A Way in the World (41 page)

“At the end of the tour, at a dinner at Miss McLurie’s, Colonel Downie presented me with the journal he had made of the tour. I was touched by the gesture—I had grown so melancholy towards the end of the tour, yet never able to show anything—but as soon as I opened the roughly bound
book I saw that the journal was the work of an uneducated man. I saw that I had been taken in by Downie’s manner and accent, having very few British people of quality here to set him against.

“I looked up. Miss McLurie (who was in her famous transparency, showing her bosom perfectly) was waiting to catch my eye. She said, ‘You know, of course, that he’s not a colonel.’ I didn’t know—I had been cherishing him because of the shine he gave to my own hopes. And I had always thought that he and Miss McLurie were special friends. And he was right there still, one of the guests, at the other end of the table.

“I asked him later. He said Miss McLurie was right: he wasn’t a colonel. He had called himself that after he had come to the island; he had military ambitions and was looking for an opening somewhere. I said he had misled me, and this could have been damaging. I had suffered enough from the
Leander
people, who had thought that service with me was only a matter of rations and plunder. My venture was likely to have its desperate passages. After my recent reverses I needed men not only with military experience but also with a record of proven luck: he should have known that.

“He hung his head and said he was sorry. But he didn’t think he had done worse than other people I knew, and no one criticized them. It was well known, for instance, that Archibald Gloster, the local attorney-general—another person I keep meeting all the time in various houses—wasn’t a lawyer. He had simply bought a lawyer’s licence from the Council secretary in the time of the first British governor, Picton.

“Bernard later told me it was true about Gloster. It was no secret that the attorney-general wasn’t a lawyer at all. And there was a further story about that, Bernard said. It came out during the enquiry into the slave rebellion that had nearly happened.

“Gloster had a personal servant called Scipio. People here often give their Negroes the better-known classical names—Hercules, Hector, Cupid, Caesar, Pompey, Agrippa, Cato, Scipio. At night—this was in the months during the preparing of the rebellion—Gloster’s Scipio would leave his quarters at the back of Gloster’s yard in the town, and go the five or six miles to the seaside village of Carenage. The Negro known as King Edward had his court at Carenage, and Scipio’s loyalty at night was to the
convoi
or regiment of King Edward. Edward’s courtiers had wooden swords painted white and green.

“When Scipio first joined the regiment, King Edward offered him a sword and a title: ‘My Lord St. John.’ Everybody who joined a regiment got a title which he had to use at night. Scipio said no, he didn’t want to be My Lord St. John. It didn’t mean anything. He wanted to be attorney-general, like his master. Edward said that wasn’t a proper title for a courtier in his regiment. In the end they decided that Scipio was to be clerk and secretary—the job Bernard now has in real life—and at night, at Carenage, while King Edward’s dauphins and dauphines and princes and princesses drank white rum and sang and danced and ate things that had been cooked for the party in the various estate kitchens during the day, Scipio sat in the light of a flambeau and turned over the pages of one of Gloster’s lawbooks and then for ten or fifteen minutes at a time made a pretence of writing. As secretary, though, he had a serious enough job: he became one of the organizers of the rebellion. He was one of those who got a hundred lashes and lost their ears.

“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.

“He pretended to be very angry. He lined up everybody on his estate, had one of the corpses brought out, and said he intended to find out who the poisoner was. The estate doctor cut the corpse open and he and Begorrat began to look at it very closely.

“It was too much for the poisoner, who was the hospital nurse. Her name was Thisbe. She broke from the watchers and ran through the cocoa woods to the neighbouring estate and asked there for sanctuary. Bernard tells me that this is what they do in certain parts of Africa: people from one village can claim sanctuary in another village nearby. She was handed back. Begorrat had pack thread tied around her thumbs and she was suspended by the thumbs until she gave the names of about twenty poisoners and sorcerers on other estates.

“It frightened people that there were so many. That very day they were all picked up and taken to Vallot’s jail in the town. They were kept apart from one another. They were chained or put in irons and some were shut up in the special hot chambers below the roof. Some of them were chained so that they couldn’t move. Some of those in the hot chambers quickly became demented. They were fed on plantains and water and over three weeks they were examined and examined in the jail by Begorrat and a poisoning commission of planters. Thisbe was repeatedly tortured. When it came to the judgements the planters followed Spanish forms. The people judged to be poisoners and sorcerers were heavily chained and made to kneel to hear their sentences. Some of them were hanged and decapitated. The new Negroes among them were first baptized; Africans are considered infants by the Church, and can be baptized without instruction. One man was burned alive. Thisbe was hanged and decapitated. Her body was burned and her head was staked on a pole in Begorrat’s estate.

“Begorrat tells Thisbe’s story like a story he has told many times. The pole on which Thisbe’s head was staked is still there, facing the Negro houses, almost on the spot where the corpse was cut open.

“He said with a smile, ‘There’s nothing there now. But they see the pole all the time and they know what they’re seeing. It’s magic against magic. I’ve told Bernard many times. It’s the only way. Here it’s my magic against theirs.’

“He told this story in the little grotto he has created in the hillside, and his current favourite—Bernard says he has had several—threw himself about with laughter whenever Begorrat smiled. He smiled often. He smiled especially when he talked about opening the corpse and pretending to look carefully at it, like a Roman reading the entrails, and when he said it was his magic against theirs.