A Way in the World (28 page)

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.