A Way in the World (29 page)

Still, they went. They went illegally. As a boy I used to hear of people going over in this way. With my Port of Spain ideas of our small-scale colonial geography—in which the Gulf of Paria was little more than what I could see of it from the city—I used to think that the people going over illegally would have crossed the few miles to Venezuela at the north of the Gulf, just to the west of Port of Spain. I imagined them getting into their rowing boats at dusk or at night and drifting with the strong currents to the Venezuelan shore.

That was fantasy. But I never asked how the crossing was made, and it was only now, half a life later, and long after I had written my book, and after my own Venezuelan travel, that I began to see that the illegal-immigrant way to Venezuela would have been the old aboriginal way, which in the late sixteenth century became the way used by explorers and
traders: down to the far south of the Gulf, and then up the intricate channels of the immense Orinoco estuary—never easy to police.

One afternoon, not long after my short adventure on the Orinoco in an open boat, I came to an estuary town. It had been raining; the main street was sodden, with water in puddles, as though river water had risen up through the earth itself; the air was full of moisture. “The drowned lands of the Orinoco”—the words of an old document came to me. Behind the damp concrete fences flower plants and shrubs and small trees I had known in Trinidad made little jungles around the low houses.

Here and there along this street there came, unexpectedly, through all the damp, the smell of a heavy meat curry. Indians from Trinidad lived here; they were an important part of the local population.

Once aboriginal Indians were masters of these waters. They no longer existed; and that knowledge of currents and tides had passed to their successors. On the south-westernmost point of the long Trinidad peninsula that almost ran into the river estuary there had been an aboriginal port or anchoring place called Curiapan. Curiapan was known to the early Spaniards, and known to Raleigh and others. There was still a fishing village there. But Curiapan no longer existed as a name; the village had a Spanish name, Cedros, the Cedars. Many of the fishermen of Cedros were Asian Indians, descendants of agricultural people from the Gangetic Plain. In less than a hundred years the geography of their new home had remade these Asian Indian people of Cedros, touched them with old aboriginal aptitudes, and given them sea skills which their landlocked ancestors had never had.

I had seen from the air the confusion and the great extent of the waters and the drowned lands of the estuary, and had marvelled at everyone who had come there in the old days, without maps. Because—on the ground, as a traveller—I had
approached the estuary from the other side of the Gulf, from the interior of a country that for very long had been for me only an imagined place, I had arrived at a way of looking that contained both the fabulous past and the smaller scale of what I had grown up with.

I had grown up with a small-island geography in my head. But the Gulf I had looked out on as a child was far bigger than the island. The Gulf, with its confused currents, between an island and the estuary of a continental river, had always been part of the fabulous New World. Columbus had found salt water and fresh in it, and—thinking himself only between two islands—had never known why. It had other, and now mysterious, names: Golfo de las Ballenas, the Gulf of Whales, and—like a name that goes back to the beginning—Golfo Triste, the Sad Gulf.

Now I could without disturbance fit Raleigh’s 1595 map of the Gulf to what I saw. His map was the wrong way round. South was at the top of the page: it made more sense that way, to a man looking for a way down to the Orinoco. You can look at the map and see what was real and what—from the formality of the shapes: hard in maps absolutely to lie or to invent—he was making up.

USUALLY, WHEN
I made these trips to Venezuela, I went first to Trinidad. From there after a few days, in a plane with a more local atmosphere, I did the hour-long flight across the Gulf and over the Venezuelan Caribbean coast to Maiquetía, the airport for Caracas.

It was on one such flight, on a Venezuelan aeroplane, that I met Manuel Sorzano. This was about fifteen years ago.

He had the window seat. I had the aisle seat next to him. Though he had gone aboard only a couple of minutes ahead of me, he looked quite established when I saw him. There were a number of parcels disposed about his feet, in spite of
the regulations, and a few more in the locker above. Unusual, this sign that he had been shopping in Trinidad. In those days, of the oil boom, when there was money on both sides of the Gulf, the shopping traffic usually went the other way, to Caracas, with its skyscrapers and glittering commercial centres.

He was a small, elderly brown man, perhaps in his late fifties. His face, carefully shaven, was broad and wrinkled, with a closed expression that held just a hint of aggression. My first quick assessment—while I put away my own things—was that he was an out-and-out Venezuelan, a coastal mestizo, a product of a racial mixture that had started with the Spanish settlement, someone who had known only his own landscape and limited language and his own way of life, and was cut off from everything else.

Later I took in an unexpected touch of style in the old man: his curly hair was plaited and tied at the back into a tight little pigtail about an inch long. It gave him a piratical, eighteenth-century appearance. And I thought, though I hadn’t actually noticed it before, that the pigtail might have affected my first reading of his face, and made me see an aggression that perhaps wasn’t really there. But no: the pigtail was part of something a little too assertive about the man: below the buttoned cuffs of his shirt I could now see heavy gold or gilt bracelets, of linked big coins.

What was he taking back to Venezuela? I could see some long-playing records, in a plastic shopping bag; and, in a plaited raffia basket, label-less bottles and jars of Trinidad Indian pickles. Those pickles looked home-made. Had I misread him, then? Was he, after all, an Asian Indian from Trinidad, with ideas and assumptions I could intuit—and not the Venezuelan stranger I had taken him for? I considered his appearance. He was unusual. He could be one thing or the other: it depended on what you thought he was.

I asked him, “Are you from Trinidad?”

“No. Venezuela.” He was firm. But his accent was of Trinidad.

We were now airborne, and in a few minutes were flying low over the Gulf, so much bigger than I had thought thirty or forty years before, a little sea, with for some time no sight of land on either side. The water was of different shades of olive, in wide, distinct, irregular bands, sometimes frothing white or yellow at the edges: Orinoco and Atlantic in eternal conflict, mighty volumes of water pressing against each other.

I asked, “Where in Venezuela do you live?”

“All over. My work take me all over. Presently I am in Ciudad Guayana. But I know all over. Barquisimeto, Tucupita, Maracaibo, Ciudad Bolívar. Even Margarita for a time.”

He seemed to love the sound of the place names: it was as though to speak the names was to have a claim on the places.

I said, “Ciudad Bolívar used to be called Angostura. It was where they first made the bitters.”

I thought the fact romantic, and thought it would appeal to him. He paid no attention. I let go; I didn’t try to think of new things to say.

We had then to fill in disembarkation cards.

He said, “You have to give me a little hand with this. I don’t have my glasses.”

He took out his passport. It was Venezuelan, reddish brown, and he handled it very carefully (the way I handled my own British passport, always nervous, when I was travelling, of losing it, and doubting whether, if I lost it, I would be able to explain myself to anyone in authority). He passed it to me, and I saw his photograph, and his name, Manuel Sorzano. I knew the name Sorzano from the late eighteenth-century Venezuelan records. It was a good solid Venezuelan name then; but perhaps Venezuela was full of Sorzanos. The occupation of this Sorzano was given as
carpintero,
carpenter.

He took the passport back and put it away. He said he had to get it renewed every year. He did a lot of travelling. The previous year a new passport cost thirty-five bolívares, thirty-five “b’s”; this year it was going to cost seventy-five b’s. There were two b’s to the dollar. He was wrong there; the dollar was worth less than half that; and I thought it strange, in a man who did much travelling and wore heavy gold bracelets, that he didn’t know this basic fact about the Venezuelan currency.

Then, as though rewarding me for filling in his disembarkation form and not asking difficult questions, he showed me the new records in the plastic bag. They were of Hindi devotional songs. Some had been done by a Trinidad group, some by a woman singer, Dropati, from Surinam, the former Dutch Guiana.

It was his way of saying that he was an Indian from Trinidad—and at the same time letting me know I wasn’t to ask him any more about it. So, once again, his appearance subtly altered; he became what I had been told he was. But though he wasn’t the stranger I had thought, he was in some ways still strange, far from me, because of his religious needs, which I didn’t have, and his mangled idea (hard to imagine) of the old gods of India, and their due rites.

When the steward offered a snack-tray, Manuel Sorzano refused to have it. He didn’t eat meat, he told me, and he didn’t drink. I was surprised. I hadn’t thought of him as that kind of Hindu. But I didn’t really believe him. I thought he had the face of the Trinidad Indian drinking man—the soft, pressed-down lips, the sagging cheeks, the aggressive, watery eyes. But then it occurred to me that he might be doing a penance of some kind; he might have made a religious vow. Perhaps the abstemiousness of which he was making such a show was connected with the funeral rites for someone in his family. Perhaps he had gone back to Trinidad for those rites.

He certainly knew about Trinidad rums. He said he had
been hoping to take back some white rum to Venezuela, but his mind had been “so hot” in the last few days he had forgotten about it. Trinidad white rum was the best thing for a cold.

He said, “You sap a little bit on your head”—he made a delicate sapping gesture with his fingers, and I saw more of his gold-coin bracelet—“and you dab a little bit on your forehead, and the next morning the cold gone.”

We had left the Gulf behind. For some time now the Venezuelan Caribbean coast was passing below us, outlined as on a large map, blurred green land, stretches of white or red or brown beach, dark sea, little muddy stains at the mouths of little rivers. Just as space satellites show us a seemingly untouched world, where great cities are mere smudges, so, from the height of this Aeropostal plane, the Spanish Main was still like a new place.

In his earlier life, in Trinidad (his name there not given me, but I thought it would have been a name of the Asian sub-continent), he had had four children. In Venezuela, as Manuel Sorzano, he had nine children, and they all had Venezuelan names.

“It was like choosing names out of a hat. One call Antonio, another one Pedro. The first girl call Dolores. The mother love that name.”

Who was the mother of the nine? He said she was an Indian. He meant an Asian Indian. “She talk only Indian.”

Hindi had ceased to be a living language in Trinidad or Guyana, and this meant that the mother of Manuel Sorzano’s Venezuelan children came from Surinam, the homeland of the Hindi singer Dropati.

Manuel Sorzano said, “I only talk Spanish at home, and the children only talk Spanish.”

A new land, a new name, a new identity, a new kind of family life, new languages even (Surinam Hindi would have been different from the Hindi he would have heard in Trini
dad)—his life should have been full of stress, but he gave the impression of living as intuitively as he had always done, making his way, surviving, with no idea of being lost or in a void.

But just as it was strange that, with all the travelling he said he did, he didn’t know the dollar value of Venezuelan money; so it was strange that, with all his peasant need of what had survived in him, after a century of separation, of the religion of India, and the difficult concept of the deities, and the food and the music, and the reverences, he didn’t know that the language the mother of his nine children spoke was Hindi and not “Indian.” But perhaps it wasn’t strange: living intuitively, he was possessed by what had remained of his ancestral culture. He couldn’t stand back from it or assess it; he couldn’t acquire external knowledge about it; and it would die with him. He would have no means of passing it on to his children. They had Spanish names and spoke only Venezuelan. These Sorzanos would be quite different; there would be no ambiguities about them; they would be the kind of Venezuelan stranger I had in the beginning taken their father for.

I wanted to look at his gold-coin bracelet. He took it off and showed it to me. The coins were Victorian sovereigns. He opened his shirt and showed me more: he was wearing a heavy gold necklace with a big gold-coin pendant.

He had found gold in Venezuela: a gold hoard. And he had found it years before, not long after he had got to Venezuela, when he was working as a mixture of carpintero and day-labourer, and was one of a gang of twenty-five pulling down an old building in central Caracas. This was part of the great tearing down and rebuilding of old Caracas—rebuilding with motorways—after the oil. In one room, in a hollow in the mud-brick wall, he and two others had found the hoard, many sovereigns like those on his bracelet, and many coins like the one he now wore around his neck. That coin had
been cast in 1824. It was big, intended to be historical, a statement of certainty, commemorating an event in 1818, the first Congress of the independent South American state that Simón Bolívar had tried to set up. It wasn’t a date I carried in my head: the coin was the first token I had seen of the grandeur of the ambition.

From the date of the English sovereigns it seemed that the hoard would have been hidden some time in the 1860s. So just thirty years or so after the coin had been struck, to mark the end of an old empire, an old order, and to bless the new, the coin had to be hidden away. In Venezuela and elsewhere in South America a century of disorder had followed the destruction of the Spanish empire. In 1869 the English writer Charles Kingsley, a great naturalist, in Trinidad for the winter, reported that there were no ships going up the Orinoco; that only one verminous vessel went from Port of Spain to La Guaira, the port for Caracas; and that after all the years of conflict life and property were still not safe in Caracas.