By Kohinoor Dasgupta
When published in 1905, Nostromo, A Tale of the Seaboard may well have been a page-turner. In 2023, when more than a hundred years of human aggression and avarice have seeped into its porous pages, Nostromo is more than a page-turner. It must be kept aside and returned to several times, even after the last page has been read.
Twelve years after the publication of Nostromo Joseph Conrad (born Konrad Korzeniowski, in Russian Poland in 1857), appended a Note in which he, with touching faith in the multi-chromatic appeal of literature, provided several spoilers. He also remembered a facetious younger self not unlike Martin Decoud.
After finishing the final story of Typhoon, Conrad felt he was all written out! But, in the early 1900s, he happened to pick up a used book that mentioned a crooked sailor of whom he had heard in 1875 or 1876, when he was working on a ship in the Gulf of Mexico. It was a notorious seaboard story. A man who stole a lighterful of silver! The audacity! Was it the audacity of a fool? Of a thief? Of a hero? A different sort of man, modeled on a Corsican sailor he knew in his youthful days, took hold of Conrad's imagination. He ruminated on character versus reputation, and had "the first vision of a twilight country which was to become the province of Sulaco, with its high shadowy Sierra and its misty Campo for mute witnesses of events flowing from the passions of men short-sighted in good and evil”.
Sulaco is a fictitious province of a fictitious South American country, the Republic of Costaguana, where, as today, the vocabulary of unscrupulous politicians needs its own dictionary and etymology and a careful record of volte-faces. Military coups frequently change the government of Costaguana, and the military band plays on the Alameda, the main street of Sulaco, "sometimes in the evenings between the revolutions”.
Four different governments are alluded to in the novel, starting with the brutal regime of the tyrant Guzman Bento. The following long excerpts give an idea of the political climate in the Bento years.
"Don José Avellanos loved his country. He had served it lavishly with his fortune during his diplomatic career, and the later story of his captivity and barbarous ill-usage under Guzman Bento was well known … It was a wonder that he had not been a victim of the ferocious and summary executions which marked the course of that tyranny; for Guzman had ruled the country with the sombre imbecility of political fanaticism. The power of Supreme Government had become in his dull mind an object of strange worship, as if it were some sort of cruel deity. It was incarnated in himself, and his adversaries, the Federalists, were the supreme sinners, objects of hate, abhorrence, and fear, as heretics would be to a convinced Inquisitor. For years he had carried about at the tail of the Army of Pacification, all over the country, a captive band of such atrocious criminals, who considered themselves most unfortunate at not having been summarily executed. It was a diminishing company of nearly naked skeletons, loaded with irons, covered with dirt, with vermin, with raw wounds, all men of position, of education, of wealth, who had learned to fight among themselves for scraps of rotten beef thrown to them by soldiers, or to beg a Negro cook for a drink of muddy water in pitiful accents. Don José Avellanos, clanking his chains amongst the others, seemed only to exist in order to prove how much hunger, pain, degradation, and cruel torture a human body can stand without parting with the last spark of life. Sometimes interrogatories, backed by some primitive method of torture, were administered to them by a commission of officers hastily assembled in a hut of sticks and branches, and made pitiless by the fear for their own lives. A lucky one or two of that spectral company of prisoners would perhaps be led tottering behind a bush to be shot by a file of soldiers. Always an army chaplain – some unshaven, dirty man girt with a sword and with a tiny cross embroidered in white cotton on the left breast of a lieutenant’s uniform – would follow, cigarette in the corner of his mouth, wooden stool in hand, to hear the confession and give absolution; for the Citizen Saviour of the Country (Guzman Bento was called thus officially in petition) was not averse from the exercise of rational clemency. The irregular report of the firing squad would be heard, followed sometimes by a single finishing shot; a little, bluish cloud of smoke would float up above the green bushes, and the Army of Pacification would move on over the savannas, through the forests, crossing rivers, invading rural pueblos, devastating haciendas of the horrid aristocrats, occupying the inland towns in the fulfilment of its patriotic mission, and leaving behind a united land wherein the evil taint of Federalism could no longer be detected in the smoke of burning houses and the smell of spilt blood.”
**
"Guzman Bento, usually full of fanciful fears and brooding suspicion, had sudden accesses of unreasonable self-confidence when he perceived himself elevated on a pinnacle of power and safety beyond the reach of mere mortal plotters. At such times he would impulsively command the celebration of a solemn Mass of thanksgiving which would be sung in great pomp in the cathedral of Sta Marta by the trembling, subservient Archbishop of his creation. He heard it sitting in a gilt armchair placed before the high altar, surrounded by the civil and military heads of his Government. The unofficial world of Sta Marta would crowd into the cathedral, for it was not quite safe for anybody of mark to stay away from the manifestation of presidential piety. Having thus acknowledged the only power he was at all disposed to recognize as above himself, he would scatter acts of political grace in a sardonic wantonness of clemency. There was no other way left now to enjoy his power but by seeing his crushed adversaries crawl impotently into the light of day out of the dark, noisome cells of the Collegio. Their harmlessness fed his insatiable vanity, and they could always be got hold of again. It was the rule for all the women of their families to present thanks afterwards in a special audience. The incarnation of that strange god: El Gobierno Supremo, received them standing, cocked hat on head, and exhorted them in a menacing mutter to show their gratitude by bringing up their children in fidelity to the democratic form of government "which I have established for the happiness of our country”.
For centuries, Sulaco enjoyed a degree of autonomy. Hills cut it off from the rest of the country. It is situated by the huge and perfectly still Golfo Placido which, in the past, kept away the deep-sea galleons of the conquerors. Every night, a bank of clouds rolls out of the valley and sits over the middle of the gulf, blotting out the shoreline. Sulaco is difficult to approach even in the daytime from Cayta, the next port on the straight Costaguana seaboard, because of an insignificant peninsula called Punta Mala. On the other end of the semicircular shoreline is the stony and barren Azuera peninsula. Opposite the entrance to the harbor of Sulaco lie three uninhabited islets, the Isabels.
However, Sulaco’s age of isolation is over. Steam ships can negotiate Golfo Placido. The international Oceanic Steam Navigation Company (OSN) operates a cargo service. Thanks to the newest high priest of the Material Interest, the Englishman Charles Gould (Don Carlos), the fabulous silver mine at San Tomé is up and running after decades of closure. Foreign investors are bent on opening up Sulaco. A railway line, more steamers, and a telegraph-cable are coming. The latest lot of opportunists are plotting away to topple the benevolent Government of Vincente Ribiero. They dream of silver, and of defrauding and destroying another Gould.
Nostromo used to be the bosun on a Genoese cargo ship. He was persuaded to stay on in Sulaco by a compatriot, Old Giorgio. The OSN superintendent of Sulaco, Englishman Capt. Joseph Mitchell, hired him as 'Foreman of the Lightermen (Capataz de Cargadores)'. Capt. Mitchell believes in Nostromo’s courage and incorruptibility. The young man’s given name is Giovanni Battista Fidanza, but people call him "Nostromo” (boatswain or bosun) or "Capataz de Cargadores".
Every opportunist in Sta Marta pretends to be a champion of the people’s cause, but Nostromo and the outlaw Hernandez really are popular leaders in a land where rule of law has not been established. Everyone lives in fear. The population is divided by class, color, and political ideology. For example, the Ribierists at Sulaco scorn but fear the rabblerousers in Sta Marta, whom they call “Negro Liberals”. At Sulaco, though, Nostromo, a foreigner, has no difficulty with his lightermen, who are native Costaguaneros of mixed blood, mostly Black men. His aloof and commanding personality inspires awe and fear, but is also oddly reassuring to all the common people of Sulaco. To Capt. Mitchell he is a most useful and reliable employee. As for the robber Hernandez, former ranchero, forcibly recruited soldier, deserter, bandit and terror of the Campo, he too is a leader of men with similar personal histories and tragedies. In Sulaco, some such people grab on eagerly to the promise of a better life offered by the well-run San Tomé mine, but if you ask Dr. Monygham, the Material Interest is bound to take away their freedoms in due course.
The novel, going back and forth in time, has a meaty section of chronological action, excruciatingly suspenseful, that I read as breathlessly as I read Treasure Island in my girlhood. The clash of interests, the scheming and outwitting, blackmail and cruelty, courage and nobility, the expediency that brings together bandit and priest and the icy Administrator of the silver mine, the perils, the panic, the tribulations of ordinary people, the manipulation subtly wrought by love, from Teresa’s to Emilia’s to Antonia’s, every aspect is electrifying. Conrad doubles the interest by his obsessive investigation of character.
The characters are sometimes given a detailed history, like Old Giorgio and Charles Gould. Nostromo, in contrast, is very present; only a couple of details are thrown in regarding his childhood. Though a late entrant in the novel as a character, vis-à-vis a legend, once face-to-face with us, Nostromo rapidly shows us the stuff of legend. The aloof and mysterious Capataz de Cargadores is now hero, now Chorus through the days and hours of the Great Trouble.
The ending underscores the theme of the novel. However, despite Conrad’s best efforts, Nostromo never really falls off his heroic perch, in my mind at least. It is difficult to recognize his frail humanity.
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