The Dream of the Celt: A Novel

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  They were sitting on the small terrace off Roger’s bedroom, and on the table, in front of the bench they shared, was a pitcher with papaya juice and two glasses. Eponim Thomas Campbell had been hired seven years earlier in Bridgetown, the capital of Barbados, with eighteen other Barbadians, by Lizardo Arana, the brother of Don Julio César, to work as an overseer at one of the stations in Putumayo. And right there the deception began because, when they hired him, they never told him he would have to spend a good part of his time on correrías.

  “Explain to me what correrías are,” said Roger.

  Going out to hunt Indians in their villages to make them come to harvest rubber on the company’s lands. Whoever they were: Ocaimas, Muinanes, Nonuyas, Andoques, Rezígaros, or Boras. Any of the Indians in the region. Because all of them, without exception, were unwilling to collect jebe. They had to be forced. Correrías required very long expeditions, sometimes with no result. They would arrive and find the villages deserted. The inhabitants had fled. Other times not, happily. They would attack, shooting to frighten them and keep them from defending themselves, but they did, with their blowguns and garrotes. There would be a battle. Then the ones who could walk, men and women, had to be driven back, tied together by the neck. The old people and newborns were left behind so they wouldn’t hold up the march. Eponim never committed the gratuitous cruelties of Armando Normand in spite of having worked for him for two years in Matanzas, where Mr. Normand was the manager.

  “Gratuitous cruelties?” Roger interrupted. “Give me some examples.”

  Eponim shifted on the bench, uncomfortable. His large eyes rolled in their sockets.

  “Mr. Normand had his eccentricities,” he murmured, looking away. “When someone behaved badly. That is, when he didn’t behave the way he expected. He would drown the man’s children in the river, for example. Himself. With his own hands, I mean.”

  He paused and explained that Mr. Normand’s eccentricities made him nervous. You could expect anything at all from so strange a man, even that one day he’d feel like emptying his revolver into the person closest to him. That’s why Eponim asked to transfer to another station. When they sent him to Último Retiro, whose chief was Mr. Alfredo Montt, Eponim slept easier.

  “Did you ever have to kill Indians in the course of your duties?”

  Roger saw that the Barbadian’s eyes looked at him, moved away, then looked at him again.

  “It was part of the job,” he admitted, shrugging. “For the overseers and the ‘boys,’ who were also called ‘rationals.’ In Putumayo a lot of blood flows. People end up getting used to it. Life there is killing and dying.”

  “Would you tell me how many people you had to kill, Mr. Campbell?”

  “I never kept count,” Eponim quickly replied. “I did the job I had to do and tried to turn the page. I did what I had to. That’s why I say the company treated me very badly.”

  He became entangled in a long, confused monologue against his former employers. They accused him of being involved in the sale of some fifty Huitotos to a plantation that belonged to Colombians, the Señores Iriarte, with whom the company of Señor Arana was always fighting for laborers. It was a lie. Eponim swore and swore again he had nothing to do with the disappearance of those Huitotos from Último Retiro, who, it was learned later, reappeared working for the Colombians. The one who had sold them was the station chief himself, Alfredo Montt. A greedy man and a miser. To hide his guilt he denounced Eponim and Dayton Cranton and Sinbad Douglas. Pure slander. The company believed him and the three overseers had to flee. They suffered terrible hardships to reach Iquitos. The company chiefs in Putumayo had ordered the “rationals,” those men receiving company rations, to kill the three Barbadians on sight. Now Eponim and his two companions lived by begging and doing occasional odd jobs. The company refused to pay their return passage to Barbados. It had denounced them for abandoning their work, and the judge in Iquitos ruled in favor of Casa Arana, of course.

  Roger promised that the government would take care of repatriating him and his two colleagues, since they were British citizens.

  Exhausted, he went to lie down as soon as he had said goodbye to Eponim Thomas Campbell. He was perspiring, his body ached, and he felt a traveling indisposition that was tormenting him little by little, organ by organ, from his head to his feet. The Congo. Amazonia. Was there no limit to the suffering of human beings? The world was infested with these enclaves of savagery that awaited him in Putumayo. How many? Hundreds, thousands, millions? Could the hydra be defeated? Its head was cut off in one place and reappeared in another, bloodier and more horrifying. He fell asleep.

  He dreamed about his mother at a lake in Wales. A faint, distant sun shone through the leaves of the tall oaks, and agitated, feeling palpitations, he saw the muscular young man he had photographed this morning on the embankment in Iquitos. What was he doing at that Welsh lake? Or was it an Irish lake in Ulster? The slender silhouette of Anne Jephson disappeared. His uneasiness was due not to the sadness and pity caused in him by an enslaved humanity in Putumayo, but the sensation that although he didn’t see her, Anne Jephson was nearby, spying on him from a circular grove of trees. Fear, however, did not weaken his growing excitement while he watched the boy from Iquitos approach. His torso dripped water as he emerged from the lake like a lacustrian god. At each step his muscles stood out, and on his face was an insolent smile that made Roger shudder and moan in his sleep. When he awoke, he confirmed with disgust that he had ejaculated. He washed and changed his trousers and underwear. He felt ashamed and uncertain.

  He found the members of the commission overwhelmed by the testimonies they had just received from the Barbadians Dayton Cranton and Sinbad Douglas. The ex-overseers had been as raw in their statements as Eponim had been with Roger. What horrified them most was that Dayton as well as Sinbad seemed obsessed above all with disproving they had “sold” those fifty Huitotos to the Colombian plantation owners.

  “They weren’t in the least concerned with the floggings, mutilations, or murders,” Walter Folk kept repeating, a man who did not seem to suspect the evil that greed could provoke. “Such horrors seem the most natural thing in the world to them.”

  “I couldn’t bear Sinbad’s entire statement,” Henry Fielgald confessed. “I had to go out to vomit.”

  “You’ve read the documentation collected by the Foreign Office,” Roger reminded them. “Did you think the accusations of Saldaña Roca and Hardenburg were pure fantasies?”

  “Not fantasies,” replied Walter Folk, “but certainly exaggerations.”

  “After this aperitif, I wonder what we’re going to find in Putumayo,” said Louis Barnes.

  “They’ll have taken precautions,” suggested the botanist. “They’ll show us a very cosmetic reality.”

  The consul interrupted to announce that lunch was served. Except for Stirs, who with appetite ate sábalo fish served with a salad of chonta fruit and wrapped in corn husks, the commissioners barely tasted a mouthful. They were silent, absorbed in their memories of the recent interviews.

  “This journey will be a descent into hell,” prophesied Seymour Bell, who had just rejoined the group. He turned to Roger. “You’ve already gone through this. One survives, then.”

  “The wounds take time to close,” Roger suggested.

  “It’s not so serious, gentlemen.” Stirs tried to raise their spirits; he had eaten in very good humor. “A good Loretan siesta and you’ll feel better. With the authorities and the heads of the Peruvian Amazon Company, things will go better for you than with the blacks, you’ll see.”

  Instead of taking a siesta, Roger sat at the small night table in his room and wrote in his notebook everything he remembered of his conversation with Eponim Thomas Campbell and made summaries of the testimonies the commission members had taken from the other two Barbadians. Then, on a separate paper, he wrote down the questions he would ask that afternoon of the prefect, Rey Lama, and the manager of the company, Pablo Zumaeta, wh
o, Stirs had told him, was Julio C. Arana’s brother-in-law.

  The prefect received the commission in his office and offered them glasses of beer, fruit juices, and cups of coffee. He’d had chairs brought in and distributed straw fans for ventilation. He still wore the riding trousers and boots he’d had on the night before, but had changed his embroidered vest for a white linen jacket and a shirt closed to the neck, like a Russian tunic. He had a distinguished air with his snowy temples and elegant manners. He let them know he was a career diplomat. He had served in Europe for several years and accepted this prefecture at the behest of the president of the republic—he indicated the photograph on the wall of a small, elegant man, dressed in tails and a top hat, with a sash across his chest—Augusto B. Leguía.

  “Who sends through me his most cordial greetings,” he added.

  “How good that you speak English and we can do without the interpreter, Prefect,” responded Roger.

  “My English is very bad,” Rey Lama interrupted affectedly. “You’ll have to be indulgent.”

  “The British government regrets that its requests that President Leguía’s government initiate an investigation into the accusations in Putumayo have been useless.”

  “There is a judicial action in progress, Señor Casement,” the prefect interrupted. “My government did not need His Majesty to initiate it. That is why it has appointed a special judge who is on his way now to Iquitos. A distinguished magistrate: Judge Carlos A. Valcárcel. You know that the distance between Lima and Iquitos is enormous.”

  “But in that case, why send a judge from Lima?” Louis Barnes intervened. “Aren’t there judges in Iquitos? Yesterday, at the dinner you held for us, you introduced several magistrates.”

  Roger noted that Rey Lama gave Barnes a pitying look, the kind appropriate for a child who has not reached the age of reason, or an imbecilic adult.

  “This talk is confidential, isn’t it, gentlemen?” he asked at last.

  Every head nodded. The prefect still hesitated before answering.

  “My government sending a judge from Lima to investigate demonstrates its good faith,” he explained. “The easiest thing would have been to ask a local judge to do it. But then …”

  He stopped, uncomfortable.

  “A word to the wise,” he added.

  “Do you mean that no judge from Iquitos would dare confront the company of Señor Arana?” Roger asked quietly.

  “This is not cultured, prosperous England, gentlemen,” the prefect murmured sorrowfully. He had a glass of water in his hand and he drank it all in one swallow. “If a person takes months to come here from Lima, the remuneration for magistrates, authorities, the military, and functionaries takes even longer. Or, quite simply, it never arrives at all. And what can these people live on while they wait for their salaries?”

  “The generosity of the Peruvian Amazon Company?” suggested Walter Folk.

  “Don’t put words I haven’t said in my mouth,” Rey Lama balked, raising his hand. “Señor Arana’s company advances their salaries to functionaries as a loan. These sums are to be paid back, in principle, with minimal interest. They are not a gift. There is no bribery. It is an honorable agreement with the state. But even so, it’s natural that magistrates who live thanks to those loans are not absolutely impartial when dealing with Señor Arana’s company. You understand, don’t you? The government has sent a judge from Lima to carry out an absolutely independent investigation. Isn’t this the best proof that it is determined to find out the truth?”

  The commission members drank from their glasses of water or beer, confused and demoralized. How many are already looking for a pretext to return to Europe? Roger thought. They certainly hadn’t foreseen any of this. With the exception perhaps of Louis Barnes, who had lived in Africa, the others did not imagine that in the rest of the world not everything functioned the way it did in the British Empire.

  “Are there authorities in the region whom we’ll visit?” asked Roger.

  “Except for inspectors who pass through when a bishop dies, none,” said Rey Lama. “It is a very isolated region. Until a few years ago, virgin forest, populated only by savage tribes. What authority could the government send there? And to what end? For the cannibals to eat? If there’s commercial life there now, and work, and a beginning of modernity, it is due to Julio C. Arana and his brothers. You should consider that as well. They have been the first to conquer that Peruvian land for Peru. Without the company, all of Putumayo would already have been occupied by Colombia, which hungers for the region. You cannot leave out that aspect, gentlemen. Putumayo is not England. It is an isolated and remote world of pagans who, when they have twins or children with a physical deformity, drown them in the river. Julio C. Arana has been a pioneer, he has brought in boats, medicines, Catholicism, clothes, Spanish. Abuses must be punished, naturally. But don’t forget, we’re dealing with a land that awakens greed. Don’t you find it strange that in the accusations of Señor Hardenburg, all the Peruvian plantation owners are monsters while the Colombians are archangels filled with compassion for the natives? I’ve read the articles in the journal Truth. Didn’t you find that odd? Sheer coincidence that the Colombians, bent on taking over that land, have found a defender like Señor Hardenburg, who saw only violence and abuses among the Peruvians but not a single comparable case among the Colombians. Before he came to Peru he worked on the railroads in Cauca, remember. Couldn’t we be dealing with an agent?”

  He paused to catch his breath, fatigued, and decided to drink beer. He looked at them, one by one, with eyes that seemed to say: A point in my favor, isn’t that so?

  “Whippings, mutilations, rapes, murders,” murmured Henry Fielgald. “Is that what you call bringing modernity to Putumayo, Prefect? Not only Hardenburg bore witness. So did Saldaña Roca, your compatriot. Three overseers from Barbados, whom we questioned this morning, have confirmed those horrors. They acknowledge having committed them.”

  “They should be punished then,” stated the prefect. “And they would have been if there were judges, or police, or authorities in Putumayo. For now there is nothing but savagery. I defend no one. I excuse no one. Go there. See with your own eyes. Judge for yourselves. My government could have prevented your entering Peru, for we are a sovereign nation and Great Britain has no reason to interfere in our affairs. But we haven’t. On the contrary, I have been instructed to facilitate matters for you in any way I can. President Leguía is a great admirer of England, gentlemen. He would like Peru to be a great country one day, like yours. That is why you are here, free to go anywhere and investigate everything.”

  It started to pour. The light dimmed and the clatter of water on corrugated metal was so strong it seemed the roof would cave in and streams of water would fall on them. Rey Lama had adopted a melancholy expression.

  “I have a wife and four children whom I adore,” he said, with a dejected smile. “I haven’t seen them for a year and God knows whether I’ll ever see them again. But when President Leguía asked me to come to serve my country in this remote corner of the world, I didn’t hesitate. I’m not here to defend criminals, gentlemen. Just the opposite. I ask only for you to understand that working, trading, setting up an industry in the heart of Amazonia is not the same as doing it in England. If this jungle one day reaches the living standards of western Europe, it will be thanks to men like Julio C. Arana.”

  They spent a long time in the prefect’s office. They asked many questions and he answered all of them, sometimes evasively and sometimes with bravado. Roger had not yet formulated a clear idea of the man. At times he seemed to be a cynic playing a part, and other times a good man with crushing responsibilities that he tried to carry out as successfully as possible. One thing was certain: Rey Lama knew the atrocities were real and didn’t like it, but his position demanded that he minimize them any way he could.

  When they took their leave of the prefect, it had stopped raining. On the street, the roofs were still dripping water, ther
e were puddles everywhere with splashing toads, and the air had filled with blowflies and mosquitoes that peppered them with bites. Heads lowered, silent, they walked to the Peruvian Amazon Company, a spacious mansion with a tile roof and glazed tiles on the facade, where the general manager, Pablo Zumaeta, was expecting them for the final interview of the day. They had a few minutes and took a turn around the large cleared space of the Plaza de Armas. Curiously they contemplated the metal house of the engineer Gustave Eiffel exposing its iron vertebrae to the elements like the skeleton of an antediluvian animal. The surrounding bars and restaurants were already open and the music and din deafened the Iquitos twilight.

  The Peruvian Amazon Company, on Calle Perú, a few yards from the Plaza de Armas, was the largest, most solid building in Iquitos. Two stories, constructed of cement and metal plates, its external walls were painted light green, and in the small sitting room next to his office, where Pablo Zumaeta received them, a fan with wide wooden blades hung motionless from the ceiling, waiting for electricity. In spite of the intense heat, Señor Zumaeta, who must have been close to fifty, wore a dark suit with a brightly decorated vest, a string tie, and shiny half boots. He ceremoniously shook hands with each person and asked each of them, in a Spanish marked by the lilting Amazonian accent that Roger had learned to identify, whether their lodgings were satisfactory, Iquitos hospitable, or whether they needed anything. He repeated to each one that he had orders cabled from London by Señor Julio C. Arana himself to offer them every assistance for the success of their mission. When he mentioned Arana, the manager of the Peruvian Amazon Company bowed to the large portrait hanging on one of the walls.

  While Indian domestics, barefoot and dressed in white tunics, passed trays with drinks, Roger contemplated the serious, square, dark face with penetrating eyes of the owner of the Peruvian Amazon Company. Arana’s head was covered by a French beret, and his suit looked as if it had been cut by one of the good Parisian tailors or, perhaps, in Savile Row in London. Was it true that this all-powerful rubber king, with elegant houses in Biarritz, Geneva, and the gardens of Kensington Road in London, began his career selling straw hats on the streets of Rioja, the godforsaken village in the Amazon jungle where he was born? His gaze revealed a clear conscience and great self-satisfaction.