A Way in the World (37 page)

Miranda said, “These people are my volunteers. I have no other now.”

“Your volunteers. Not your masters. As a military man I have been bred up in the virtues of obedience to my lawful superiors. I’ve never knowingly—as a military man—done an illegal or wrong or insubordinate thing. Most military
men can say the same. It is particularly galling to me now to live with the prospect of being dragged before the public as an oppressor. Especially as the oppressor of people whom I’ve considered it my duty to protect. If there is an investigation or enquiry or trial, I wouldn’t know how to defend myself. To defend myself, I will have to put myself on the side of people whom I consider infamous. The people of colour have said, after the Picton conviction, that they intend to make an example of me. They are not nice words to hear. And I have reason to believe that they are being encouraged by the French, of all people, just to do me down. Nothing is clear to me now, General. I have become clouded.”

“Your bed has certainly not been one of roses.
Claro que su cama no ha sido una de rosas, como ha dicho.”

“I feel I need to make a fresh start.”

“You certainly can do that in Caracas.”

“General.”

“But you’ll be on the same side as the French volunteers.”

“That will be accidental. I will have the clarity of your own purpose and vision.”

Miranda said, “Let me read this letter from your sentry-box. It might be from one of your mulatto friends, you think? Please, General. Allow me that joke. The letter’s not in French. It’s in Spanish. A scrivener’s hand. So at least it’s formal. I’ll skim. It may be nothing. It may just be standard abuse. It begins politely. Too politely—a bad sign. Sure enough, it soon becomes very passionate. I recognize the manifesto style of certain Spanish official pronouncements. It’s a letter from the Spanish authorities. It’s very serious. It warns me of the fate of Tupac Amaru. Tupac Amaru was the Inca name taken by the leader of a very big Indian rebellion in Peru in 1780. He was horribly tortured when he was caught. His tongue was cut off while he was still alive, and then, while he was still alive, he was quartered by four horses pulling in different directions. The four quarters of the mangled
body were placed in four specially prepared leather cases and sent to different places in Peru. Every officer in the Spanish service knew about the fate of Tupac Amaru. I was in Jamaica at the time, a newly brevetted colonel, negotiating an exchange of prisoners with the British. The idea of people preparing the four leather cases for a man who was still living was particularly upsetting to me. I think it was one of the things at the back of my mind when I decided to desert two years later. When I was in the United States there was another rebellion. Another man took the name of Tupac Amaru, and was killed in the same dreadful way. But let me read the letter more carefully.

“Esteemed sir: Liberty is the watchword of our times, in all continents. As Spaniards, in a land which has been ours immemorially, we have aspirations like your own. Our purpose is to tell you, always with the respect due to a distinguished compatriot, how we have fared under your British patrons since the British conquest of our island. Picton, the first British military governor, who is now in London expiating his crimes, sought simply to cut off the Spanish head. He expelled nearly all Spaniards of culture and breeding and professional attainment. You will not hear from your convivial host, Hislop, how he has dealt with the peon remnant of your compatriots, the keepers of grog-shops, the boatmen and huntsmen, the charcoal-burners, the hawkers of tallow and dried horse-meat, simple people like those you surely would remember from your childhood, people who do not know fine words and in their current humiliations are protected only by their faith and pride. Hislop—who in his craven way has not dared to touch the French of family, holding their very Negroes inviolate, exempt even from the corvée—has made militia service compulsory for all Spaniards. This entails a charge of one hundred dollars for uniform and equipment. Hislop himself has fixed this charge. Very few of our peons can pay this sum, so most will have to leave the island or take to the high woods, abandoning in either case what little property they have to Hislop’s Treasury. So, in less than ten years of British rule, we have become runaways and
outlaws in our own land, and our language is judged to be a servant’s language.

“And now you come among us. On both sides of the Gulf we have got to know the prospectuses of your London sponsors, Turnbull and Forbes. They offer many desirable modern manufactures at a fair price, but it cannot be a surprise to you if in the eyes of some of us you appear less a liberator and a lover of freedom than a Caracas man who has remained true to his origins, and has returned as the factor of a British commercial enterprise that seeks to reduce the people of the continent to peonage, as has happened to people in large parts of Asia, and as has happened here.

“Since the British conquest you and Picton between you have used the language of liberty and revolution to seduce many good people away from the fear of God, the sentiments of humanity, and the no less sacred duties of religion and society. You have lured these people to this island, your base for subversion, and you have kept them here like caged wild animals, to be released at your whim on an innocent populace. These misguided people have been ready to give everything to you and your cause. You have given them nothing. Your revolution, because it is baseless and finds no echo in the souls of good men, because it has degenerated into a personal enterprise and is without nobility, has never come. And when these proud Spanish spirits, recognizing their error, have rebelled against their betrayal by you and Picton, ways have been found of silencing them. Think of Juan Mansanares, for some time so loud and boastful in the grog-shops of this town, and flush with English money, then mysteriously dead at the age of thirty-six; old Manuel Guai, at first hidden away by Picton, then cruelly poisoned with pills of opium mixed with crushed glass; his friend José España, driven by his despair back across the Gulf, betrayed in his own hearth, beheaded, his fair body quartered, his head displayed in an iron cage at the Caracas Gate of the port of La Guaira; Andrés de España, languishing for years in the infamous jail here; Juan Caro and Antonio Vallecilla, both dead, their graves unknown. Think of these men, and all the others whose life and passion you and Picton ate away
month by month and year by year, and wonder that you felt so little trepidation at setting foot on this bloodstained soil. Wonder that you never thought that your fate might be like theirs, and that this usurped island might also become your prison and grave.

“Whatever encouragement Hislop gives, his word is worthless. He is a soldier; his honour lies in obedience. He will feast you today; he is famous as a good host. He will turn his back on you tomorrow, if he is required to do that. You may discover, as we have done, that he has claws. Justice approaches for the fifty-eight men you abandoned off the coast. Justice approaches for you too. You are more alone and unprotected here, in what used to be your homeland, than you ever were in London. Six copies have been made of this letter. At least one will get to you, and you will think of TUPAC AMARU.”

Hislop said, “General, General. I shouldn’t have shown you the letter on your first day. It has unsettled you.”

“It has, I know Spanish hate, but it’s always a shock whenever I am reintroduced to it. This is a letter of hate. You were talking earlier of the hatred the people here got you to feel for the free man of colour whose ears they wanted to cut off. They made you look at him. They told you he believed in his own powers. They showed you hell in his eyes. They made you feel you didn’t have just to punish the man, you had to destroy what was inside him. Spanish hatred is like that. It’s never far away, and it’s mixed up with ideas of faith and truth and retribution. As a punisher you’re in the right. You’re in the place of God.

“I know about this hate because it’s in me too, after all these years. I have dealt in it myself, and I know that what I’ve done is partly responsible for this letter. Hate against hate. I’ve said things about Spain and the Spaniards I shouldn’t have said. I said foolish things, wounding things. I know how to wound them. When I left Caracas in 1771 Spain was the centre of the world for me. History, culture, elegance. The United States didn’t exist—the American colonies
were poorer than we were—and the French Revolution was twenty years away. I’m ashamed to tell you how much money I spent on clothes in my first month in Cadiz. It was some years before I saw that the ideas I had had about Spain and its position in the world were exaggerated. When I deserted from the Spanish service and went to the United States in 1783, at the end of the war, I found for the first time I could say things about Spain that I had grown to feel. And it actually did me no harm. I saw that. And then there was the execution of the second Tupac Amaru. That affected me more than the Americans I was with. I began to say things I shouldn’t have said. The president of Yale rebuked me one evening. He said the Spaniards had a higher regard for law than I allowed. I said I knew about Spanish legalism: I had graduated in law from the University of Mexico. I made that up on the spur of the moment. It came out very easily, and it silenced him.

“It was much worse when I went to Russia. I felt I was so far away that it didn’t matter what I said about Spain or myself. I made full use of the freedom, I should tell you. And the empress and her nobles were so interested, so protective. I was dazzled. I felt it was what I was born for. I had never felt so safe. I said things about Spain to please them, dreadful things about the Inquisition and superstition and Spanish ignorance and degeneracy, dreadful things about the Spanish king and his son, the Prince of Asturias.

“I was in demand. One night at a gathering in St. Petersburg a fine gentleman I hadn’t met, as soon as he caught sight of me, came right across the room towards me. I smiled and bowed, getting ready for his Russian French, expecting him to be hampered by the language but friendly and interested and as anxious to invite me to his house as so many of the other Russian noblemen I had met. It wasn’t French that came out of this fine gentleman’s mouth, but Spanish, the Spanish of Spain, spoken in a tone and with the forms you would use
with a servant. He was the Spanish chargé d’affaires, Macanaz. He wanted me to produce—there and then, almost—the Spanish patents which made me a colonel and a count. That was my style in Russia. It did no one any harm, and it gave the Russians pleasure. I was staggered by his contempt. It was the contempt of the well-born Spaniard from Spain for the South American. I felt shabby, caught out. It was like being pushed back to the Caracas of twenty years before. I was about to say that I had served for some time in the Princess Regiment and had retired from the service as a colonel. But at the last moment I changed my mind, and the crudest street-corner obscenities of Caracas came out of my mouth. In any other setting he would have had to draw his sword. But in that room he had to digest the insult. He didn’t forget, of course. He wrote to the ambassador, and the ambassador wrote around to other people about me. I thought about that incident quite recently, when the
Bee
and the
Bacchus
were cut off. It was very strange. I was leading an invasion, something I had talked about for years, and then with the memory of that far-away St. Petersburg room I thought, ‘And now you’ve put yourself within their reach.’ ”

Hislop said, “What will happen to those men?”

“No question. The Spaniards will treat it very seriously. The officers, Donohue and Powell and the others, will be executed. The men will all be imprisoned. I always told them. Tell me—this is about something in the letter—why do you think all the agents I sent out here failed me, or went bad? You know about Bernard. I know about the others.”

“They got tired of waiting. They lost faith. Like Picton. In spite of what people say about him, he didn’t come here to buy estates. He never wanted to be a planter. He is a military man, and he came here hoping for action. They promised big things in South America, but the alliances kept changing in Europe, and the politics kept changing in London. The invasion was postponed and postponed. You can’t
ask a man to wait and wait. Not everyone has your steadfastness, General.”

“Steadfastness. I don’t know. Perhaps there has never been an alternative. No second possibility ever came up. No one has ever offered me a second idea.”

“No one would ever think of doing that, General.”

“There was a time when I used to talk against Picton in London. I thought he was destroying my agents and destroying the revolutionaries from across the Gulf. I was wrong. Old Manuel Gual and the others who were killed here were killed by a Venezuelan I now know about; Caracas recruited him and gave him the famous glass pills. The one man of mine Picton expelled and sent back to Europe turned out to be a fraud. My bad judgement again. The man could write me a witty letter about the unreliable revolutionaries of France, and then, almost on the same day, write a tearful letter to the king of Spain, begging to be forgiven. Picton expelled him almost as soon as he saw him. I was enraged when I heard, but he did me a service there.

“Actually there was another reason why I talked against Picton. But I couldn’t admit it to anyone. In 1798, without knowing anything about me or my past or all the work I had done for the revolution, he wrote to London about me. He said they might find me useful, but I shouldn’t be told too much. The actual words were much worse. I can’t forget them. They were reported back to me by my friend Rutherfurd. Those words did me much harm with the ministers. I know them by heart. ‘There is a native of Caracas now in London who might be useful on this occasion, not that he possesses a great local knowledge, or has any considerable connection, being the son of a shopkeeper of Caracas …’ This was nearly thirty years after I had left home. I had done so much, established my cause and my character, taken so many risks. He had ignored all that. And he himself had done nothing.”