Vidiadhar Naipaul - A Way in the World

“He went up to the general’s cabin. He knew the way. Everyone looked at him. The surgeon followed him, and I followed the surgeon. The general’s door was open. There was no reply when the commander knocked, but he went in, still holding his stick, and bending — a very tall man, a small doorway — in order not to strike his head. The general was in his hammock. Since I had left him he had become very ill. His shirt was wet with sweat. His face was white above the hollows of his eyes and cheeks. He didn’t talk. And yet, as I had learned, these two old men were very old friends.

“The commander began to talk. The old man didn’t reply. The commander talked on. I felt his words didn’t matter. I felt after a time that even the commander wasn’t paying attention to what he was saying. I think that all of us in that cabin were waiting for an explosion from the sick man in the hammock. And that explosion did come, and it went on for a long time. It was as though the waiting and the disappointments and the grief of many weeks now, and many years before that, had been gathered up into this moment, as though this was the moment that the general had been waiting for, the one clear thing he had felt he had to do, after he had understood his doom.

“The old commander, already bending below the low ceiling, bent lower before the general’s words. The commander had ruined everything, the general said. The commander had come out at the general’s expense many years before to look for the gold mines, and he had said he had found the gold mines. There were three people in San Thomé who operated gold mines, the general said. He even knew their names. Don José knew their names. Francisco Fashardo owned a mine. Hermano Fruntino owned a mine. Pedro Rodrigo Paraná owned a mine.

“When I heard my name mentioned, I looked up and caught the surgeon’s eye. He translated what the general had said into Spanish. I wanted to say that it wasn’t true, that there were no gold mines in San Thomé, that none of those names the general had spoken were real, that Paraná was the name of a river, and that hermano meant brother. But the surgeon looked hard at me and made a slight gesture with his head, and I knew that I was to say nothing, that we had to bear with the general in his madness, that this madness was all that remained of his life now, that this rage had given the sick man who had lost his son a kind of life.

“The old man raged and raged at the commander that afternoon. The sun shone through the green curtains. The heat was too much for me, and the anger of the old man, and the grief of the tall half-starved man with the bad eye and the very dirty clothes and hands. I went outside, and found everyone quiet and hushed and unhappy. Nothing that had happened was hidden from anyone on the Destiny or in the other ships.

“At length the commander left, without his stick, and went to his cabin. It was above the general’s. The general called for me, and I found him trembling in his hammock, his face thin and white, his shirt very wet, and he was complaining of feeling cold. He said, ‘I am sick, Don José, very sick.’ The commander’s polished stick was on the lid of the general’s clothes chest. We could hear the commander moving about in his cabin overhead, and the general behaved as though every noise, every sign of life from his commander, was an insult.

“Later, just before sunset, the general summoned the commander and went at him again.

“The commander had taken off some of his clothes. His shirt was undone. This time he didn’t listen for very long. He said something which I didn’t understand, and after that he didn’t try to talk. Not long after, he left and went up to his cabin.

“The general was like a man possessed. He got out of his hammock, got out his book, took some sheets of paper from it, and began to write by the light of a candle. It was the first time I had seen him use a candle since I had got on to the ship. There was a sound of a shot from above. The general made a face. It was dark, even with the candle. If it wasn’t dark, I would have said that the general smiled when he heard. After the shot the general wrote and wrote, this man who had not written in his journal since I had come to be with him.

“The surgeon came, and he and the general talked. We all three then went to the cabin above, the cabin of the commander. There he was, in the clothes he had arrived in, fully dressed again, on the floor. They were the clothes I had seen on him when he had put me on the launch at San Thomé and sent me to the general, with the gifts of the tortoise and the papers and the roll of tobacco. The commander’s face was turned towards the floor. The general turned him over, like a man anxious to see what other men would have preferred not to see. We could see where the shot had torn the shirt and damaged his ribs over his very thin chest. But there was also a knife, a long, thin knife. It had been thrust in between the ribs. What had come first? The knife or the shot? I think the shot.

“The cabin was soon full of people. The general wanted everyone to see, and no one liked what he had seen. I was told later that they didn’t like the idea of a man putting an end to his own life. It was like a judgement the dead man had made on himself. Though among us who are Indians or partly Indian it is better to do away with oneself than to live with dishonour.

“For hours that night, like a man inspired, like a man drawing energy from some unknown source or soul, the general wrote. The next day the commander was buried, without ceremony, his body tied in a shroud, for the sake of decency, rather than for religion, and thrown out into the Gulf, he who had walked according to the rules behind the shrouded corpses of the general’s son and the other dead English nobleman at San Thomé.

“That was the end. There was nothing more to do there. The captains of the other ships came to the general and asked what they were to do. He said that he was a doomed man, very sick and very old, a man who had lost his son, a man who had been betrayed by everyone, even his oldest friend, and that they should leave him, because he brought misfortune to all who followed him. When the captains did as he said, and left us, and there was nothing in the Gulf where we had been used to seeing their ships, the general complained about their ingratitude. He complained to me and the surgeon and to other people. But not with any great passion. He didn’t believe what he said. He was a tired-out man, drained of feelings, trying to play with feelings.

“It was the end. And in spite of all that the general said he could do, he decided quite simply, when the time came, to head for home, and his doom at the hands of his king.

“When the poor commander — a very frightened man, as I now understood — had dressed me for a joke in Don Palmita’s very big clothes at San Thomé, and had sent me down river in the launch, I had found a picture, in my head, for my own doom. I had felt I was falling into the sea, falling into the sky. I had focussed on that picture and found a comfort in it, because the doom it contained was so complete that it took away meaning from grief and the life of men and the world itself.

“Now, a few days after leaving the Gulf, leaving emptiness where our own ship had been, I found that the world had become like that picture in my head. Just a few days after leaving so many things that were familiar to me, familiar not only from the journeys I had made with the Berrios, but also from what I had heard from so many people: the rock called The Soldier, where the strong-winged pelicans settled down to die; the lake of pitch on the island of lere, which the Spaniards had called Trinidad; the high solitary hill of Anaparima, a marker for all who travelled in the Gulf; Guanaganare’s territory of Conquerabo or Cumucurapo, where my father’s father had founded the City of the Spaniards; the high island of Chacachacare and the other islands and islets in the Dragon’s Mouth. Familiar places, with clouds and sky and wind and sea as they had always been, but all now in a world changed forever, for me and for everybody else.