Picked-Up Pieces (71 page)

T
HE
Loss
OF
E
L
D
ORADO
, by V. S. Naipaul. 335 pp. Knopf, 1970.

Never ask an artist to do the ordinary. Some time ago, an American publisher asked V. S. Naipaul, the Anglo-Indian novelist from Trinidad, to write the Port of Spain volume in a series of historical handbooks on cities of the world. Naipaul produced a masterly anomaly that, under the title
The Loss of El Dorado
, has been brought out, garlanded with British praise, by another American publisher. The book, though minutely researched and presented in a factual prose that verges on the dry, seems less a work of history than a piece of poetry, a rather fevered meditation, a hypnotized concentration upon two focal points in Trinidad’s history: the founding of St. Joseph and its port, “which they call of Spain,” in 1592 by the “dispossessed conquistador” Antonio de Berrio; and, two hundred years later, the six-year rule of the city and the island by its first British governor, Thomas Picton, a blithe brute who was to die a hero at Waterloo. Both men suggest legendary figures: like Don Quixote, Berrio was old, tough, gallant, and bewitched; while Picton’s career seems a shadow of Wellingon’s and his final reputation has been “absorbed in Wellington’s more complex, nation-building myth.” Indeed, it was Wellington
who pronounced Picton’s epitaph: “A rough foul-mouthed devil as ever lived.” Naipaul’s portraiture, closely based upon historical records hitherto scarcely tapped, mixes irony and sympathy somewhat enigmatically, yet he does seem to grant Berrio and Picton the stature of founders and a certain tenacity of purpose. In counterpoint stand his portraits of Sir Walter Raleigh and Francisco Miranda, two engaging and intelligent adventurers whom he condemns as—in the end—ineffectual and, oddly, quiescent; both ended in prison, and “prison was perhaps the setting that Miranda, like Raleigh, subconsciously required.” Behind these principal actors a host of lesser ones come swarming forward out of the colonial archives: henchmen and buccaneers, Spanish soldiers and French planters and English administrators, lawyers and torturers, agitators, mulattoes, and slaves. The richly detailed episodes of West Indian history hover, however, in a virtual vacuum; the matrix of world circumstances—not only the power struggles on the Continent but even the events on nearby islands—is so lightly indicated that the machinations on Trinidad appear as eerie as the motions of a sleepwalker. This quality would be a fault were it not at the heart of Mr. Naipaul’s attempt. He wishes, using his native Trinidad as a microcosm, to uncover the something strange in the entire New World, the something futile and cruel and—to use a word he repeatedly uses, as if re-coined with a more sinister meaning—“simple.”

There are many surprising facts, fascinating stories, and shrewd epigrammatic thrusts in these pages. Naipaul is very good on the Spaniards—their egoistic “simplicity,” the unreality to them of everything but God and gold, their disastrous inability to plant crops, the abstract accounts they left of their marvellous journeys (“The conquistador who found nothing had nothing to report. Believing in wonders, he had no gift of wonder”), their superstitious and murderous abhorrence of the heathen Indian, the mild legalism of their slave code. They experienced the New World as a “medieval adventure.” Antonio de Berrio became the last and least of the conquistadors. His wife, whom he married late, was the niece of one of the great ones, Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada. Quesada had marched into the Colombian plateau, conquered the Chibcha Indians, and founded at Bogotá the kingdom of New Granada—an achievement sufficient to make him rich but not content. He wished to discover another Mexico or Peru and to become, after Cortés and Pizarro, the third marquis of the New World. The
rumor of El Dorado—a tale the jungle Indians told, a confusion of the ritual gilding of a Chibchan chieftain with the opulent Inca empire the Spaniards had already seized—drew Quesada into the swamps of the Orinoco River; of the two thousand men in this expedition, twenty-five returned. When, some years later, Quesada died, his nephew-in-law inherited his fortune and his quest. The one consumed the other. Berrio, an old soldier of sixty, came from Spain to the Indies and for fifteen years devoted himself to the search for the gilded man and the city of gold. A collection of straw huts in Trinidad served as the capital of a jungle territory—Trinidad, Guiana, and eastern Venezuela—that for many decades was known in the Spanish colonial records as “these provinces of El Dorado.” The tangle of ruinous expeditions and English raids and Indian massacres defies summary; by one of those ironies whereby literature wags history, it was Sir Walter Raleigh—a timid cutthroat, in Naipaul’s narrative—who captured the El Dorado legend from its leading devotee, Berrio, by writing a book,
The Discovery of the Large, Rich, and Beautiful Empire of Guiana
. Though “really the story of a defeat and of a nervous six-day journey of exploration,” the book “catches part of the New World at that moment between the unseeing brutality of the discovery and conquest and the later brutality of colonization. It was the swiftly passing moment when romance could be apprehended.” Berrio’s own story has an end worthy not of romance but of an anti-romantic novel. After seizure and release by Raleigh, Berrio, now seventy-five and probably lunatic, was stranded, with a dozen men, on an island in the Orinoco. Meanwhile, Domingo de Vera, his “campmaster for El Dorado,” had wangled from the chronically bankrupt Spanish king a support expedition of twenty-eight ships and perhaps two thousand men and women. The New World was not ready to support such a population; unsheltered, unfed, cannibalized by Caribs, the expedition disintegrated and became, in the Spanish Indies, a “folk memory of horror.” And Berrio, when Vera got to him on his island, was not grateful. He said (and these are the only spoken words of his that have been recorded), “We are trying to do too much. If we try to do too much we will end by doing nothing at all.” So Don Quixote, invited to rise from his deathbed and resume the search for Dulcinea, replied, “No more of that, I beseech you. All the use I shall make of these follies at present is to heighten my repentance.” The New World as medieval adventure had ended.

After a brief section on Trinidad’s two hundred years as a “ghost province” within the Spanish Empire, and on its sudden, bloodless surrender to the British in 1797,
The Loss of El Dorado
concentrates upon Trinidad as an outpost in the young British Empire and upon the rule, disgrace, and final glory of Thomas Picton. If the collapse of Vera’s relief force epitomizes the Spanish quest, the basic symbol of the British establishment is Vallot’s jail. Jean-Baptiste Vallot, the conscientious, amiable, tirelessly cruel jailer of Port of Spain, is one of Naipaul’s prime catches in the sea of forgotten documents. Vallot, who was paid by fees for each flogging, ear-clipping, and torture by suspension, and Begorrat, the chief magistrate, who prescribed the tortures and punishments, were both French; in Spanish times, Trinidad had suffered an influx of French planters and their slaves from the more turbulent islands of Santo Domingo and Martinique. The planters had brought with them their skill at “the management of Negroes.”

Picton brought to his post no aversion to brutality. Instant hangings and fatal lashings were the first order of his new establishment. He signed all of Begorrat’s torture orders. The growing agitation of the “radical” English-born artisans and merchants in Port of Spain, and the intervention of Colonel William Fullarton, one of two commissioners appointed to mitigate Picton’s one-man rule, succeeded in having him brought to trial in London for a relatively innocent act—signing the
order to torture Luisa Calderon, a young free mulatto accused by her lover of theft. Picton’s two trials consumed five years. Luisa and the Negro policeman who testified with her had time to learn English between the first and the second. At the first, Picton was technically convicted, on the basis that torture was illegal under the Spanish law that still obtained in Trinidad; at the second, he was acquitted. Meanwhile, Fullarton—who, a spendthrift as well as a humanitarian, had squandered the treasury surplus accumulated under Picton’s hard-headed management—fell into disfavor and died. Back in Port of Spain, Vallot’s jail, with its torture chambers, its tiny, stinking cells, its
cachots brûlants
(windowless hotboxes), was pulled down by Picton’s friends. No plan of it remains. Vallot disappeared; Begorrat remained a prominent planter into the 1830’s; Picton’s destiny took him into the peninsular campaign with Wellington, storming and sacking Badajoz, and on to Waterloo and a valorous death and a memorial statue at Carmarthen and the immortal good name enshrined, if you look him up, in the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
.

The Loss of El Dorado
concludes with a summary of Trinidad’s next hundred and fifty years, as a “ghost province” now of the British Empire, and touches on Mr. Naipaul’s childhood in Port of Spain, when it seemed “a place at the rim of the world.” Then, in the 1940’s, “Picton was the name of a street; no one knew more. History was a fairy tale about Columbus.… History was also a fairy tale not so much about slavery as about its abolition.” These two impressions, of history as layers of fantasy and of Trinidad as a place on the rim of the world, animate Naipaul’s zealous and intricate work of research and lurk behind his curious thesis that the New World is hopelessly “simple” and unreal. Himself a resident of England for twenty years, Naipaul voices this thesis, or suspicion, through the exiled revolutionary Miranda. “After the years in Europe, the books, pictures, and study, after the talk of liberty and constitutions, the colonial world remained, still knowing only about blood and money, cacao and tobacco, the management of Negroes and shops.… Miranda was applying the concepts of Europe as words alone, accurate but misleading, to a simpler world: the Negro-worked plantations of Venezuela, the low wooden houses of Port of Spain, the muddy shore, the rough Spanish shops, the one printery.” The reader puzzles over this “deeper colonial deprivation, the sense of the missing real world.” Is it that Europe has no muddy shores? Is greater length of history the token of superiority? Another exile, the Venezuelan lawyer
Level de Goda, in Spain, is excited “to be close for the first time to the real world and real events, to be in a country that could support classical illusion.” Illusion or allusion? Naipaul’s indictment is slow to form. “It wasn’t only that the wines, the manners and the graces, the books and the art and the ideas of a living culture came from outside. The simple society bred simple people”—“too simple for lasting causes,” so simple that their revolutions are “second-hand,” “with energy but without principles,” “the imperfectly constituted society decaying into minute egoisms.” And what is the cause of this decay, which turned the Spaniards feckless, which made Frenchmen into monsters of cruelty, which sapped British liveliness and idealism? Slavery. “In the slave society … this liveliness began to be perverted and then to fade, and the English saw their preëminence, more simply, as a type of racial magic.” Inhumane laws are enacted by people “who have ceased to assess themselves by the standards of the metropolis and now measure their eminence only by their distance, economic and racial, from their Negroes.”

If for “colonial” we substitute “southern,” the situation, and the truth of the charge, become recognizable. There is no denying the evidence Naipaul has resurrected concerning the cruelty and folly enacted in the provinces of El Dorado, where slaves poisoned each other to destroy the master’s wealth and ate dirt to destroy themselves. Naipaul’s sense of an evil unreality presiding over the New World makes it possible for him to sympathize on all sides, to bring into rounded life his great variety of doomed actors. “Fantasy,” with “simple,” is a recurrent word: there was the fantasy of a city of gold, and the fantasy of the underground slave life of voodoo and midnight courts, and the fantasy of bookish revolutionaries like Miranda, and the fantasy of the British that they could manipulate South American revolutions to serve their economic ends. But in viewing an entire hemisphere as a corrupted dream, Naipaul dissolves what realities there were.
The Loss of El Dorado
rests upon an unexamined assumption, of metropolitan superiority. In this it is like Naipaul’s last, fine but cold novel,
The Mimic Men
, which presented the men of the
West Indies as poor imitations of Europeans. Yet were the conquistadors more fanatic and quixotic than the captains of the Thirty Years’ War? Were the English planters more rapacious and callous than the mill-owners of Lancashire? Were the South American revolutionaries more deluded or ineffectual than the French prototypes, who slew each other and prepared the way for Napoleon? Was the cruelty of slavery not an extension of the cruelty already present on the African continent? Does not the collapse of “metropolitan” values amid “simpler” conditions demonstrate their own frailty and unreality? For the fallacy of the primitive paradise, it seems to me, Mr. Naipaul wants to exchange that of the metropolitan paradise. This desire gives
The Loss of El Dorado
its bleak and caustic tone, yet also its persuasive sadness and the power of poetry.