Vidiadhar Naipaul - A Way in the World

“I know that. I knew it then. And things like that don’t worry me at all now. But I couldn’t forgive him then. I always talked against him. So much so that when the ministers in London decided to replace him by commissioners and to have him investigated, the news was brought to me as good news, and I was asked to send out one of my own people with the new commissioners. I thought I should send the most reliable man I knew, to re-establish my credit generally. I couldn’t have chosen anyone worse. Bernard, you know, came out and never wrote me a word. This man wrote all the time. His name was Pedro Vargas. Every two or three weeks, when the mail ships arrived from Barbados or the Leeward Islands station, the people in Whitehall would send me bundles of letters from the first commissioner’s office, from my man Pedro Vargas. Every word was false. I should have spotted it. The language was rhetorical, in the Spanish manifesto style. Vargas was a master of that. I was a messiah, a redeemer. Everyone in Venezuela and New Granada was waiting for me, ready to give their lives and property to the cause.

“One letter made me lose my head. He said that he was writing in great excitement. For various reasons the moment for action had absolutely come. We shouldn’t wait. If necessary the two of us alone should start the revolution. Once we landed, at any spot on the coast, people would flock to our banner. I took the letter to ministers. I showed them what Commissioner Vargas — giving him this false title — had written. I nearly caught myself out, with that exaggeration of the dignity of Pedro Vargas. I told the ministers I would be willing to forego the allowance I had from the British government if they would give me a ship and equipment and allow me to go to Trinidad and raise a force from among the black troops there. Fortunately they refused. I don’t know whether othey knew more about Vargas than I did. Can you imagine what would have happened if I had turned up here and asked for black troops to invade the continent? You hardly have enough men to defend this little town. And the planters wouldn’t have given me their Negroes. I would have had to go back to London and ask them to give me my allowance again.

“I later discovered that Vargas hadn’t even embroidered some little incident or some piece of local gossip. He had written that letter just to give a little variety to his reports. He had attached himself to the suite of the first commissioner as a kind of secretary and assessor in Spanish law. He would sit in the first commissioner’s house — this very house — and every few days write me a fairy story. He was getting an allowance from me, ten shillings a day. He was getting a good deal more from the first commissioner. He had been a revolutionary at one time. He had been part of a conspiracy in New Granada and had exposed himself to real danger and had suffered. But what mattered to him now was getting that regular money from the first commissioner.”

Hislop said, “It was Vargas’s evidence that condemned Picton at the trial in February. I’ve read the transcript. Vargas was called as the Spanish legal expert. He was the only man in England — if you would believe it — who had the relevant Spanish lawbooks. He said that there were very old Spanish laws that permitted torture, but no modern ones. And that was it. Strange that all the bigger charges of hanging and burning should have been thrown out, and this case of petty theft should have brought Picton down. Signing the order that the very respectable magistrate brought him for the torture of the young mulatto girl. And Picton is tried, and the magistrate is untouched. And very strange that Picton should have been ruined by this man you sent here who let you down. He has opened up the possibility of all those charges against me now. The mulatto and the love potion, the very first week I came here. Every night in my head I work out my defence in the Court of King’s Bench. I wonder who I’m going to call as a witness, and how I’m going to prove that the Spaniards do torture. And then I think it’s a waste of my life, all this worrying about something I had almost nothing to do with.”

Miranda said, “Even when I was enraged by Picton, I didn’t want him brought down like this. He would despise the lie and he would despise us for it. I certainly didn’t want him brought down all these years later by someone like Pedro Vargas.”

“MY DEAR Sally, all goes well. You see, you are too nervous. With Hislop’s help we have brought the Leander Americans round. There are still days when they get drunk and make a racket, but discipline gets better and better. We drill them and the French every day at the local barracks. Count Loppinot de Lafresillière refused absolutely to serve under an American, and we have decided it is better to keep the two groups apart. This time we will make a little armada of ten ships. The British are helping unofficially with the ships, and I can gauge the strength of my support in London from the attitude of people like Admiral Cochrane and General Maitland and Hislop here. These men court me. I can see regard in their faces. They still think I am the man who can do things for them, and I thank God for that. Hislop thinks I can give him a good job, and Maitland and Cochrane (his immense greed makes him easy to manage) expect me in due course to grant them vast estates on the continent.

“It is wrong, querida, for you to think of these men as snakes in the grass. When I was young I used to complain in that way. I was wrong. You must not encourage Leander and Francisco to expect more from men than they should expect. You must not talk to them about snakes in the grass. These men, Cochrane, Maitland, Hislop, owe me no loyalty. A mutual interest draws us together. When there is no interest, we will pull apart. There will be no immorality or disloyalty in pulling apart. If you don’t start thinking like that, querida, you will eat yourself up. You will be in a perpetual moral frenzy in which you will condemn everybody except yourself, and people would start wondering what it is about you they don’t like. It is something I’ve talked to you about. I think it is most noticeable in your attitude to certain members of your family.

“As for Turnbull, he is my oldest friend. We met more than thirty years ago in Gibraltar, when he was a young factor and I was a captain, and we have been friends ever since. Whatever happens now, he will have regard for me afterwards, and I for him. I will not find people like Turnbull and Rutherfurd again. The time for that kind of friendship is past. If Turnbull gets impatient with me, I get impatient with myself. A friend doesn’t have to watch his words always. Don’t be suspicious of him. Don’t be unhappy about him. I write this only because, as you know, I am worried about your nerves.

“My serial letter, or my letter-journal, never stops. I speak to you constantly in my mind. I report everything to you, sometimes very small things, because I love your love. You have almost become my waking mind. But not everything I speak I will write.

“We are about to go now. The ships are ready. I will not be on the Leander. I will be on H.M.S. Lily. This is Cochrane’s idea: he thinks that if there is a battle the Spaniards will go for the Leander, which flies American colours and is known to be my ship. The men are as prepared as they will ever be. But — this is something I wouldn’t write, and want no one to know — my spirits are low.

“A second Spanish letter was thrown yesterday in the sentry box here (and Bernard later sent a copy of the same letter that had been left at the Council room). This one is about the big thanksgiving service they held in the Metropolitan Church of Caracas for the capture of the Bee and the Bacchus, and about the sentences at Puerto Cabello on the fifty-eight men. Sixteen days ago they were all taken out in ankle fetters to the prison yard and made to kneel down while their sentences were read to them. The ten officers were to be hanged. All the others were sentenced to eight or ten years in prison with hard labour. They are to sleep on beds of stone, with pillows of brick, and they are to wear twenty-five-pound chains. The ten executions took place seven days ago. I know that the Spaniards would have hurried through the legal process so that all this news could get to me before this second attempt.