn’t man enough to tell my father no. Before I could turn around, I have a wife and I start having children. It was like something that just happen to me, like something somebody give me. I didn’t go out looking for it.
“And you could say something like that happen again after I cut loose from over there and bust it to here. I was living a runaway kind of life in Maturin, and I used to take my meals with this Indian family. I never talk nice to the daughter. I hardly talk to her at all. Somehow I just move in with them, and then she move out with me, and everybody agree, and nobody talk too much. And I must tell you I never touch the lady until we start living together.
“The funny thing is, as the children start growing up, it wasn’t the boys I worry about so much as the girls. We can’t arrange anything for them here, and they don’t want anything old-fashioned like that. They want the modern way, to choose their own, and you know how girl children foolish. One piece of sweet talk, and their head turn. And when a girl have a child, that isn’t something she can take back. Good or bad, is what she have, and her life follow that direction. But Dolores and the other girl was all right. They have the right kind of looks, and they get a lot of offers, and they could pick and choose, and they settle down. And I know the other girls going to be all right, because that good example set.
“Was different for the boys. The girls could just sit and wait. The boys have to go out and get. They have to be men in a new way, and they don’t really know what to do. They don’t have the example from me. They just copying people outside without really understanding. And is extra hard for them, because all the time they still have the old-fashioned bashfulness which they get from me.
“It was easier for Antonio to get into the Guardia than for him to get that girl, and then he was so bashful about it he didn’t tell me for a long time. He wasn’t being sly. He wasn’t worried about the girl. He just bashful. He feel it wouldn’t be showing me respect, it would look as though he running me competition.
“And when he tell me, and I go to see them, I too was so damn bashful I can’t bring myself to look the girl in the face, and Antonio so bashful he pretending he hardly know the girl. The only person who not bashful is the girl. And I think afterwards that all I know of the girl is what I see, that the girl is really a stranger, and that Antonio don’t know much more about her either. And I feel now, as he and I talk in the house, that this is part of the mess he is in.
“We talk all day, and we talk until late at night. We talk and talk. We say the same things ten, twelve times, and then we start all over again, he is in such a state.
“I tell him God was with him that day, when his finger didn’t pull the trigger, and then when he walk out of the Syrian man shop. I tell him that he don’t really know the girl, and he can’t talk of shame and disgrace. He must only think he make a mistake with her. The next time he wouldn’t make a mistake. The girl probably make her own mistakes already, and the Syrian man, too. Everybody going out to look for boy friend and girl friend among strangers must make a mistake. And my feeling is that in the end what is really for you you will get.
“I say, ‘I never had the kind of excitement in my life that you and your generation looking for in yours. Yours is the modern way, and I must tell you I jealous you a little bit for it, for the freedom it give. But if you want this kind of excitement, you have to pay the price. Other people must have their excitement and freedom too. You can’t tie them down. You can’t start thinking of fair and unfair. Once you start looking for this excitement, you have to put away this idea of fair and unfair.’
“So we sit down in the dark, in the shed with the fern baskets and the plants, talking and talking, and I search my mind for things to say to him, some true, some half true.
“People passing in the road all the time. They are like shadows against the lights of the other houses. I suppose some of them pick up the drama by now, and they know that the Guardia Nacional man and his father sitting and talking about the little girl and the Syrian man. I feel I can tell when people know. They don’t want to look, and they walk as though they don’t want to make any noise. They treat the house as though it is a house of sickness. Nobody mock. It is a side of the people here I never know about or had cause to look for, and it make me appreciate and respect them.
“I feel that as we talk, and as he get more and more tired, Antonio start calming down. But every now and then he break down and say that he will have to leave the Guardia. I don’t really believe him now, but at the same time I have the feeling that, just because I am taking his grief very seriously, and because he is calmer, and because of all the sympathy he must know he is getting from the neighbours, he might want to show off and do something dramatic. I feel this is the most dangerous time.
“I tell him, ‘I will say some prayers for you.’
“The idea did just come to me. And as soon as I say it, I see it was the right thing to say. He know that I have special prayers in mind. He don’t know much about these prayers, but he know they are very important to his mother, and I take them seriously too.
“I say to him, ‘I want you to promise that you won’t do anything until I say these prayers for you.’
“He don’t say anything, but I feel he agree. And that take a weight off my mind.”
The special prayers Manuel Sorzano meant were readings from the Hindu scriptures. They required a pundit chanting in Sanskrit (or what in this far-off part of the world passed for Sanskrit), sitting in front of a low, decorated earthen altar, stuck with a young banana tree, and with sugar and clarified butter burning on an aromatic pitch-pine fire: old emblems of fertility and sacrifice. These prayers couldn’t be arranged in Venezuela: Manuel Sorzano had had to return to Trinidad, where in an earlier life he had had another, and now unspoken, name. It was from those prayers that he was now returning, freshly cleansed in his own mind, not eating meat and not drinking, with the souvenir raffia basket with the jars and bottles of lime pickle and mango pickle and pepper sauce; and with the devotional Hindi records.
He said, “I hope I not coming
back to big news.” He struck his heart heavily with his braceleted right hand. “I can’t tell you how much I feel that I am going to pay now for all my luck here.”
Closer and closer below us now the windy grey and white sea, the blocks of flats, the long runways of the airport in the narrow strip of flat land between the sea and the mountains, the scarred red earth, the scores of yellow earth-removing machines, the many small white aeroplanes of the internal Venezuelan airlines, Aeropostal, Avensa, the larger jets of half a dozen international airlines beside the long terminal building: Venezuela of the boom, where in Caracas (reached by long tunnels through those mountains) in the more luxurious commercial centres a shirt could cost a hundred dollars, at a time when in New York a fifty-dollar shirt was an extravagance.
We stood in different immigration queues. As a Venezuelan he was quickly through. He waited for me, noticeable with his pigtail and his souvenir raffia bag.
The immigration official, when I got to him, waved my disembarkation form at me. He was about to say something when a colleague called to him; he called back, absently wrote something on my form, stamped it, stamped my passport, waved me on, and left his desk.
Manuel Sorzano lifted his chin and asked, “What he write on your paper?”
I looked. I had not written what my occupation was—and this was only partly an oversight: at that time writers were suspect: some guerrillas had been misusing the word. In the blank for occupation, the distracted official had written “Ejecutivo,” executive.
Manuel Sorzano said, “You see why this is a great country? They treat you according to what you show yourself to be. They respect you just as much as you respect yourself. Nowhere else.”
A man of the Guardia was looking at us. Manuel Sorzano had noticed, and he had very slightly adjusted his demeanour to show that he was on both sides of authority: a friendly acknowledgement of the uniform, together with a slight rounding of the shoulder to show deference to it.
In the customs hall he said, “But you should be a little careful. We have a few guerrillas here. Two or three times Antonio get involved in a little gunplay with them. One fellow write on his ID card Director Ejecutivo, Chief Executive. Boasting, nuh. Word get around, and one bright morning the guerrillas drive up and snatch him just as he was getting in a bus to go to work. A colectivo, one of those little private buses where you have to stoop. Everybody so busy scrambling on and minding their head, nobody notice. When they find he have no big company behind him, to pay up, they shoot him. In this country you have to know how to handle yourself.”
CHAPTER 8
In the
Gulf of
Desolation:
An Unwritten
Story
AT ONE time I thought I should try to do a play or a film—a film would have been better—about the Gulf. I saw it as a three-part work: Columbus in 1498, Raleigh in 1618, and Francisco Miranda, the Venezuelan revolutionary, in 1806: three obsessed men, well past their prime, each with his own vision of the New World, each at what should have been a moment of fulfilment, but really near the end of things, in the Gulf of Desolation. Separate stories, different people, changing style of clothes, but the episodes would have developed one out of the other, as in a serial.
Raleigh in 1618, an old, sick man, waiting in the Gulf for news of the gold mines which he had never seen and which he no longer believed in, was like Columbus in 1498, complaining in his journal about his bad eyesight and bad health and bad luck, pleading in advance for the sympathy of his sovereigns. As he picked his way along the indentations of this strange Gulf, partly salt, partly fresh, he saw himself sailing between the island he called The Trinity and another island (really the South American continent) which he called the Land of Grace. He was offering place-names as prayers, and exaggerating the wonder of what he saw. He had already almost lost his dream of the New World; he knew that things had gone very wrong with the little Spanish colony he had left behind on the island of Haiti. And at the end of this third journey he was to go back in chains to Spain. Just as Raleigh in 1618, when there was no longer anything to wait for, went back to the Tower and execution.
There is this kind of madness and self-deception—followed by surrender—in the later career of Francisco Miranda, the Venezuelan revolutionary who came before Bolívar. Miranda is not as well known as Columbus or Raleigh. His career is just as fabulous and original, but (for a reason we will come to later) he has no historical myth, and it is necessary at this point to establish his story.
In 1806 Miranda is fifty-six. He has been out of Venezuela for thirty-five years. For more than twenty of those years, in the United States, England and France, he has been touting around an idea of Spanish-American liberation. Technically, he is a deserter from the Spanish army. This means he has been cut off from such family wealth as he has in Venezuela; and he has been living on his wits. The South American revolution—and his potential place at the head of it—is his only asset. In 1805 he panics; he feels that the French under Napoleon might invade the South American continent and that there might be no revolution for him to lead. He leaves England and goes to the United States. With money from a merchant (who is willing to speculate in the revolution) Miranda buys a small ship, recruits two hundred mercenaries, and decides to invade South America.
It is a long, slow journey south. He quarrels with the captain, he quarrels with his recruits, and the invasion is a disaster. In a simple forty-minute action a Spanish ship cuts off and detains the two unarmed schooners that are being used to land fifty-eight of the invaders. Miranda, who has last seen action twenty-five years before, turns and flees in his own ship.
He is succoured by the British authorities in Barbados and Trinidad. His unpaid, mutinous American recruits are brought to heel; he recruits more men from among the French in Trinidad; and he starts on a fresh invasion. Like Columbus, like Raleigh, he has a sense of history. He issues a proclamation: “The Gulf that Columbus discovered and honoured with his presence will now witness the illustrious action of our gallant efforts.”
His proclamations are of another sort when, with covert British naval help this time, he lands without opposition in Venezuela. Local officials who do not give up their allegiance to the Spanish authorities, he says, will be treated as enemies. His idea of revolution is as simple as that. No one comes over to him; people run away from him.
He makes no effort to ransom or to rescue or to bargain for the fifty-eight men he had lost earlier. Ten of them are hanged and quartered, their heads spiked, their remains ceremonially burnt. The others are all shut up in dreadful prisons. Miranda never talks about them or expresses sorrow for them. They were mercenaries, gamblers. If the invasion had come off, they would have had a lot of loot. As it is, they lost; nothing is owed them.
He isn’t strong enough—or skilled enough or confident enough—to move inland. After ten days he re-embarks. For some weeks he waits indecisively off the Venezuelan coast. British naval support, never officially authorized, is finally withdrawn; and there is nothing for Miranda to do but return to Trinidad.
For a whole year after this Miranda stays in Trinidad, and he is like a man marooned.
Until nine years before Trinidad was part of Venezuela and the Spanish empire. Now it is a British territory. Most of the island is forest, but it is empty forest: the aboriginal population has almost ceased to exist. Twenty years before, on the site of the old Indian shore settlement of Cumucurapo, the Spaniards had laid out a small Spanish-style town of regularly intersecting straight streets. Most of the residential plots away from the main square are empty and overgrown. Right at the end of the unfinished town, and going back to the hills and the forest on three sides, are the new slave plantations—newer than the town—set up on land that had remained bush for two hundred years, after the disappearance of the aboriginal people.
The planters are refugees from Haiti and the other French-speaking islands to the north. The planters are not all white. There are many mulattoes and b
lacks among them, and they are known, in the caste language of the time, as “free people of colour”; they are not called Negroes. An unusually high proportion of the slaves in Trinidad are “new Negroes,” freshly imported from Africa.
The island now lives by and for these plantations, and away from them there is almost no life. Travel is controlled. There are no wanderers, no floating, free population. There is no place here for a metropolitan man like Miranda. There must have been times during the year when—waiting on developments, and at the mercy of the British government—he would have felt like a prisoner, and wondered whether he would ever get out, leave what had once been part of his native land, and go back to London, to his house and family.
After a long, idle year he does go back. This is where his story should have ended, with this escape from what had once been part of his native land. That would have been irony enough. But he isn’t allowed to go out on a dying fall. He is too famous, has been active for too long, has talked too much. Another fate has been prepared for him.
Three years later the real revolution in Venezuela is started by Bolívar and others. They call Miranda out from London. They think they need him. Miranda is the most famous South American or Spanish American of his time; he knows important people in England and the United States. The revolutionaries also believe they need Miranda’s military skill: the word among South Americans is that in military matters he is second only to Napoleon. (For eleven years he had been a captain in the Spanish service in Spain, North Africa, and the West Indies. Fleetingly, before he deserted and went to the United States, he was a colonel. But when he got to France he encouraged the French to believe that he had been a general in the American War of Independence; and, in the early days of the French Revolution, he had served for seven months as a general in the revolutionary army, until he was arrested for incompetence.)