A Way in the World

7. A New Man

WHEN I BEGAN to write of it, the Trinidad landscape that was present to me was the landscape I had known as a child and felt myself part of — the western parts of Port of Spain; the forested hills to the north-west; the sugar-cane plains to the south, with the neat fields coming right up to the huts and houses and bare yards of villages lining the narrow and very black asphalt roads; the coconut estates on the muddy Atlantic coast, where the tall grey coconut trunks made a constant criss-crossing pattern as you drove by: a simple small-island geography.

Later, in London, when I was writing a book of history, I studied for many months the historical documents of the region. The documents (the early ones were copies of Spanish originals stored in Seville) took me back to the discovery. They gave me a sense of a crowded aboriginal Indian island, busy about its own affairs, and almost without relation to what I had known. A sense, rather than a vision: little was convincingly described in those early documents, and few concrete details were given. In my mind’s eye I created an imaginary landscape for the aboriginal peoples living — on what was to become my own ground — with ideas I couldn’t enter, ideas of time, distance, the past, the natural world, human existence. A different weather seemed to attach to this vanished landscape (like the unnatural weather in an illuminated painted panorama in a museum glasscase), a different sky.

The landscape I had grown up in, and felt myself part of, had been wiped clean of this other past. I had always known that, but I hadn’t been able to feel it as something that had really happened. In the first book of Nelson’s West Indian History, by Captain Daniel of the Trinidad Education Department, a textbook we used at the elementary school in Port of Spain, there was a short early chapter about the Caribs and the Arawaks. Perhaps very little was known about those people; perhaps Captain Daniel didn’t have much to play with. I remember nothing of what he wrote — except that the Caribs were fierce and the Arawaks gentle — and have no memory even of the illustrations he used. Because they had ceased to exist, and were not real, the aboriginals of our own island offered less to the imagination than the still living people we read about in Homes Far Away in the geography class: Kirghiz in shady black tents on their boundless, empty steppes, Eskimos crawling in and out of their warm ice igloos, Africans in their stockades at night, safe against marauding lions and other wild animals.

The idea of a recent wiped-out past was too big for a child in an elementary school to grasp. Later it became difficult in another way. As soon as you tried to enter that idea, it ramified. And it ramified more and more as your understanding grew: different people living for centuries where we now trod, with our own overwhelming concerns: different people, with their own calendar and reverences and ideas of human association, different houses or huts, different roads or paths, different crops and fields and vegetation (and seasons), different views, speeds, reasons for journeys, different ideas of the ages of man, different ideas of the enemy and fellowship and sanctity and what men owed themselves.

In this way, leaving aside the primary notion of cruelty, the idea of a wiped-out, complete past below one’s feet quickly became almost metaphysical. The world appeared to lose some of its substance; reality became fluid. It was more natural to let go, to let the mind spring back to an everyday, ground-level vision that took in only what could be seen.

It was easier in London, separated by many years and some thousands of miles from that ground-level view, and while I read in the British Museum and the Public Record Office, to feel the truth of the other, aboriginal island. From that distance, from that other side, as it were, the landscape of the aboriginal island became fabulous. And it was that landscape — which I wrote about without actually seeing — that I half looked for whenever afterwards I went back to Trinidad.

I found it mainly on the coast, and sometimes in glimpses of the Gulf and the North Coast from certain hills above Port of Spain. I found it inland once, after a highway had been driven through the lower hills of the Central Range. The land here, too broken for fields and roads, would always have been covered by forest or woodland or bush. Now it was stripped, shaved down to a kind of rough grass, and all its ridges and hollows were revealed. It looked unused. It was like another landscape; it was like a bit of the past just revealed and still fresh.

Over land like this, perhaps over this very spot, an Elizabethan nobleman, with thirty soldiers from his ship, all in armour, had gone one night on a long march looking for Indian gold. The hills and ravines and the vegetable debris of the tropical forest — near here, on land now shaved to grass — made marching very hard. To terrorize the Indians, the intruders blew trumpets and fired off their muskets. The Indians ran from their houses; in one village they even left food cooking (“seething”) on fires. The soldiers ate the food. They found no gold, though the nobleman thought he saw gold-dross at the bottom of an Indian pot. Later — to complete this New World romance — the soldiers thought they heard Indian war-pipes in the forest. No misadventure befell them, however; and in the morning they marched back to the coast and their ship.

What the food in the Indian village was, whether maize or cassava or potato or meat or fish, how it was seasoned, the pots it seethed in, what the fireplaces were like, and the houses — none of this is known. Captain Wyatt, who wrote an account of the expedition, had no eye for that kind of detail. He had strong literary tastes, and had his own idea of what should be written about. He knew parts of The Spanish Tragedy, a new London play, by heart; in the New World, on the Gulf shore of Trinidad, or in the forests, he saw his general and himself and the soldiers (and the Spanish enemy, and the Indians in the forest) as figures in a romance of chivalry.

The expedition itself — which took back loads of marcasite sand to England as “gold ore”—was an absurdity; and Wyatt’s account was too inflated. It wasn’t published. It was forgotten, and, with it, Wyatt’s account of the night march which, remarkably, provides the only witness — the houses, the fires, the cooking pots, the war-pipes in the night — of the still autonomous aboriginal life of the island. When Wyatt’s account was at last published, in London in 1899, a scholarly series, three hundred and four years after the event, the aboriginal Indians had ceased to exist for almost a century; and their grounds had become home for other people.

Three centuries for Wyatt’s witness to be disinterred; and seventy years or so after that for the aboriginal land, hidden below bush, to be exposed.

Once exposed, the land quickly altered. People from agricultural villages near and far began to squat on it. Many of these squatters were Indians, Hindus and Muslims, descendants of nineteenth-century immigrants from India. The huts or shacks they put up were on low stilts. The sloping roofs were of corrugated iron; the walls were of hollow clay bricks or timber, sometimes new timber, sometimes old, with irregular patches of old paint. Banana trees grew around these huts. Outside the Hindu houses there were prayer flags or pennants on tall bamboo poles. These were put up after certain religious ceremonies: emblems of piety (sometimes competitive, hut against hut): pleas for good luck.

Away from the coast, it was hard to hold on to the idea of the aboriginal and fabulous. What was familiar, the small-island colonial geography one had grown up in, was stronger.

IT WAS different when I crossed the Gulf to Venezuela. Geographically, Trinidad was an outcrop of Venezuela; for three hundred years they had been part of the same province of the Spanish empire. The book of history I had written about Trinidad was also to some extent about Venezuela. When I wrote the book I hadn’t been to Venezuela. I did that not long afterwards, and the land I saw then remained touched with fable; no personal memories or associations got in the way.

The Orinoco remained the river of my story. Even in the Araya Peninsula on the Caribbean coast — a desolation of eroded red earth and scrub, where the modern road simply crumbled away to nothing at a certain point (no one had told me, and the Venezuelan driver was also surprised) — I found something of the special atmosphere I had hoped to find.

In the late sixteenth century the salt-pans of Araya were famous, and Dutch and French and English ships were always here, illegally, though with the quiet approval of local Spanish officials. Every kind of Spanish suggestion was made for stopping the trade in Araya salt. One governor wanted to poison the salt-pans, and wrote to the king of Spain to ask for poison. In 1604, to survey these waters and say what might be done, there appeared a Spanish nobleman with a very famous name: the Duke of Medina-Sidonia, entrusted with this minor task (among others) sixteen years after the defeat of the great Spanish Armada, which he had commanded.

Pelicans — only sign of life and community in the desolation — flew in fishing groups not far above the sea. They would have flown in that kind of formation four hundred years before, or a thousand years before. Their awkward, prehistoric shape, their power, their grey-brown colour, which was the colour of the beachless sea, the light, the unstable colours at midday of water and sky and barren earth, all this seemed to take me back to the beginning of things.

In other parts of Venezuela I found tropical woodland like the woodland I had got to know as a child and thought very special.

During the war, for two years or so after my eighth birthday, we moved from the town to the forested hills to the north-west of Port of Spain. This was an area of old cocoa and citrus estates, half derelict after various kinds of plant disease and the long Depression. At that time I thought of myself as a town boy; I didn’t like the idea of the country. But this wasn’t the kind of country I had known, and I liked it as soon as I saw it: the cool green hills, the narrow valleys, the emptiness, the general feeling of forest and bush.

The bush was full of surprises, found objects, remains of the old estate: avocado and citrus trees, coffee bushes and tonka-bean trees (the tonka bean used for flavouring cocoa) and cocoa trees that in spite of disease and choking bush still bore fruit. Somewhere in the cocoa woods was the old concrete cistern of the estate house. It was useless now, clogged with compacted dirt and sand and dead leaves; but the clear-water spring that had fed the cistern still ran, though in its own rippled channels now, over clean brown sand and between dead leaves. The samaan trees that had been planted years before to shade the cocoa trees were now aged, branching giants, themselves overgrown with moss-hung parasites: wild pines, lianas, ferns, vines. When you walked below the trees you could feel a dust, from dried moss and other dead vegetable matter, drifting down.

We lived disordered, deprived, and uncomfortable lives; we were like campers in someone else’s ruins; and we were glad to go back to the town when the time came. But then I grew to understand that those months in the cocoa wilderness had given me my most intense experience of the beauty of the natural world. They had fixed for me the idea of the perfect tropical landscape.

The place itself soon changed. We ourselves had been there at a moment of change. We had been part of the change, and this change speeded up after we left. The area — which we had known as an area of ’pagnols, patois-speaking Spanish mulattoes connected with the old estates — began to be settled by poor blacks, many of them illegal immigrants, from the small islands to the north. It became crowded and noisy and confused, like the hillside slums to the east of Port of Spain.

That was what was presented to me — suddenly, completely — when I went there again after my first six years abroad. The tops of the green hills, too steep to be damaged, were as I remembered them; the bush on one side of the road was still there; but on the other side of the road, where there was no bush or woodland, only settlement, I could no longer work out the contours of the land and couldn’t tell where old things, even the old estate house, or the formal gardens, or the cistern in the woods, had been. Half the landscape I had cherished was still miraculously there, on one side of the road; but that only added to my memory of what had been erased. I took care after that to stay away. I didn’t like even getting near the road (itself much changed) that led to the valley.

And now in Venezuela in many places I found again the vegetation and colours of that Trinidad valley. In Venezuela at that time, with its oil boom and city-property boom, estates and plantations were being neglected; and I was able to rediscover the very atmosphere of the cocoa woods I had known. Once for many miles I drove beside such a cocoa wood. There had been nothing in Trinidad on this scale; and nothing like the smell of vanilla — from the vanilla vine — which was now added to the damp cocoa-wood smell of earth and leaf and mould.

Trinidad was an outcrop of the South American continent. Venezuela was part of the continent, and everything was on a continental scale. The geography that at one time in Trinidad had seemed logical and complete — and had then, because of the growth in population, begun to feel like a constriction — was here immeasurably magnified: the mighty Andes for our little Northern Range, now built up on its lower slopes for many miles, and scaffolded with immigrant shacks around Port of Spain; the empty Venezuelan llanos, a country in itself, for our sugar-cane plain, which from certain high points could be taken in at a glance; the wonder of the many-branched Orinoco for the single channel of our narrow Caroni.

Because I had written about it, because for many months Venezuela had existed for me as an imaginary country, created in my mind from the documents I read in London, I felt I had a claim on it. Over a number of journeys I began to think of Venezuela as a kind of restored homeland.

I went on week-long drives along the coast and across the llanos. On my second or third journey I went in an open boat on the Orinoco at a point near the estuary. This landscape had existed for so long in my imagination that even now, when I was seeing it for the first time, it seemed to have a half-imagined, formal quality. The river was wide, full, without turbulence. The banks were worn and denuded: no forest. It was the rainy season. The sky was grey and dark grey, with many layers of cloud, but there was almost a dazzle on the water because of the openness. The river surface (though muddy close to, and oily near the bank) was as grey as the sky, and smooth.

The air was heavy: more rain was going to come. It came sooner than I thought — with a roar, and with a noticeable river swell. Big drops spattered on the water as though on concrete, and the boatman turned back to the bank.

It would have been like the rain, constant violent bursts alternating with damp heat, that tormented Raleigh when he was on the river in 1595. In the documents of the region, he is the first man to write in a modern way — or in a way that brings him close to us — of the many small physical discomforts of this kind of exploration. Spaniards before Raleigh had made journeys twenty times as hard on this river, but in their matter-of-fact accounts, plain to the point of being abstract, physical sensation is missing; landscape is missing. The endurance of these earlier men goes with a narrower way of seeing and feeling.

Not far away from here was an abandoned oil camp. It was like a little ghost town. The bush that some years before had been cut down and regulated was now growing fast again (with here and there a vigorous flower shrub from the settlement) over half-stripped derricks, oil pipes, roofless wooden barracks and roofless concrete-pillared bungalows. Concrete-and-metal bases, and a concentrated mess of old oil, dulled to sepia, showed where the pumps had been. For years, while there had been oil to extract, the big metal arms or shoulders of those pumps would have done their measured, creaking see-saw, night and day, with a plunging, sighing sound at the end of each movement.

Oil had turned out to be the true gold of the region. In the beginning, in the 1920s and 1930s, many people from Trinidad were recruited to work as labourers and artisans and clerks in the Venezuelan oilfields. I don’t know whether this was because Venezuelans simply didn’t want to work in camps in the bush; or whether, after a full century of destructive civil wars, they were without the skills; or whether — as in the Trinidad oilfields, or, earlier in the century, in the building of the Panama Canal — the contracting companies preferred to deal with an immigrant workforce that it could more easily control. But Trinidadians were recruited, and in the oil camps of Venezuela (even with their colonial atmosphere) many of these Trinidadians got their first taste of freedom and money, their first glimpse of possibility.

Until this time Venezuela had a bad reputation in Trinidad, as a South American country of war and poverty, lawlessness, uncertainty, overnight revolutions, dictatorships and sadism. Refugees were constantly coming over; the British laws of the colony offered political asylum. Now, with the oil, Venezuela became a country of opportunity. That was how it was thought of in the 1940s, when I was growing up. But by then Trinidadians were not recruited to work in Venezuela. Venezuela was looking to Europe for its immigrants; there were immigration laws to keep Trinidadians out.

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.

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.

“And you could say something like that happen again after I cut loose from over there and bust it to here. I was living a runaway kind of life in Maturin, and I used to take my meals with this Indian family. I never talk nice to the daughter. I hardly talk to her at all. Somehow I just move in with them, and then she move out with me, and everybody agree, and nobody talk too much. And I must tell you I never touch the lady until we start living together.

“The funny thing is, as the children start growing up, it wasn’t the boys I worry about so much as the girls. We can’t arrange anything for them here, and they don’t want anything old-fashioned like that. They want the modern way, to choose their own, and you know how girl children foolish. One piece of sweet talk, and their head turn. And when a girl have a child, that isn’t something she can take back. Good or bad, is what she have, and her life follow that direction. But Dolores and the other girl was all right. They have the right kind of looks, and they get a lot of offers, and they could pick and choose, and they settle down. And I know the other girls going to be all right, because that good example set.

“Was different for the boys. The girls could just sit and wait. The boys have to go out and get. They have to be men in a new way, and they don’t really know what to do. They don’t have the example from me. They just copying people outside without really understanding. And is extra hard for them, because all the time they still have the old-fashioned bashfulness which they get from me.

“It was easier for Antonio to get into the Guardia than for him to get that girl, and then he was so bashful about it he didn’t tell me for a long time. He wasn’t being sly. He wasn’t worried about the girl. He just bashful. He feel it wouldn’t be showing me respect, it would look as though he running me competition.

“And when he tell me, and I go to see them, I too was so damn bashful I can’t bring myself to look the girl in the face, and Antonio so bashful he pretending he hardly know the girl. The only person who not bashful is the girl. And I think afterwards that all I know of the girl is what I see, that the girl is really a stranger, and that Antonio don’t know much more about her either. And I feel now, as he and I talk in the house, that this is part of the mess he is in.

“We talk all day, and we talk until late at night. We talk and talk. We say the same things ten, twelve times, and then we start all over again, he is in such a state.

“I tell him God was with him that day, when his finger didn’t pull the trigger, and then when he walk out of the Syrian man shop. I tell him that he don’t really know the girl, and he can’t talk of shame and disgrace. He must only think he make a mistake with her. The next time he wouldn’t make a mistake. The girl probably make her own mistakes already, and the Syrian man, too. Everybody going out to look for boy friend and girl friend among strangers must make a mistake. And my feeling is that in the end what is really for you you will get.

“I say, ‘I never had the kind of excitement in my life that you and your generation looking for in yours. Yours is the modern way, and I must tell you I jealous you a little bit for it, for the freedom it give. But if you want this kind of excitement, you have to pay the price. Other people must have their excitement and freedom too. You can’t tie them down. You can’t start thinking of fair and unfair. Once you start looking for this excitement, you have to put away this idea of fair and unfair.’

“So we sit down in the dark, in the shed with the fern baskets and the plants, talking and talking, and I search my mind for things to say to him, some true, some half true.

“People passing in the road all the time. They are like shadows against the lights of the other houses. I suppose some of them pick up the drama by now, and they know that the Guardia Nacional man and his father sitting and talking about the little girl and the Syrian man. I feel I can tell when people know. They don’t want to look, and they walk as though they don’t want to make any noise. They treat the house as though it is a house of sickness. Nobody mock. It is a side of the people here I never know about or had cause to look for, and it make me appreciate and respect them.

“I feel that as we talk, and as he get more and more tired, Antonio start calming down. But every now and then he break down and say that he will have to leave the Guardia. I don’t really believe him now, but at the same time I have the feeling that, just because I am taking his grief very seriously, and because he is calmer, and because of all the sympathy he must know he is getting from the neighbours, he might want to show off and do something dramatic. I feel this is the most dangerous time.

“I tell him, ‘I will say some prayers for you.’

“The idea did just come to me. And as soon as I say it, I see it was the right thing to say. He know that I have special prayers in mind. He don’t know much about these prayers, but he know they are very important to his mother, and I take them seriously too.

“I say to him, ‘I want you to promise that you won’t do anything until I say these prayers for you.’

“He don’t say anything, but I feel he agree. And that take a weight off my mind.”

The special prayers Manuel Sorzano meant were readings from the Hindu scriptures. They required a pundit chanting in Sanskrit (or what in this far-off part of the world passed for Sanskrit), sitting in front of a low, decorated earthen altar, stuck with a young banana tree, and with sugar and clarified butter burning on an aromatic pitch-pine fire: old emblems of fertility and sacrifice. These prayers couldn’t be arranged in Venezuela: Manuel Sorzano had had to return to Trinidad, where in an earlier life he had had another, and now unspoken, name. It was from those prayers that he was now returning, freshly cleansed in his own mind, not eating meat and not drinking, with the souvenir raffia basket with the jars and bottles of lime pickle and mango pickle and pepper sauce; and with the devotional Hindi records.

He said, “I hope I not coming back to big news.” He struck his heart heavily with his braceleted right hand. “I can’t tell you how much I feel that I am going to pay now for all my luck here.”

Closer and closer below us now the windy grey and white sea, the blocks of flats, the long runways of the airport in the narrow strip of flat land between the sea and the mountains, the scarred red earth, the scores of yellow earth-removing machines, the many small white aeroplanes of the internal Venezuelan airlines, Aeropostal, Avensa, the larger jets of half a dozen international airlines beside the long terminal building: Venezuela of the boom, where in Caracas (reached by long tunnels through those mountains) in the more luxurious commercial centres a shirt could cost a hundred dollars, at a time when in New York a fifty-dollar shirt was an extravagance.

We stood in different immigration queues. As a Venezuelan he was quickly through. He waited for me, noticeable with his pigtail and his souvenir raffia bag.

The immigration official, when I got to him, waved my disembarkation form at me. He was about to say something when a colleague called to him; he called back, absently wrote something on my form, stamped it, stamped my passport, waved me on, and left his desk.

Manuel Sorzano lifted his chin and asked, “What he write on your paper?”

I looked. I had not written what my occupation was — and this was only partly an oversight: at that time writers were suspect: some guerrillas had been misusing the word. In the blank for occupation, the distracted official had written “Ejecutivo,” executive.

Manuel Sorzano said, “You see why this is a great country? They treat you according to what you show yourself to be. They respect you just as much as you respect yourself. Nowhere else.”

A man of the Guardia was looking at us. Manuel Sorzano had noticed, and he had very slightly adjusted his demeanour to show that he was on both sides of authority: a friendly acknowledgement of the uniform, together with a slight rounding of the shoulder to show deference to it.

In the customs hall he said, “But you should be a little careful. We have a few guerrillas here. Two or three times Antonio get involved in a little gunplay with them. One fellow write on his ID card Director Ejecutivo, Chief Executive. Boasting, nuh. Word get around, and one bright morning the guerrillas drive up and snatch him just as he was getting in a bus to go to work. A colectivo, one of those little private buses where you have to stoop. Everybody so busy scrambling on and minding their head, nobody notice. When they find he have no big company behind him, to pay up, they shoot him. In this country you have to know how to handle yourself.”