Vidiadhar Naipaul - A Way in the World

“They know I’m against it. So they’ve blackened my character in London and up and down the islands. I’m a tippler, a sot, too fond of the pleasures of the table at Government House, dead to the world after dinner. Too little dignity for a governor. The pleasures of the table — red, salty butter, no vegetables, and this ship’s food.

“You will see now that the worst thing I could have done was to have allowed that man’s ears to be cut off. A free man reduced to slavery, and treated as the worst kind of Negro. It’s really what the French want to do to all the free people of colour. They infected me at the time of the enquiry. They talked to me about Martinique and Haiti. They talked to me about having to burn Negroes when they became too steeped in sorcery and magic. One man told me that a friend of his in Martinique had had to burn four of his Negroes. They told me that a free man of colour who habitually mixed with Negroes was very dangerous. They made me want to hurt the man very badly. After all the evidence at the inquiry, after hearing those simple-looking people talking very calmly about murdering people as though it was a continuation of their king-and-queen play at night, I saw the island and the town going up in flames. I never asked to see the laws. I never saw the man or what they did to him in the jail or asked how they sold him out of the island. I wonder now whether I would have even thought more about it if the Picton conviction hadn’t occurred. The turpitude, General. The turpitude I’ve lived with these past three years.”

Miranda said, “These people are my volunteers. I have no other now.”

“Your volunteers. Not your masters. As a military man I have been bred up in the virtues of obedience to my lawful superiors. I’ve never knowingly — as a military man — done an illegal or wrong or insubordinate thing. Most military men can say the same. It is particularly galling to me now to live with the prospect of being dragged before the public as an oppressor. Especially as the oppressor of people whom I’ve considered it my duty to protect. If there is an investigation or enquiry or trial, I wouldn’t know how to defend myself. To defend myself, I will have to put myself on the side of people whom I consider infamous. The people of colour have said, after the Picton conviction, that they intend to make an example of me. They are not nice words to hear. And I have reason to believe that they are being encouraged by the French, of all people, just to do me down. Nothing is clear to me now, General. I have become clouded.”

“Your bed has certainly not been one of roses. Claro que su cama no ha sido una de rosas, como ha dicho.”

“I feel I need to make a fresh start.”

“You certainly can do that in Caracas.”

“General.”

“But you’ll be on the same side as the French volunteers.”

“That will be accidental. I will have the clarity of your own purpose and vision.”

Miranda said, “Let me read this letter from your sentry-box. It might be from one of your mulatto friends, you think? Please, General. Allow me that joke. The letter’s not in French. It’s in Spanish. A scrivener’s hand. So at least it’s formal. I’ll skim. It may be nothing. It may just be standard abuse. It begins politely. Too politely — a bad sign. Sure enough, it soon becomes very passionate. I recognize the manifesto style of certain Spanish official pronouncements. It’s a letter from the Spanish authorities. It’s very serious. It warns me of the fate of Tupac Amaru. Tupac Amaru was the Inca name taken by the leader of a very big Indian rebellion in Peru in 1780. He was horribly tortured when he was caught. His tongue was cut off while he was still alive, and then, while he was still alive, he was quartered by four horses pulling in different directions. The four quarters of the mangled body were placed in four specially prepared leather cases and sent to different places in Peru. Every officer in the Spanish service knew about the fate of Tupac Amaru. I was in Jamaica at the time, a newly brevetted colonel, negotiating an exchange of prisoners with the British. The idea of people preparing the four leather cases for a man who was still living was particularly upsetting to me. I think it was one of the things at the back of my mind when I decided to desert two years later. When I was in the United States there was another rebellion. Another man took the name of Tupac Amaru, and was killed in the same dreadful way. But let me read the letter more carefully.

“Esteemed sir: Liberty is the watchword of our times, in all continents. As Spaniards, in a land which has been ours immemorially, we have aspirations like your own. Our purpose is to tell you, always with the respect due to a distinguished compatriot, how we have fared under your British patrons since the British conquest of our island. Picton, the first British military governor, who is now in London expiating his crimes, sought simply to cut off the Spanish head. He expelled nearly all Spaniards of culture and breeding and professional attainment. You will not hear from your convivial host, Hislop, how he has dealt with the peon remnant of your compatriots, the keepers of grog-shops, the boatmen and huntsmen, the charcoal-burners, the hawkers of tallow and dried horse-meat, simple people like those you surely would remember from your childhood, people who do not know fine words and in their current humiliations are protected only by their faith and pride. Hislop — who in his craven way has not dared to touch the French of family, holding their very Negroes inviolate, exempt even from the corvée — has made militia service compulsory for all Spaniards. This entails a charge of one hundred dollars for uniform and equipment. Hislop himself has fixed this charge. Very few of our peons can pay this sum, so most will have to leave the island or take to the high woods, abandoning in either case what little property they have to Hislop’s Treasury. So, in less than ten years of British rule, we have become runaways and outlaws in our own land, and our language is judged to be a servant’s language.

“And now you come among us. On both sides of the Gulf we have got to know the prospectuses of your London sponsors, Turnbull and Forbes. They offer many desirable modern manufactures at a fair price, but it cannot be a surprise to you if in the eyes of some of us you appear less a liberator and a lover of freedom than a Caracas man who has remained true to his origins, and has returned as the factor of a British commercial enterprise that seeks to reduce the people of the continent to peonage, as has happened to people in large parts of Asia, and as has happened here.

“Since the British conquest you and Picton between you have used the language of liberty and revolution to seduce many good people away from the fear of God, the sentiments of humanity, and the no less sacred duties of religion and society. You have lured these people to this island, your base for subversion, and you have kept them here like caged wild animals, to be released at your whim on an innocent populace. These misguided people have been ready to give everything to you and your cause. You have given them nothing. Your revolution, because it is baseless and finds no echo in the souls of good men, because it has degenerated into a personal enterprise and is without nobility, has never come. And when these proud Spanish spirits, recognizing their error, have rebelled against their betrayal by you and Picton, ways have been found of silencing them. Think of Juan Mansanares, for some time so loud and boastful in the grog-shops of this town, and flush with English money, then mysteriously dead at the age of thirty-six; old Manuel Guai, at first hidden away by Picton, then cruelly poisoned with pills of opium mixed with crushed glass; his friend José España, driven by his despair back across the Gulf, betrayed in his own hearth, beheaded, his fair body quartered, his head displayed in an iron cage at the Caracas Gate of the port of La Guaira; Andrés de España, languishing for years in the infamous jail here; Juan Caro and Antonio Vallecilla, both dead, their graves unknown. Think of these men, and all the others whose life and passion you and Picton ate away month by month and year by year, and wonder that you felt so little trepidation at setting foot on this bloodstained soil. Wonder that you never thought that your fate might be like theirs, and that this usurped island might also become your prison and grave.