A Way in the World (34 page)

“Sarah, I will never find the courage to tell you. The flag that carried so much of you was lost five weeks after you wrote that, when the
Bee
and the
Bacchus
were lost, with all the landing party. I waited until the 12th of March before I took the flag out of my trunk and showed it to the men on the
Leander.
I thought that Francisco would have been born by then. I know now that he was two weeks old. The
Bee
and the
Bacchus
were both unarmed sloops. The other ships we were expecting all the way down never came. After that long voyage, with those unruly, mocking Americans, butcher boys, I had to try to land. I couldn’t just go away without doing anything. The Spaniards will dishonour that flag. They will find special ways …”

“First of May 1806. I wait for news of my dear Sir and try to guess what other people know. Mr. Holland the print-seller sent to my uncle for a Picture of the Gen, and my uncle
sat down all morning at the small library table and drew one of my dear Sir in Profile with his long white queue hanging down his back tied up at the end with a little ribbing and with his silk cravat below his chin, all in Profile, very serious and stern, and my uncle says that in the Print the Engraver will show clouds and a Crown above the Gen’s head. I thought this was a good sign, because as my uncle says Mr. Holland wants to sell his prints and he knows when to expect good news. But then Mr. Turnbull came and walked through the house in a way he wouldn’t have dared if my Gen was here. Standing up in the library and Ex-Claiming when are those Volumes going to be paid for, they cost Thousand’s, the booksellers and binders are sending their bills to the firm of Turnbull and Forbes, I never authorized that. Walking through the house as though I wasnt there, no bowing and no my good lady now, Leander and Francisco and their mother not much thought of now that you are not here. My dear Sir they are all snake’s in the Grass as long as I live I will encourage Leander and Francisco to look for their Deseat. I was mighty sick after he left and my heart allmost broke. Take yourself out of their power my dear Sir, I nightly pray in the silence of the house for you soon to claim your own, and for that Crown to be sett on your head.”

THERE WAS
a disturbance outside. A number of men talking at once, an irregular hollow stamping on the ground, the sounds of harness, more talk, shouts, and then a slow, heavy crash.

Miranda was roused from the sound of Sarah’s voice, from the flow of his own unspoken reply, from thoughts and pictures of his library, his sleeping sons, the London night, the silence of his house.

It was darker in the room than he had thought, as though time had shifted with his thoughts and it was nearly night here too. It was only the rainy-season weather of the estuary
and the Gulf: one brief, violent downpour recently over, a remnant of its drizzle still about, another downpour about to come.

He went to the window. It was in the local style, the shutter roughly jalousied, hinged at the top (the better to keep out the rain), and propped open with a stick. Water dripped from the sloping sides of the shutter. The paint had long ago peeled, the timber had weathered grey; the sill had begun to rot.

The grounds at the back of the house were a mess of mud and rubble and bush, like a clearing in the forest. To one side—near the separate little cook-house, whitewash fallen off grey, soaked boards, smoke coming out of blackened open windows: dinner for the governor and his guest being got ready—there were old compacted mounds of kitchen ash.

In the mud directly in front, a mule had been unharnessed from a cart. The badly distributed load of rubble had fallen forward, breaking the front flap of the cart and pressing the shafts into the mud.

The three or four mud-stained black men around the mule and cart were talking in a language Miranda had never heard before. He supposed it to be a language of Africa.

If the men had been talking English or French or Spanish Miranda would not have noticed them as he now did. He would have seen only Negroes and he would not have been able to recognize them later. But the strange private language, and the whole internal, unknowable world it implied, made him consider the faces of the men.

They noticed him, too, almost at the same time, the old man with the long white pigtail appearing below the sloping jalousied shutter against the darkness of the window. For a while, waiting for they knew not what, looking at him, they stood still, and for those moments it was as if in their bewilderment—men who seemed not to have any idea what they were doing or why, or even where they were—Miranda saw
something of his own disturbance, called away from London and his house and Sarah and her panic, to focus all at once on that piece of bush and those men.

He noticed their frailty. It was strange in people expected to do physical labour, but (and this was plantation lore, in Venezuela as well) the sturdiness of the plantation worker was grafted on to this kind of stock over later generations. Many Africans when they arrived were as frail as these men. A certain number were expected to die in the first year, from the water, the food, the new insects. On the established plantations there were ways of “seasoning” new arrivals and seeing them through their dangerous first year. These Africans in the grounds of Government House looked neglected. In the hollow red eyes of one man could be seen signs of a rainy-season fever. He was doomed, and so perhaps was one of the men with him.

That idea of doom, of another kind of life, coming to Miranda even while he was looking at the eyes of the Africans, re-established distance between him and the men he saw, and returned him to himself and the setting: the downpour coming, the wet, rotting window sill with disagreeable drifts of black-and-white lizard droppings in the eaten-away parts of the wood: the lizards now seen to be active everywhere around him, pale yellow creatures, almost transparent, like little crocodiles but with enormous lidless eyes.

He saw in a corner of the room now the three new deal chests, like seamen’s chests, with the Turnbull and Forbes samples General Hislop had mentioned. The chests were painted with a style of lettering—thin horizontals, very thick verticals—that brought back the signboards and street signs of London:
Brig.-Gen. Thos. Hislop, Headquarters, Trinidad. For General Miranda. From Turnbull and Forbes, London.

He didn’t go back to Sarah’s letter. It was an hour or so to dinner, time enough to consider other correspondence. The heavy roaring rain that came soon, beating on the ground and trees and the roof, helped his concentration.

Not long after the rain stopped a servant came and told him he had a visitor.

He went out to the verandah. He recognized his visitor as Bernard, last seen seven years ago in London. There was a mud-spattered calash with a wet black coachman in the drive. Though the rain had stopped, the drive was running with yellow water that came off the surrounding hills and made a general gurgling noise all around.

The calash made a good first impression; but then Miranda saw that the hood, which was up, was cracked and worn in the folds, the bodywork was dented and scratched, and the emblem on the low door was crudely painted. The wet coachman was wearing alpargatas, peon’s footwear, a cheap kind of slipper with a very thin leather sole with woven cotton straps for the toes and the heel. The heel-straps of the coachman’s alpargatas had long ago been flattened below the man’s heel.

The verandah was wet and every little breath of air felt chill. The rain had blown in on three sides.

Miranda didn’t ask Bernard inside. Both men remained standing in the verandah.

Bernard said, “General.”

Miranda didn’t speak.

“I never wrote. I know.”

“There are so many letters,” Miranda said. “You never wrote at all? Are you sure?”

“I put it off and put it off. Year after year. And then it was too late. Governor Hislop would have told you that I’m married. My wife is the daughter of the Chevalier de Gourville. Dupont Duvivier de Gourville. He’s a relation of the Baron de Montalembert. No finer connection is possible in these parts. It wasn’t something I would have thought possible for myself. I had to set aside thoughts of the revolution. You’re a man of the world, and I feel I can offer you this explanation. I won’t call it an excuse.”

Miranda said, “I’ve heard of the baron. He came here in
1801 with a hundred and fifty Negroes, and he lost a hundred at one blow.”

“A hundred and twenty. In the first month. After losing everything in Santo Domingo and Martinique. And there’s no bitterness in him. He simply started up again. General, I don’t want to take up more of your time. I thought it was my duty to make this call on you, to see you as soon as possible, and to declare myself. Times change, General. And though at one time I had to set aside thoughts of the revolution, I have these past few months been serving you in ways you don’t know. I think it is important for you to know that. Of course, French people of standing here know of our old connection, and I have been able to reassure them—especially those who have volunteered for your new expedition—that there was never any political quarrel between us. Friends and foes have spread all kinds of stories about you here, General. The stories haven’t been all about the court of Catherine the Great. Some have been about the French Revolution. You were a general in the army of the Revolution. But I’ve always told people that you will honour property rights in land and Negroes, that there is nothing to fear. People worry about these things here, and you can’t blame them, after recent history. I hope you think I’ve done well.”

“You’ve done well.”

“Now I must go.”

“Your calash?”

“My wife’s. What you see on it are the Gourville arms. Roughly done, but it was painted by a Negro born and bred in Martinique and—you wouldn’t believe—trained as a pastrycook.”

“Pastrycook! The things you can get people to do these days!”

Bernard began to go down the steps. Miranda (never forgetting, with a remnant of shame, how, thirty-five years ago, eight fanegas, four hundred and fifty pounds, of Venezuelan
cocoa had been converted in Cadiz into nothing more than a silk handkerchief and a silk umbrella) noticed how carefully, even with all the rain, the chevalier’s son-in-law had dressed for the occasion: the pale yellow pantaloons, the white ruffed shirt, the blue silk jacket. Before he got to the bottom of the broad, semi-rotting wooden steps (the driver of the calash getting ready, shaking the wet off the reins), he turned and looked at Miranda. It was the moment Miranda—wondering about the purpose of the call—had thought would never come.

Bernard said, “General. The clerk of the Council died last week. Did Governor Hislop tell you? It means there is a vacancy. The fees are small. Over a month they wouldn’t purchase you a dinner in London. But it’s a position of some local dignity. It matters to me, to be something in my own right. You’ll understand. I hope you’ll feel able to recommend me for it.”

AT DINNER
Hislop said, “I know what he wants. You don’t have to tell me. So far, when the messages have come I’ve pretended not to hear. Let’s leave it like that. Let’s have some wine now, to celebrate your homecoming. Because that’s what it is: a homecoming after thirty-five years. And that’s what I hope it will turn out to be in a lasting way.”

Miranda said, “No wine for me, General. Just sugar and water. It’s all I’ve had for years. It’s what we used to drink in Caracas as children.”

“Almost the only commodities we’re not short of here. But sugar-and-water isn’t the kind of story we hear about you.”

“It’s strange about those stories. I started some of them, or at any rate encouraged them. Now they’re like stories about someone else. When I went to Spain in 1771, wine was one of the things I was travelling to know. It was something
the poets wrote about. The wine of Europe, not the brackish church stuff we had in Caracas. I thought a lot about wine on the
Prins Frederik.
I expected nectar. As soon as I got to Cadiz I started to make notes about every wine I had, as I made notes about the women, the churches, the pictures. I don’t know now how much I was acting for the sake of my journal. Acting being a man of culture. I was twenty-one.”

“So the chevalier’s son-in-law came in his calash. A famous calash. With its shop-sign coat of arms. I hope he was friendly.”

“I don’t know. He threatened me. He said I had a revolutionary past. He said he knew more about that past than anyone here, and some people might easily be made to feel that property wasn’t safe with me.”

Hislop said, “Unfortunately, he’s right. It could be very damaging. The Spaniards have also been spreading rumours. The local Spaniards are already keeping out, and unless these stories are checked, your French volunteers might also drop away. They’re refugees from the islands, aristocrats without money, and they’re going into this business for the sake of property. Land and Negroes. To re-establish their fortunes. We all know that. I wish it were otherwise, but in this part of the world it always comes down to land and Negroes, as I told you. We have to take Be’nard’s threat seriously. I’ll find ways of letting him know that you’ve spoken to me, and that I’ve agreed to let him have the clerkship, but that I won’t be making the appointment for a month. That should keep him out of mischief and give you enough time. Ah, the calash! Be’nard will feel it did the trick again.”

“I couldn’t really afford the money I gave him when I sent him out here in 1799. And yet when I saw him this morning I had to pretend to be stiff with him. It was strange. I felt no animosity towards him. And right at the end, as he was going down the steps and he turned and I saw how carefully he had dressed, my heart went out to him. He
looked so vulnerable, so easy to hurt. It would have been so easy to call his bluff, to laugh at the calash and the barefoot Negro driving it. And simply because it was so easy I didn’t want to do it. There’s always a touch of pathos in someone like that. He’s so exposed. I felt I was looking at a younger version of myself.

“I too had a coat of arms at one time. You need one to get a commission in a Spanish regiment. There are people in Spain who do these things. The man my father employed was called Zazo y Ortega. Zazo’s method was simple. He linked the Mirandas of Caracas and the Canary Islands to the twelfth-century Mirandas of Old Castile. And although I knew precisely who I was, and was proud of my father, and very proud of our money, I also passionately believed when I got on the
Prins Frederik
at La Guaira that I was another kind of person, and that I was travelling to Spain to claim my rightful inheritance, of which the coat of arms was a part. The
Prins Frederik
was a Swedish frigate. It was utterly foreign. It helped me to feel that I had undergone a transformation. For years I lived like this, knowing who I was and at the same time believing myself to be somebody else. Holding those two different ideas in my head at the same time, even drawing the Miranda arms on the expensive books I bought.