A Way in the World (43 page)

“This letter is among your papers in London?”

“The papers of thirty-five years. They are in thirty cardboard boxes and two leather portfolios. I have a rough idea where to look. It would be impossible for anyone else to find. The Picton appeal is coming up soon.”

“It might be useful for you to be there beforehand.”

“Important things are preparing, General. A big force, and General Wellesley. I think you have an idea. If I don’t get to London in time, there may be no room for me in the plans now being made. And there may be no need for me to have a staff. If I were to have a staff, I would need someone who has a knowledge of Spanish and would know how to deal with British military people at the highest level. I know very well it’s not been a bed of roses for you here.”

“General.”

“As far as the Spanish government is concerned, they need only know that I am leaving this place, abandoning my enterprise, leaving my ship behind, my supplies, and going back to London. Lord Castlereagh will not be embarrassed in any way. And success, you know, General, wipes out certain things. Of course, since I am going back to London I have no further need of my ship. The ship can be sold or in some way disposed of. There is solid value there. I will leave you as my agent. You will do me that service. I am sure that, between you and Briarly and the master of the
Trimmer
and the disgruntled Americans of the
Leander,
certain matters can be adjusted.”

“Something can be done. About Briarly, I think I should tell you that I sent him to the jail for a while.”

“Did you, did you?”

“He complained from the jail about the stench and the filth. I handled his complaint with perfect correctness. I passed it to the provost-marshal. The jail is his responsibility. He collects a portion of the jail fees. The provost-marshal said the jail was as clean as a jail could be kept. It was washed down every day. I passed that message back to Briarly in the jail. I don’t think it did him any harm. He had really become quite impossible. He seized the ship that brought the Chinese from Calcutta. It’s an East India Company ship, but he claimed there had been some irregularity. We are still wrangling about that. Nobody’s sure who’s paying for the ship and the Chinese. Our Treasury here is quite empty. We don’t know whether we are supposed to be paying the Company, or the London government is paying. Until that is cleared up we don’t have a ship to send the Chinese back. They didn’t work out. I feel that when the East India Company people in Calcutta were told by London to send Chinese to us, they just went out and emptied the first opium houses they found. I don’t believe these people ever planted a tree in Calcutta or
grew a vegetable or hoed a weed. They are city people. And nobody in London or Calcutta thought about women. These Chinese wouldn’t look at Negro women. And no free mulatto woman would look at the Chinese. So they have just gone mad over the year they’ve been here. They’ve been here for as long as you, General. They hate being stared at, and there are still people who want to come and look at them. They’ve been keeping going only on the opium. Many of them have died. I want to send the rest back as soon as possible.”

“A six or seven months’ journey back. The same time to come over. A year or more here. I wonder what memories the survivors will take back to Calcutta of this part of their lives. Will they know where they’ve been? How they stare!”

“They’ve gathered to look at you. I think it’s because of the long white pigtail you have. It’s unusual here. It’s longer than the Navy pigtail, and you are older than most Navy people. They probably think you are one of theirs, come to take them back home. A passport will be made out for you, General. The
British Queen
will be leaving for Tortola in the third week of October. That gives you enough time to order your affairs here. In Tortola you will join the convoy for England. That will leave in mid-November. The flagship will be the
Alexandra.
I think they will find a cabin for you. You will be in London before the end of the year.”

The Chinese looked silently at the two men as they talked, and when Miranda began to go down the verandah steps they came a little nearer to consider him.

Miranda said, “Will anyone in Calcutta believe them when they tell this story? Will they believe it themselves, after a while?”

“General. The active years that remain to me are few. This makes them all the more important to me. My principal aim is, of course, to be creditably employed, but naturally without prejudice to my private interests. General, I think
we should understand one another. Service with you will be a privilege, but I should find it hard to accept any rank lower than major-general. It is not from vainglory, I assure you. It is more for the sake of others. I have certain obligations, and I will not be able with a full heart, at this stage of a life with more than its share of hardships and cheated hopes, to accept anything less than I have said.”

“General, you need say nothing more.”

WE JUMP
six years. Venezuela is in turmoil, a land of blood and revenge after three years of revolution, and Miranda is a prisoner of the Spaniards, in Morro Castle in Puerto Rico. He is waiting to make his last journey across the Atlantic, to Spain, to the dungeons of La Carraca in Cadiz. Cadiz was where the
Prins Frederik
took him in 1771. It was the first city he saw in Europe. It was where he bought his silk handkerchief and silk umbrella, and it will be where he will spend the last three years of his life, sometimes chained.

THERE HAD
in the end been no major British invasion of Spanish South America. Such an invasion, though, was being seriously planned when Miranda went back to London from Trinidad. General Wellesley (who two years later became the Duke of Wellington) was assembling a large invasion force in Ireland. Miranda—as a South American who would have given legitimacy to the British action—would have had an important place in his army. But then, as so often with Miranda, plans had to be changed. Almost at the last minute the French occupied Spain; Spain all at once became an ally of Britain’s in the war against Napoleon; and the British army that should have gone to occupy Spanish South America went instead to the Iberian peninsula to fight a war of liberation.

Miranda was fifty-eight, white-haired. It might have seemed now that after all the years of waiting there was nothing left for him to do. But then, two years later, Venezuela declared its separation from Spain. The twenty-seven-year-old Simón Bolívar came to London to get help for his country, and Miranda went back to Venezuela with him.

He must have thought he was going back to a revolution that had been accomplished. He found a country split into all its racial and caste groups, a civil war beyond any one man’s managing, and far beyond his military skill. After twenty months the first phase of that war was over. The revolution had for the moment been defeated; in the jails revenge was being taken on republican prisoners; and Miranda—like a man who had run to meet the fate from which he had more than once escaped—was a prisoner himself, betrayed to the Spaniards, his old enemies, by the man who had called him out from London, and had gone to tea one day at Grafton Street.

He was kept for five months in the jail at La Guaira, from where the
Prins Frederik
had left in 1771. Then he was moved to the fortress of San Felipe in Puerto Cabello, where in 1806 ten of the officers of the
Bacchus
and the
Bee,
dressed in white gowns and caps, had been hanged and quartered and burnt with their uniforms and arms and Miranda’s own South American flag. Five months later he was taken to Puerto Rico, to Morro Castle, where thirteen men from the
Bacchus
and the
Bee
had for some time been imprisoned, loaded with twenty-five-pound chains, and given beds of stone and pillows of brick.

IT IS
there now, while he is waiting to be transported to Spain, that Miranda is allowed visits by a Venezuelan, Andrés Level de Goda. Level is thirty-six, and a lawyer by profession. Thirty-eight years later, when most of these passions
have turned to dust, and the reputation of Miranda has been all but erased, Level in his memoirs will provide the only witness (apart from official jail-book entries) of Miranda in captivity.

Level is of a creole landowning family, with (at least until the revolution) cocoa and sugar estates on the Venezuelan side of the Gulf. He is a royalist. He wants Venezuela to hold on to the Spanish connection. He thinks the revolution Miranda was called out to serve was started by local aristocrats—second-rate people, in his estimation—to settle personal grudges and to secure their own position, and had no popular support. A Venezuela set adrift from Spain will live through an unending civil war, Level thinks: the country is too full of factions and castes and hatreds.

Politically, Level and Miranda have been on opposing sides. But in Puerto Rico they are meeting in a kind of understanding. Miranda has been betrayed by the revolution and is now beyond politics. Level has been turned by the troubles in Venezuela and Spain into a wanderer with little money. He cannot for the time being go back to Venezuela: the revolution has caught alight again and he has been declared a proscribed person. In Puerto Rico he is dependent on the generosity of the captain-general, Meléndez, who is a friend. So both men, Miranda and Level, are also meeting in a kind of shared destitution.

On many afternoons Level goes to Morro Castle to sit with Miranda in his cell, and they talk while Miranda drinks his daily cup of tea. The head of Miranda’s special guard leaves the cell door open when the two men are together.

Level’s admiration for Miranda grows: the fluent speech, the authority, the voice, the physical presence of the old man, the knowledge of men and books and great events.

Meléndez, the captain-general, shows Miranda every regard. He has Miranda’s meals sent from a tavern outside. He even arranges for Miranda to get money (against funds in
London) from an official on the British island of St. Martin, which is only a few hours’ sailing away.

Miranda is interested in the news from Spain, and Meléndez passes on the Cadiz newspapers as soon as he gets them. In them Miranda reads of the war against the French in Spain. He reads of the battles and growing reputation of the Duke of Wellington and General Picton, the former governor of Trinidad. The old man must suffer, thinking of his own fall, but he shows no emotion to Level or Meléndez.

He drinks his tea in a special way. He squeezes half a lemon into a cup of tea, and while he drinks this mixture he nibbles at the hull of the lemon, taking care (almost as if he is racing against himself) to finish both drink and lemon hull at the same time.

He says one afternoon to Level, “Why are you staring? You remind me of the Chinese in Trinidad. They thought I had come to take them home. Did Hislop tell you about that?”

Level knows the reference. He worked for some time in Trinidad as an adviser in Spanish law to Governor Hislop.

He says, “I’m not staring, General. I’m looking, to remember. I was thinking that one day I would be telling people that General Miranda turned his tea into a lemonade.”

“It’s what my father used to do on hot afternoons in Caracas. I began to do it when I came back.”

“When I’m with you I think of all the places you’ve been to, and all the people you’ve seen, and I can begin to feel that I myself have entered history a little. It is a feeling so precious I can hardly hold on to it. General, I’ve been trying for some time to put this to you. It is something I know I shouldn’t put to you. But, equally, I will not forgive myself later for not doing so. I want to know about Catherine the Great. If you think the question is wrong, please forgive me. If you think it is too intrusive, please consider it as never having been spoken.”

“It was one of the stories I encouraged, almost something I spread myself in the beginning, in my thirties, after I had left the Spanish service. Like so many of the thoughtless things I did then, it came back later and did me much harm. It exposed me to a lot of jealousy. Not in the way you might think. Venezuelans loved the story. They didn’t see it as a tribute to me. They saw it as a tribute to themselves. Some of them behaved as though I had taken away something from them. They felt that I had misused something that belonged to them. I had come between them and the arms of the empress. And then they extended this to my whole career. Whatever I had done in the world I had done, according to this way of thinking, only because I was like them, my critics. Whether in Russia or England or France or the United States, there was nothing personal about my achievement. If they had been where I had been they would have done what I had done. I had gambled nothing of myself, taken no risks, exercised no personal will. And this was extended even further. They had done it for me. I had done nothing. I was nothing.

“I told Hislop in Trinidad—I don’t know whether he told you—how Picton had damaged me in 1798, nearly thirty years after I had left home. He had written to the ministers in London that though I was important, I was nothing, the son of a Caracas shopkeeper. Of course he had got that from Caracas—and even at all the removes I could detect the voice of the Venezuelan who felt I had sullied the empress’s arms and spoilt what was his due.

“Something like that happened again when I came back. I had been called back by Bolívar, as you know, and I was going to stay in his house in Caracas, because after forty years I had none of my own. I didn’t go there directly. I thought I should behave formally and show respect to the revolution. When I landed at La Guaira I wrote to Roscio, the junta’s secretary for foreign affairs, asking for permission to go to
Caracas. His reply was insulting and extraordinary. He said that I should never forget that I owed more than most to the country, because I had been unusually privileged and had spent many years abroad in the courts of Europe. What he was saying was that during my forty years abroad I had actually been exploiting the country, living off the national patrimony, and now should pay back a little of what I owed. And I knew at once that, though we were talking about the revolution, it was the old Catherine-the-Great jealousy at work on Roscio. That story did me much harm. I should never have come to Caracas after receiving that letter of Roscio’s. I should have known that the situation had been misrepresented to me. I should have stayed at La Guaira and gone back to Curaçao on H.M.S.
Avon.
I should have made them wait, for a year, if necessary. That’s how I should have handled it.”