The Dream of the Celt: A Novel

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  He saw that there where the jamb of his cell door was supposed to be, a ray of light had appeared.

  XII

  I’ll leave my bones on that damn trip, Roger thought when Chancellor Sir Edward Grey told him that in view of the contradictory news coming from Peru, the only way for the British government to know what it could believe with regard to what was occurring there was for Casement to go back to Iquitos and see on the ground whether the Peruvian government had done anything to end the iniquities in Putumayo or was using delaying tactics because it would not, or could not, confront Julio C. Arana.

  Roger’s health was going from bad to worse. Since his return from Iquitos, even during the few days at the end of the year that he spent in Paris with the Wards, he was again tormented by conjunctivitis and a return of malaria. And he was bothered again by hemorrhoids, though without the hemorrhages he’d had earlier. As soon as he returned to London, early in January 1911, he went to see doctors. The two specialists he consulted decided his condition was the result of the immense fatigue and nervous tension of his time in Amazonia. He needed rest, a very quiet vacation.

  But he couldn’t take one. Writing the report that the British government urgently required, and many meetings at the ministry when he had to inform them of what he had seen and heard in Amazonia, as well as visits to the Anti-Slavery Society, took up a great deal of time. He also had to meet with the British and Peruvian directors of the Peruvian Amazon Company, who, during their first interview, after listening to his impressions of Putumayo for almost two hours, were left paralyzed. Their long faces, with partially opened mouths, looked at him in disbelief and horror, as if the floor had begun to open under their feet and the ceiling to fall in on their heads. They didn’t know what to say. They took their leave without formulating a single question for him.

  Julio C. Arana attended the second meeting of the board of directors of the Peruvian Amazon Company. It was the first and last time Roger saw him in person. He had heard so much about him, heard so many different people deify him as they tend to do with religious saints or political leaders (never with businessmen) or attribute horrendous cruelties and crimes to him—monumental cynicism, sadism, greed, avarice, disloyalty, swindles, and all kinds of knavery—that he sat observing him for a long while, like an entomologist with a mysterious insect that has not yet been classified.

  It was said he understood English but never spoke it because of timidity or vanity. He had an interpreter beside him who translated everything into his ear in a very quiet voice. He was a fairly short man, dark, with mestizo features and an Asian trace in his slanted eyes, a very broad forehead, and thinning hair, carefully combed with a center part. He had a small mustache and goatee, recently combed, and he smelled of cologne. The legend of his mania regarding hygiene and attire must be true. He dressed impeccably, wearing a suit of fine wool that may have been cut on Savile Row. He didn’t open his mouth while the other directors interrogated Roger with a thousand questions undoubtedly prepared for them by Arana’s lawyers. They attempted to make him fall into contradictions and insinuated the mistakes, exaggerations, susceptibilities, and scruples of an urbane, civilized European who is disconcerted by the primitive world.

  As he responded and added testimonies and precise facts that made what he had told them at the first meeting even worse, Roger did not stop glancing at Arana. As still as an idol, he didn’t move in his seat and didn’t even blink. His expression was indecipherable. There was something inflexible in his hard, cold gaze. It reminded Roger of the eyes, empty of humanity, of the station chiefs on the rubber plantations in Putumayo, the eyes of men who had lost (if they ever possessed it) the capacity to discriminate between good and evil, kindness and wickedness, the human and the inhuman.

  This small, elegant, slightly plump man, then, was master of an empire the size of a European country, the hated, adulated master of the lives and property of tens of thousands of people, a man who in that miserably poor world of Amazonia had accumulated a fortune comparable to that of the great potentates of Europe. He had begun as a poor boy in the small forsaken village Rioja must have been, in the high Peruvian jungle, selling from door to door straw hats that his family had woven. Little by little, compensating for his lack of education—only a few years of primary instruction—with a superhuman capacity for work, a brilliant instinct for business, and an absolute lack of scruples, he climbed the social pyramid. From a traveling peddler of hats in vast Amazonia, he became a financial backer of the wretched rubber workers who ventured at their own risk into the jungle, whom he supplied with machetes, carbines, fishing nets, knives, cans for the rubber, canned goods, yucca flour, and domestic utensils in exchange for part of the rubber they harvested, which he took care of selling in Iquitos and Manaus to export companies, until, with the money he had earned, he could move from supplier and agent to producer and exporter. At first he became partners with Colombian rubber planters who, less intelligent or diligent than he, or less lacking in morality, eventually sold their land, depositories, and indigenous laborers to him at a loss, and at times went to work for him. Distrustful, he installed his brothers and brothers-in-law in key positions in the enterprise, which, in spite of its vast size and having been registered on the London stock market since 1908, continued to function in practice like a family business. How great was his fortune? The legend undoubtedly exaggerated the reality. But in London, the Peruvian Amazon Company had this valuable building in the heart of the City, and Arana’s mansion on Kensington Road was in no way inferior to the palaces of princes and bankers that surrounded it. His house in Geneva and his elegant summer home in Biarritz were furnished by fashionable decorators and displayed paintings and luxurious objects. But it was said that he led an austere life, didn’t drink or gamble or have lovers, and dedicated all his free time to his wife. He had loved her since he was a boy—she was also from Rioja—but Eleonora Zumaeta said yes only after many years, when he was already wealthy and powerful and she was a schoolteacher in the small village where she had been born.

  When the second meeting of the board of directors of the Peruvian Amazon Company had ended, Julio C. Arana guaranteed through his interpreter that his company would do everything necessary to correct immediately any deficiency or malfunction on the rubber plantations of Putumayo, for it was the policy of his firm to always act within the law and altruistic morality of the British Empire. Arana took his leave of the consul with a nod, not offering his hand.

  Writing the Report on Putumayo took Roger a month and a half. He began writing it in a room at the Foreign Office, assisted by a typist, but then he preferred to work in his Philbeach Gardens apartment, in Earls Court, next to the beautiful little church of St. Cuthbert and St. Matthias, where he sometimes went to listen to the magnificent organist. And since even there he was interrupted by politicians and members of humanitarian and antislavery organizations and people from the press, for the rumor that his Report on Putumayo would be as devastating as the one he had written about the Congo circulated throughout London and gave rise to conjectures and talk in the London gossip columns and rumor mills, he requested authorization from the Foreign Office to travel to Ireland. There, in a room in Buswells Hotel on Molesworth Street in Dublin, he completed his work early in March 1911. Congratulations from his superiors and colleagues immediately poured in. Sir Edward Grey himself summoned him to his office to praise his report and at the same time suggest a few minor corrections. The text was immediately sent to the government of the United States so that London and Washington could put pressure on President Leguía, demanding in the name of the civilized world that he put an end to the slavery, torture, abductions, rapes, and annihilation of the indigenous communities, and take those incriminated to court.

  Roger could not yet take the rest prescribed by his physicians, which he needed so much. He had to meet several times with committees from the government, Parliament, and the Anti-Slavery Society that were studying the most practical ways for
public and private institutions to alleviate the situation of the Amazonian natives. At his suggestion, one of their first initiatives was to pay for the establishment of a religious mission in Putumayo, something that Arana’s company had always prevented but now was pledged to facilitate.

  Finally, in June 1911, he was able to leave for a vacation in Ireland. He was there when he received a personal letter from Sir Edward Grey. The chancellor informed him that on his recommendation, His Majesty George V had decided to knight him for exemplary service to the United Kingdom in the Congo and Amazonia.

  While relatives and friends showered him with congratulations, Roger, who almost burst into laughter the first few times he heard himself called Sir Roger, was filled with doubts. How could he accept a title granted by a regime toward which, in the depths of his heart, he felt enmity, the same regime that had colonized his country? On the other hand, didn’t he serve this king and this government as a diplomat? He had never been so intensely aware of the double life he had lived for years, working on one hand with discipline and efficiency in the service of the British Empire, and on the other devoted to the cause of the emancipation of Ireland and becoming increasingly drawn not to the moderates led by John Redmond, who aspired to Home Rule, but to the radicals of the IRB, secretly led by Tom Clarke, whose goal was independence through armed action. Consumed by these vacillations, he chose to thank Sir Edward Grey in a courteous letter for the honor he had conferred on him. The news spread throughout the press and helped to increase his prestige.

  The demands made to the Peruvian government by Britain and the United States that the principal criminals cited in the Report—Fidel Velarde, Alfredo Montt, Augusto Jiménez, Armando Normand, José Inocente Fonseca, Abelardo Agüero, Elías Martinengui, and Aurelio Rodríguez—be arrested and tried seemed at first to bear fruit. The chargé d’affaires for the United Kingdom in Lima, Mr. Lucien Gerome, cabled the Foreign Office that the eleven principal employees of the Peruvian Amazon Company had been dismissed. Judge Carlos Valcárcel, sent from Lima, organized an expedition as soon as he arrived in Iquitos to investigate the rubber plantations in Putumayo, but he couldn’t join it because he fell ill and had to travel to the United States for surgery. He put an energetic, respectable person at the head of the expedition: Rómulo Paredes, editor of the newspaper El Oriente, who traveled to Putumayo with a doctor, two interpreters, and an escort of nine soldiers. The commission visited all the rubber stations of the Peruvian Amazon Company and had just gone back to Iquitos, where a recuperated Judge Valcárcel had also returned. The Peruvian government had promised Mr. Gerome that as soon as it received the report from Paredes and Valcárcel, it would take action.

  However, a short while later, Gerome again reported that Leguía’s government was distressed to inform him that most of the criminals whose arrests it had ordered had fled to Brazil. The others perhaps were hiding in the jungle or had entered Colombian territory clandestinely. The United States and Great Britain attempted to have the Brazilian government extradite the fugitives to Peru to be brought to justice. But the chancellor of Brazil, the Baron de Río Branco, replied to both governments that there was no extradition treaty between Peru and Brazil and therefore those persons could not be returned without provoking a delicate problem in international law.

  Days later, the British chargé d’affaires reported that in a private interview, the Peruvian minister of foreign relations had admitted, unofficially, that President Leguía was in an impossible situation. Due to its presence in Putumayo and the security forces it had to protect its installations, Arana’s company was the only restraint that kept the Colombians, who had been reinforcing their border garrisons, from invading the region. The United States and Great Britain were asking for something absurd: closing or harassing the Peruvian Amazon Company meant handing to Colombia the immense territory it coveted, pure and simple. Neither Leguía nor any other Peruvian leader could do such a thing without committing suicide. And Peru lacked the resources to establish in the remote wilds of Putumayo a military garrison strong enough to protect national sovereignty. Lucien Gerome added that for all these reasons, it was not possible to expect the Peruvian government to do anything efficacious now except make statements and gestures lacking in substance.

  This was the reason the Foreign Office decided, before His Majesty’s government made his Report on Putumayo public and asked the Western nations for sanctions against Peru, that Roger Casement should return to the territory and confirm in Amazonia, with his own eyes, whether any reforms had been realized, a judicial process was in progress, and the legal action initiated by Dr. Valcárcel was genuine. Sir Edward Grey’s insistence meant that Roger found himself obliged to agree, telling himself something that in the next few months he would have many occasions to repeat, I’ll leave my bones on that damned trip.

  He was preparing for his departure when Omarino and Arédomi arrived in London. In the five months they had spent in his care in Barbados, Father Smith had given them English lessons and notions of reading and writing, and had accustomed them to dressing in the Western manner. But Roger found two young boys whom civilization, in spite of giving them enough to eat and not hitting or flogging them, had saddened and dulled. They always seemed fearful that the people around them, subjecting them to inexhaustible scrutiny, looking at them from head to toe, touching them, passing their hands over their skin as if they thought they were dirty, asking them questions they didn’t understand and didn’t know how to answer, would hurt them. Roger took them to the zoo, to have ice cream in Hyde Park, to visit his sister Nina, his cousin Gertrude, and for an evening with intellectuals and artists at the house of Alice Stopford Green. Everyone treated them with affection, but the curiosity with which they were examined, above all when they had to take off their shirts and show the scars on their backs and buttocks, disturbed them. At times, Roger discovered the boys’ eyes filled with tears. He had planned to send them to be educated in Ireland, on the outskirts of Dublin, at St. Enda’s bilingual school directed by Patrick Pearse, whom he knew well. He wrote to him about it, telling him the origin of both boys. Roger had given a talk at St. Enda’s on Africa and supported with financial donations Patrick Pearse’s efforts, both in the Gaelic League and its publications and in this school, to promote the diffusion of the ancient Irish language. Pearse, poet, writer, militant Catholic, pedagogue, and radical nationalist, agreed to take them both, even offering a discount on the matriculation and room and board at St. Enda’s. But when he received Pearse’s answer, Roger had already decided to consent to what Omarino and Arédomi pleaded for every day: to return them to Amazonia. Both were profoundly unhappy in England, where they felt they had been turned into human anomalies, objects on display that surprised, amused, moved, and at times frightened people who would never treat them as equals but always as exotic outsiders.

  On the trip back to Iquitos, Roger would think a great deal about this lesson reality had given him on how paradoxical and ungraspable the human soul was. Both boys had wanted to escape the Amazonian hell where they were mistreated and made to work like animals and given barely anything to eat. He had made efforts and spent a good amount of his scant funds to pay for their passages to Europe and support them for the past six months, thinking that in this way he was saving them, giving them access to a decent life. Yet here, though for different reasons, they were as far from happiness or, at least, a tolerable existence, as they had been in Putumayo. Though they weren’t beaten and instead were treated with affection, they felt alienated, alone, and aware they would never form part of this world.

  Shortly before Roger left for the Amazon, the Foreign Office, following his advice, appointed a new consul, George Michell, in Iquitos. It was a magnificent choice. Roger had met him in the Congo. Michell was persistent and worked enthusiastically in the campaign to denounce the crimes committed under the regime of Leopold II. With regard to colonization, he held the same position as Roger. In the event, he would not hesitate to con
front Casa Arana. They had two long conversations and planned a close collaboration.

  On August 16, 1911, Roger, Omarino, and Arédomi left Southampton on the Magdalena, bound for Barbados. They reached the island twelve days later. As soon as the ship began to cut through the silvery blue water of the Caribbean, Roger felt in his blood that his sex, asleep in these recent months of diseases, preoccupations, and great physical and mental effort, was waking again and filling his mind with fantasies and desires. In his diary he summarized his state of mind with three words: “I burn again.”

  As soon as they disembarked, he went to thank Father Smith for all he had done for the two boys. He was moved to see how Omarino and Arédomi, so sparing in the display of their feelings in London, embraced and patted the cleric with great familiarity. Father Smith took them to visit the Ursuline convent. In that serene cloister with carob trees and the purple blossoms of bougainvillea, where noise from the street did not reach and time seemed suspended, Roger moved away from the others and sat down on a bench. He was observing a line of ants carrying a leaf in the air, like the men carrying the platform of the Virgin in processions in Brazil, when he remembered: today was his birthday. Forty-seven! He couldn’t say he was an old man. Many men and women his age were in their prime physically and psychologically, with energy, desires, and projects. But he felt old, with the unpleasant feeling of having entered the final stage of his life. Once, in Africa, with Herbert Ward, they had imagined how their final years would be. The sculptor envisioned a Mediterranean old age, in Provence or Tuscany, in a house in the countryside. He would have a huge studio and many cats, dogs, ducks, and chickens, and on Sundays he would cook dense, spiced dishes such as bouillabaisse for a long line of relatives. Roger, on the other hand, startled, declared: “I won’t reach old age, I’m certain.” It had been a presentiment. He vividly recalled that premonition and felt it again as true: he would never be an old man.