“The poor, associating by an obscure instinct of consolation the ideas of evil and wealth, will tell you that [the peninsula of Azuera] is deadly because of its forbidden treasures. The common folk of the neighbourhood, peons of the estancias, vaqueros of the seaboard plains, tame Indians coming miles to market with a bundle of sugar-cane or a basket of maize worth about threepence, are well aware that heaps of shining gold lie in the gloom of the deep precipices cleaving the stony levels of Azuera. Tradition has it that many adventurers of olden time had perished in the search. The story goes also that within men's memory two wandering sailors -- Americanos, perhaps, but gringos of some sort for certain -- talked over a gambling, good-for-nothing mozo, and the three stole a donkey to carry for them a bundle of dry sticks, a water-skin, and provisions enough to last a few days. Thus accompanied, and with revolvers at their belts, they had started to chop their way with machetes through the thorny scrub on the neck of the peninsula.
“On the second evening an upright spiral of smoke (it could only have been from their camp-fire) was seen for the first time within memory of man standing up faintly upon the sky above a razor-backed ridge on the stony head… The impious adventurers gave no other sign. The sailors, the Indian, and the stolen burro were never seen again… the two gringos, spectral and alive, are believed to be dwelling to this day amongst the rocks, under the fatal spell of their success. Their souls cannot tear themselves away from their bodies mounting guard over the discovered treasure. They are now rich and hungry and thirsty.”
Conrad, Joseph. “Nostromo.” Penguin Classics edition. 1990. Pgs. 39-40
This passage, which stands at the beginning of Conrad’s Nostromo, tells of two sailors who go in search of a buried treasure, in the process becoming ghosts. This story is told stylistically as a folk legend or local fairytale of the people of Sulaco, that is, an event that may not have actually happened, or occurred only in some mythical, non-historic time. The use of fairytale sets up a tone that this story may not be important to the following events, as it is something that did not happen, perhaps only suggesting some background about the people or place of the book. Linguistically however, Conrad uses the same kinds of descriptive language that abound through the rest of the novel. The depictions of the folk of the neighborhood or the gringos’ provisions clearly place this legend within a setting and cultural context similar to that in which Nostromo as a whole takes place. It is important to notice that despite this clarity of detail, the two gringos are not given names; in fact it is not even certain that they are actually Americans. They only thing definite is that they are sailors, and as gringos they may most likely be foreigners to Sulaco.
Several images appear in the legend of the forbidden treasure that hold thematic importance for Nostromo, and can be tied up in the opening sentence’s equating of evil and wealth. Beyond the almost insignificant details mentioned above, the story focuses on a treasure hidden in a ravine on the peninsula of Azuera, off the coast of Sulaco, suggesting the lure and inaccessibility of money. Secondly, there is the pair of foreigners who go searching for the treasure with the help of a mozo, a native youth. This image points to the way that foreign interests have exploited the local populaces of Latin America in order to grow wealthy. Then there is the fate of the gringos, who become hungry ghosts, unable to either use or abandon the treasure once they find it. This idea of money as a curse or “fatal spell” most clearly illustrates the evil inherent in wealth, and leads the way into the actual story of Nostromo.
Legends and fairytales hold an important place for the people of Sulaco, even though the rest of the novel unfolds in actions clearly bound to a historical chain of events (though often a labyrinthine one). There is for instance a popular legend that the former dictator Guzman Bento became a specter whose body is carried off by the devil after his death, a fitting apotheosis for a man who had many put to death under his regime. This local folktale can be contrasted with the names of classical Roman mythology, the old deities of the Spanish upper class, which are household words in Sulaco only because the O.S.N. Company ships are named after them. Costaguana had “never been ruled by the gods of Olympus” (Conrad, 43). Another more basic local story concerns a treasure supposedly buried under the house of Giorgio Viola, echoing the legend of the gringos’ treasure and foreshadowing both the treasure that is his daughters as well as the lost silver that ends up under his lighthouse. As the engineer-in-chief puts it, the events of the novel are “like a comic fairy tale… true to the very spirit of the country” (Conrad, 273).
Many of the characters in Nostromo not only tell, but live their lives based on such fantasies, which they identify with or make up about themselves. One case of this is the mine owner Charles Gould, who Decoud claims idealizes everything and does not believe his own motives if they are not part of a fairytale. When first introduced to Charles Gould’s fascination with the San Tomé mine, we are even told that he personifies mines as living beings. The journalist Decoud claims that his own life is not “a moral romance derived from… a pretty fairy tale” (Conrad, 202), yet while trying to save the silver he later admits to living an imaginative existence: the desire to form an independent state out of his love of Antonia. It is not just the book’s “heroes” who contain this flaw of self-mythologizing. General Montero’s brother Pedrito helps bring about the Monterist Revolution because he wants to live out the political splendor depicted in stories of the Duc de Morny. Colonel Sotillo is similarly possessed by the delusion that the silver has been sunk in the harbor, and eventually gets killed by his own man for refusing to give in to reality. As Mrs. Gould says of her husband, though it could apply to almost any character in the book, “A man haunted by a fixed idea is insane. He is dangerous even if that idea is an idea of justice; for may he not bring the heaven down pitilessly upon a loved head” (Conrad, 322)?
There is no clearer place where we see this tragic self-mythologizing than in the character of Nostromo, especially since he directly identifies himself with the gringos of Azuera in the legend of the forbidden treasure. While trying to save the silver, Nostromo says that the treasure of the mine is greater than the one guarded by ghosts on Azuera, and that their task is more dangerous than trying to get the forbidden treasure. Nostromo also tells Dr. Monygham that if he fails he won’t linger like the dead sailors, while at the same time suggesting that having the silver is like a curse. After the treasure is hidden it does indeed become a curse on the sailor, and we really begin to see the association of evil and wealth. Where Nostromo had been an integral, though proud, man, after becoming a slave to the silver “the genuineness of all his qualities was destroyed” (Conrad, 432). He compares himself to the gringos again, as unable to forget the treasure until he is dead, and “belonging body and soul to the unlawfulness of his audacity” (Conrad, 438) in stealing the silver.
“There are spirits of good and evil that hover near every concealed treasure” (Conrad, 416), spirits that seem to make Decoud fascinated with the power of the silver until he kills himself, spirits that turn Mrs. Gould’s heart into a wall of silver-bricks. It is perhaps these same evil spirits, trapped in the ghosts of Azuera, that keep Nostromo coming back for more treasure until he is accidentally killed for it (by his old friend Viola, who thought he was another man trying to run off with the treasure of his daughter). On his deathbed Nostromo says that the silver has killed him, when his killer was perhaps his own fascination with its mythology. Yet even still he offers to pass that curse on. Thankfully Mrs. Gould decides to let the legend of the forbidden treasure die with him.
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