Vidiadhar Naipaul - A Way in the World

Meléndez said, “The ship is waiting, General. It only remains to say goodbye. Lieutenant Ibáñez has given his word that no restraint will be placed on you during your voyage to Cadiz.”

Miranda said, “No chains?”

“You will be treated with honour.”

Miranda said, “I give thanks to God that I am going to Europe. Captain-General, I will never forget this kindness you have done me.”

He embraced Meléndez and then, before being handed down into the boat by the soldiers, he embraced Level. Level remembered the embrace as the embrace of a friend.

LEVEL WROTE his memoirs — and gave that little formal farewell speech to Miranda — thirty-eight years later, when he was seventy-four. This was in 1851, when, as Level said, the Venezuelan revolution or civil war was still going on after forty-one years, and seemed set to go on for another forty-one. The memoirs might have been one of the casualties of the war. They were never absolutely finished, and (perhaps also because of Level’s politics) were not published until 1933, and then only in a Venezuelan learned journal.

Level would have known that Miranda had died in jail in Cadiz just about thirty months after he left Puerto Rico. He wouldn’t have known that Miranda had died painfully, over four months, racked by one affliction after the other, violent fits, typhus, and towards the end by an illness that made him haemorrhage from the mouth. He was buried unceremoniously, lifted away from the hospital of the jail in the mattress and sheets of his deathbed, and in the clothes in which he had died, and set down with it all in his grave. The men who took him away then came back and gathered up his other clothes and possessions and burnt them. Knowledge of the spot where he was buried was soon lost.

Miranda’s second son, Francisco, was seven when Miranda was in Puerto Rico. Level might not have known that this Francisco, his father’s namesake, left London when he was grown up and went to fight in the South American civil wars. He was executed in Colombia in 1831 (the year after Bolívar’s death), when he was twenty-five, in one of the many purges of the war.

Level remembered, very delicately, Miranda’s concern about a lady in London, to whom he would have liked to send money, and to whom, through Meléndez, he sent a letter about household matters. Level would not have known that in 1847, four years before he began to write his memoirs, Sarah had died in the house in Grafton Street. She was seventy-three. She had lived in the same house for forty-eight years, and for the last thirty-seven of those years she had been without Miranda. The census of 1841 records two women servants in the house, and it is possible that Miranda’s library — valued at nine thousand pounds in 1807, with debts to booksellers of five thousand pounds — provided her in the end with a fair income.

It would have been a slow fading away for her. At the time of her death Miranda, once so important and busy in London, was hardly a name. His three boxes of papers had apparently been lost; and, as with the corpses at Pompeii, where Miranda should have been in historical accounts there was a void. Sarah vanished with him. The date of her death, and even the fact that she had kept on living at Grafton Street, was uncovered by a researcher from the Venezuelan embassy in London only in 1980.

Miranda’s papers were found more than a hundred years after his death. In the second decade of this century an American scholar, William Robertson, had the idea that (though the money and the gold had been seized) Miranda’s papers might have been sent on from Curaçao to London, to the appropriate British minister; and that they might subsequently have become part of the minister’s own archive. The appropriate minister in 1812 was Lord Bathurst, secretary of state for war and the colonies. In 1922 the sixty-three volumes of Miranda’s papers were identified by Robertson in the Bathurst library in Cirencester in Gloucestershire. Perhaps a speck or two of Venezuelan dust still adhered to them from the two three-hour journeys they had made more than a hundred years before on the cart road between Caracas and La Guaira. The papers were acquired by the Venezuelan government, and then made their last journey to Caracas.

The first volumes, heavily edited, with many things suppressed or omitted, were published in Caracas in 1924. The final volumes were published in Havana in 1950 for the bicentenary of Miranda’s birth. These Havana volumes, in which the papers appear just as Miranda preserved them, the ephemeral mixed up with more formal things, without editorial gloss or interference, seem still warm with the life of the man.

THE FIRST black African country I went to was in East Africa. I was in my early thirties. I was loosely connected with the local university, and I lived in a little low bungalow in the landscaped grounds of a government compound on the edge of the town. Most of the people in the compound were expatriates — mostly British, with a few Americans — serving the government in various ways. Some were directly employed by the government; others had been sent out (like me) by foreign foundations or aid agencies.

The country was newly independent and was thought of as revolutionary, but the compound still had a colonial feel. It made me think of the expatriate compounds of the Trinidad oilfields, and it probably had been laid out at about the same time, between the wars.

The bungalows and flats in both places were quite modest. It was the setting — the many acres of landscaped grounds — that made them special, suggesting separateness and privilege. The land seemed to have been scraped clean of haphazard local bush. There were no internal fences, no middens that showed, no junk, no obvious patches of waste ground. The open spaces between houses were grassed. Every local tree and shrub, however common outside, cassia, coconut, flamboyant, hibiscus, seemed in this stripped enclosure to have an extra, exotic beauty.

The idea of privilege — or protection: almost the same thing — was not wrong. The East African compound was like a little welfare state within the country. There was a whole side of life we didn’t have to worry about. A special department looked after the flats and bungalows. It did repairs and replacements and attended to complaints. And though it wasn’t part of the official deal or issue, nearly everyone who came soon got a servant or houseboy who was used to the ways of the compound.

I was self-conscious with these servants in the beginning. I was embarrassed by the idea itself: African servants in East Africa — settler country in parts, still, and safari country as well — came with too many associations from books and films. But then I saw that most people on the compound, even the servants, were living unnatural lives. Everyone had been presented with a style — in some ways as formal as that of an Oxford college — that couldn’t exist outside. After a time the idea came to me that it might have always been like that on the compound, even in colonial days.

Because the compound was on the edge of the town and there were no buses or taxis, I had to have a car. And because I couldn’t drive, or didn’t trust myself with a car, I had to have a driver. It would have been convenient if one man could have done the driving for me and the cooking and the looking after the bungalow, but in the compound it didn’t work like that. I had to have a professional driver.

Just after breakfast the man would come, respectable and neat in creased trousers and clean shirt and shining shoes, and ask about the day’s programme. Most of the time I didn’t have a going-out programme. I was working in my bungalow. So he would sit in the kitchen and wait, at first looking up whenever I passed the open doorway, then conscientiously looking down. He took later to bringing comic books, magazines, and then proper books to the kitchen; he wrote letters. Sometimes in the morning I sent him home for the day, and then a few hours afterwards I wanted to get out. Compound life, with all its privileges, had its complications.