The Dream of the Celt: A Novel

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  While the other members of the commission had to sleep two in a room, Roger had the privilege of a room to himself. It was small, with a hammock instead of a bed and a piece of furniture that could be both trunk and desk. On a small table were a basin, a pitcher of water, and a mirror. They explained to him that on the first floor, beside the entrance, were a septic tank and a shower. As soon as he had settled in and put away his things, before he sat down to have lunch, Roger told Juan Tizón he wanted to interview all the Barbadians in La Chorrera, beginning that afternoon.

  By then the rank, penetrating, oily stench, similar to the smell of rotting plants and leaves, was in his nostrils. It saturated every corner of La Chorrera and would accompany him morning, noon, and night for the three months of his stay in Putumayo, a smell he never became accustomed to, that made him vomit and retch, a pestilence that seemed to come from the air, the earth, objects, and human beings, and from then on would become for Roger the symbol of the evil and suffering that greed for the rubber exuded by the trees in Amazonia had exacerbated to dizzying extremes. “It’s curious,” he remarked to Tizón on the day of his arrival. “In the Congo I was often on rubber plantations and rubber depositories. But I don’t recall Congolese latex giving off so strong and unpleasant an odor.” “They’re different varieties,” Tizón explained. “This smells more and is also stronger than African rubber. They sprinkle talc on the bales going to Europe to reduce the stink.”

  The number of Barbadians in the entire region of Putumayo was 196, but there were only six in La Chorrera. Two refused from the outset to talk to Roger, even though he, with the intervention of Bishop, assured them their testimony would be private and in no case would they be indicted for what they told him, and that he personally would take care of returning them to Barbados if they did not wish to continue working for Arana’s company.

  The four who agreed to give testimony had been in Putumayo close to seven years and had served the Peruvian Amazon Company at different stations as overseers, a position halfway between the chiefs and the “boys,” or “rationals.” The first one he spoke to, Donal Francis, a tall, strong black who limped and had a clouded eye, was so nervous and distrustful that Roger immediately assumed he wouldn’t obtain much from him. He responded in monosyllables and denied every accusation. According to him, in La Chorrera chiefs, employees, and “even the savages” got along very well. There were never problems, much less violence. He had been carefully coached regarding what he had to say and do before the commission.

  Roger perspired profusely. He kept sipping water. Would the other interviews with Barbadians in Putumayo be as useless as this one? They weren’t. Philip Bertie Lawrence, Seaford Greenwich, and Stanley Sealy, especially the third, after overcoming an initial caution and receiving Roger’s promise, in the name of the British government, that they would be repatriated to Barbados, began to talk, to tell everything and incriminate themselves vehemently, at times frantically, as if impatient to unburden their conscience. Stanley Sealy, a small mulatto, illustrated his testimony with so many details and examples that, in spite of his long experience of human atrocities, Roger at certain moments became dizzy and felt an anguish that barely allowed him to breathe. When the Barbadian finished speaking, night had fallen. The hum of nocturnal insects seemed thunderous, as if thousands were flying around them. They were sitting on a wooden bench on the terrace that led to Roger’s bedroom. Between the two of them they had smoked a pack of cigarettes. In the growing darkness, Roger could no longer see Sealy’s features, only the outline of his head and muscular arms. He had been in La Chorrera a short time. He had worked for two years at the Abisinia station, the right arm of the chiefs Abelardo Agüero and Augusto Jiménez, and before that at Matanzas, with Armando Normand. They both were silent. Roger felt mosquitoes biting his face, neck, and arms but did not have the energy to drive them away.

  Suddenly he realized that Sealy was crying. He had brought his hands to his face and sobbed slowly, with sighs that filled his chest. Roger saw the gleam of tears in his eyes.

  “Do you believe in God?” he asked. “Are you a religious person?”

  “I was as a boy, I think,” the mulatto moaned, his voice breaking. “My godmother would take me to church on Sunday, back in St. Patrick, the village where I was born. Now, I don’t know.”

  “I ask because it probably will help you to talk to God. I’m not saying to pray, just to talk. Try it. As frankly as you’ve talked to me. Tell Him what you’re feeling, why you’re crying. In any case, He can help you more than I can. I don’t know how. I feel as upset as you do.”

  Like Lawrence and Greenwich, Sealy was prepared to repeat his testimony to the members of the commission and even to Señor Tizón, as long as he could stay close to Roger and travel with him to Iquitos and then to Barbados.

  Roger went into his room, lit the oil lamps, removed his shirt, and washed his chest, underarms, and face with water from the basin. He would have liked to take a shower but would have had to go downstairs and do it outdoors, and he knew his body would be devoured by the mosquitoes that multiplied in numbers and ferocity at night.

  He went down to the ground floor for supper in a dining room lit by oil lamps. Juan Tizón and his travel companions were drinking lukewarm, watery whiskey. They stood and talked, while three or four half-naked indigenous servants carried in fried and baked fish, boiled yucca, sweet potatoes, and corn flour with which they powdered food just as the Brazilians did with farinha. Others drove flies away with straw fans.

  “How did things go with the Barbadians?” Tizón asked, handing him a glass of whiskey.

  “Better than I expected, Señor Tizón. I was afraid they’d be reluctant to talk. But just the opposite. Three of them spoke with total frankness.”

  “I hope you share with me the complaints you receive,” said Tizón, half joking, half serious. “The company wants to correct what it lacks and improve. That has always been Señor Arana’s policy. Well, I imagine you must be hungry. To the table, gentlemen!”

  They sat and began to help themselves from the various serving dishes. The members of the commission had spent the afternoon looking over the installations in La Chorrera and, with Bishop’s help, conversing with the employees in administration and the storehouses. They all seemed tired and not very interested in talking. Could their experiences this first day have been as depressing as his?

  Tizón offered them wine but, since he had warned them that with transportation and the climate, French wine arrived here disturbed and at times sour, everyone preferred to continue with whiskey.

  Halfway through the meal, Roger remarked, glancing at the Indians serving them:

  “I’ve seen that many native men and women in La Chorrera have scars on their backs, buttocks, and thighs. That girl, for example. How many lashes do they receive as a rule when they’re whipped?”

  A general silence fell in which the sputtering of the oil lamps and the hum of the insects increased. Everyone looked at Juan Tizón very seriously.

  “Most of the time they make those scars themselves,” he stated, uncomfortably. “In their tribes they have fairly barbaric initiation rites, you know, like making holes in their faces, lips, ears, noses, to insert rings, teeth, and all kinds of pendants. I don’t deny some might have been made by overseers who did not respect the company’s orders. Our regulations categorically prohibit physical punishment.”

  “That wasn’t the intention of my question, Señor Tizón,” Roger apologized. “I meant that even though so many scars are visible, I haven’t seen any Indians with the company’s brand on their bodies.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Tizón replied, lowering his fork.

  “The Barbadians explained to me that many indigenous people are branded with the company initials: CA, that is, Casa Arana. Like cows, horses, and pigs. So they won’t escape or be taken by Colombian rubber planters. They themselves had branded many of them. Sometimes with fire, and sometimes with a knife. But
I still haven’t seen anyone with the brand. What happened to them, Señor?”

  Tizón suddenly lost his composure and elegant manners. He had turned red and trembled with indignation.

  “I will not allow you to speak to me in that tone,” he exclaimed, mixing English and Spanish. “I’m here to facilitate your work, not to suffer your ironic remarks.”

  Roger agreed, not changing expression.

  “I beg your pardon, I didn’t mean to offend you,” he said calmly. “It’s just that even though I was witness to unspeakable cruelties in the Congo, I haven’t yet seen the branding of human beings with fire or a knife. I’m sure you’re not responsible for this atrocity.”

  “Of course I’m not responsible for any atrocity!” Tizón raised his voice again, gesticulating. He rolled his eyes in their sockets, beside himself. “If atrocities are committed, it’s not the fault of the company. Don’t you see what kind of place this is, Señor Casement? Here there is no authority, no police, no judges, nothing. Those who work here, as chiefs, overseers, assistants, are not educated people but, in many cases, illiterate adventurers, rough men hardened by the jungle. At times they commit abuses that would horrify a civilized man. I know that very well. We do what we can, believe me. Señor Arana agrees with you. Everyone who has committed outrages will be dismissed. I’m not an accomplice to any injustice, Señor Casement. I have a respected name, a family that means something in this country, I’m a Catholic who practices his religion.”

  Roger thought Tizón probably believed what he was saying. A good man, who in Iquitos, Manaus, Lima, or London would not know or want to know what went on here. He probably cursed the hour it occurred to Julio C. Arana to send him to this godforsaken corner of the world to carry out a thankless assignment and suffer a thousand discomforts and difficulties.

  “We ought to work together, collaborate,” Tizón repeated, somewhat calmer, moving his hands a great deal. “What is going badly will be corrected. The employees who have committed atrocities will be sanctioned. I give you my word of honor! All I ask is that you see me as a friend, someone who’s on your side.”

  Shortly afterward, Tizón said he wasn’t feeling very well and preferred to retire. He said good night and left.

  Only the members of the commission remained at the table.

  “Branded like animals?” murmured Walter Folk, with a skeptical air. “Can that be true?”

  “Three of the four Barbadians I questioned today assured me of that,” Roger asserted. “Stanley Sealy says he did it himself, at the Abisinia station, on the orders of his chief, Abelardo Agüero. But I don’t think branding is the worst thing. I heard even more terrible things this afternoon.”

  They continued talking, not eating a mouthful, until they had finished the two bottles of whiskey on the table. The commissioners were affected deeply by the scars on the backs of the Indians and by the pillory or rack for torture they had discovered in one of the La Chorrera warehouses where rubber was stored. With Señor Tizón present, who experienced a very difficult time, Bishop explained how that framework of wood and ropes worked, how the Indian was placed in it and forced into a squatting position, unable to move his arms or legs. He was tortured by adjustments of the wooden bars or by being suspended in midair. Bishop explained that the pillory was always in the center of the clearing in every station. They asked one of the “rationals” at the warehouse when the device had been brought inside. The boy said only on the eve of their arrival.

  They decided the commission would listen the next day to Philip Bertie Lawrence, Seaford Greenwich, and Stanley Sealy. Seymour Bell suggested that Juan Tizón be present. There were divergent opinions, especially from Walter Folk, who feared that before the high-level official, the Barbadians would retract what they had said.

  That night Roger did not close his eyes. He made notes on his conversations with the Barbadians until the lamp went out because there was no more oil. He lay down on his hammock and remained awake, dozing for a moment and then waking with aching bones and muscles, unable to shake off the uneasiness that afflicted him.

  And the Peruvian Amazon Company was a British firm! On its board of directors were individuals highly respected in the world of business and in the City, such as Sir John Lister-Kaye, the Baron de Sousa-Deiro, John Russell Gubbins, and Henry M. Read. What would those partners of Julio C. Arana say when they read in the report he would present to the government that the enterprise they had legitimized with their name and money practiced slavery, obtaining harvesters of rubber and servants by means of correrías by armed thugs who captured indigenous men, women, and children and took them to the rubber plantations, where they were exploited iniquitously, hanged from the pillory, branded with fire and knife, and whipped until they bled to death if they didn’t bring in the minimum quota of thirty kilos of rubber every three months. Roger had been in the offices of the Peruvian Amazon Company in Salisbury House, E.C., in the financial center of London. A spectacular place, with Gainsborough landscapes on the walls, uniformed secretaries, carpeted offices, leather sofas for visitors, and a multitude of clerks in striped trousers, black frock coats, and shirts with stiff white collars and cravats, keeping accounts, sending and receiving telegrams, selling and collecting remittances for powdered, odoriferous rubber in all the industrial cities of Europe. And, at the other end of the world, in Putumayo, Huitotos, Ocaimas, Muinanes, Nonuyas, Andoques, Rezígaros, and Boras were gradually being exterminated without anyone moving a finger to change that state of affairs.

  “Why haven’t these indigenous people attempted to rebel?” the botanist Walter Folk had asked during supper. And he added: “It’s true they don’t have firearms. But there are so many of them, they could rebel, and though some would die, they would defeat their tormenters by dint of numbers.” Roger replied that it wasn’t so simple. They didn’t rebel for the same reasons the Congolese hadn’t in Africa. Revolt was an exceptional occurrence, localized and sporadic suicidal acts by an individual or a small group. Because when the system of exploitation was so extreme, it destroyed spirits even before bodies. The violence that victimized them annihilated the will to resist, the instinct to survive, and transformed the indigenous people into automatons paralyzed by confusion and terror. Many did not understand what was happening to them as a consequence of the evil in concrete, specific men, but as a mythic cataclysm, a curse of the gods, a divine punishment from which there was no escape.

  Though here, in Putumayo, Roger discovered in the documents he consulted concerning Amazonia that a few years earlier there had been an attempt at rebellion at the Abisinia station, where the Boras were. It was a subject no one wanted to talk about. All the Barbadians had avoided it. One night, a young Bora village chief, named Katenere, supported by a small group from his tribe, stole the rifles of the chiefs and “rationals,” killed Bartolomé Zumaeta (a relative of Pablo Zumaeta), who had raped Katenere’s wife when he was drunk, and disappeared into the jungle. The company put a price on his head. Several expeditions went out looking for him. For almost two years they couldn’t lay a hand on him. Finally, a party of hunters, led by an Indian informant, surrounded the hut where Katenere was hiding with his wife. The chief managed to escape, but his wife was captured. The manager, Vásquez, raped her himself, in public, and put her in the pillory without water or food. He kept her like that for several days. From time to time, he had her flogged. Finally, one night, the chief appeared. No doubt he had seen the torture of his wife from the undergrowth. He crossed the clearing, threw down the carbine he was carrying, and went to kneel in a submissive attitude beside the pillory where his wife was dying or already dead. Vásquez shouted at the “rationals” not to shoot him. He himself took out Katenere’s eyes with a wire. Then he had him burned alive, along with his wife, before the natives from the surrounding area who had been placed in a circle. Was this the way things had happened? The story had a melodramatic ending that Roger thought had probably been altered to bring it closer to the appetite
for ferocity so prevalent in these hot places. But at least it had the symbol and the example: a native had rebelled, punished a torturer, and died a hero.

  At the first light of dawn, he left the house where he was staying and went down the slope to the river. He swam naked after finding a small pool where he could resist the current. The cold water had the effect of a massage. When he dressed he felt refreshed and strengthened. On his return to La Chorrera he turned off to visit the sector where the Huitotos’ huts were located. The huts, scattered among plantings of yucca, corn, and plantains, were round, with partitions of tucuma wood held down with lianas and protected by roofs of woven yarina leaves that reached down to the ground. He saw skeletal women carrying infants—none of them responded to the gestures of greeting he made to them—but no men. When he returned to his cabin, an indigenous woman was putting the clothing he had given her to wash on the day of his arrival in his bedroom. He asked how much he owed her but the woman—young, with green and blue stripes on her face—looked at him, not understanding. He had Frederick Bishop ask her how much he owed. Bishop asked in Huitoto, but the woman seemed not to understand.