The Dream of the Celt: A Novel

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  Startled, he realized he was bellowing with laughter.

  AMAZONIA

  VIII

  When, on the last day of August 1910, Roger arrived in Iquitos after a little more than six weeks of an exhausting voyage that transported him and the members of the commission from England to the heart of the Peruvian Amazon, the old infection that irritated his eyes had become worse, as had the attacks of arthritis and the general state of his health. But, faithful to his Stoic character (Herbert Ward called him “Senecan”), at no moment during the journey did he allow his ailments to be evident, making an effort instead to raise the spirits of his companions and help them endure their suffering. Colonel R. H. Bertie, a victim of dysentery, had to return to England when the ship docked at Madeira. The one who held up best was Louis Barnes, familiar with African agriculture since he had lived in Mozambique. The botanist Walter Folk, an expert in rubber, suffered in the heat and had neuralgia. Seymour Bell feared dehydration and always had a bottle of water in his hand, sipping from it constantly. Henry Fielgald had been in Amazonia the previous year, sent by Julio C. Arana’s company, and gave advice on how to protect against mosquitoes and the “evil temptations” of Iquitos.

  There were certainly a good number of those. It seemed incredible in a city so small and unattractive—an immense muddy district with crude constructions of wood and adobe topped with palm leaves, a few buildings of noble materials with galvanized metal roofs, spacious mansions whose facades were decorated with tiles imported from Portugal—that there should be so great a proliferation of bars, taverns, brothels, and gambling houses, and that prostitutes of all races and colors should be on display so shamelessly from the earliest hours of the day on the high sidewalks. The countryside was superb. Iquitos was on the banks of a tributary of the Amazon, the Nanay River, surrounded by luxuriant vegetation, very tall trees, a permanent murmur from the groves, and river water that changed color as the sun moved across the sky. But few streets had sidewalks or asphalt, ditches ran beside them carrying excrement and garbage, there was a stench that at nightfall thickened to the point of nausea, and music from the bars, brothels, and centers of diversion never stopped, playing twenty-four hours a day. Stirs, the British consul, who welcomed them at the docks, indicated that Roger would stay in his house. The company had prepared a residence for the members of the commission. That same night, the prefect of Iquitos, Señor Rey Lama, gave a dinner in their honor.

  It was a little after midday and Roger, saying that instead of having lunch he preferred to rest, withdrew to his bedroom. A simple room had been prepared for him that had indigenous fabrics with geometric drawings hanging on the walls and a small terrace from which a stretch of the river was visible. The street noise diminished here. He lay down without even removing his jacket or shoes and fell asleep immediately. He was filled with a peaceful feeling he hadn’t experienced for the month and a half of his journey.

  He dreamed not of the four years of consular service he had just completed in Brazil—in Santos, Pará, and Rio de Janeiro—but the year and a half he had spent in Ireland between 1904 and 1905 following the months of heightened excitement and a demented rush of activity while the British government prepared the publication of his Report on the Congo, and the scandal that would make of him a hero and a pariah as praise from the liberal press and humanitarian organizations and diatribes from Leopold II’s hacks rained down on him at the same time. To escape the publicity while the Foreign Office decided his new assignment—after the Report it was unthinkable that he would set foot again in the Congo—Roger left for Ireland in search of anonymity. He did not pass unnoticed, but he was free of the invasive curiosity that in London left him no private life. Those months meant the rediscovery of his country, his immersion in an Ireland he had known about only in conversations, fantasies, and readings, very different from the one where he had lived as a child with his parents, or as an adolescent with his great-aunt and great-uncle and the rest of his paternal family, an Ireland that was not the tail and shadow of the British Empire, that fought to recover its language, traditions, and customs. “Roger, dear: you’ve become an Irish patriot,” his cousin Gee joked in a letter. “I’m making up for lost time,” he replied.

  During those months he had made a long trek through Donegal and Galway, taking the pulse of the geography of his captive homeland, observing like a lover the austerity of her deserted fields and wild coast, chatting with her fishermen, fatalistic, unyielding men, independent of time, and her frugal, laconic farmers. He had met many Irish people “from the other side,” Catholics and some Protestants who, like Douglas Hyde, founder of the National Literary Society, promoted the renaissance of Irish culture, wanted to restore native names to towns and villages, resuscitate the ancient songs of Ireland, the old dances, and the traditional spinning and needlework of tweed and linen. When his appointment to the consulate in Lisbon was announced, he delayed his departure repeatedly, inventing pretexts regarding his health, in order to attend the first Feis na nGleann (Festival of the Glens) in Antrim, attended by close to three thousand people. During those days Roger felt his eyes grow wet when he heard the joyous melodies played by bagpipers and sung in chorus, or listened—not understanding what they were saying—to the storytellers recounting in Gaelic the ballads and legends submerged in the medieval night. Even a hurling match, that centuries-old sport, was held at the festival, where Roger met nationalist politicians and writers such as Sir Horace Plunkett, John Bulmer Hobson, and Stephen Gwynn, and was reunited with the women friends who, like Alice Stopford Green, had made the struggle for Irish culture their own: Ada McNeill, Margaret Dobbs, Alice Milligan, Agnes O’Farrelly, and Rose Maud Young.

  From then on he dedicated part of his savings and income to the associations and schools of the Pearse brothers, which taught Gaelic, and the nationalist journals to which he contributed under a pseudonym. In 1905, when Arthur Griffith founded Sinn Féin, Roger communicated with him, offered to collaborate, and subscribed to all his publications. This journalist’s ideas coincided with those of Bulmer Hobson, with whom Roger had become friends. It was necessary to create, along with colonial institutions, an Irish infrastructure (schools, businesses, banks, industries) that gradually would replace the one imposed by Britain. In this way the Irish would become conscious of their own destiny. It was necessary to boycott British products, refuse to pay taxes, replace British sports such as cricket and soccer with national sports, and literature and the theater as well. In this way, peacefully, Ireland would break free of colonial subjugation.

  In addition to reading a great deal about the Irish past, under Alice’s tutelage, Roger tried again to study Gaelic and hired a teacher, but made little progress. In 1906 the new foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey of the Liberal Party, offered to send him as consul to Santos, in Brazil. Roger accepted, not because he wanted the job, but because his pro-Irish patronage had used up his small patrimony, he existed on loans, and he needed to earn a living.

  Perhaps the scant enthusiasm with which he returned to his diplomatic career contributed to making his four years in Brazil—1906 to 1910—a frustrating experience. He never really became accustomed to that vast country in spite of its natural beauty and the good friends he acquired in Santos, Pará, and Rio de Janeiro. What depressed him most was that, unlike the Congo, where, in spite of the difficulties, he always had the impression he was working for something transcendent that went far beyond the consular framework, in Santos his principal activity had to do with drunken British sailors who got into fights and whom he had to get out of jail, then pay their fines and return them to Britain. In Pará he heard for the first time about violence in the rubber regions. But the Foreign Office ordered him to concentrate on the inspection of port and commercial activity. His work consisted of recording the movement of ships and facilitating matters for the British who arrived intending to buy and sell. His worst time was in Rio de Janeiro, in 1909. The climate made all his ailments worse and added to them
allergies that kept him from sleeping. He had to live fifty miles from the capital, in Petrópolis, situated in highlands where the heat and humidity were lower and the nights were cool. But daily travel by train to his office turned into a nightmare.

  In his sleep he recalled insistently that in September 1906, before leaving for Santos, he wrote a long epic poem, “The Dream of the Celt,” about the mythic past of Ireland, and a political pamphlet, with Alice Stopford Green and Bulmer Hobson, The Irish and the English Army, objecting to the recruitment of Irishmen into the British armed forces.

  Biting mosquitoes woke him, taking him from a pleasurable siesta and submerging him in the Amazonian twilight. The sky had turned into a rainbow. He felt better: his eye burned less and the arthritic pain had eased. Showering in Stirs’s house turned out to be a complicated operation: the pipe holding the showerhead came out of a receptacle into which a servant poured buckets of water while Roger soaped and rinsed. The lukewarm temperature of the water made him think of the Congo. When he went down to the first floor, the consul was waiting for him at the door, ready to take him to the house of Prefect Rey Lama.

  They had to walk several blocks in wind that obliged Roger to keep his eyes half-closed. In the semidarkness they stumbled over holes, rocks, and garbage in the street. The noise had increased. Each time they passed the door of a bar the music swelled and they could hear toasts, fights, and the shouts of drunks. Stirs, advanced in years, a widower with no children, had spent half a decade in Iquitos and seemed a weary man without illusions.

  “What’s the attitude in the city toward the commission?” Roger asked.

  “Frankly hostile,” the consul replied immediately. “I suppose you already know that half of Iquitos lives off Señor Arana. I mean, off the enterprises of Señor Arana. People suspect the commission intends harm to the person who gives them work and food.”

  “Can we expect any help from the authorities?”

  “Just the opposite: all the obstacles in the world, Mr. Casement. The authorities in Iquitos also depend on Señor Arana. The prefect, the judges, and the military haven’t received their salaries from the government for months. Without Señor Arana they would have starved to death. Bear in mind that Lima is farther from Iquitos than New York and London because of the lack of transportation. In the best of circumstances it’s two months of travel.”

  “This is going to be more complicated than I imagined,” remarked Roger.

  “You and the gentlemen of the commission must be very prudent,” the consul added, hesitating now and lowering his voice. “Not here in Iquitos. There, in Putumayo. Anything can happen in those remote places. It’s a savage world, without law or order. No more and no less than the Congo, I suppose.”

  The Prefecture of Iquitos was on the Plaza de Armas, a large space without trees or flowers, where, the consul pointed out, indicating a curious iron structure that looked like a partially completed Meccano, an Eiffel house (“Yes, the same Eiffel as the tower in Paris”) was being assembled. A prosperous rubber-grower had bought it in Europe, brought it back to Iquitos in pieces, and now was reassembling it to be the best social club in the city.

  The Prefecture occupied almost half a block. It was a large, faded one-story house, lacking grace or form, with spacious rooms and barred windows, and divided into two wings, one used for offices and the other for the prefect’s residence. Señor Rey Lama, a tall, gray-haired man whose large mustache was waxed at the ends, wore boots, riding pants, a shirt buttoned to the neck, and a strange bolero jacket with embroidered decorations. He spoke some English and gave Roger an excessively cordial welcome full of bombastic rhetoric. The members of the commission were all there, packed into their evening clothes, perspiring. The prefect introduced Roger to the other guests: magistrates from the Superior Court; Colonel Arnáez, commander of the garrison; Father Urrutia, father superior of the Augustinians; Señor Pablo Zumaeta, general manager of the Peruvian Amazon Company; and four or five other people: merchants, the head of the customs office, the editor of El Oriental. There was not a single woman in the group. He heard champagne being uncorked. They were offered glasses of a white sparkling wine that, though lukewarm, seemed of good quality, undoubtedly French.

  The supper had been prepared in a large courtyard lit by oil lamps. Countless indigenous servant girls, barefoot and wearing aprons, served hors d’oeuvres and brought in platters of food. It was a mild night, and stars twinkled in the sky. Roger was surprised at how easily he understood Loretan speech, a somewhat syncopated and musical Spanish in which he recognized Brazilian expressions. He felt relieved: he’d be able to understand a good deal of what he heard on the journey and this, even though they’d have an interpreter, would support the investigation. Around him at the table, where they had just been served a greasy turtle soup he swallowed with difficulty, several conversations were being held at the same time, in English, Spanish, and Portuguese, with interpreters who interrupted them, creating parentheses of silence. Suddenly the prefect, sitting across from Roger and his eyes already alight with glasses of wine and beer, clapped his hands. Everyone stopped talking. He offered a toast to the new arrivals. He wished them a pleasant stay, a successful mission, and hoped they would enjoy Amazonian hospitality. “Loretan and especially Iquitian,” he added.

  As soon as he sat down, he spoke to Roger in a voice loud enough to stop the other conversations and start another one, with the participation of the twenty or so guests.

  “If you’ll permit me a question, my esteemed Consul? What exactly is the purpose of your trip and this commission? What have you come here to find out? Don’t take this as impertinent. On the contrary. My desire, and the desire of all the authorities, is to assist you. But we have to know why the British Crown has sent you. A great honor for Amazonia, of course, and we would like to prove ourselves worthy.”

  Roger had understood almost everything Rey Lama said, but he waited patiently for the interpreter to translate his words into English.

  “As you no doubt know, in England, in Europe, there have been denunciations of atrocities committed against the indigenous people,” he explained calmly. “Torture, murder, very serious accusations. The principal rubber company in the region, the one that belongs to Señor Julio C. Arana, the Peruvian Amazon Company, is, and I assume this is well known, a British company, registered on the London stock market. The government and public opinion would not tolerate a British company violating human and divine laws in this way in Great Britain. The reason for our journey is to investigate the truth of those accusations. Señor Arana’s company has sent the commission. His Majesty’s Government has sent me.”

  An icy silence fell over the courtyard when Roger opened his mouth. The noise from the street seemed to diminish. There was a curious immobility, as if all those gentlemen who a moment earlier had been drinking, eating, conversing, moving, gesturing, had become victims of a sudden paralysis. All eyes were on Roger. A climate of distrust and disapproval had replaced the cordial atmosphere.

  “The company of Julio C. Arana is prepared to cooperate in defense of its good name,” Señor Pablo Zumaeta said, almost shouting. “We have nothing to hide. The ship that will take you to Putumayo is the best in our firm. There you will have every opportunity to confirm with your own eyes the vileness of these slanders.”

  “We are grateful, señor,” Roger agreed.

  And at that very moment, with an excitement unusual in him, he decided to subject his hosts to a test that, he was sure, would unleash reactions which would be instructive for him and the members of the commission. In the casual voice he would have used to speak of tennis or the rain, he asked:

  “By the way, señores. Do you know whether the journalist Benjamín Saldaña Roca, I hope I’m pronouncing his name correctly, happens to be in Iquitos? Would it be possible to speak to him?”

  His question had the effect of a bomb. The diners exchanged looks of shock and anger. A long silence followed his words, as if no one dared touch
so thorny a subject.

  “But is it possible!” the prefect exclaimed at last, theatrically exaggerating his surprise. “The name of that blackmailer has reached even London?”

  “That’s true, señor,” Roger agreed. “The denunciations of Señor Saldaña Roca and of the engineer Walter Hardenburg made the scandal concerning the Putumayo rubber plantations explode in London. No one has answered my question: Is Señor Saldaña Roca in Iquitos? Might I see him?”

  There was another long silence. The discomfort of the guests was manifest. Finally the father superior of the Augustinians spoke.

  “No one knows where he is, Señor Casement,” said Father Urrutia in a very pure Spanish clearly different from that of the Loretans. Roger had more difficulty understanding him. “He disappeared from Iquitos some time ago. People say he’s in Lima.”

  “If he hadn’t fled, we Iquitians would have lynched him,” declared an old man, shaking a choleric fist.

  “Iquitos is the land of patriots,” exclaimed Pablo Zumaeta. “No one forgives that individual who invented despicable stories to slander Peru and bring down the enterprise that has brought progress to Amazonia.”