A Way in the World (25 page)

“When there were two hours of daylight left, the governor said they had done as much as they could do. For an hour or so he and the two others practised running from musket position to musket position, and withdrawing from one line to another. Then they ate their last meal, and the fires were put out. The sun went down, and after the silence of the day the forest began to roar. We waited. I don’t know how long.
I don’t think it would have been possible for the whistles or signals of the Portuguese boy to be heard with all that forest noise. And then we heard four musket shots. Just four, very close together. There was nothing more after that. Just the forest. In the morning, when it was silent again, the English soldiers came into the square. They carried very big lances.

“I was in the Berrios’ house. The soldiers had no trouble finding me. They found the three Indian women, too, hiding in one of the rancherías. And the Portuguese boy, and the two Negroes. They began to drive us very roughly to the governor’s house, shouting at us in English and what they thought was Spanish.

“ ‘You,’ they said to me. ‘
Castellano
’? I wanted to tell them that my father was the previous governor, but I didn’t know how to say that. So I just made signs to say yes. This made them very angry. One of the soldiers unhooked a coil of rope from his belt, and I think they would have hanged me there and then if the Negroes hadn’t said, ‘No castellano, no castellano. Indio, indio. Indian, Indian.’

“There were many soldiers in the governor’s house. In one room, the office, we saw a man with bandages and blood on his torn clothes. He had been wounded by a musket shot. In another room, the one with the Royal Chest, we saw two dead men laid out. We were taken to the main bedroom. There we found the English commander. He was an old man, very tall, as tall as the Spanish governor, but very thin. He had a bad eye. As commander he carried a polished stick about a yard long. He said through an interpreter to the women, ‘Some Spanish men died during the night. We want you to tell us who they are.’

“They took us to the redoubt, where we had done so much digging in the red earth the day before. The ground had been scuffed by the English soldiers’ feet, but you could still see the branches we had cut and where we had dragged them on the ground. Don Palmita, Erenetta, and Captain
Monje had died at musket positions in the outer line. All that work, and the fight had lasted only a minute. Four musket shots. One man had fired twice. With those four shots they had killed two English soldiers and wounded one. Only one shot had missed. And then all three of them had died. You could see where the big English lances had thrown aside the branches. I don’t think they were expecting the English to come so far up the river with those lances. Erenetta and Captain Monje still had their clothes, but they had already stripped the clothes off Don Palmita. He was naked and dirty and the blood was black on him and there was a gash from the top of his head down to his teeth.

“I told the commander who the dead men were. He changed colour when he heard that the naked man was the governor. The women were crying at the sight of the dead men, and when the English commander asked them to bury the dead men they said they didn’t know how to bury people. I don’t know what rule the commander was following. I don’t know why he wanted the women to bury the dead men. He didn’t ask me. He didn’t ask the Negroes. When the women said they didn’t know how to bury dead men, he looked as though he didn’t know what to do. Then he said to the women through the interpreter, ‘All right, all right. Cook for us. If you cook for us, nothing will happen to you. What can you cook for us?’ The women said they had only maize, and there wasn’t much of that because the vecinos had stripped the fields and taken most of the maize to the island.

“They cooked the maize, boiling it with some herbs, and the commander asked me and the other Indian, the one chained up in the house, to eat with them in the governor’s house. They treated us with a lot of honour. I wasn’t expecting that. The man who had been chained they called Señor Don Pedro. It wasn’t his name. It was like a joke with them.

“All the time there were those two dead bodies in the
Treasury room. One of them was the son of the English general. And outside were those three other bodies. When people die they should disappear. A dead body is like a weight on the earth, a weight on the soul. Later that day, when everyone was less tired, some of the English soldiers went out to the dead men, tried to compose their limbs, tied the bodies together and buried them in one of the holes we had dug the day before. That felt better. The crippled priest said some prayers in his house.

“The next day they buried the two men stretched out in the governor’s house. They brought shrouds from the ships and wrapped the bodies in them. They placed the bodies on planks and some men carried the planks round the open bare ground of the plaza, in front of the shacks and the thatched adobe church. The commander walked alone just behind the planks. It looked strange, but again I didn’t know what rule they were following. Some of the soldiers marched in formation with their flags pointing down. Others held their big lances in their right hands, the points sloping up, the wooden hafts dragging on the ground behind them. Twice they walked round the plaza. Then the bodies were buried in another hole we had dug the day before, not far from the other.

“After this, the commander began to look for gold. He dug up the ground in every ranchería. Once for a whole morning he had the Portuguese boy whipped back and forth through the settlement. He thought the Portuguese boy knew where the gold was. It might have been because of the boy’s accent. Then he left the poor boy alone. Day after day he had the soldiers dig. One night he went out of the settlement. In the morning he came back with some sand. He showed it to me. ‘Is this gold, Don José?’ He became demented. His bad eye flickered out of control more and more. He went up and down the river. Once he went too near the island and the soldiers from Puerto Rico opened up and killed six of his soldiers.

“Every day now, in little incidents like this, he began to lose men. Every day there were burials, and not always with their rules. Once for many days he went up the river in a launch. He travelled in this way for two hundred miles. He took me with him. He had said before we started that he knew this stretch of the river well, but it soon was clear that the river here was quite new to him. He was terrified that the people on the banks might shoot poisoned arrows. Every time he saw a rock or coloured earth or sand he wanted to know whether it contained gold. But he never wanted to stay too long on the banks because of his fear of the arrows. When we came back to the settlement we found that one of the ships had gone away.

“It was strange. I had hated Don Diego, the governor. Then I grieved for him. Now I began to grieve for the man who had killed Don Diego. He was frightened and unhappy. He held on to his polished stick but he no longer knew what to do. The soldiers were sick and dying. We had no food. His men had no regard for him. He was frightened that more ships might desert. That was when he decided to send me in the launch to the river mouth to meet the general.

“He sat in the bedroom of the governor’s house and wrote a letter. He said I was not to tell the general about the death of his son. The general should read it first in his letter. Then he began to put things in the launch. A lot of papers from the Treasury, where the general’s dead son had lain for two nights and a day. The oranges and lemons. The only gold things in San Thomé. There were some trees in the settlement. The roll of tobacco. There was tobacco everywhere. That was what people grew to trade with the foreign ships. If only it was food no one would have gone hungry. Then he thought of the tortoise. He would have liked to send the general an armadillo, he said. On the river one day in 1595 he and the general and everybody else had feasted on armadillo. The tortoise wasn’t food, but the general was interested in these strange animals. I was to keep the tortoise cool.

“And then, just before I left, the idea came to him to dress me up in the clothes they had stripped off the dead governor. They were pretty clothes, but they were too big for me. That made him laugh. I thought it was a strange time for a joke like that. But he was probably following some rules of his own. It was like the time he and his officers unchained the Indian in the governor’s house, dressed him up, and called him Señor Don Pedro, and then wanted him and me to sit and eat boiled maize with them in the governor’s house, while the three dead men were unburied outside, and the two dead men were lying in the other room.”

EYES ALONE
again, we move down river. But now we are looking at what the launch is leaving behind. We are never far from the northern bank, and we are moving fast, at about four or five miles an hour. At a certain stage we leave the main river and turn into a channel that flows north. We slow down. The current no longer drives us. We depend on wind and tack from side to side, until the banks vanish. We are out in the wide Gulf again, and soon we see the heavy brown pelicans and the slender frigate birds flying over The Soldier.

Half-way through these pictures, as we consider water and flat land, green and brown and yellow, we hear the voice of Fray Simón, the historian.

“You are now a well-travelled man. Better travelled than most people in the world. You’ve been to England. You’ve seen some of its great cities and great buildings. You’ve seen things I haven’t seen. The spire of Salisbury, the great cathedrals of Winchester and Southwark, the Tower of London that they say Julius Caesar built. You’ve met important men. You’ve been to Spain, too. You’ve been to Toledo and Salamanca. You’ve been to Seville. You’ve seen the galleons from the Americas on the river there. And now you’re back here, in New Granada, where you were born. Don José in name and deed.”

“It was the doing of Sir Guateral, the English general. He could have condemned me with a word.”

“Why did he like you?”

“He never said.”

“Did he see in you some resemblance to the son he had lost? Was it because you were among the last people to see his son?”

“We never talked about it. He never asked me about his son.”

“Did you know the general was going to die in a few months?”

“I didn’t know, and I’m glad I didn’t know. It would have been too much for me after all that had happened. And I was full of my own grief.”

“Because of all the dead men? Or grief because you were being taken away?”

“It had been with me for some weeks. But it was only on the launch that I began to understand what I was feeling. I wasn’t a Guiana man. I was from New Granada, and had made that long journey down the river with the Berrios. I always had the hope that I would be able to pick my way back home from Guiana. When the settlement was abandoned, and the vecinos took refuge on the island in the river, I felt the world had changed for me. I felt I had lost touch with things. On the launch this grief grew and grew. Sometimes a child playing in a puddle after rain gets suddenly frightened by the reflected sky. I was like that. I felt I was falling into the sky, falling into the sea. I hardened my heart. And then, from being frightened by that idea of falling into the sky, I began to hold on to it. It was the only comfort I had. The thought of my doom lifted me above people. I thought I would acknowledge no one. Even if people laughed at me, or smiled at me, because of the clothes I was wearing, I wasn’t going to smile back.”

“Was this the face you showed to the general when you went aboard his ship?”

“Yes.”

“You were a lucky man. He had fallen out of love with the Indians. He thought they’d let him down.”

“As I said, he could have condemned me with a word.”

“It may be your demeanour impressed him. Perhaps he saw his fate in yours.”

“He didn’t look at me at first. And I was thinking about the birds above the rock they called The Soldier. Then he began to read the letter, and he cried for his son, and the surgeon held him. It was only after this that I felt his eyes fall on me.”

“Of course, you were the only thing from Guiana he was taking back to England.”

“That was what people said later. At the time I just felt his old man’s eyes falling on my face, and I felt at ease with him.”

“I was hoping to get something else from you, I must confess. My feeling now is that as an historian I should deal as simply as possible with the moment of news. I should present only the facts.”

We consider again the frigate birds floating high over The Soldier, and, lower down, flying in well-spaced lines above the sea glitter, the awkwardly shaped pelicans (like miniature airborne caravels), heavy-bodied, heavy-beaked, with no balancing length of tail.

Over this comes the voice of Fray Simón, reading aloud as he writes his history.

“So their joy at the death in battle of the valiant Don Diego Palomeque de Acuña was well watered by the weeping that began in their ships for the death of their own general’s son.”

WE FOCUS
again on Don José: his confident face, his fine Jacobean tunic. He takes up his narrative again.

“When the general was a little restored, he gave orders that I was to be taken to his cabin and given some of his own
clothes. So at once my position on the ship changed. People who had looked at me with irony stopped doing so. Even my name they pronounced in a different way. The general’s cabin was small, but the hangings were richer than anything I had seen. The attendant who took me to the cabin opened a chest that was battened down to the floor, took out some clothes, and asked me to choose. The general was closer to my size. It was a relief to get out of the Spanish governor’s clothes. They were the fine clothes he had put on for the battle. The blood had turned black on them, and the red San Thomé mud, from that night of the battle, had dried to powder. They gave off the smell of death and the forest, river water and wet old leaves, and, faintly, as if from a long time before, the smell of the sweet root the governor had kept in his own clothes chest to perfume his clothes and keep out insects. I folded the clothes as neatly as I could and placed them on the lid of the chest.