THERE WAS a disturbance outside. A number of men talking at once, an irregular hollow stamping on the ground, the sounds of harness, more talk, shouts, and then a slow, heavy crash.
Miranda was roused from the sound of Sarah’s voice, from the flow of his own unspoken reply, from thoughts and pictures of his library, his sleeping sons, the London night, the silence of his house.
It was darker in the room than he had thought, as though time had shifted with his thoughts and it was nearly night here too. It was only the rainy-season weather of the estuary and the Gulf: one brief, violent downpour recently over, a remnant of its drizzle still about, another downpour about to come.
He went to the window. It was in the local style, the shutter roughly jalousied, hinged at the top (the better to keep out the rain), and propped open with a stick. Water dripped from the sloping sides of the shutter. The paint had long ago peeled, the timber had weathered grey; the sill had begun to rot.
The grounds at the back of the house were a mess of mud and rubble and bush, like a clearing in the forest. To one side — near the separate little cook-house, whitewash fallen off grey, soaked boards, smoke coming out of blackened open windows: dinner for the governor and his guest being got ready — there were old compacted mounds of kitchen ash.
In the mud directly in front, a mule had been unharnessed from a cart. The badly distributed load of rubble had fallen forward, breaking the front flap of the cart and pressing the shafts into the mud.
The three or four mud-stained black men around the mule and cart were talking in a language Miranda had never heard before. He supposed it to be a language of Africa.
If the men had been talking English or French or Spanish Miranda would not have noticed them as he now did. He would have seen only Negroes and he would not have been able to recognize them later. But the strange private language, and the whole internal, unknowable world it implied, made him consider the faces of the men.
They noticed him, too, almost at the same time, the old man with the long white pigtail appearing below the sloping jalousied shutter against the darkness of the window. For a while, waiting for they knew not what, looking at him, they stood still, and for those moments it was as if in their bewilderment — men who seemed not to have any idea what they were doing or why, or even where they were — Miranda saw something of his own disturbance, called away from London and his house and Sarah and her panic, to focus all at once on that piece of bush and those men.
He noticed their frailty. It was strange in people expected to do physical labour, but (and this was plantation lore, in Venezuela as well) the sturdiness of the plantation worker was grafted on to this kind of stock over later generations. Many Africans when they arrived were as frail as these men. A certain number were expected to die in the first year, from the water, the food, the new insects. On the established plantations there were ways of “seasoning” new arrivals and seeing them through their dangerous first year. These Africans in the grounds of Government House looked neglected. In the hollow red eyes of one man could be seen signs of a rainy-season fever. He was doomed, and so perhaps was one of the men with him.
That idea of doom, of another kind of life, coming to Miranda even while he was looking at the eyes of the Africans, re-established distance between him and the men he saw, and returned him to himself and the setting: the downpour coming, the wet, rotting window sill with disagreeable drifts of black-and-white lizard droppings in the eaten-away parts of the wood: the lizards now seen to be active everywhere around him, pale yellow creatures, almost transparent, like little crocodiles but with enormous lidless eyes.
He saw in a corner of the room now the three new deal chests, like seamen’s chests, with the Turnbull and Forbes samples General Hislop had mentioned. The chests were painted with a style of lettering — thin horizontals, very thick verticals — that brought back the signboards and street signs of London: Brig.-Gen. Thos. Hislop, Headquarters, Trinidad. For General Miranda. From Turnbull and Forbes, London.
He didn’t go back to Sarah’s letter. It was an hour or so to dinner, time enough to consider other correspondence. The heavy roaring rain that came soon, beating on the ground and trees and the roof, helped his concentration.
Not long after the rain stopped a servant came and told him he had a visitor.
He went out to the verandah. He recognized his visitor as Bernard, last seen seven years ago in London. There was a mud-spattered calash with a wet black coachman in the drive. Though the rain had stopped, the drive was running with yellow water that came off the surrounding hills and made a general gurgling noise all around.
The calash made a good first impression; but then Miranda saw that the hood, which was up, was cracked and worn in the folds, the bodywork was dented and scratched, and the emblem on the low door was crudely painted. The wet coachman was wearing alpargatas, peon’s footwear, a cheap kind of slipper with a very thin leather sole with woven cotton straps for the toes and the heel. The heel-straps of the coachman’s alpargatas had long ago been flattened below the man’s heel.
The verandah was wet and every little breath of air felt chill. The rain had blown in on three sides.
Miranda didn’t ask Bernard inside. Both men remained standing in the verandah.
Bernard said, “General.”
Miranda didn’t speak.
“I never wrote. I know.”
“There are so many letters,” Miranda said. “You never wrote at all? Are you sure?”
“I put it off and put it off. Year after year. And then it was too late. Governor Hislop would have told you that I’m married. My wife is the daughter of the Chevalier de Gourville. Dupont Duvivier de Gourville. He’s a relation of the Baron de Montalembert. No finer connection is possible in these parts. It wasn’t something I would have thought possible for myself. I had to set aside thoughts of the revolution. You’re a man of the world, and I feel I can offer you this explanation. I won’t call it an excuse.”
Miranda said, “I’ve heard of the baron. He came here in 1801 with a hundred and fifty Negroes, and he lost a hundred at one blow.”
“A hundred and twenty. In the first month. After losing everything in Santo Domingo and Martinique. And there’s no bitterness in him. He simply started up again. General, I don’t want to take up more of your time. I thought it was my duty to make this call on you, to see you as soon as possible, and to declare myself. Times change, General. And though at one time I had to set aside thoughts of the revolution, I have these past few months been serving you in ways you don’t know. I think it is important for you to know that. Of course, French people of standing here know of our old connection, and I have been able to reassure them — especially those who have volunteered for your new expedition — that there was never any political quarrel between us. Friends and foes have spread all kinds of stories about you here, General. The stories haven’t been all about the court of Catherine the Great. Some have been about the French Revolution. You were a general in the army of the Revolution. But I’ve always told people that you will honour property rights in land and Negroes, that there is nothing to fear. People worry about these things here, and you can’t blame them, after recent history. I hope you think I’ve done well.”