A Way in the World (30 page)

And just as the buriers of treasure at the time of the break-up of the Roman empire could have had no idea of the twists of history, the further great migrations, that would one day lead people unknown to them, people beyond their imagining, to turn up the treasure they had laid up for brighter days; so those people in old Caracas, at a time of darkness, amassing (almost certainly by plunder) a secret hoard of sovereigns and gold coins, could have had no idea of the twists of history that would lead Manuel Sorzano, whose ancestors in the 1860s had not yet left India, to come upon their gold.

He said, “Is how I buy my own house. I don’t have to put up with anybody bossing me around.”

I began to wonder whether that piece of luck—his wish to keep it or renew it or not to lose it—wasn’t bound up with his abstemiousness now, following perhaps upon some
religious vow (marked, it may be, in Trinidad or Venezuela, by prayer flags in a garden).

I passed my thumb again over the coin commemorating the Angostura Congress. It was still so new, the raised letters of its vainglorious legend still sharp.

By a strange coincidence, the year in which it was struck, 1824, was the year in which, in that same Orinoco river town of Angostura, Dr. Siegert first produced his aromatic bitters. Some years afterwards the Venezuelan chaos, sweeping away the promise of the Congress, drove Dr. Siegert and his secret formula across the Gulf to Trinidad. As a British colony, Trinidad provided peace and commercial opportunity; at the same time, as a geographical outcrop of Venezuela, it provided all the tropical herbs and plants and fruits of Dr. Siegert’s formula. The town of Angostura in Venezuela was renamed after Bolívar; and now Angostura lived on as a name in the world not because of the Congress which the coin commemorated, but because of the bitters, made elsewhere.

I hefted the necklace again, to feel the weight of the gold, and gave it back to him.

I said, “I would be worried to carry that around.”

He made a little bow, and slipped the necklace over his neck with the swift practised gesture of a priest assuming a ritual upper garment. He gave two or three pats over the scattered twists of grey-black hair on his loose-skinned, old man’s chest, to settle the coin below his singlet; and he buttoned up his shirt.

“Is only like a souvenir for me. It safer like this than in the bank. If I take it to the bank, they would put me in jail. Is what happen to the two other fellows with me. Negro fellows, not from the islands, but from a place called Barlovento. A lot of old-time plantations there, and a lot of Venezuelan black people.”

It was one of the places in Venezuela where I had found
again the vegetation of the little cocoa valley of my childhood. The old plantation barracks and the community of very black people (many of them working in the town now) had been a surprise. But Barlovento—the word meant “windward,” and to me was of the Caribbean—was also where one day I had driven for miles beside an unkempt cocoa estate with tall shade trees, through a smell of vanilla.

Manuel Sorzano said, “As soon as those black fellows see the coins, they just want to stuff their pockets and run. I tell them no, they will get catch. At first they listen to me, but then they begin to feel that I want to deny them something. So they just stuff their pockets and run. I stay behind, taking my time. I prise out a few more bricks, looking for a little more, and even finding a little more. Very quiet I start fulling my food-carrier. Three round enamel bowls one on top the other, in a metal frame or cage, with a handle on the top. I full that, the rice and bread and other food keeping the coins very quiet, and I keep my eye on it and went on working in another room, with other fellows, till it was time to knock off. When I leave the site with that food-carrier I was like a man walking on glass, I was so frighten of falling. In the evening I take the coins somewhere else. In the morning I went back to work, very quiet, making no fuss, and that same day we knock down the room where we find the coins. I just keep on doing my work, and sure enough in the afternoon five or six Guardia Nacional men come. They start going through the site like crazy ants. They not saying what they come for, but I know they looking for a room that already knock down. It was because of the black fellows. You wouldn’t believe what they do. They feel that all the gold make them important, and they take the coins to one of the biggest banks in Caracas, where everybody wearing suits. Imagine. Black fellows from Barlovento, dress the way they dress, talking with their twang, and going into this big quiet air-condition bank and saying they have
gold coins. Of course the people in the bank call the Guardia, and the fellows get lock up and beat up, and they lose everything.”

I said, “I hear the Guardia can be rough.”

“Well, yes.” But then Manuel Sorzano appeared to change sides. “They have a lot of rough people to deal with. And if you want to answer back like a man, you have to take what you get.”

A little while later he said, “My son Antonio is in the Guardia. Ever since he small, he want to be in the Guardia.”

I said, “The uniform, the gun, the jeep.”

“And the accommodation. You mustn’t forget that. They can have very nice quarters. Antonio always particular about that kind of thing. I remember an incident that happen some years back. This was in Puerto La Cruz. I was working on a hotel there. I went out in the car with the children and their mother one Saturday afternoon. They was having some kind of fair on the sea road. Suddenly I hear a siren, and this Guardia Nacional jeep start pushing me off the road. When I stop, one of the Guardia men jump in the car with a revolver in his hand. As soon as he see the mother and the children, this man—who was ready to hit me with the butt of the revolver—get very bashful and confused. He say, ‘
Disculpe, disculpe, señora.
Pardon, pardon, lady.’ And he jump out again. For some weeks Antonio make that into a kind of game. Running about the yard and the house, pretending he have a gun and saying, ‘
Disculpe, disculpe, señora.’ ”

We were flying lower now over the coast.

Looking out of the window, showing me his profile with the pigtail, Manuel Sorzano said, after a silence, “The boy a lot in my thoughts these days. He having a little trouble.”

“The boy in the Guardia?”

“Yes. Antonio. I don’t mean ‘trouble’ trouble. But it
serious. And is not something where I can help him. Two years or so ago he start living with a young girl. First woman I know him to have. He was very bashful about it, but after a while he wanted me to know, and I went up to see them. This was in a town on the Orinoco. The girl was very young and small, fair-skin Venezuelan type. About fifteen or sixteen, that’s what I thought. She was full of respect when I was there and didn’t say too much, and I was too shy to look too hard at her, to tell you the truth. When the time come for me to leave them, she come and kiss me on my cheek and I put my hand on her shoulder. No, not her shoulder. The top part of her arm. That give me a surprise. She wasn’t soft at all. She was hard like a man, and she was so small. Was what I remember more than anything, and I think about it all the way back, thinking, ‘What kind of hard life they put that poor girl through? What kind of hard work they make this little child do?’ When I get home the mother ask me, ‘What you think of the child? The child all right?’ She mean the little girl. I say yes. She say, ‘What type?’ I say, ‘’
Pagnol
type.’ I didn’t want to tell her anything else.

“And then the usual thing happen. I say usual, but it not usual when it happen to you. Antonio was on a murder case one day. He had to go out to a ranch far out of town. Cattle ranch. Foreign people. Antonio hate that place. They build those big concrete sheds, and with all that land, and in all that heat, they keep the cattle pen up tight, and they feeding them chicken-shit and molasses. It had to end in murder. Antonio should have been out the whole day, but something happen and he come back early in the afternoon.

“Let me tell you now that there was a Syrian store in this town. The Syrian man live upstairs, but he also have a little quinta, a house with a little land, just outside the town. As he was coming back to the town Antonio see the little girl leaving the quinta with the Syrian man. He get
’basourdi
when
he see that. As though somebody drop a sack of flour on his head.

“He couldn’t bear going home. He went to the station and spend a couple of hours there. Then he went home. The girl was there now. She was in the yard. She was in a little open shed, with a concrete floor, with ferns in hanging baskets and plants in pots. A nice, cool place where she do her washing, and where they also sit out sometimes. She was doing something with the plants. He didn’t say anything to her. He just stop in the yard, in the sun, and look at her, only at her face, and not at what she was doing. And as soon as she look at him she know she was in trouble.

“She left the plants and went to the house, to the kitchen. He went there too, and he sit down in the kitchen and now he look at the table. She leave the kitchen. He get up and draw his revolver and follow her. He follow her from room to room, from kitchen to drawing room to bedroom to gallery, waiting for when his finger would pull the trigger. She didn’t try to run out of the house. Thank God. Otherwise the finger would have pulled the trigger. Then she stop walking. He come right up to her and she scream at him, ‘You don’t know how these Syrians like to take advantage of little girls? Why you don’t go and kill him?’

“The words cut him like a knife. ‘Taking advantage,’ ‘little girls’—the words cut him up. He get sad and foolish. He know he can’t bear to kill her. He go to the little bedroom and lie down on the bed, in his uniform. The window open, the half-curtain hardly blowing. It still hot. He feel very peaceful, and he start sleeping right away. It nearly dark when he wake up, and he feel he come from far away. He stay lying down, smelling a neighbour frying fish, and he feel very peaceful, smelling that smell, and hearing the little noises from the houses all around. The noises sound as though they come from very far away. As he wake up a little bit more he know he feeling peaceful because he don’t have
to spoil his life or anybody else life. He don’t have to do anything.

“It very dark when he get up. The house dark. He just seeing the few lights from the neighbours. It dark in the yard, dark in the shed outside, with the ferns in the hanging baskets, and the plants, and the chairs on the concrete. Nothing cooking in the kitchen, nobody outside. He alone in the house. The girl not there. She gone. He start walking through the house, round and round. He don’t put on the lights. He walk in the dark.

“He go to the toilet. Then he go out in the dark yard. He walk about a little. Then he straighten himself, straighten his uniform, and pat the revolver in his holster. He get into his car and drive to the centre of the town, to the big park on the riverside.

“The river run on one side of the park. The Syrian shop is in a road on the other side. The road have a covered sidewalk with concrete columns at the side and a lot of advertisements one on top of the other on the columns. Is a long shop, with two wide doorways, but this evening one of the doors close. When Antonio go in he see the Syrian man at the far end of the counter, standing like a policeman in front of the shelves with the bolts of cheap cloth. He standing below a very dim hanging bulb, chatting and laughing with the people he cheating.

“Antonio study the laughing man and say to himself, ‘Go on and laugh now. You going to stop laughing soon.’ He check that the revolver there at his waist. He don’t take it out, because this time he not going to wait for it to go off. This time when he take it out he going to use it. He start moving down from the open door. The Syrian man turn, and when he see the Guardia uniform he look a little respectful.

“In his own mind Antonio start talking to the Syrian man: ‘Good. You showing respect. But is not enough to
show respect. I want to see the fright in your eyes. I want to see your eyes when you start begging. That is when I will send you home.’

“The Syrian man recognize Antonio. He don’t look shocked. He don’t look frightened. He look vexed. Then he look at Antonio with hate. That throw Antonio. Is as though the Syrian man don’t understand how serious the moment is. The people in the shop understand, though. They stop talking, and they stand aside for Antonio to walk between them. He walk up to the counter, and the Syrian man now look at him with scorn. All this time the Syrian man don’t move.

“And now a funny thing happen. In his mind Antonio stop talking to the Syrian man, and he start talking to himself. ‘Why this man scorn me so? Somebody tell him something. I can’t send this man home when his heart so full of scorn for me. The girl tell him something, to give him this strength over me. What she tell him?’ All kinds of private things pass through his head. The power flow out of him, and he begin to feel cold, standing there in the shop. He begin to feel he want to cry. The Syrian man say, ‘Yes, Pepe?’ Calling him Pepe to insult him, in front of the other people, even though he wearing his uniform. And Antonio could only turn and leave.

“Somehow he live through the next few days. He send a message to me, asking me to come and see him. I find him in a state, and the house in a state. Is only the second time I see the house. The first time they had it so nice for me. The girl was in her nice clothes, and she was respectful. Now she not there, and everything that I see make me think of her. The little shed in the yard, with the plants and the ferns, make me think of her. It was there that we sit out and take tea.

“So when Antonio tell me the story I feel in my own self a little bit of what he feel. He say he think he will have
to leave the Guardia—he too mash up inside to do that kind of work now. He start crying. I don’t know what to tell him. Though I miss the girl and feel a little bit of what he feel, I don’t have the experience to tell him anything. I can’t tell him what to do to get people to like him or to stay with him.

“I grow up in the old days, with different ways. The older people used to look after that side for you. When I was twenty-two—it was the war, and I was working on the American base at Cumuto—my father just say to me one Friday when I come home for the weekend, ‘You getting too damn big. Is high time you get married. I have my eye on one or two girls for you. I will go and talk to the families.’ And that was that. I was a big man on the base, working with the Americans and everything, but I wasn’t man enough to tell my father no. Before I could turn around, I have a wife and I start having children. It was like something that just happen to me, like something somebody give me. I didn’t go out looking for it.