Vidiadhar Naipaul - A Way in the World

“There were only twelve people in the town the next morning. I counted them. There was the chained Indian in the governor’s house. There was myself. There were three Indian servant women. Two Negroes, left by their owners to fend for themselves. A crippled priest, and a Portuguese boy. There was the governor, and there were two captains with him, Captain Monje and Captain Erenetta.”

Fray Simón said, “Arias Nieto. That was the name that came out at the official enquiry.”

“The governor, Don Diego, behaved like a man. I have to say it. There were only the three of them who were soldiers, and he behaved as though they were three hundred. He was a big, stout man, the biggest Spaniard I had seen. I had never seen him do any manual work. Now he showed how much he could do. He and the two captains worked from first light to fortify the redoubt the soldiers from Puerto Rico had begun to create around some rocks just outside the plaza. He and the captains dug. They got the two Negroes to dig with them, and they made me dig with them as well. So there were six of us digging. Six men can dig a lot in a day. They had about a dozen muskets and they were preparing three lines of defence. We cut down branches and created barricades in front of each musket position. In the outer line the musket positions were far apart, about forty yards. In the second line they were closer, and in the last line they were very close, just inside the plaza. They set up rests for their muskets, and in some rests they placed primed muskets.

“They didn’t have a chance, but they were going to do all that they could. And they were working with such a will that it was only in the afternoon, when it was very hot and quiet, that I began to think that they were really dead men, that this was the last day of their life. I must tell you I admired them then, and I began to work with a will like theirs. The Indian women prepared food for us and brought us water, and the governor didn’t forget the crippled priest. We worked right through the day. A silent day, a deserted plaza, and we were all so active. The Portuguese boy acted as scout and watched the river.

“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.