The Dream of the Celt: A Novel

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  Pablo Zumaeta, through the interpreter, announced that the company’s best ship, the Liberal, was ready for them to board. He had provided the most experienced captain and the most competent crew on the Amazonian rivers. Even so, sailing to Putumayo would demand sacrifices of them. It took between eight and ten days, depending on the weather. And before any of the members of the commission had time to ask him a question, he hurried to hand Roger a pile of papers in a folder:

  “I’ve prepared this documentation for you, anticipating some of your concerns,” he explained. “They are the orders from the company to the managers, chiefs, assistant chiefs, and overseers of stations with regard to the treatment of personnel.”

  Zumaeta disguised his nervousness by raising his voice and gesticulating. As he displayed the papers filled with inscriptions, stamps, and signatures, he enumerated what they contained with the tone and attitudes of an orator in a small square:

  “A strict prohibition against imparting physical punishment to the natives, their wives, children, and kin, and offending them in word or deed. They are to be reprimanded and counseled in a severe manner when they have committed a verified misdeed. According to the gravity of the misdeed, they may be fined or, in the case of a very serious misdeed, fired. If the misdeed has criminal connotations, they are to be transferred to the nearest competent authority.”

  He took a long time to summarize the indications, oriented—he repeated it unceasingly—toward avoiding the commission of “abuses against the natives.” He made a parenthesis to explain that “humans being what they are,” at times employees violated these orders. When that occurred, the company sanctioned the person responsible.

  “The important thing is that we do the possible and the impossible to avoid the commission of abuses on the rubber plantations. If they were committed, it was the exception, the act of some miscreant who did not respect our policy toward the indigenous people.”

  He sat down. He had talked a great deal and with so much energy that his exhaustion was obvious. He wiped the perspiration from his face with a handkerchief that was already soaked.

  “In Putumayo will we find the station heads incriminated by Saldaña Roca and Engineer Hardenburg or have they fled?”

  “None of our employees has fled,” the manager of the Peruvian Amazon Company said indignantly. “Why would they? Because of the slanders of two blackmailers who, since they couldn’t get money out of us, invented that filth?”

  “Mutilations, murders, floggings,” Roger recited. “Of dozens, perhaps hundreds of people. They are accusations that have moved the entire civilized world.”

  “They would move me, too, if they had happened,” an incensed Pablo Zumaeta protested. “What moves me now is that cultured and intelligent people like you credit such lies without prior investigation.”

  “We are going to carry out our investigation on site,” Roger reminded him. “A very serious one, you can be sure.”

  “Do you believe that Arana, that I, that the administrators of the Peruvian Amazon Company are suicidal and kill natives? Don’t you know that the number one problem for plantation owners is the lack of harvesters? Each worker is precious to us. If those killings were true, there wouldn’t be a single Indian left in Putumayo. They all would have left, isn’t that so? Nobody wants to live where they’re whipped, mutilated, and killed. The accusation is infinitely imbecilic, Señor Casement. If the indigenous people run away we are ruined, and the rubber industry goes under. Our employees there know it. And that’s why they make an effort to keep the savages happy.”

  He looked at the members of the commission, one by one. He was always indignant, but now he was saddened, too. He made some faces that looked like pouting.

  “It isn’t easy to treat them well, to keep them satisfied,” he confessed, lowering his voice. “They’re very primitive. Do you know what that means? Some tribes are cannibals. We can’t permit that, can we? It isn’t Christian, it isn’t human. We prohibit it and sometimes they get angry and act like what they are: savages. Should we allow them to drown the children born with deformities? A harelip, for example. No, because infanticide isn’t Christian either, is it? Well. You’ll see with your own eyes. Then you’ll understand the injustice England is committing against Señor Julio C. Arana and a company that, at the cost of enormous sacrifices, is transforming this country.”

  It occurred to Roger that Pablo Zumaeta was going to shed some tears. But he was mistaken. The manager gave them a friendly smile.

  “I’ve spoken a great deal and now it’s your turn,” he apologized. “Ask me whatever you wish and I’ll answer you frankly. We have nothing to hide.”

  For nearly an hour the members of the commission questioned the general manager of the Peruvian Amazon Company. He answered them with long tirades that at times confused the interpreter, who had him repeat words and phrases. Roger did not take part in the questioning and often was distracted. It was evident that Zumaeta would never tell the truth, would deny everything and repeat the arguments used by Arana’s company to respond in London to criticisms in the newspapers. There were, perhaps, occasional excesses committed by intemperate individuals, but it was not the policy of the Peruvian Amazon Company to torture, enslave, and certainly not to kill the indigenous people. The law prohibited it, and it would have been madness to terrorize the laborers who were so scarce in Putumayo. Roger felt himself transported in space and time to the Congo. The same horrors, the same contempt for truth. The difference, Zumaeta spoke Spanish and the Belgian functionaries French. They denied the obvious with the same boldness because all of them believed that harvesting rubber and making money was a Christian ideal that justified the worst atrocities against pagans who, of course, were always cannibals and killers of their own children.

  When they left the Peruvian Amazon Company building, Roger accompanied his colleagues to the house where they were staying. Instead of returning directly to the British consul’s house, he walked through Iquitos with no particular destination. He had always liked to walk, alone or in the company of a friend, to begin and end the day. He could do it for hours, but on the unpaved streets of Iquitos he often stumbled over holes and puddles where frogs were croaking. The noise was enormous. Bars, restaurants, brothels, dance halls, and gambling dens were filled with people drinking, eating, dancing, or arguing. And in every doorway, clusters of half-naked little boys, spying. He saw the last reddish clouds of twilight disappear on the horizon and took the rest of the walk in the dark, along streets lit at intervals by the lamps in the bars. He realized he had reached that quadrangular lot with the pompous name of Plaza de Armas. He walked around the square and suddenly heard someone, sitting on a bench, greet him in Portuguese: “Boa noite, Señor Casement.” It was Father Ricardo Urrutia, superior of the Augustinians in Iquitos, whom he had met at the dinner given by the prefect. He sat beside him on the wooden bench.

  “When it doesn’t rain, it’s pleasant to go out and see the stars and breathe a little fresh air,” the Augustinian said in Portuguese. “As long as you cover your ears so you don’t hear that infernal noise. They must have told you already about this iron house that a half-mad plantation owner bought in Europe and is erecting on that corner. It was shown in Paris, at the Great Exposition of 1889, it seems. They say it will be a social club. Can you imagine what an oven it will be, a metal house in the climate of Iquitos? For now it’s a bat cave. Dozens of them sleep there, hanging from the rods.”

  Roger told him to speak Spanish, that he understood it. But Father Urrutia, who had spent more than ten years of his life with the Augustinians in Ceará, in Brazil, preferred to continue speaking Portuguese. He had been in Peruvian Amazonia less than a year.

  “I know you’ve never been on Señor Arana’s rubber plantations. But undoubtedly you know a great deal about what happens there. May I ask your opinion? Can Saldaña Roca’s and Walter Hardenburg’s accusations be true?”

  The priest sighed.

  “Unfortunatel
y, they can be, Señor Casement,” he murmured. “We’re very far from Putumayo here. A thousand, twelve hundred kilometers at least. Yes, in spite of being in a city with authorities, a prefect, judges, military men, police, bad things still happen here. What can happen there where there are only employees of the company?”

  He sighed again, this time with anguish.

  “The great problem here is the buying and selling of young indigenous girls,” he said, his voice sorrowful. “No matter how hard we try to find a solution, we can’t.”

  The Congo, again. The Congo, everywhere, Roger thought.

  “You’ve heard about the famous correrías,” the Augustinian added. “Those assaults on indigenous villages to capture harvesters. The attackers don’t steal only men. They also take little boys and girls. To sell here. Sometimes they take them to Manaus, where, it seems, they can get a better price. In Iquitos, a family buys a little maid for twenty or thirty soles at the most. They all have one, two, five little servants. Slaves, really. Working day and night, sleeping with the animals, beaten for any reason, and of course, taking care of the sexual initiation of the family’s sons.”

  He sighed again and breathed with difficulty.

  “Can’t you do anything with the authorities?”

  “We could, in principle,” said Father Urrutia. “Slavery was abolished in Peru more than half a century ago. We could have recourse to the police and the judges. But all of them also have bought their little servants. Besides, what would the authorities do with the girls they rescued? Keep them or sell them, of course. And not always to families. Sometimes to brothels for what you can imagine.”

  “Is there no way to return them to their tribes?”

  “The tribes around here are almost nonexistent by now. The parents were abducted and driven to the rubber plantations. There’s no place to take them. Why rescue those poor creatures, and for what? In these circumstances, perhaps it’s a lesser evil for them to stay in families. Some people treat them well, are fond of them. Does that seem monstrous to you?”

  “Monstrous,” Roger repeated.

  “It does to me, to us, as well,” said Father Urrutia. “We spend hours at the mission, racking our brains. What’s the solution? We can’t find it. We’ve taken steps in Rome to see if nuns can come and open a small school here for the girls. At least they’d receive some instruction. But will the families agree to send them to school? Very few, in any case. They consider them animals.”

  He sighed again. He had spoken with so much bitterness that Roger, infected by the priest’s dejection, wanted to return to the British consul’s house. He stood.

  “You can do something, Señor Casement,” said Father Urrutia in farewell, shaking his hand. “What’s happened is a kind of miracle. I mean, the denunciations, the scandal in Europe. The coming of this commission to Loreto. If anyone can help these poor people, it is all of you. I’ll pray for you to come back from Putumayo safe and sound.”

  Roger walked back very slowly, not looking at what was going on in the bars and brothels where he could hear voices, singing, strumming guitars. He thought about those children torn away from their tribes, separated from their families, packed into the bilge of a launch, brought to Iquitos, sold for twenty or thirty soles to a family where they would spend their lives sweeping, scrubbing, cooking, cleaning toilets, washing dirty clothes, insulted, hit, and at times raped by their owner or the sons of the owner. The same old story. The never-ending story.

  IX

  When the cell door opened and he saw in the doorway the bulky shape of the sheriff, Roger thought he had a visitor—Gee or Alice, perhaps—but the jailer, instead of indicating that he should get to his feet and follow him to the visitors’ room, stood looking at him in a strange way, not saying anything. They turned down the petition, Roger thought. He remained lying on his cot, certain that if he stood the trembling in his legs would make him collapse.

  “You still want a shower?” the cold, slow voice of the sheriff asked.

  My last wish, he thought. After the wash, the hangman.

  “This goes against the rules,” the sheriff murmured with some emotion. “But today’s the first anniversary of the death of my son in France. I want to offer an act of compassion to his memory.”

  “I thank you,” said Roger, standing. What had gotten into the sheriff? When had he ever shown him any kindnesses?

  It seemed as if the blood in his veins, frozen when he saw the jailer appear at the door of his cell, began to circulate through his body again. He went out to the long, soot-stained hall and followed the fat jailer to the bathroom, a dark area that had a row of chipped toilets along one wall, a line of showers along the opposite wall, and some unpainted concrete receptacles with rusted spouts that poured out the water. The sheriff remained standing at the entrance while Roger undressed, hung his blue uniform and convict’s cap on a nail in the wall, and went into the shower. The stream of water made him shiver from head to toe and, at the same time, produced a feeling of joy and gratitude. He closed his eyes, and, before soaping himself with the cake he had taken from one of the rubber boxes hanging on the wall, rubbed his arms and legs, feeling the cold water slide along his body. He was happy and exalted. With the stream of water not only did the dirt that had accumulated on his body for so many days disappear, but preoccupations, distress, and remorse as well. He soaped and rinsed himself for a long while until the sheriff indicated from a distance, with a clap of his hands, that he should hurry. Roger dried with the same clothing he put on. He did not have a comb and smoothed his hair with his hands.

  “You have no idea how grateful I am for this wash, Sheriff,” he said as they returned to his cell. “It has given me back life and health.”

  The jailer replied with an unintelligible murmur.

  When he lay down on his cot again, Roger attempted to go back to reading Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ, but he couldn’t concentrate and put the book back on the floor.

  He thought about Captain Robert Monteith, his assistant and friend for the last six months he spent in Germany. A magnificent man! Loyal, efficient, and heroic. His companion in travel and travails on the U-19 German submarine that brought them, along with Sergeant Daniel Julian Bailey, alias Julian Beverly, to the coast of Kerry, where the three almost drowned because they didn’t know how to row. Didn’t know how to row! That’s how things were: foolish little things could become mixed with great events and wreck them. He recalled the gray, rainy dawn, rough sea, and heavy mist on Good Friday, April 21, 1916, and the three of them in the unsteady boat with three oars where the German submarine had left them before disappearing into the fog. “Good luck,” Captain Raimund Weisbach shouted by way of farewell. Again he had the awful feeling of impotence, trying to control the boat pitching in the violent waves, and the inability of three makeshift rowers to head it toward the coast whose location none of them knew. The boat spun around, went up and down, leaped, traced circles with a variable radius, and since none of the three managed to maneuver past them, the waves, striking the sides of the boat, made it shudder so much they thought that at any moment it might capsize. And in fact, it did capsize. For a few minutes the three men were on the point of drowning. They splashed and swallowed salt water until they succeeded in righting the boat and, helping one another, climbed back in. Roger recalled the valiant Monteith, his hand infected by the accident he’d had in Germany, in the port of Heligoland, trying to learn to drive a motor launch. They moored there to change submarines because the U-2, on which they sailed from Wilhelmshaven, had a flaw. The wound had tormented him during the entire week’s voyage between Heligoland and Tralee Bay. Roger, who made the crossing suffering atrocious seasickness and vomiting, hardly eating or getting off his narrow bunk, recalled Monteith’s stoic patience as his wound swelled. The anti-inflammatories the German sailors on the U-19 gave him did no good. His hand continued suppurating and Captain Weisbach, commander of the U-19, predicted that if it wasn’t taken care of as
soon as they landed, the wound would develop gangrene.

  The last time he saw Captain Robert Monteith was in the ruins of McKenna’s Fort at dawn on April 21, when his two companions decided Roger should remain hidden there while they went to ask the Tralee Volunteers for help. They decided this because he was the one who ran the greatest risk of being recognized by the soldiers—the most sought-after prize for the watchdogs of the Empire—and because he could not endure any more. Sick and weakened, he had fallen down twice, exhausted, and the second time was unconscious for several minutes. After shaking his hand, his friends left him in the ruins of Fort McKenna with a revolver and a small bag of clothes. Roger recalled how, when he saw the larks flying around him and heard their song and discovered he was surrounded by wild violets growing out of the sandy ground of Tralee Bay, he thought, I have reached Ireland at last. His eyes filled with tears. Captain Monteith, when he left, had given him a military salute. Small, strong, agile, untiring, an Irish patriot to the marrow of his bones. Roger didn’t hear a single complaint from him or detect the slightest symptom of weakness in him during the six months they had lived together in Germany, in spite of the failures he’d had in Limburg Camp because of the resistance—when it wasn’t open hostility—of the prisoners to enrolling in the Irish Brigade Roger wanted to form to fight alongside Germany (“but not under their command”) for the independence of Ireland.

  Monteith was soaked from head to foot, his swollen, bleeding hand badly wrapped in a rag that was coming loose, and with an expression of great fatigue. Walking with energetic strides in the direction of Tralee, he and Sergeant Bailey, who was limping, were lost in the fog. Had Robert Monteith arrived without being captured by the officers of the Royal Irish Constabulary? Had he managed to make contact in Tralee with people from the IRB (the Irish Republican Brotherhood) or the Volunteers? He never learned how and where Bailey was captured. His name was never mentioned in the long interrogations to which Roger was subjected, first in the Admiralty by the heads of the British intelligence services, and then by Scotland Yard. The sudden appearance of Daniel Bailey as a witness for the public prosecutor at his trial for treason dismayed Roger. In his statement, filled with lies, Monteith was not named once. Was he still free or had they killed him? Roger prayed the captain was safe and sound now, hiding in some corner of Ireland. Or had he taken part in the Easter Rising and perished there like so many anonymous Irish fighting in an adventure as heroic as it was rash? This was most likely. That he had been in the Dublin Post Office, firing, beside Tom Clarke whom he so admired, until an enemy bullet put an end to his exemplary life.