A Way in the World by V. S. Naipaul

Author:V. S. Naipaul
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Historical Fiction, Biographical, Biographical Fiction, Fiction, Literary, Imperialism, Historical, Imperialism - History, General
ISBN: 9780307401465
Publisher: Vintage Canada
Published: 1994-01-02T05:00:00+00:00

EYES ALONE again, we move down river. But now we are looking at what the launch is leaving behind. We are never far from the northern bank, and we are moving fast, at about four or five miles an hour. At a certain stage we leave the main river and turn into a channel that flows north. We slow down. The current no longer drives us. We depend on wind and tack from side to side, until the banks vanish. We are out in the wide Gulf again, and soon we see the heavy brown pelicans and the slender frigate birds flying over The Soldier.

Half-way through these pictures, as we consider water and flat land, green and brown and yellow, we hear the voice of Fray Simón, the historian.

“You are now a well-travelled man. Better travelled than most people in the world. You’ve been to England. You’ve seen some of its great cities and great buildings. You’ve seen things I haven’t seen. The spire of Salisbury, the great cathedrals of Winchester and Southwark, the Tower of London that they say Julius Caesar built. You’ve met important men. You’ve been to Spain, too. You’ve been to Toledo and Salamanca. You’ve been to Seville. You’ve seen the galleons from the Americas on the river there. And now you’re back here, in New Granada, where you were born. Don José in name and deed.”

“It was the doing of Sir Guateral, the English general. He could have condemned me with a word.”

“Why did he like you?”

“He never said.”

“Did he see in you some resemblance to the son he had lost? Was it because you were among the last people to see his son?”

“We never talked about it. He never asked me about his son.”

“Did you know the general was going to die in a few months?”

“I didn’t know, and I’m glad I didn’t know. It would have been too much for me after all that had happened. And I was full of my own grief.”

“Because of all the dead men? Or grief because you were being taken away?”

“It had been with me for some weeks. But it was only on the launch that I began to understand what I was feeling. I wasn’t a Guiana man. I was from New Granada, and had made that long journey down the river with the Berrios. I always had the hope that I would be able to pick my way back home from Guiana. When the settlement was abandoned, and the vecinos took refuge on the island in the river, I felt the world had changed for me. I felt I had lost touch with things. On the launch this grief grew and grew. Sometimes a child playing in a puddle after rain gets suddenly frightened by the reflected sky. I was like that. I felt I was falling into the sky, falling into the sea. I hardened my heart. And then, from being frightened by that idea of falling into the sky, I began to hold on to it.

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