The Dream of the Celt: A Novel

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  And yet that night, as he and the consul were drinking their usual glass of port in Stirs’s small living room, listening to the clatter of rain on the tin roof and the spouts of water beating on the windows and the terrace railing, Roger abandoned his prudence.

  “What opinion do you have of Father Ricardo Urrutia, Stirs?”

  “The superior of the Augustinians? I don’t know him very well. In general, my opinion is good. You’ve seen a great deal of him recently, haven’t you?”

  Did the consul guess they were entering shaky ground? In his small bulging eyes there was an uneasy gleam. His bald head shone in the light of the oil lamp sputtering on the little table in the middle of the room.

  “Well, Father Urrutia has been here barely a year and hasn’t left Iquitos,” said Roger. “So he doesn’t know a great deal about what occurs on the rubber plantations in Putumayo. On the other hand, he’s spoken to me about another human drama in the city.”

  The consul savored a mouthful of port. He began to fan himself again and Roger thought his round face had reddened slightly. Outside, the storm roared with long, muffled claps of thunder, and at times a flash of lightning lit the darkness of the forest for an instant.

  “The one about the little girls and boys stolen from the tribes,” Roger continued. “Brought here and sold to families for twenty or thirty soles.”

  Stirs remained silent, observing him. He was fanning himself furiously now.

  “According to Father Urrutia, almost all the servants in Iquitos were stolen and sold,” Roger added, looking fixedly into the consul’s eyes. “Is that the case?”

  Stirs heaved a prolonged sigh and moved in his rocking chair, not hiding an expression of annoyance. His face seemed to say: You don’t know how happy I am that you’re leaving tomorrow for Putumayo. I really hope we don’t see each other again, Mr. Casement.

  “Didn’t those things occur in the Congo?” he replied evasively.

  “Yes, they did occur, though not in the general way they do here. Forgive my impertinence. The four servants you have, did you hire them or buy them?”

  “I inherited them,” the British consul said drily. “They came with the house when my predecessor, Consul Cazes, left for England. You can’t say I hired them because that’s not the custom here in Iquitos. The four of them are illiterate and wouldn’t know how to read or sign a contract. They sleep and eat in my house, I clothe them and tip them as well, something that isn’t frequent in this territory, I assure you. They are free to leave whenever they like. Speak to them and ask them if they’d like to find work elsewhere. You’ll see their reaction, Mr. Casement.”

  Roger nodded and sipped at his glass of port.

  “I didn’t mean to offend you,” he apologized. “I’m trying to understand the country I’m in, the values and customs of Iquitos. I have no desire for you to look on me as an inquisitor.”

  Now the consul’s expression was hostile. He moved the fan slowly and in his gaze was apprehension as well as hatred.

  “Not as an inquisitor but as righteous,” he corrected him, making another grimace of dislike. “Or, if you prefer, a hero. I’ve already told you, I don’t like heroes. Don’t take my frankness in the wrong way. As for the rest, don’t have any hopes. You’re not going to change what happens here, Mr. Casement. And Father Urrutia won’t either. In a certain sense, for these children, what happens to them is a stroke of luck. Being servants, I mean. It would be a thousand times worse if they grew up in the tribes, eating their own lice, dying of fevers or some other epidemic before they’re ten, or working like animals on the rubber plantations. They live better here. I know my pragmatism will displease you.”

  Roger said nothing. He knew now what he wanted to know. And also that from now on the British consul in Iquitos would probably be another enemy he ought to watch out for.

  “I’ve come here to serve my country on a consular assignment,” Stirs added, looking at the fiber mat on the floor. “I carry it out with precision, I assure you. I know the British citizens, who don’t number many, and I defend and serve them in every way necessary. I do all I can to encourage trade between Amazonia and the British Empire. I keep my government informed regarding commercial activity, ships that come and go, any border incidents. Combating slavery or the abuses committed by the mestizos and whites of Peru against the Amazonian Indians is not one of my obligations.”

  “I’m sorry to have offended you, Stirs. Let’s not speak of the matter again.”

  Roger stood, said good night to the master of the house, and retired to his room. The storm had subsided but it was still raining. The terrace next to the bedroom was soaked. There was a dense odor of plants and wet earth. The night was dark and the sound of insects intense, as if they were not only in the forest but inside the room. With the rain another downpour had fallen: the black beetles called vinchucas. Tomorrow their corpses would carpet the terrace, and if you stepped on them, they would crack like nuts and stain the floor with dark blood. He undressed, put on his pajamas, and got into bed under the mosquito net.

  He had been imprudent, of course. Offending the consul, a poor man, perhaps a good man, who was merely waiting to reach his retirement without becoming involved in problems, return to England, and bury himself in tending the garden of the cottage in Surrey he probably had been paying for gradually with his savings. That’s what he should have done, and then he would have fewer ailments in his body and less anguish in his soul.

  He recalled his violent argument on the Huayna, the ship on which he traveled from Tabatinga, the border between Peru and Brazil, to Iquitos, with the rubber planter Victor Israel, a Maltese Jew, who had lived in Amazonia for many years and with whom he’d had long and very diverting conversations on the terrace of the boat. Victor Israel dressed in an eccentric manner, always seemed to be in disguise, spoke impeccable English, and while they played poker recounted with great charm his adventurous life, which seemed to have come from a picaresque novel, drinking glasses of cognac that the planter loved. He had the awful habit of shooting with a huge old-fashioned pistol at the pink herons that flew over the boat, but, happily, rarely hit one. Until, one fine day, Roger did not remember why, Victor Israel defended Julio C. Arana. The man was taking Amazonia out of savagery and integrating it into the modern world. He defended the correrías, thanks to which, he said, there were still laborers to harvest the rubber. Because the great problem in the jungle was a lack of workers to collect the precious substance the Maker had wanted to present as a gift to the region and a blessing to the Peruvians. This “manna from heaven” was being squandered because of the laziness and stupidity of the savages who refused to work as harvesters of latex and obliged the planters to go to the tribes and take them by force. Which meant a great loss of time and money for the enterprises.

  “Well, that’s one way of looking at things,” Roger interrupted tersely. “There’s also another way.”

  Victor Israel was a long, very thin man with white streaks in his mane of straight hair that reached to his shoulders. He had several days’ growth of beard on his large bony face and dark, triangular, somewhat Mephistophelian eyes that fixed on Roger disconcertedly. He wore a red vest and, over that, suspenders as well as a brightly colored scarf.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m referring to the point of view of the people you call savages,” Roger explained in a lighthearted tone, as if he were talking about the weather or the mosquitoes. “Put yourself in their place for a moment. There they are, in their villages, where they’ve lived for years, or centuries. One day some white or mestizo gentlemen come with rifles and revolvers and demand that they abandon their families, their plantings, their houses, to go and harvest rubber dozens or hundreds of miles away, for the benefit of strangers whose only reason is the force at their disposal. Would you go willingly to harvest your famous latex, Don Victor?”

  “I’m not a savage who lives naked, worships the yacumama, and drowns his children if they’r
e born with a harelip,” replied the planter with a sardonic guffaw that accentuated his irritation. “Do you put the cannibals of Amazonia on the same plane as the pioneers, entrepreneurs, and merchants who work in heroic conditions and risk our lives to transform these forests into a civilized land?”

  “Perhaps you and I have different concepts of what civilization is, my friend,” said Roger, always in that comradely tone that seemed to irritate Victor Israel beyond measure.

  At the same poker table were Walter Folk and Henry Fielgald, while the other members of the commission had gone to lie in their hammocks and rest. It was a calm, warm night, and a full moon illuminated the water of the Amazon with silvery brilliance.

  “I’d like to know what your idea of civilization is,” said Victor Israel. His eyes and voice were throwing off sparks. His irritation was so great that Roger wondered if the planter would not suddenly pull out the archaeological revolver he carried in his holster and shoot him.

  “It could be summed up by saying that it’s an idea of a society where private property and individual liberty are respected,” he explained very calmly, all his senses alert in case Victor Israel meant to attack him. “For example, British laws prohibit colonists from occupying indigenous lands in the colonies. And they also prohibit, under pain of imprisonment, employing force against natives who refuse to work in the mines or camps. You don’t believe that’s civilization, do you? Or am I wrong?”

  Victor Israel’s thin chest rose and fell, agitating the strange blouse with loose sleeves he wore buttoned to the neck, and the red vest. He had both thumbs caught in his suspenders and his narrow, triangular eyes were as red as if they were bleeding. His open mouth displayed a row of uneven teeth stained with nicotine.

  “According to that criterion,” he stated, mocking and offensive, “Peruvians would have to allow Amazonia to remain in the Stone Age for the rest of eternity, in order not to offend the pagans or occupy lands they don’t know what to do with because they’re lazy and don’t want to work. Waste a resource that could raise the standard of living for Peruvians and make Peru a modern country. Is that what the British Crown proposes for this country, Señor Casement?”

  “Amazonia is a great emporium of resources, no doubt,” Roger agreed, without becoming agitated. “Nothing more just than that Peru should take advantage of it. But not by abusing the natives, or hunting them down like animals, or forcing them to work as slaves. Rather, by incorporating them into civilization by means of schools, hospitals, and churches.”

  Victor Israel burst into laughter, shaking like a puppet on springs.

  “What a world you live in, Consul!” he exclaimed, raising his hands with their long, skeletal fingers in a theatrical way. “It’s obvious you’ve never seen a cannibal in your life. Do you know how many Christians have been eaten here by the natives? How many whites and cholos they’ve killed with their spears and poisoned darts? How many have had their heads shrunk, the way the Shapras do? Let’s talk when you have a little more experience of barbarism.”

  “I lived close to twenty years in Africa and know something about those things, Señor Israel,” Roger assured him. “By the way, I met a good number of whites there who thought the way you do.”

  To keep the disagreement from becoming even more bitter, Walter Folk and Henry Fielgald turned the conversation to less thorny subjects. Tonight, in his wakefulness, after ten days in Iquitos interviewing all kinds of people, of writing down dozens of opinions gathered here and there from authorities, judges, military men, restaurant owners, fishermen, pimps, vagrants, prostitutes and waiters in brothels and bars, Roger told himself that the immense majority of the whites and mestizos in Iquitos, Peruvians and foreigners, thought as Victor Israel did. For them the Amazonian indigenous people were not, strictly speaking, human beings, but an inferior, contemptible form of existence, closer to animals than civilized people. That’s why it was legitimate to exploit them, whip them, abduct them, take them to the rubber plantations or, if they resisted, kill them like rabid dogs. It was so generalized a view of the Indian that, as Father Ricardo Urrutia said, no one was shocked that the domestic servants in Iquitos were girls and boys stolen and sold to Loretan families for the equivalent of one or two pounds sterling. Anguish obliged him to open his mouth and breathe deeply until air reached his lungs. If he had seen and learned these things in this city, what wouldn’t he see in Putumayo?

  The members of the commission left Iquitos on September 14, 1910, mid-morning. Roger had hired Frederick Bishop, one of the Barbadians he interviewed, as an interpreter. Bishop spoke Spanish and assured him he could understand and make himself understood in the two most common indigenous languages spoken on the rubber plantations: Bora and Huitoto. The Liberal, the largest of the fleet of fifteen ships belonging to the Peruvian Amazon Company, was well maintained. It had small cabins, each accommodating two travelers. There were hammocks in the prow and stern for those who preferred to sleep outdoors. Bishop was afraid to go back to Putumayo and asked Roger for a written guarantee that the commission would protect him during the journey and afterward the British government would repatriate him to Barbados.

  The passage from Iquitos to La Chorrera, capital of the enormous territory between the Napo and Caquetá Rivers where Julio C. Arana’s Peruvian Amazon Company had its operations, lasted for eight days of heat, clouds of mosquitoes, boredom, and the monotony of the landscape and the noises. The ship sailed down the Amazon, whose width, once they had left Iquitos, grew until its banks became invisible, crossed the Brazilian border in Tabatinga, continued down the Yavarí, and then reentered Peru along the Igara Paraná. On this stretch of river the banks were closer and at times the vines and branches of extremely tall trees hung over the deck. They heard and saw flocks of parrots zigzagging and screeching in the trees, or solemn pink herons taking the sun on an islet and balancing on one leg, turtle shells whose brown color stood out in somewhat paler water, and, at times, the bristling back of an alligator dozing in the mud of the bank and shot at with rifles or revolvers from the boat.

  Roger spent a good part of the crossing arranging his notes and notebooks from Iquitos and outlining a work plan for the months he would spend in the territories of Julio C. Arana. According to the Foreign Office’s instructions, he was to interview only the Barbadians who worked at the stations, because they were British citizens, leaving the employees from Peru and other nations alone in order not to wound the sensitivities of the Peruvian government. But he didn’t intend to respect those limits. His investigation would be left one-eyed, maimed, and crippled if he didn’t also obtain information from the station chiefs, their “boys” or “rationals”—Hispanicized Indians responsible for guarding the works and dispensing punishments—and from the indigenous people themselves. Only in this way would he have a complete vision of how Arana’s company violated laws and ethics in its relations with the natives.

  In Iquitos, Pablo Zumaeta informed the members of the commission that on Arana’s instructions, the company had sent ahead to Putumayo one of its principal officers, Señor Juan Tizón, to receive them and facilitate their travel from place to place and their work. The commissioners supposed the real reason for Tizón’s trip to Putumayo was to hide evidence of abuses and present a cosmetic image of reality.

  They arrived in La Chorrera, or the Rapids, at midday on September 22, 1910. The name of the place was due to the torrents and waterfalls caused by an abrupt narrowing of the riverbed, a tumultuous, magnificent spectacle of foam, noise, wet rocks, and whirlpools that broke the monotonous flow of the Igara Paraná, the tributary on whose banks the general headquarters of the Peruvian Amazon Company were located. To move from the dock to the offices and residences of La Chorrera, it was necessary to climb a steep slope of mud and brambles. The travelers’ boots sank into the mud and sometimes, in order not to fall, they had to lean on the Indian porters carrying the luggage. As he greeted those who had come out to receive them, Roger, with a small shudder, confi
rmed that one out of every three or four of the half-naked Indians carrying their baggage or looking at them curiously from the bank, smacking their arms with open hands to chase the mosquitoes, had on their backs, buttocks, and thighs scars that could have come only from floggings. The Congo, yes, the Congo was everywhere.

  Juan Tizón was a tall man, dressed in white, very courteous with aristocratic manners, who spoke enough English to be understood. He must have been close to fifty, and because of his carefully shaved face, small trimmed mustache, fine hands and clothing, it was obvious from miles away that he was not in his element here in the middle of the jungle, but was a man of offices, salons, the city. He welcomed them in English and in Spanish and introduced his companion, whose mere name produced repugnance in Roger: Víctor Macedo, chief of La Chorrera. He, at least, hadn’t fled. The articles of Saldaña Roca and those by Hardenburg in the magazine Truth in London singled him out as one of the cruelest of Arana’s lieutenants in Putumayo.

  As they climbed the slope, he observed Macedo. He was a man of indeterminate age, husky, on the short side, a light-skinned cholo but with the somewhat Asian features of an Indian, a flat nose, a mouth with very full lips that were always open, revealing two or three gold teeth, the hard expression of someone weathered by the outdoors. Unlike the newcomers, he climbed the steep hill easily. He had a rather oblique gaze, as if he looked sideways to avoid the glare of the sun or because he was afraid to face people. Tizón was unarmed, but Víctor Macedo wore a revolver in his belt.

  In a very large clearing, there were wooden buildings on pilings—thick tree trunks or cement columns—with verandas on the second floor, the larger ones with corrugated roofs, the smaller ones with roofs of braided palm leaves. Tizón was talking as he pointed—“There are the offices … Those are rubber storerooms … All of you will stay in this house”—but Roger barely heard him. He was observing the groups of partly or completely naked Indians who looked at them indifferently or avoided looking at them at all: men, women, and sickly children, some with paint on their faces and chests, their legs as skinny as reeds, pale yellowish skin, and sometimes incisions and pendants in their lips and ears that reminded him of the African natives. But there were no blacks here. The few mulatto and dark-skinned men he could see wore trousers and boots and undoubtedly were part of the contingent from Barbados. He counted four. He recognized the “boys,” or “rationals,” immediately, for though they were Indian and barefoot they had cut their hair and combed it like “Christians,” wore trousers and shirts, and had clubs and whips hanging from their belts.