I was told that the smell of death lingered for days in that area where, thirty-five years or so before, the fathers and grandfathers of some of the rebels (many were very young, boys in their teens) might have once partaken of the sacrament of Woodford Square.
I had never thought of St. Vincent Street—so calm and quiet in my first memory of it—as a place where men might fight so desperately. But all scenes of human habitation are touched by violence of this kind. Nearly every town has been besieged and fought over and has known this kind of blood. And as soon as I thought back, even to my own nerves at the time of my first return from England, I saw that there was an immense chain of events. You could start with the sacrament of the square and work back: to the black madmen on the benches, the Indian destitutes, the plantations, the wilderness, the aboriginal settlements, the discovery. And you could move forward from that exaltation and that mood of rejection to the nihilism of the moment.
As soon as the siege began there was no effective government. It took a little while for this to be understood; and then the effect on black communities—local and immigrant, in the capital and all those contiguous settlements at the foot of the Northern Range, north of the mainly Indian countryside, which remained quiet, untouched by the frenzy to the north—the effect on these communities was extraordinary. They were like people who had been granted a moment of pure freedom. They formed looting gangs. It was of this—of the inflamed, unrecognizable faces of the looters, the glittering eyes—as much as of the siege at the Red House that people spoke when I went back. For six days or so whole communities had lived with the idea of the end of things, a world without logic, and they had been lifted out of themselves. At least twenty-nine people died during this looting.
For many years I had accepted that the city I had known as a child no longer existed and what was there now belonged to others. Nazaralli Baksh, who had made the clothes I had gone away in, had ceased for some time to be a name in St. Vincent Street. But to see the destruction around where his shop had been was to be reminded of him more than ever. Across the road, the Victorian Gothic Police Headquarters—he used to make uniforms for them—had been blasted in at one side. The grey outer wall, where it still stood, was blackened; smoke had poured out of the pointed arches. It was unsettling to see what had been city—regulated, serviced, protected, full of wonder and the possibility of adventure—turn to vacancy, simple ground. The commercial streets of the centre had been levelled. You could see down to what might have been thought buried forever: the thick-walled eighteenth-century Spanish foundations of some buildings. You could see the low gable marks of early, small buildings against higher walls. You could look down, in fact, at more than Spanish foundations: you could look down at red Amerindian soil.
There had been blood here before. Where the shacks of immigrants now scaffolded the hillsides there had once been aboriginal people. The eighteenth-century Spanish city had been laid out on a wilderness the Spaniards had themselves created two centuries before, when they had taken over the aboriginal settlement of Cumucurapo. The Spaniards, always legalistic, nearly always had a notary on hand to “give faith” to what he witnessed. “Doy fe,” the notary would write: “I give faith,” “I give witness.” And there was a notary who recorded the names of the Amerindian chiefs of Cumucurapo who had surrendered their land to the Spaniards; the notary said that they had done so willingly, and that the people had “rejoiced.” The names of these chiefs were confirmed by an extraordinary accident. A short while later an English marauder came raiding. The Spaniards, who had so recently taken “true possession,” were themselves now put to flight; and, in the jail of the new Spanish settlement beyond the hills, five of the dispossessed chiefs were found, with the very names the notary had recorded, the last aboriginal rulers of the land, held together on one chain, scalded with hot bacon fat, and broken by other punishments.
CHAPTER 3
New Clothes:
An Unwritten
Story
SOME WRITING ideas go cold on you when you try to work them out on the page. Other ideas you simply play with in your mind, and don’t do more about, perhaps because you know you won’t get far. Most of these unattempted ideas fade; but one or two can stay with you. This is an account of an idea that has stayed.
The first impulse came to me in the first or second week of 1961, when I was in the Guiana Highlands, an Amerindian no man’s land on the frontiers of Venezuela, Brazil and what is now called Guyana.
I hadn’t been to South America before, had never travelled in wilderness. I had never, in fact, done any kind of serious travelling; and the writing wish that came to me was less an idea for a story than an excitement about where I was.
Once for nearly a whole day I was in a small boat on a highland river, moving upstream through tall, cool woodland. The river here was the merest tributary of a tributary. It was shallow, widening out sometimes over a cluttered rocky bed, with occasional deep pools where fallen trees or branches made perfect reflections, together with big fissured boulders. These boulders, grey, scoured clean, were sometimes so neatly cracked apart—like some kind of enormous petrified fruit—that they became things of beauty in themselves. The river water was reddish (from rotting leaves and tree-bark), transparent in sunlight, and clean enough to drink.
Brightly coloured birds followed our boat. We had a man with a gun with us, an Amerindian. He fired at the birds, for sport. After every shot he looked down at the boat, at no one in particular, and gave a nervous laugh. The birds didn’t take fright; they stayed with us; you could hear their wings flapping steadily on.
Once or twice during the day we stopped at an Amerindian village. At these village sites the river bank was higher, with a ramp or path zigzagging down to where the village dugouts were tied up. The people were pale, with black hair. Animated among themselves, exchanging food and goods and news, they managed at the next moment to be distant with the rest of us: holding themselves with an extraordinary stillness on their tree-shaded bank, and looking down without expression at the boat.
That was the setting. I would have liked to do something with it, but every piece of invention that came to me seemed to falsify what I had felt as a traveller.
Six or seven years later, when I was writing another kind of book, I did some detailed reading about the area. I went back to the earliest records, concentrating on the period between 1590 and 1620. Among the Spanish documents were accounts of the formal foundation of Spanish towns in Amerindian wilderness, reports of expeditions (most of them ending in death or despair), petitions of colonists to the king (read by the king or an official perhaps a full year later): curiously informal and fresh, these old Spanish cries from the other end of the world, the complaints and deceptions of hungry, quarrelsome, self-righteous, stoical people.
I looked also at the accounts of foreign adventurers. Foreigners—other Europeans—were barred by Spanish law from the Spanish empire. They risked death or the Inquisition if they were picked up. But this was a neglected corner of the Spanish empire, and the interlopers, as they were called, kept on coming, from France and Holland and England. Most came to trade (bringing in African slaves, taking out salt or tobacco); but a few had the idea of setting up colonies or kingdoms of their own, and came to find allies and subjects among the Indians.
I wondered at the fortitude of all these people. I remembered what I had first seen of the continent, a very small corner of it, from the low-flying aeroplane in the last week of 1960: miles of muddy wild beach with collapsed big trees where perhaps no traveller had set foot and no tourist ever would; tight forest; the vast half-drowned confusion of meandering rivers. It would have been achievement enough to get there and survive. The people whose words I was reading went there to intrigue, to look for gold, to fight.
A story shaped in my mind, over some years. But it never clothed itself in detail, in the “business” necessary to a narrative, even though this business fades as the narrative moves on—much as th
e oil or alcohol that carries a longer-lasting perfume fades.
My idea remained an idea, and (partly working it out for the first time) I write it down here.
THE NARRATOR is going up a highland river in an unnamed South American country. Who is this narrator? What can he be made to be? This is often where fiction can simply become false.
To make the narrator a writer or traveller would be true to the actual experience; but then the fictional additions would be quite transparent. Can the narrator be a man in disguise, a man on the run? That would be true about the region. In 1971 Michael X, the Trinidad Black Power man, after he had killed two people in Trinidad, went to Guyana (physically like the country of the narrative) and made for the interior, to hide. And many years before, one of the last men of the Frank James gang, looking for a sanctuary outside the United States, fetched up in the Guiana savannah country, lower down from the forest. (So I had heard when I went there on my own journey. Local people were proud of the connection; and I, too, thought it glamorous, having seen as a child the Tyrone Power and Henry Fonda films about Frank and Jesse James.)
A man on the run would have been true to the place. But narrative has its own strictness. It requires pertinence at all times, and to have given that character to the narrator would have introduced something not needed, a distraction, something that wouldn’t have tied up with what was to come at the end of his journey.
Better, instead of a man on the run, have a narrator who is a carrier of mischief. A revolutionary of the 1970s, say. A man seeking the help of up-country Amerindians to overthrow the African government on the coast. Such a situation wouldn’t only echo the truth of more than one country in the region. It would also hold certain historical ironies.
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, at the time of the Dutch and British slave plantations on the coast—the Dutch and British no longer interlopers on the Spanish Main, but sovereign powers—when slaves ran away to the interior, Amerindians hunted them down for a bounty. Now, at the time of the story, the Africans on the coast, descendants of the slaves, have inherited the authority of the old colonial government. They have a substantial educated and professional class. They are the rulers now; and the Amerindians are culturally what they were two hundred years before.
So for this narrator—who is more than a traveller looking for new sights—everything seen on the river has many meanings.
At the stern of the boat there is a man with a shotgun. From time to time he fires at the birds following the boat; and after every shot he laughs. It was perhaps with this sense of sport that his ancestors hunted down African runaways. Not with guns then, but with arrows—delicate little wands with the merest metal tip, not at all dangerous-looking, looking more like toys. They are still made: the arrows and quivers in the craft shops on the coast are exactly like the real things, fifty or sixty years old, that can be seen, coated with dust, in the ramshackle little museum—hardly touched since colonial days—in the capital.
And—perhaps, perhaps, the narrator thinks—this old instinct, this old attitude to the African, can be revived now, to serve a higher cause. Though when the boat stops at the villages, and the narrator considers the blank faces, the stillness of the staring people (after the first agitation), he has his doubts, comparing these withdrawn, passive river people with the Africans on the coast, and with the liveliness of revolutionary tribal people in other continents.
The once-a-week boat on this river is a cause for excitement at all the villages. At one shady village a woman comes down the zigzagging yellow ramp with a basket of food for the man with the shotgun: various things in tins and wooden bowls, separately tied up in cloth. The man doesn’t look at the woman when he speaks a few words to her; and later she comes down again with some cassava bread, two halves of a big stiff whitish disc about half an inch thick, with something of the appearance of granulated polystyrene.
The man breaks these halves into smaller pieces and wedges them between the bowls and tins and the side of the basket—roughly, as though the wrapping up of food in cloth is something that only women do. Later, when they are on the smooth river again, and the time has come to eat, the man unties all the dishes and—with sudden seriousness—breaks off small pieces of bread to dip into them. Cassava bread is part of every mouthful that he chews. It is the staple; it bulks out the meal.
The narrator asks for a piece, to try. The man laughs, pleased to be of interest. Below the unexpected sourness of the bread there is almost no taste.
The light alters; the mood of the day alters. The sun, more directly overhead, strikes down between the forest walls, and the river becomes full of glare. The river changes. The man with the gun, his meal finished, the dishes rinsed in the river and put back in the basket, is now sitting in the bow looking out for snags. He sits and watches and never stirs.
The narrator, with the sourness of the cassava bread lingering in his mouth, and a memory of its grittiness, thinks of the world’s staples. Rice and wheat and other kinds of grain are grasses. Cassava—a cousin of the red-leaved poinsettia—is more miraculous. It is a root, and it has a poison. It would have taken centuries for the remote ancestors of these forest people, after the crossing over of their ancestors from Asia, to have made their way down the continent to these forests and rivers. How many centuries more before the discovery of cassava? And how many centuries after that for the folk invention of the simple tools for getting rid of the poison?
Thinking like this, thinking of all the inventions of these isolated people, the narrator begins to think of the antiquity of the forest. Not new, not virgin. Those villages on the river would have been like the towns of the classical world, rising for millennia on the middens of their predecessors.
All at once, then, the light altering again, acquiring colour after glare, the river journey is over. It is about four o’clock, two hours to sunset. There is a new clearing in the forest, with a damaged stretch of low dirt-yellow bank—not the high bank of the Indian villages. There is no well-made ramp, just a number of crumbling chutes. After a day of river and sun and forest and Indian faces, the narrator is startled to see two almost naked white boys with bows and the small Indian arrows hiding behind the grass and boulder at the water’s edge. Not the arrows of the craft shops on the coast: the real arrows, from the forest. For a moment or two it is like being taken back to the beginning of things. Before white skins turned another colour, and yellow hair turned black.
There is no mystery: the children are from the new settlement in the clearing. They are playing at being Indians. The narrator is expected.
The narrator will stay for a few days here. The settlement is not his final destination. He will rest, take guides and go on. He will have to go on foot. The river cannot be navigated beyond this point. Beyond this are the boulders and the shallow rapids.
The settlement is the site of a religious mission. It is a newish religion, with a Christian basis. It has established itself in the country, both on the coast, where its followers are African, and in the interior, where it is getting Amerindian converts.
On the coast, among the Africans, it is even popular, because it promotes the idea of voluntary service as a two-way traffic, a form of international exchange. This means that the local country doesn’t simply receive foreign volunteers. Favoured local people who accept the religion can be sent abroad as service volunteers, to Europe, the United States, Canada, and even West Africa. Since few people on the coast have the means to travel (and most of the black population want to migrate to northern countries), there are any number of Africans, among them the relatives and friends of local politicians, who want to be volunteers and go abroad.
So the church has some authority and, in this country which is officially hostile to white people, the service volunteers who come from abroad have a good deal of freedom. These are the people who have been infiltrated by the revolutionaries. The disguise is almost perfect. Both groups have the same kind of dedication; both t
alk about racial brotherable; both talk about the wastefulness of the rich and the exploitation of the poor; and both deal in the same stern idea of imminent punishment and justice.
The narrator is one of these infiltrators. Who the others are at this mission station he doesn’t know. They will declare themselves to him in time. Now, at this moment of arrival, shouldering his rucksack, allowing himself to be marched off as a prisoner by the boys with the bows and deadly little Indian arrows, he is concerned to act only as a religious volunteer.
He is led to a cabin in the centre of the clearing. It is a rough timber cabin, but it is on tree-branch pillars about four feet high, and it easily dominates the other, smaller cabins which are flat on the rough ground. The clearing is still littered with the finer debris of felled trees, still with the marks of bush-clearing fires, and the salty smell of those fires. On three sides the forest wall, with many tall, thin, white-trunked trees close together, looks freshly exposed.
The narrator is expecting some kind of welcome, after his long journey. But the heavy white man, in jeans and washed-out tee-shirt, who comes out of the kitchen shed at the back of the central cabin, simply says to the boys, “Take the man to his house.” It is a foreign voice, central or eastern European, overlaid by American or Canadian intonation; and the narrator doesn’t know whether the abruptness has to do with the lack of language or whether it comes out of aggression. As the narrator walks away the man calls out: “Dinner here at five-thirty. That’s the rule here.”