Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard

J >> Joseph Conrad >> Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard


Sometimes she had no patience with pain. For years its gnawing had been
part of the landscape embracing the glitter of the harbour under
the wooded spurs of the range; and the sunshine itself was heavy and
dull--heavy with pain--not like the sunshine of her girlhood, in which
middle-aged Giorgio had wooed her gravely and passionately on the shores
of the gulf of Spezzia.

"You go in at once, Giorgio," she directed. "One would think you do not
wish to have any pity on me--with four Signori Inglesi staying in the
house." "_Va bene, va bene_," Giorgio would mutter. He obeyed. The Signori
Inglesi would require their midday meal presently. He had been one
of the immortal and invincible band of liberators who had made the
mercenaries of tyranny fly like chaff before a hurricane, "_un uragano
terribile_." But that was before he was married and had children; and
before tyranny had reared its head again amongst the traitors who had
imprisoned Garibaldi, his hero.

There were three doors in the front of the house, and each afternoon the
Garibaldino could be seen at one or another of them with his big bush of
white hair, his arms folded, his legs crossed, leaning back his leonine
head against the side, and looking up the wooded slopes of the foothills
at the snowy dome of Higuerota. The front of his house threw off a black
long rectangle of shade, broadening slowly over the soft ox-cart track.
Through the gaps, chopped out in the oleander hedges, the harbour branch
railway, laid out temporarily on the level of the plain, curved away its
shining parallel ribbons on a belt of scorched and withered grass within
sixty yards of the end of the house. In the evening the empty material
trains of flat cars circled round the dark green grove of Sulaco,
and ran, undulating slightly with white jets of steam, over the plain
towards the Casa Viola, on their way to the railway yards by the
harbour. The Italian drivers saluted him from the foot-plate with raised
hand, while the negro brakesmen sat carelessly on the brakes, looking
straight forward, with the rims of their big hats flapping in the wind.
In return Giorgio would give a slight sideways jerk of the head, without
unfolding his arms.

On this memorable day of the riot his arms were not folded on his chest.
His hand grasped the barrel of the gun grounded on the threshold; he
did not look up once at the white dome of Higuerota, whose cool purity
seemed to hold itself aloof from a hot earth. His eyes examined the
plain curiously. Tall trails of dust subsided here and there. In
a speckless sky the sun hung clear and blinding. Knots of men ran
headlong; others made a stand; and the irregular rattle of firearms came
rippling to his ears in the fiery, still air. Single figures on foot
raced desperately. Horsemen galloped towards each other, wheeled round
together, separated at speed. Giorgio saw one fall, rider and horse
disappearing as if they had galloped into a chasm, and the movements of
the animated scene were like the passages of a violent game played upon
the plain by dwarfs mounted and on foot, yelling with tiny throats,
under the mountain that seemed a colossal embodiment of silence. Never
before had Giorgio seen this bit of plain so full of active life; his
gaze could not take in all its details at once; he shaded his eyes with
his hand, till suddenly the thundering of many hoofs near by startled
him.

A troop of horses had broken out of the fenced paddock of the Railway
Company. They came on like a whirlwind, and dashed over the line
snorting, kicking, squealing in a compact, piebald, tossing mob of bay,
brown, grey backs, eyes staring, necks extended, nostrils red, long
tails streaming. As soon as they had leaped upon the road the thick dust
flew upwards from under their hoofs, and within six yards of Giorgio
only a brown cloud with vague forms of necks and cruppers rolled by,
making the soil tremble on its passage.

Viola coughed, turning his face away from the dust, and shaking his head
slightly.

"There will be some horse-catching to be done before to-night," he
muttered.

In the square of sunlight falling through the door Signora Teresa,
kneeling before the chair, had bowed her head, heavy with a twisted
mass of ebony hair streaked with silver, into the palm of her hands.
The black lace shawl she used to drape about her face had dropped to
the ground by her side. The two girls had got up, hand-in-hand, in short
skirts, their loose hair falling in disorder. The younger had thrown
her arm across her eyes, as if afraid to face the light. Linda, with
her hand on the other's shoulder, stared fearlessly. Viola looked at his
children. The sun brought out the deep lines on his face, and, energetic
in expression, it had the immobility of a carving. It was impossible to
discover what he thought. Bushy grey eyebrows shaded his dark glance.

"Well! And do you not pray like your mother?"

Linda pouted, advancing her red lips, which were almost too red; but she
had admirable eyes, brown, with a sparkle of gold in the irises, full of
intelligence and meaning, and so clear that they seemed to throw a glow
upon her thin, colourless face. There were bronze glints in the sombre
clusters of her hair, and the eyelashes, long and coal black, made her
complexion appear still more pale.

"Mother is going to offer up a lot of candles in the church. She always
does when Nostromo has been away fighting. I shall have some to carry up
to the Chapel of the Madonna in the Cathedral."

She said all this quickly, with great assurance, in an animated,
penetrating voice. Then, giving her sister's shoulder a slight shake,
she added--

"And she will be made to carry one, too!"

"Why made?" inquired Giorgio, gravely. "Does she not want to?"

"She is timid," said Linda, with a little burst of laughter. "People
notice her fair hair as she goes along with us. They call out after
her, 'Look at the Rubia! Look at the Rubiacita!' They call out in the
streets. She is timid."

"And you? You are not timid--eh?" the father pronounced, slowly.

She tossed back all her dark hair.

"Nobody calls out after me."

Old Giorgio contemplated his children thoughtfully. There was two years
difference between them. They had been born to him late, years after
the boy had died. Had he lived he would have been nearly as old as Gian'
Battista--he whom the English called Nostromo; but as to his daughters,
the severity of his temper, his advancing age, his absorption in his
memories, had prevented his taking much notice of them. He loved his
children, but girls belong more to the mother, and much of his affection
had been expended in the worship and service of liberty.

When quite a youth he had deserted from a ship trading to La Plata, to
enlist in the navy of Montevideo, then under the command of Garibaldi.
Afterwards, in the Italian legion of the Republic struggling against the
encroaching tyranny of Rosas, he had taken part, on great plains, on the
banks of immense rivers, in the fiercest fighting perhaps the world had
ever known. He had lived amongst men who had declaimed about liberty,
suffered for liberty, died for liberty, with a desperate exaltation, and
with their eyes turned towards an oppressed Italy. His own enthusiasm
had been fed on scenes of carnage, on the examples of lofty devotion, on
the din of armed struggle, on the inflamed language of proclamations.
He had never parted from the chief of his choice--the fiery apostle of
independence--keeping by his side in America and in Italy till after
the fatal day of Aspromonte, when the treachery of kings, emperors,
and ministers had been revealed to the world in the wounding and
imprisonment of his hero--a catastrophe that had instilled into him
a gloomy doubt of ever being able to understand the ways of Divine
justice.

He did not deny it, however. It required patience, he would say. Though
he disliked priests, and would not put his foot inside a church for
anything, he believed in God. Were not the proclamations against tyrants
addressed to the peoples in the name of God and liberty? "God for
men--religions for women," he muttered sometimes. In Sicily, an
Englishman who had turned up in Palermo after its evacuation by the army
of the king, had given him a Bible in Italian--the publication of the
British and Foreign Bible Society, bound in a dark leather cover.
In periods of political adversity, in the pauses of silence when the
revolutionists issued no proclamations, Giorgio earned his living with
the first work that came to hand--as sailor, as dock labourer on the
quays of Genoa, once as a hand on a farm in the hills above Spezzia--and
in his spare time he studied the thick volume. He carried it with
him into battles. Now it was his only reading, and in order not to be
deprived of it (the print was small) he had consented to accept the
present of a pair of silver-mounted spectacles from Senora Emilia Gould,
the wife of the Englishman who managed the silver mine in the mountains
three leagues from the town. She was the only Englishwoman in Sulaco.

Giorgio Viola had a great consideration for the English. This feeling,
born on the battlefields of Uruguay, was forty years old at the very
least. Several of them had poured their blood for the cause of freedom
in America, and the first he had ever known he remembered by the name of
Samuel; he commanded a negro company under Garibaldi, during the famous
siege of Montevideo, and died heroically with his negroes at the fording
of the Boyana. He, Giorgio, had reached the rank of ensign-alferez-and
cooked for the general. Later, in Italy, he, with the rank of
lieutenant, rode with the staff and still cooked for the general. He had
cooked for him in Lombardy through the whole campaign; on the march to
Rome he had lassoed his beef in the Campagna after the American manner;
he had been wounded in the defence of the Roman Republic; he was one of
the four fugitives who, with the general, carried out of the woods the
inanimate body of the general's wife into the farmhouse where she died,
exhausted by the hardships of that terrible retreat. He had survived
that disastrous time to attend his general in Palermo when the
Neapolitan shells from the castle crashed upon the town. He had cooked
for him on the field of Volturno after fighting all day. And everywhere
he had seen Englishmen in the front rank of the army of freedom.
He respected their nation because they loved Garibaldi. Their very
countesses and princesses had kissed the general's hands in London, it
was said. He could well believe it; for the nation was noble, and the
man was a saint. It was enough to look once at his face to see the
divine force of faith in him and his great pity for all that was poor,
suffering, and oppressed in this world.

The spirit of self-forgetfulness, the simple devotion to a vast
humanitarian idea which inspired the thought and stress of that
revolutionary time, had left its mark upon Giorgio in a sort of austere
contempt for all personal advantage. This man, whom the lowest class in
Sulaco suspected of having a buried hoard in his kitchen, had all his
life despised money. The leaders of his youth had lived poor, had died
poor. It had been a habit of his mind to disregard to-morrow. It was
engendered partly by an existence of excitement, adventure, and wild
warfare. But mostly it was a matter of principle. It did not resemble
the carelessness of a condottiere, it was a puritanism of conduct, born
of stern enthusiasm like the puritanism of religion.

This stern devotion to a cause had cast a gloom upon Giorgio's old
age. It cast a gloom because the cause seemed lost. Too many kings and
emperors flourished yet in the world which God had meant for the people.
He was sad because of his simplicity. Though always ready to help his
countrymen, and greatly respected by the Italian emigrants wherever he
lived (in his exile he called it), he could not conceal from himself
that they cared nothing for the wrongs of down-trodden nations. They
listened to his tales of war readily, but seemed to ask themselves what
he had got out of it after all. There was nothing that they could see.
"We wanted nothing, we suffered for the love of all humanity!" he cried
out furiously sometimes, and the powerful voice, the blazing eyes, the
shaking of the white mane, the brown, sinewy hand pointing upwards as
if to call heaven to witness, impressed his hearers. After the old man
had broken off abruptly with a jerk of the head and a movement of the
arm, meaning clearly, "But what's the good of talking to you?" they
nudged each other. There was in old Giorgio an energy of feeling, a
personal quality of conviction, something they called "terribilita"--"an
old lion," they used to say of him. Some slight incident, a chance
word would set him off talking on the beach to the Italian fishermen of
Maldonado, in the little shop he kept afterwards (in Valparaiso) to his
countrymen customers; of an evening, suddenly, in the cafe at one end of
the Casa Viola (the other was reserved for the English engineers) to the
select clientele of engine-drivers and foremen of the railway shops.

With their handsome, bronzed, lean faces, shiny black ringlets,
glistening eyes, broad-chested, bearded, sometimes a tiny gold ring in
the lobe of the ear, the aristocracy of the railway works listened
to him, turning away from their cards or dominoes. Here and there a
fair-haired Basque studied his hand meantime, waiting without protest.
No native of Costaguana intruded there. This was the Italian stronghold.
Even the Sulaco policemen on a night patrol let their horses pace softly
by, bending low in the saddle to glance through the window at the heads
in a fog of smoke; and the drone of old Giorgio's declamatory narrative
seemed to sink behind them into the plain. Only now and then the
assistant of the chief of police, some broad-faced, brown little
gentleman, with a great deal of Indian in him, would put in an
appearance. Leaving his man outside with the horses he advanced with a
confident, sly smile, and without a word up to the long trestle table.
He pointed to one of the bottles on the shelf; Giorgio, thrusting his
pipe into his mouth abruptly, served him in person. Nothing would be
heard but the slight jingle of the spurs. His glass emptied, he would
take a leisurely, scrutinizing look all round the room, go out, and ride
away slowly, circling towards the town.



CHAPTER FIVE

In this way only was the power of the local authorities vindicated
amongst the great body of strong-limbed foreigners who dug the earth,
blasted the rocks, drove the engines for the "progressive and
patriotic undertaking." In these very words eighteen months before the
Excellentissimo Senor don Vincente Ribiera, the Dictator of Costaguana,
had described the National Central Railway in his great speech at the
turning of the first sod.

He had come on purpose to Sulaco, and there was a one-o'clock
dinner-party, a convite offered by the O.S.N. Company on board the Juno
after the function on shore. Captain Mitchell had himself steered the
cargo lighter, all draped with flags, which, in tow of the Juno's steam
launch, took the Excellentissimo from the jetty to the ship. Everybody
of note in Sulaco had been invited--the one or two foreign merchants,
all the representatives of the old Spanish families then in town, the
great owners of estates on the plain, grave, courteous, simple men,
caballeros of pure descent, with small hands and feet, conservative,
hospitable, and kind. The Occidental Province was their stronghold;
their Blanco party had triumphed now; it was their President-Dictator,
a Blanco of the Blancos, who sat smiling urbanely between the
representatives of two friendly foreign powers. They had come with him
from Sta. Marta to countenance by their presence the enterprise in
which the capital of their countries was engaged. The only lady of that
company was Mrs. Gould, the wife of Don Carlos, the administrator of the
San Tome silver mine. The ladies of Sulaco were not advanced enough to
take part in the public life to that extent. They had come out strongly
at the great ball at the Intendencia the evening before, but Mrs. Gould
alone had appeared, a bright spot in the group of black coats behind the
President-Dictator, on the crimson cloth-covered stage erected under a
shady tree on the shore of the harbour, where the ceremony of turning
the first sod had taken place. She had come off in the cargo lighter,
full of notabilities, sitting under the flutter of gay flags, in the
place of honour by the side of Captain Mitchell, who steered, and her
clear dress gave the only truly festive note to the sombre gathering in
the long, gorgeous saloon of the Juno.

The head of the chairman of the railway board (from London), handsome
and pale in a silvery mist of white hair and clipped beard, hovered near
her shoulder attentive, smiling, and fatigued. The journey from London
to Sta. Marta in mail boats and the special carriages of the Sta.
Marta coast-line (the only railway so far) had been tolerable--even
pleasant--quite tolerable. But the trip over the mountains to Sulaco was
another sort of experience, in an old diligencia over impassable roads
skirting awful precipices.

"We have been upset twice in one day on the brink of very deep ravines,"
he was telling Mrs. Gould in an undertone. "And when we arrived here
at last I don't know what we should have done without your hospitality.
What an out-of-the-way place Sulaco is!--and for a harbour, too!
Astonishing!"

"Ah, but we are very proud of it. It used to be historically important.
The highest ecclesiastical court for two viceroyalties, sat here in the
olden time," she instructed him with animation.

"I am impressed. I didn't mean to be disparaging. You seem very
patriotic."

"The place is lovable, if only by its situation. Perhaps you don't know
what an old resident I am."

"How old, I wonder," he murmured, looking at her with a slight smile.
Mrs. Gould's appearance was made youthful by the mobile intelligence of
her face. "We can't give you your ecclesiastical court back again; but
you shall have more steamers, a railway, a telegraph-cable--a future
in the great world which is worth infinitely more than any amount
of ecclesiastical past. You shall be brought in touch with something
greater than two viceroyalties. But I had no notion that a place on
a sea-coast could remain so isolated from the world. If it had been a
thousand miles inland now--most remarkable! Has anything ever happened
here for a hundred years before to-day?"

While he talked in a slow, humorous tone, she kept her little smile.
Agreeing ironically, she assured him that certainly not--nothing ever
happened in Sulaco. Even the revolutions, of which there had been two in
her time, had respected the repose of the place. Their course ran in the
more populous southern parts of the Republic, and the great valley of
Sta. Marta, which was like one great battlefield of the parties, with
the possession of the capital for a prize and an outlet to another
ocean. They were more advanced over there. Here in Sulaco they heard
only the echoes of these great questions, and, of course, their official
world changed each time, coming to them over their rampart of mountains
which he himself had traversed in an old diligencia, with such a risk to
life and limb.

The chairman of the railway had been enjoying her hospitality for
several days, and he was really grateful for it. It was only since he
had left Sta. Marta that he had utterly lost touch with the feeling
of European life on the background of his exotic surroundings. In the
capital he had been the guest of the Legation, and had been kept busy
negotiating with the members of Don Vincente's Government--cultured men,
men to whom the conditions of civilized business were not unknown.

What concerned him most at the time was the acquisition of land for the
railway. In the Sta. Marta Valley, where there was already one line in
existence, the people were tractable, and it was only a matter of price.
A commission had been nominated to fix the values, and the difficulty
resolved itself into the judicious influencing of the Commissioners.
But in Sulaco--the Occidental Province for whose very development the
railway was intended--there had been trouble. It had been lying for ages
ensconced behind its natural barriers, repelling modern enterprise by
the precipices of its mountain range, by its shallow harbour opening
into the everlasting calms of a gulf full of clouds, by the benighted
state of mind of the owners of its fertile territory--all these
aristocratic old Spanish families, all those Don Ambrosios this and Don
Fernandos that, who seemed actually to dislike and distrust the coming
of the railway over their lands. It had happened that some of the
surveying parties scattered all over the province had been warned off
with threats of violence. In other cases outrageous pretensions as to
price had been raised. But the man of railways prided himself on being
equal to every emergency. Since he was met by the inimical sentiment of
blind conservatism in Sulaco he would meet it by sentiment, too, before
taking his stand on his right alone. The Government was bound to carry
out its part of the contract with the board of the new railway company,
even if it had to use force for the purpose. But he desired nothing less
than an armed disturbance in the smooth working of his plans. They
were much too vast and far-reaching, and too promising to leave a stone
unturned; and so he imagined to get the President-Dictator over there
on a tour of ceremonies and speeches, culminating in a great function
at the turning of the first sod by the harbour shore. After all he was
their own creature--that Don Vincente. He was the embodied triumph of
the best elements in the State. These were facts, and, unless facts
meant nothing, Sir John argued to himself, such a man's influence must
be real, and his personal action would produce the conciliatory effect
he required. He had succeeded in arranging the trip with the help of a
very clever advocate, who was known in Sta. Marta as the agent of the
Gould silver mine, the biggest thing in Sulaco, and even in the whole
Republic. It was indeed a fabulously rich mine. Its so-called agent,
evidently a man of culture and ability, seemed, without official
position, to possess an extraordinary influence in the highest
Government spheres. He was able to assure Sir John that the
President-Dictator would make the journey. He regretted, however, in
the course of the same conversation, that General Montero insisted upon
going, too.

General Montero, whom the beginning of the struggle had found an obscure
army captain employed on the wild eastern frontier of the State, had
thrown in his lot with the Ribiera party at a moment when special
circumstances had given that small adhesion a fortuitous importance.
The fortunes of war served him marvellously, and the victory of Rio Seco
(after a day of desperate fighting) put a seal to his success. At the
end he emerged General, Minister of War, and the military head of the
Blanco party, although there was nothing aristocratic in his descent.
Indeed, it was said that he and his brother, orphans, had been brought
up by the munificence of a famous European traveller, in whose service
their father had lost his life. Another story was that their father
had been nothing but a charcoal burner in the woods, and their mother a
baptised Indian woman from the far interior.

However that might be, the Costaguana Press was in the habit of styling
Montero's forest march from his commandancia to join the Blanco forces
at the beginning of the troubles, the "most heroic military exploit of
modern times." About the same time, too, his brother had turned up from
Europe, where he had gone apparently as secretary to a consul. Having,
however, collected a small band of outlaws, he showed some talent as
guerilla chief and had been rewarded at the pacification by the post of
Military Commandant of the capital.

The Minister of War, then, accompanied the Dictator. The board of the
O.S.N. Company, working hand-in-hand with the railway people for the
good of the Republic, had on this important occasion instructed Captain
Mitchell to put the mail-boat Juno at the disposal of the distinguished
party. Don Vincente, journeying south from Sta. Marta, had embarked at
Cayta, the principal port of Costaguana, and came to Sulaco by sea.
But the chairman of the railway company had courageously crossed the
mountains in a ramshackle diligencia, mainly for the purpose of meeting
his engineer-in-chief engaged in the final survey of the road.

For all the indifference of a man of affairs to nature, whose hostility
can always be overcome by the resources of finance, he could not help
being impressed by his surroundings during his halt at the surveying
camp established at the highest point his railway was to reach. He spent
the night there, arriving just too late to see the last dying glow of
sunlight upon the snowy flank of Higuerota. Pillared masses of black
basalt framed like an open portal a portion of the white field lying
aslant against the west. In the transparent air of the high altitudes
everything seemed very near, steeped in a clear stillness as in an
imponderable liquid; and with his ear ready to catch the first sound of
the expected diligencia the engineer-in-chief, at the door of a hut of
rough stones, had contemplated the changing hues on the enormous side
of the mountain, thinking that in this sight, as in a piece of inspired
music, there could be found together the utmost delicacy of shaded
expression and a stupendous magnificence of effect.