The Dream of the Celt: A Novel

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  “Can I ask how many men and women you’ve killed?” Roger fired at him point-blank.

  “All those who have committed a crime,” replied the chief of Matanzas, not changing his tone and standing up. “Excuse me. I have work to do.”

  The distaste Roger felt for this little man was so great he decided not to interview him personally and to leave the task to the commission members. That murderer would tell them only an avalanche of lies. He devoted himself to listening to the Barbadians and “rationals” who agreed to testify. He did this in the morning and afternoon, dedicating the rest of the day to developing the notes he had taken during the interviews. In the mornings he went down to swim in the river, took some photographs, and then didn’t stop working until it grew dark. He would fall, exhausted, on his cot. His sleep was intermittent and feverish. He noticed he was losing weight day by day.

  He was exhausted and sick of it. As had happened at a certain moment in the Congo, he began to be afraid that the maddening succession of crimes, violent acts, and horrors of every kind he uncovered on a daily basis would affect his mental balance. Would the health of his spirit resist this quotidian horror? It demoralized him to think that in civilized Britain few people would believe that the whites and mestizos in Putumayo could reach these extremes of savagery. Once again he would be accused of exaggeration and prejudice, of magnifying abuses to make his report more dramatic. Not only the iniquitous mistreatment of the indigenous people had him in this state, but knowing that after seeing, hearing, and witnessing what went on here, he would never again have the optimistic view of life he’d had in his youth.

  When he learned that an expedition of porters was going to leave Matanzas carrying the rubber harvested in the last three months to the Entre Ríos Station and from there to Puerto Peruano to be shipped abroad, he told his companions he would go with them. The commission could remain here until it finished its inspection and the interviews. His friends were as exhausted and discouraged as he was. They told him that Armando Normand’s insolent manner had changed suddenly when they let him know that “Mr. Consul” had been assigned the mission to investigate the atrocities in Putumayo by Sir Edward Grey himself, the minister of foreign affairs for the British Empire, and that the killers and torturers, since they worked for a British company, could be brought to trial in England—above all if they had British nationality or were attempting to acquire it, as might be true in his case. Or they could be turned over to the Peruvian or Colombian governments to be tried here. When he heard this, Normand adopted a submissive, servile attitude toward the commission. He denied his crimes and assured them that from now on the errors of the past would not be repeated: the Indians would be well fed, healed when they fell ill, paid for their work, and treated like human beings. He had ordered a handbill saying these things to be placed in the middle of the clearing. It was ridiculous, since the indigenous people, all illiterate, could not read it and neither could the majority of the “rationals.” It was exclusively for the commissioners.

  The journey on foot through the jungle, from Matanzas to Entre Ríos, accompanying the eighty Indians—Boras, Andoques, and Muinanes—who were carrying on their shoulders the rubber harvested by Armando Normand’s people, would be one of the most horrifying memories of Roger’s first trip to Peru. Normand wasn’t leading the expedition but Negretti, one of his lieutenants, an Asian-looking mestizo with gold teeth who was always digging in his mouth with a toothpick and whose stentorian voice made the army of wounded, branded, and scarred skeletons in the expedition, among them many women and children, some very young, tremble, jump, hurry, their faces distorted by fear. Negretti carried a rifle on his shoulder, a revolver in a holster, and a whip at his waist. On the day they left, Roger asked his permission to photograph him and Negretti agreed, laughing. But his smile vanished when Roger warned him, pointing at the whip:

  “If I see you use that on the Indians, I’ll personally turn you over to the Iquitos police.”

  Negretti’s expression was one of total confusion. After a moment he said in an undertone:

  “Do you have any authority in the company?”

  “I have the authority granted me by the British government to investigate the abuses committed in Putumayo. You know that the Peruvian Amazon Company you work for is British, don’t you?”

  Disconcerted, the man moved away. And Roger never saw him flog the porters; he only yelled at them so they would move faster or harassed them with curses and other insults when they dropped the “sausages” of rubber they carried on their shoulders and heads because their strength failed or they tripped.

  Roger had brought three Barbadians with him: Bishop, Sealy, and Lane. The other nine remained with the commission. Roger recommended to his friends that they never get far away from these witnesses, for they ran the risk of being intimidated or bribed by Normand and his henchmen to retract their testimonies, or even murdered.

  The most difficult part of the expedition was not the large buzzing blowflies that hounded them day and night with their stings, or the rainstorms that sometimes fell, soaking them and turning the ground into slippery streams of water, mud, leaves, and dead trees, or the discomfort of the camps they set up at night to sleep the poor sleep God sent them after eating a can of sardines or soup and taking a few swallows of whiskey or tea from a flask. The terrible thing, a torture that filled him with remorse and gave him a bad conscience, was seeing these naked Indians bent over by the weight of the sausages of rubber, whom Negretti and his “boys” pushed forward with shouts, always hurrying them, with very widely spaced rests and without giving them a mouthful of food. When he asked Negretti why the rations weren’t also distributed to the indigenous workers, the overseer looked at him as if he didn’t understand. When Bishop explained the question to him, Negretti stated, with total shamelessness:

  “They don’t like what we Christians eat. They have their own food.”

  But they had none, because you couldn’t call the little handfuls of yucca flour they sometimes put in their mouths food, or the stems and leaves of plants they rolled up very carefully before swallowing them. What Roger found incomprehensible was how children of ten or twelve could carry for hours and hours those sausages that weighed—he had tried carrying them—never less than fifty pounds and sometimes seventy or more. On the first day of the trek a Bora boy suddenly fell on his face, crushed by his load. He moaned weakly when Roger tried to revive him by having him drink a can of soup. The boy’s eyes showed an animal panic. Two or three times he attempted to get up, without succeeding. Bishop explained: “He’s so afraid because if you weren’t here, Negretti would finish him off with a bullet as a warning so no other pagan would decide to faint.” The boy was in no condition to stand, so they abandoned him in the forest. Roger left him two cans of food and his umbrella. Now he understood why these feeble creatures could carry so much weight: they feared being killed if they dared to faint. Terror increased their strength.

  On the second day, an old woman suddenly fell down dead when she tried to climb a slope with seventy pounds of rubber on her back. Negretti, after confirming she was lifeless, quickly distributed the dead woman’s two sausages among the other natives with a grimace of annoyance and a hoarse voice.

  In Entre Ríos, as soon as he had bathed and rested awhile, Roger hurried to write in his notebooks the vicissitudes of the trip and his reflections. An idea came to mind over and over again, an idea that in the following days, weeks, and months would return obsessively and begin to shape his conduct: We should not permit colonization to castrate the spirit of the Irish as it has castrated the spirit of the Amazonian Indians. We must act now, once and for all, before it is too late and we turn into automatons.

  He wasted no time while he waited for the arrival of the commission. He had some interviews, but above all he reviewed the payrolls, store account books, and administrative records. He wanted to establish how much Arana’s company increased the prices of foodstuffs, medicines, articl
es of clothing, weapons, and tools it advanced to the Indians as well as to the overseers and “boys.” The percentages varied from product to product, but the constant was that for everything it sold, the store doubled, tripled, and at times quintupled prices. He bought two shirts, a pair of trousers, a hat, a pair of hiking boots, and could have acquired everything in London for a third of the price. Not only the indigenous people were swindled but also those poor wretches, vagabonds, and thugs who were in Putumayo to carry out the station chiefs’ orders. It was not strange that all of them were always in debt to the Peruvian Amazon Company and were tied to it until they died or the firm considered them useless.

  Roger found it more difficult to form an approximate idea of how many indigenous people were in Putumayo in 1893, when the first rubber plantations were established in the region and the correrías began, and how many remained in this year of 1910. There were no serious statistics: what had been written on the subject was vague, and the figures differed a good deal. The person who seemed to have made the most trustworthy calculation was the unfortunate French explorer and ethnologist Eugène Robuchon (who disappeared mysteriously in the Putumayo region in 1905 when he was mapping the entire territory of Julio C. Arana), according to whom the seven tribes in the area—Huitotos, Ocaimas, Muinanes, Nonuyas, Andoques, Rezígaros, and Boras—must have amounted to one hundred thousand before rubber drew “civilized” men to Putumayo. Juan Tizón considered the figure highly exaggerated. He, through different analyses and comparisons, maintained that forty thousand was closer to the truth. In any case, now no more than ten thousand survivors remained. In this way, the system imposed by the rubber barons had already annihilated three-fourths of the indigenous population. Many undoubtedly had been victims of smallpox, malaria, beriberi, and other epidemics. But the immense majority disappeared because of exploitation, hunger, mutilations, the pillory, and murder. At this rate what had happened to the Iquarasi, who had been totally exterminated, would happen to all the tribes.

  Two days later his colleagues from the commission arrived in Entre Ríos. Roger was surprised to see Armando Normand with them, followed by his harem of young girls. Folk and Barnes informed him that even though the reason the Matanzas chief gave for coming with them was that he had to oversee personally the loading of the rubber in Puerto Peruano, he had done so because of how frightened he was with respect to his future. As soon as he learned of the accusations the Barbadians had made against him, he set in motion a campaign of bribes and threats to force them to retract what they had said. And he had been successful with some, such as Levine, who sent a letter to the commission (no doubt written by Normand himself) saying they denied all their statements, which they had been “tricked” into making, and they wanted to make it clear, in writing, that the Peruvian Amazon Company had never mistreated the indigenous people and that employees and porters worked in friendship for the greatness of Peru. Folk and Barnes thought Normand would try to bribe or intimidate Bishop, Sealy, and Lane, and perhaps Casement himself.

  Very early the next morning, Armando Normand came to knock on Roger’s door and propose “a frank, friendly conversation.” The manager of Matanzas had lost his confidence and the arrogance with which he had previously addressed Roger. He seemed nervous and rubbed his hands and bit his lower lip as he spoke. They went to the rubber depository, in a clearing with brambles that the previous night’s storm had filled with puddles and frogs. A stench of latex came from the depository and the idea passed through Roger’s mind that the smell didn’t come from the rubber sausages stored in the large shed but from the small red-faced man who looked like a midget beside him.

  Normand had prepared his speech carefully. The seven years he had spent in the jungle demanded huge privations for someone who had been educated in London. He didn’t want his life cut short by legal entanglements that would keep him from satisfying his longing to return to England. He swore on his honor he had no blood on his hands or his conscience. He was severe but just and was prepared to apply all the measures the commission and “Mr. Consul” might suggest to improve the operation of the enterprise.

  “Put an end to correrías and the abduction of Indians,” Roger enumerated slowly, counting on his fingers, “get rid of the pillory and whips, don’t have the Indians work free of charge anymore, don’t allow the chiefs, overseers, and ‘boys’ to rape or steal the wives and daughters of the Indians, get rid of physical punishments, and pay reparations to the families of those who have been murdered, burned alive, or had their ears, noses, hands, and feet chopped off. Stop stealing from the porters with dishonest scales and inflated prices at the store to keep them forever in debt to the company.” All of that was just a beginning. Because many more reforms would be needed for the Peruvian Amazon Company to deserve to be a British company.

  Armando Normand was livid and looked at him with incomprehension.

  “Do you want the Peruvian Amazon Company to disappear, Mr. Casement?” he finally stammered.

  “Exactly. And for all its killers and torturers, beginning with Señor Julio C. Arana and ending with you, to go on trial for your crimes and end your days in prison.”

  He increased his pace and left the Matanzas chief with his face contorted, motionless where he stood, not knowing what to say. Roger immediately regretted having given in to the contempt this individual deserved. He had gained a mortal enemy who now might very well feel the temptation to kill him. He had warned him, and Normand, neither stupid nor lazy, would act accordingly. He had made a very serious mistake.

  A few days later, Juan Tizón let them know that the Matanzas chief had asked the company for the money owed him, in cash, not in Peruvian soles but in pounds sterling. He would travel back to Iquitos in the Liberal along with the commission. What he was attempting was obvious: to weaken, with the help of friends and accomplices, the charges and accusations against him and to assure himself of an escape to another country—undoubtedly Brazil—where he would have a good amount of money waiting for him. The chances of his going to prison had been reduced. Tizón informed them that for the past five years, Normand had received 20 percent of the rubber harvested at Matanzas and a “bonus” of two hundred pounds sterling a year if the yield was higher than that of the previous year.

  The subsequent days and weeks followed a suffocating routine. The interviews with Barbadians and “rationals” continued to reveal an impressive catalogue of atrocities. Roger felt his strength leaving him. Since he had begun to run a fever in the evenings, he was afraid it was malaria again and increased his dose of quinine when he went to bed. The fear that Armando Normand or any other station chief might destroy his notebooks with the transcriptions of the testimonies meant that in all the stations—Entre Ríos, Atenas, Sur, and La Chorrera—he carried those papers with him and would not allow anyone else to touch them. At night he placed them under the cot or hammock where he slept, a loaded revolver always within reach.

  In La Chorrera, as they were packing their suitcases for the return to Iquitos, Roger saw about twenty Indians from the village of Naimenes come into camp. They were carrying rubber. The porters were young or adult men, except for a very skinny boy of nine or ten, who carried on his head a rubber sausage bigger than he was. Roger went with them to the scale where Víctor Macedo was accepting delivery. The little boy’s weighed fifty pounds and he, Omarino, only fifty-five. How could he walk all those miles through the jungle with that weight on his head? In spite of the scars on his back, he had lively, joyful eyes and smiled frequently. Roger had him take a tin of soup and another of sardines that he bought at the store. From that time on, Omarino did not leave his side. He accompanied him everywhere and was always ready to do any errand. One day Víctor Macedo said to him, pointing at the little boy:

  “I see he’s become fond of you, Señor Casement. Why don’t you take him with you? He’s an orphan. I’ll give him to you.”

  Afterward, Roger would think the phrase, “I’ll give him to you,” with which Víc
tor Macedo had wanted to ingratiate himself, said more than any other testimony: the station chief could “give” any Indian in his territory, since porters and harvesters belonged to him just like the trees, the houses, the rifles, and the rubber sausages. He asked Juan Tizón if there would be any problem with his taking Omarino to London—the Anti-Slavery Society would place him under its protection and be responsible for his education—and Tizón offered no objection.

  Arédomi, an adolescent who belonged to the Andoque tribe, would join Omarino a few days later. He had come to La Chorrera from the Sur station, and the next day, in the river, as he swam, Roger saw him naked, splashing in the water with other Indians. He was a beautiful boy, with a well-proportioned, agile body, who moved with natural elegance. Roger thought Herbert Ward could make a beautiful sculpture of this adolescent, the symbol of Amazonian man stripped of his land, his body, and his beauty by the rubber barons. He distributed tins of food to the Andoques who were swimming. Arédomi kissed his hand in gratitude. He was displeased and, at the same time, moved. The boy followed him to his house, talking and gesturing energetically, but Roger didn’t understand him. He called Frederick Bishop who translated:

  “He wants you to take him with you, wherever you’re going. He’ll serve you well.”

  “Tell him I can’t, that I’m already taking Omarino with me.”

  But Arédomi was obstinate. He stood motionless outside the cabin where Roger slept or followed him wherever he went, a few steps behind, a silent plea in his eyes. He decided to consult with the commission and Juan Tizón. Did they think it was all right if he took Arédomi to London along with Omarino? Perhaps the two boys would give greater persuasive strength to his report: both had flogging scars. Then, too, they were young enough to be educated and incorporated into a way of life that was not slavery.

  On the eve of the departure of the Liberal, Carlos Miranda, chief of the Sur station, arrived in La Chorrera. He brought with him about one hundred natives with the rubber harvested in that region in the past three months. He was fat, in his forties, and very white. From his way of speaking and behaving, he seemed to have been better educated than other station chiefs. No doubt he came from a middle-class family. But his record was as bloodthirsty as those of his colleagues. Roger and the other members of the commission had heard several testimonies about the episode of the old Bora woman who, a few months earlier, in Sur, in an attack of despair or madness, suddenly began to shout, exhorting the Boras to fight and not allow themselves to be humiliated anymore or treated as slaves. Her shouting paralyzed the indigenous people around her with terror. Infuriated, Carlos Miranda attacked her with the machete he snatched from one of his “boys” and decapitated her. Brandishing her head, which drenched him in blood, he told the Indians this would happen to all of them if they didn’t do their work or imitated the old woman. The decapitator was a genial, cheerful man, talkative and easygoing, who tried to win over Roger and his colleagues by telling jokes and recounting anecdotes about the bizarre, picturesque individuals he had known in Putumayo.