The Dream of the Celt: A Novel

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  Roger wanted to remain in Putumayo so his report would be as complete as possible, but that was not the only reason. Another was his curiosity to meet the individual who, according to every testimony, was the paradigm of cruelty in this world: Armando Normand, the chief of Matanzas.

  Since Iquitos he had heard anecdotes, comments, and allusions to this name, always associated with such wickedness and ignominy that he had obsessed about him to the point of having nightmares, from which he would wake bathed in sweat, his heart racing. He was certain many things he had heard from the Barbadians about Normand were exaggerations inflamed by the heated imagination so frequent in people in these areas. But even so, the fact that he had been able to generate this kind of mythology indicated he was someone who, though it seemed impossible, surpassed in savagery villains like Abelardo Agüero, Alfredo Montt, Fidel Velarde, Elías Martinengui, and others of their kind.

  No one knew his nationality with any certainty—it was said he was Peruvian, Bolivian, or British—but everyone agreed he was not yet thirty and had studied in England. Juan Tizón had heard he had been certified as an accountant in an institute in London.

  Apparently he was short, thin, and very ugly. According to the Barbadian Joshua Dyall, from his seemingly insignificant person radiated a “malignant force” that made anyone who approached him tremble, and his gaze, penetrating and icy, was like a snake’s. Dyall asserted that not only the Indians but also the “boys” and even the overseers felt insecure near him, because at any moment Armando Normand could order or carry out an act of chilling ferocity with no change in his contemptuous indifference toward everything around him. Dyall confessed to Roger and the commission that one day at the Matanzas station, Normand ordered him to kill five Andoques as punishment for not having met their rubber quotas. Dyall shot the first two, but the manager ordered that for the next two he should first crush their testicles with a stone for grinding yucca and then finish them off by garroting them. He had him strangle the last one with his bare hands. During the entire operation Normand sat on a tree trunk, smoking and watching, with no change in the indolent expression on his reddish face.

  Seaford Greenwich, who had worked for some months with Armando Normand at Matanzas, recounted that the talk among the “rationals” at the station was the chief’s habit of placing chili peppers, either ground or in their skins, inside the sex of his young concubines to hear them shriek at the burning. According to Greenwich, only in this way could he become aroused and fuck them. At one time, the Barbadian added, instead of placing those being punished in the pillory, Normand would raise them with a chain tied to a tall tree and then release them to see how their heads split open and their bones broke or their teeth severed their tongues when they fell to the ground. Another overseer who had served under Normand assured the commission that even more than him the Andoque Indians feared his dog, a mastiff he had trained to sink its teeth into and tear off the flesh of any Indian he ordered it to attack.

  Could all those monstrous acts be true? Roger told himself, sifting through his memory, that among the vast collection of villains he had known in the Congo, whom power and impunity had turned into monsters, none had reached the extremes of this individual. He was rather perversely curious to meet him, hear him speak, see him act, and learn his origins and what he could say about the crimes attributed to him.

  From Occidente, Roger and his friends traveled, always on the launch Veloz, to the Último Retiro station. It was smaller than the previous ones and also had the look of a fort, with its palisade fence and armed guards around the handful of residences. The Indians seemed more primitive and taciturn than the Huitotos. They were half-naked, with loincloths that barely covered their sex. Here Roger saw for the first time two natives with the company’s brand on their buttocks: CA. They looked older than most of the others. He tried to talk to them but they didn’t understand Spanish or Portuguese, or Frederick Bishop’s Huitoto. Later, walking around Último Retiro, they discovered other branded Indians. From a station employee they learned that at least a third of the Indians living here carried the CA brand on their body. The practice had been suspended some time earlier, when the Peruvian Amazon Company agreed to the commission’s visit to Putumayo.

  To reach Último Retiro from the river, one had to climb a slope muddied by the rain, one’s legs sinking into the mud to the knees. When Roger could remove his shoes and lie down on his cot, all his bones ached. His conjunctivitis had returned. The burning and tearing in one eye were so great that after putting in eyedrops, he bandaged it. He spent several days like that, looking like a pirate, with one eye bandaged and protected by a damp cloth. Since these precautions did not put an end to the inflammation and tearing, from then on and until the end of the journey, every moment of the day when he wasn’t working—there weren’t many—he hurried to lie down in his hammock or cot and remained there, both eyes covered with wet, lukewarm cloths. In this way his discomfort was eased. During these periods of rest and at night—he slept barely four or five hours—he tried to organize mentally the report he would write for the Foreign Office. The general outline was clear. First, a picture of conditions in Putumayo some twenty years earlier when the pioneers came and settled here, invading the tribes’ lands, and how, desperate at the lack of labor, they initiated the correrías with no fear of sanctions because there were no judges and no police. They were the only authority, sustained by firearms against which slings, spears, and blowguns proved futile.

  He had to describe clearly the system of exploitation of rubber based on slave labor and the mistreatment of the indigenous people, which was inflamed by the greed of the station chiefs who, since they worked for a percentage of harvested rubber, made use of physical punishment, mutilations, and murders to increase the amount gathered. Impunity and absolute power had developed in these individuals sadistic tendencies that could be manifested freely here against natives deprived of all rights.

  Would his report be useful? No doubt, at least the Peruvian Amazon Company would be sanctioned. The British government would ask the Peruvian government to bring those responsible for crimes to trial. Would President Leguía have the courage to do so? Tizón said he would, that just as in London, in Lima a scandal would erupt when people learned what went on here. Public opinion would demand punishment for the guilty. But Roger had his doubts. What could the Peruvian government do in Putumayo, where it didn’t have a single representative, where Arana’s company boasted, and with reason, that with its gangs of killers it was the power that maintained Peruvian sovereignty in these lands? Nothing would go beyond some rhetorical posturing. The martyrdom of the indigenous communities in Amazonia would continue until they were obliterated. This prospect depressed him. But instead of paralyzing him, it incited him to greater efforts, investigating, interviewing, and writing. He already had a pile of notebooks and cards written in his clear, careful hand.

  From Último Retiro they went to Entre Ríos, in a journey by river and land that submerged them in thickets for an entire day. The idea delighted Roger: in this physical contact with wild nature he would relive the years of his youth, the long expeditions on the African continent. But even though in those twelve hours of going through the jungle, sinking at times to his waist in mud, slipping in underbrush that hid slopes, traveling certain sections in canoes that, powered by the Indians’ poles, slipped through extremely narrow channels covered by foliage that darkened the light of the sun, he sometimes felt the excitement and joy of long ago, the experience served above all to confirm the passage of time, the wearing away of his body. It was not only the pain in his arms, back, and legs, but also the unconquerable weariness against which he had to struggle, making heroic efforts to hide it from his companions. Louis Barnes and Seymour Bell were so exhausted that halfway through the journey each had to be carried in hammocks by four Indians of the twenty or so who escorted them. Roger observed, impressed, how these natives with such thin legs and skeletal bodies moved easily as they carri
ed on their shoulders baggage and provisions, not eating or drinking for hours. During a rest break, Juan Tizón agreed to Roger’s request and ordered the distribution of tins of sardines among the Indians.

  As they traveled they saw flocks of parrots and the playful monkeys with lively eyes called frailecillos, many kinds of birds, and iguanas with sleepy eyes whose wrinkled skins blended into the branches and trunks where they lay flat. And a Victoria regia as well, those enormous circular leaves that floated on lagoons like rafts.

  They reached Entre Ríos late in the afternoon. The station was in an upheaval because a jaguar had eaten an Indian who had left the camp to give birth alone on the riverbank, as native women usually did. A hunting party led by the station chief had gone out to search for the jaguar, but they returned at nightfall without having found the animal. The chief of Entre Ríos was named Andrés O’Donnell. He was young and good-looking and said his father was Irish, but Roger, after questioning him, detected so much misinformation with respect to his forebears and Ireland that O’Donnell’s grandfather or great-grandfather was probably the first Irishman in his family to set foot on Peruvian soil. It pained him that a descendant of Irishmen was one of Arana’s lieutenants in Putumayo, though according to testimonies, he seemed less cruel than other chiefs: he had been seen whipping the indigenous people and stealing their wives and daughters for his private harem—he had seven women living with him and a multitude of children—but in his record he apparently hadn’t killed anyone with his own hands or ordered any murders. But in a prominent place in Entre Ríos the pillory was raised and all the “boys” and Barbadians carried whips at their waist (some used them as belts for their trousers). And a large number of Indian men and women showed scars on their backs, legs, and buttocks.

  Even though his official mission required that he interview only British citizens who worked for Arana’s company, that is, Barbadians, after Occidente Roger also began to interview the “rationals” willing to answer his questions. In Entre Ríos this practice extended to the entire commission. On the days they were there, the chief himself and a good number of his “boys” testified, in addition to the three Barbadians who served Andrés O’Donnell as overseers.

  The same thing almost always occurred. At first, they were all reticent and evasive and told brazen lies. But a slip, an involuntary imprudence that revealed the world of truths they were hiding was enough for them to suddenly begin to talk and tell more than what they were asked for, implicating themselves as proof of the veracity of what they were recounting. In spite of several attempts, Roger could not gather direct testimony from any Indian.

  On October 16, 1910, when he and his colleagues on the commission, accompanied by Juan Tizón, three Barbadians, and some twenty Muinane Indian porters, led by their chief, walked through the forest along a narrow trail from Entre Ríos to the Matanzas station, Roger noted in his diary an idea that had been taking shape in his mind since he disembarked in Iquitos: “I have reached the absolute conviction that the only way the indigenous people of Putumayo can emerge from the miserable condition to which they have been reduced is by rising up in arms against their masters. It is an illusion devoid of all reality to believe, as Tizón does, that this situation will change when the Peruvian state comes here and there are authorities, judges, police to enforce the laws that have prohibited servitude and slavery in Peru since 1854. Will they enforce them as they do in Iquitos, where families buy girls and boys stolen by traffickers for twenty or thirty soles? Will those authorities, judges, and police enforce the laws when they receive their salaries from Casa Arana because the state has no money to pay them or thieves and bureaucrats steal the money on its way to them? In this society the state is an inseparable part of the machinery of exploitation and extermination. The indigenous people should not hope for anything from such institutions. If they want to be free they have to conquer their freedom with their arms and their courage. Like the Bora chief Katenere. But without sacrificing themselves for sentimental reasons, as he did. Fighting until the end.” Meanwhile, absorbed by these words he had etched in his diary, he walked at a good pace, cutting his way with a machete through lianas, thickets, trunks and branches that obstructed the path, when it occurred to him in the afternoon: “We Irish are like the Huitotos, the Boras, the Andoques, and the Muinanes of Putumayo. Colonized, exploited, and condemned to be that way forever if we continue trusting in British laws, institutions, and governments to attain our freedom. They will never give it to us. Why would the Empire that colonized us do that unless it felt an irresistible pressure that obliged it to do so? That pressure can come only from weapons.” This idea that in future days, weeks, months, and years he would keep polishing and reinforcing—that Ireland, like the Indians of Putumayo, if it wanted freedom, would have to fight to achieve it—so absorbed him during the eight hours the trek took that he even forgot to think that very shortly he would meet the chief of Matanzas: Armando Normand.

  To reach the Matanzas Station, situated on the bank of the Ca-huinari River, a tributary of the Caquetá, they had to climb a steep slope that a heavy rain shortly before their arrival had transformed into a gully of mud. Only the Muinanes could climb it without falling. The rest slipped, rolled, got up covered with mud and bruises. In the clearing, also protected by a stockade of reeds, some Indian women poured pails of water on the travelers to remove the mud.

  The chief was not there. He was leading a correría against five fugitive Indians who apparently had succeeded in crossing the Colombian border, which was very close by. There were five Barbadians in Matanzas and all five treated “Mr. Consul” with great respect, having been informed of his arrival and mission. They led the visitors to the houses where they would stay. They put Roger, Louis Barnes, and Juan Tizón in a large plank house with a yarina roof and screened windows that they said was used by Normand and his wives when they were in Matanzas. But his usual residence was in La China, a small camp a few miles upriver, where Indians were forbidden to go. The chief lived there surrounded by his armed “rationals,” for he feared being the victim of an assassination attempt by the Colombians, who accused him of not respecting the border and crossing it on his correrías to abduct porters or capture deserters. The Barbadians explained that Armando Normand always took the girls in his harem with him because he was very jealous.

  In Matanzas there were Boras, Andoques, and Muinanes, but no Huitotos. Almost all the indigenous people had whipping scars and at least a dozen of them had the Casa Arana brand on their buttocks. The pillory was in the center of the clearing, beneath the tree called the lupuna, covered with furuncles and parasitic plants, for which all the tribes in the region professed a reverence suffused with fear.

  In his room, which undoubtedly was Normand’s, Roger saw yellowing photographs where his childish face appeared, a 1903 diploma from the London School of Bookkeepers, and another earlier one from a senior school. It was true, then: he had studied in England and held an accounting diploma.

  Armando Normand entered Matanzas as night was falling. Through the small screened window, Roger saw him pass by in the light from the lanterns and go into the neighboring house, short, slight, and almost as weak as an Indian, followed by “boys” with the faces of hangmen and armed with Winchesters and revolvers, and by eight or ten women dressed in the cushma or Amazonian tunic.

  During the night Roger woke several times, in anguish, thinking about Ireland. He felt nostalgia for his country. He had lived there so little and yet felt increasing solidarity with its fate and suffering. Since he had seen firsthand the via crucis of other colonized peoples, Ireland’s situation pained him more than ever. He felt an urgency to finish with all this, to complete the report on Putumayo, turn it in to the Foreign Office, and return to Ireland to work, now without distractions, with his idealistic compatriots devoted to the cause of emancipation. He would make up for lost time, become more involved in the movement, study, take action, write, and by all the means at his disposal try to pers
uade the Irish that if they wanted freedom, they would have to win it with boldness and sacrifice.

  The next morning, when he went downstairs for breakfast, Armando Normand was there, sitting at a table with fruit, pieces of yucca in place of bread, and cups of coffee. He was short and skinny, with the face of a prematurely aged boy and a gaze that was blue, fixed, hard, and appeared and disappeared because of his constant blinking. He wore boots, blue jeans, a white shirt, and over that a leather vest with a pencil holder and a small notebook visible in one of the pockets. He carried a revolver at his waist.

  Normand greeted him with an almost imperceptible nod, saying little. He spoke perfect English, with a strange accent whose origin Roger could not identify. He was very close-mouthed, almost monosyllabic, in responding to questions about his life in London or specific information about his nationality—“Let’s say I’m Peruvian”—and he replied with a certain arrogance when Roger told him that he and the members of the commission had been affected by seeing that in the territories of a British company the indigenous people were mistreated in an inhuman way.

  “If all of you lived here, you would think differently,” he remarked, drily, not at all intimidated. And after a brief pause, he added: “You can’t treat animals like human beings. A yacumama river snake, a jaguar, a puma don’t understand words. Neither do the savages. Well, I already know that outsiders passing through here cannot be convinced.”

  “I lived for twenty years in Africa and I didn’t turn into a monster,” said Roger. “Which is what you have become, Mr. Normand. Your reputation has traveled with us throughout the entire journey. The horrors told about you in Putumayo go beyond anything imaginable. Did you know that?”

  Armando Normand was not troubled in the least. Looking at him constantly with that blank, inexpressive gaze, he only shrugged and spat on the floor.