Vidiadhar Naipaul - A Way in the World

“After he told me this story Bernard said, ‘Somebody out there is studying me. And somebody is studying you as well, I’m sure. At one time I used to think it was harmless. After what nearly happened to all of us, the mockery seems horrible.’

“So the world shrinks around me while I wait, Sally. I no longer want to go out. There is very little to go out for. I have heard everything they all have to say. I feel that, as the world around me gets smaller, I dwindle with it. I hope I don’t have to wait here much longer, and I hope the waiting has been worthwhile. I cannot hold on to large ideas in this setting. My instinct now, my passion, is to get away, just as it was in Caracas in 1770, thirty-seven years ago. It’s as if after half a lifetime I have made a circular journey back to what I was — though I do not remember Caracas being as small as this. The people cannot be blamed. The merchants mix only with their fellows in the very small town, and people like Bernard are tied to their estates. And it is Bernard now who, after his Council meetings, comes back in his calash with news of the bigger world both for his wife and for me.

“At one end of the front verandah of the estate house there is a projecting room, jalousied on three sides. On hot days Bernard’s wife moves there for the air, from her inner room, and she gets a girl to sit with her. As I read and write in the verandah — decorated down the length of its inner wall with a simple, bright pattern of flowers and curling ribbons, the work no doubt of the pastrycook who did the coat of arms on the calash — I sometimes hear Bernard’s wife talking to the girl with her.

“I hear intonations rather than words, the intonations of someone lying on her back. She is really trying to talk herself asleep, and the girl with her regularly says a few words to show that she is still there. The girl’s words are clearer, because she is sitting, and the girls — there are different ones — are amazingly affectionate. It isn’t always madame. It can be mamselle, mama, dou-dou, ma ’mie, mon enfant, ma petite. It is very strange and lulling, and on a hot day, in the wine-cask smell of sweating cocoa beans, I can listen to the rhythms of the talk and watch the long-tailed cornbirds weaving the long, sock-like pouches of their nests on the samaan or immortelle trees. Often the girl falls asleep before the mistress.

“One day I thought, This is practically all the society Bernard’s wife has.’

“Every day before nightfall, at about six or just before, Bernard goes and locks the mule sheds. He doesn’t want the Negroes to go wandering about on the mules at night, as they did before. And often, even after this, he gets a feeling that things are not right outside. It’s just a feeling, but it eventually makes him go and check the mule sheds and the Negro houses. He has said more than once to me, There are so many of them, and there are only two of us.’

“In the morning he is up very early, to check the yard and the houses and the stores and the kitchen, and to unlock the mule sheds. After morning tea — there are three estate meals: tea, breakfast, dinner — he has to give out the work in the cocoa sheds and cocoa woods, and after breakfast he has to go and check the work, and he often has to show how everything is to be done, because some of the people who did a job quite well the day before will now say they have forgotten how to do it. The recently arrived Africans, or new Negroes, as they are known here, are especially difficult that way. They believe that if they do their tasks badly often enough they won’t have to do them at all, and might somehow even be sent back home.

“So Bernard is as tied as any Negro to his estate. If he didn’t have the secretaryship of the Council he would be quite immured here.

“After the recent trouble he can take nothing for granted. Every morning when he makes his round he is hoping he isn’t going to find a corpse — a poisoning or a suicide. Even while I have been here Negroes have been poisoned or have committed suicide on estates quite close by. There have been a number of suicides on the La Chancellerie estate, which is another estate owned by a woman, Rose de Gannes de la Chancellerie, Marquise de Chaurras. They commit suicide by eating dirt over many days. The eating of dirt is something the new Negroes rather than the creoles do, and those suicides come in batches. They give encouragement to one another.

“When something like that happens, or when news of it comes to Bernard, I can see it on his face. He doesn’t like talking about it. He would prefer to keep it from his wife, but he knows that it’s something she will hear about from the girls when they go to sit with her in the room with the jalousies on three sides. Perhaps something has even happened here in the last few months. If it has, Bernard wouldn’t want me to know. When I hear the women talk, I hear only maman or madame or whatever, and the rhythm of their patois. Perhaps without knowing it I have been hearing the women talk about a death in one of the little houses.

“I don’t remember that it was like this in Venezuela. Was it because I lived in the town? When I visited the plantations or estates of friends, they seemed easygoing places. I took it for granted that they would have their own rules and customs; everywhere had its own rules. Of course, it was a long time ago, before the great revolutions, and perhaps there were things I would think differently about now.

“Twenty years ago, when I was in Russia, I went and spent an hour in a public bath. This was in Moscow, in 1787, in the early summer. A Russian I had got to know told me it was something I should do. It was one of the sights for visitors. I found when I went that you could see the women from the men’s area. They were completely naked and you could see the lacerations and whip-marks on their bodies. The bath attendant allowed me to walk among the women. No one paid me any attention. It wasn’t arousing. The indifference and the damaged bodies were things I couldn’t ignore. I don’t think my Russian friend saw it like that. I kept my thoughts to myself, and very soon allowed myself to forget what I had seen.

“No one can ever read the eyes, Bernard says. There is no way of knowing who has begun to eat dirt or who has laid by a store of poison. A few years ago the poisoner on Dominique Dert’s estate, on the western boundary of the town, was the commandeur himself. He had formed a strong attachment to his master. Bernard says this often happens with trusted estate servants. The commandeur poisoned his fellows whenever he thought they were getting too close to Dert. When the commandeur was found out, he had the atelier assembled — as though he was still commandeur —and the story is that he made quite a speech to them. He became quite exalted. They didn’t know, he said, but for months he had had it in his power to poison them all. Then he spoke directly to Dert. ‘I could have poisoned all these Negroes of yours at any time. In one night I could have ruined you.’ That speech was the big moment of his life. It was like something he had been living for. The master, the atelier, the estate — this was his complete world. Nothing existed outside. A few days later he took some of his own poison.

“The poisoner on St. Hilaire Begorrat’s estate in one of the valleys to the west was the nurse in the estate hospital. This was a famous case, Bernard says. Begorrat was an early immigrant from Martinique, and he is very much like one of the old Venezuelan marquises of cocoa and tobacco, as we used to call them. Though Begorrat is a good deal more educated than they were.

“At the time of the hundred and twenty poisonings at Montalembert’s some of Begorrat’s people were also poisoned. The old marquis of cocoa didn’t like this at all. He thought it showed disrespect. Montalembert was a newcomer. He, Begorrat, was the senior planter in the place. He had established the style of the place, and even some of the institutions. Everyone deferred to him on estate matters.