The Dream of the Celt: A Novel

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  Father Smith agreed to put up Omarino and Arédomi for the week they would spend in Bridgetown. The day following his arrival, Roger went to a public bath he had frequented the last time he had been on the island. As he expected, he saw young, athletic, statuesque men, for here, just as in Brazil, people were not ashamed of their bodies. Men and women cultivated their bodies and displayed them without shame. A very young boy, an adolescent of fifteen or sixteen, disquieted him. He had the pallor frequent in mulattoes, smooth, gleaming skin, large, audacious green eyes, and from his tight swimsuit emerged hairless, limber thighs that caused the beginnings of vertigo in Roger. Experience had sharpened the intuition that allowed him to know very quickly, through signs imperceptible to anyone else—the hint of a smile, a light in the eyes, an inviting movement of the hand or body—whether a boy understood what he wanted and was willing to grant it or, at least, to negotiate it. With pain in his heart, he felt that this beautiful boy was completely indifferent to the furtive messages he was sending with his eyes. Still, he approached and talked with him for a moment. He was the son of a Barbadian clergyman and hoped to be an accountant. He was studying in a commercial academy and soon, during vacation, he would accompany his father to Jamaica. Roger invited him to have ice cream, but the boy refused.

  Back at his hotel, seized with excitement, he wrote in his diary, in the vulgar, telegraphic language he used for the most intimate episodes. “Public bath. Clergyman’s son. Very beautiful. Long, delicate penis that stiffened in my hands. I took him into my mouth. Happiness for two minutes.” He masturbated and bathed again, soaping himself carefully as he tried to drive away the sadness and feeling of loneliness that tended to afflict him at times like this.

  The next day, at noon, as he was having lunch on the terrace of a restaurant in the port of Bridgetown, he saw Andrés O’Donnell. He called to him. Arana’s former overseer, the chief of the Entre Ríos station, recognized him immediately. He looked at him for a few seconds with distrust and some fright. But finally he shook his hand and agreed to sit down with him. He drank coffee and a glass of brandy while they talked. He admitted that Roger’s passing through Putumayo had been like the curse of a Huitoto witch doctor for the rubber barons. As soon as he left, the rumor circulated that police and judges would soon arrive with arrest orders, and all the chiefs, overseers, and foremen on the rubber plantations would have problems with the law. And, since Arana’s company was British, they would be sent to England and tried there. For that reason many of them, like O’Donnell, had preferred to leave the area and head for Brazil, Colombia, or Ecuador. He had come here on the promise of a job on a sugarcane plantation but didn’t obtain it. Now he was trying to leave for the United States, where, it seemed, there were opportunities on the railroads. Sitting on the terrace, with no boots, no pistol, and no whip, wearing old overalls and a frayed shirt, he was nothing more than a poor devil agonizing over his future.

  “You don’t know it, but you owe me your life, Señor Casement,” he remarked with a bitter smile as he was saying goodbye. “Though undoubtedly you won’t believe me.”

  “Tell me in any event,” Roger urged.

  “Armando Normand was convinced that if you left there alive, all of us plantation chiefs would go to prison. The best thing would be if you drowned in the river or were eaten by a puma or an alligator. You understand me. The same thing that happened to that French explorer, Eugène Robuchon, who began to make people nervous with all the questions he asked, and they made him disappear.”

  “Why didn’t you kill me? It would have been very easy with all the practice you’ve had.”

  “I made them see the possible consequences,” Andrés O’Donnell declared with a certain arrogance. “Víctor Macedo supported me. Since you were English, and Don Julio’s company too, they’d try us in England under English laws. And hang us.”

  “I’m not English, I’m Irish,” Roger corrected him. “Things probably wouldn’t have happened as you think. In any case, thanks very much. But it would be better if you left right away and didn’t tell me where you were going. I’m obliged to report that I’ve seen you, and the British government will quickly issue an order for your arrest.”

  That afternoon, he returned to the public bath. He had better luck than the day before. A brawny, smiling, dark-skinned mulatto, whom he had seen lifting weights in the exercise room, smiled at him, took his arm, and led him to a small room where they sold drinks. As they drank pineapple and banana juice and he told him his name, Stanley Weeks, he moved very close until their legs touched. Then, with a little smile filled with mischief, he led Roger by the arm to a small dressing room, whose door he locked with a bolt as soon as they entered. They kissed, nibbled at ears and neck as they removed their trousers. Roger observed, choking with desire, Stanley’s very black phallus and red, wet glans, growing thick before his eyes. “Two pounds if you suck it,” Roger heard him say. “Then, I’ll take you up the ass.” He agreed, kneeling. Afterward, in his hotel room, he wrote in his diary: “Public bath. Stanley Weeks, athletic, young, 27. Enormous, very hard, 9 inches at least. Kisses, bites, penetration with a shout. Two pounds.”

  Roger, Omarino, and Arédomi left Barbados for Pará on September 5 on the Boniface, an uncomfortable, small, crowded ship that smelled bad and had dreadful food. But Roger enjoyed the passage to Pará because of Dr. Herbert Spencer Dickey, a North American physician. He had worked for Arana’s company in El Encanto and, in addition to corroborating the horrors that Roger already knew about, he recounted many anecdotes, some savage and others amusing, about his experiences in Putumayo. He turned out to be a man of adventurous spirit, sensitive and well-read, who had traveled half the world. It was pleasant to watch nightfall on the deck sitting beside him, smoking, drinking whiskey from the bottle, and listening to his intelligent comments. Dr. Dickey approved the efforts made by Great Britain and the United States to remedy the atrocities in Amazonia, but he was a fatalist and a skeptic: things would not change there, not today or in the future.

  “We carry wickedness in our souls, my friend,” he said, half joking, half serious. “We won’t be rid of it so easily. In the countries of Europe, and in mine, it is more disguised and reveals itself only when there’s a war, a revolution, a riot. It needs pretexts to become public and collective. In Amazonia, on the other hand, it can reveal itself openly and perpetrate the worst monstrosities without the justifications of patriotism or religion. Only pure, hard greed. The evil that poisons us is everywhere human beings are, its roots buried deep in our hearts.”

  But immediately after making these lugubrious statements, he would tell a joke or recount an anecdote that seemed to disprove them. Roger enjoyed talking to Dr. Dickey, even though, at the same time, it depressed him a little. The Boniface reached Pará on September 10 at noon. All the time he had been there as consul, he had felt frustrated and suffocated. Still, several days before arriving in the port he experienced waves of desire as he thought about the Praça do Palácio. He would go there at night to pick up one of the boys who strolled there looking for clients or adventures under the trees, wearing very tight trousers that showed off their ass and testicles.

  He stayed at the Hotel do Comércio, feeling in his body the rebirth of the old fever that took possession of him when he undertook those walks on the Praça. He recalled—or was he inventing them?—some names from those encounters that generally ended in a nearby shabby hotel or, at times, in a dark corner on the grass in the park. He anticipated those rapid, unplanned meetings, feeling his heart racing. But tonight he was unlucky, too, because Marco, Olympio, and Bebé (were those their names?) did not appear, and instead he was almost assaulted by two ragged vagrants who were practically children. One tried to put a hand in his pocket, looking for a wallet he did not carry, while the other asked him for directions. He got rid of them by giving one a shove that sent him rolling on the ground. When they saw his decisive attitude, they ran away. He returned to the hotel in a fury. He calmed down
by writing in his diary: “Praça do Palácio: a thick, very hard one. Breathless. Drops of blood on my underwear. A pleasurable pain.”

  The next morning he visited the British consul and some European and Brazilian acquaintances from his previous stay in Pará. His inquiries were useful. He located at least two fugitives from Putumayo. The consul and the local police chief assured him that José Inocente Fonseca and Alfredo Montt, after spending some time on a plantation on the banks of the Yavarí River, were now settled in Manaus, where Casa Arana had found them work in the port as customs inspectors. Roger immediately telegraphed the Foreign Office to ask the Brazilian authorities for an arrest order for this pair of criminals. And three days later they responded that Petrópolis looked favorably on this request. It would immediately order the Manaus police to arrest Montt and Fonseca. They would not be extradited but tried in Brazil instead.

  His second and third nights in Pará were more fruitful than the first. At nightfall on the second day, a barefoot boy selling flowers practically offered himself when Roger sounded him out, asking the price of a bouquet of roses he had in his hand. They went to a small cleared lot where, in the shadows, Roger heard the panting of couples. These street encounters, in precarious conditions always full of risk, infused him with contradictory feelings: excitement and disgust. The flower seller smelled of armpits, but his thick breath and hot body and the strength of his embrace heated him and led very quickly to a climax. When he walked into the Hotel do Comércio, he realized that his trousers were dirty and stained, and the receptionist was looking at him in surprise. “I was attacked,” he told him.

  The next night, on the Praça do Palácio, he had another encounter, this time with a young man who asked him for money. He invited him for a stroll, and at a kiosk they had a glass of rum. João took him to a hut of cane and rushes in an impoverished district. As they undressed and made love in the dark on a fiber mat on the dirt floor, listening to dogs barking, Roger was sure that at any moment he would feel the edge of a knife on his head or the blow of a stick. He was prepared: at times like this he never carried much money or his watch or silver pen, just a few bills and coins so he could let himself be robbed and placate the thieves. But nothing happened. João accompanied him to the area near his hotel and said goodbye, biting his mouth with a great guffaw. The next day, Roger discovered that João or the flower seller had given him crabs. He had to go to a pharmacy to buy calomel, which was always disagreeable: the druggist—it was worse if she was a woman—would stare at him in a way that embarrassed him or, at times, give him a complicit little smile that both disconcerted and enraged him.

  The best but also the worst experience in the twelve days he was in Pará was his visit to the Da Mattas. They were the closest friends he had made during his stay in the city: Junio, a road engineer, and his wife, Irene, who painted watercolors. Young, good-looking, joyful, easygoing, they exhaled love of life. They had a charming little girl, María, with large laughing eyes. Roger had met them at a social gathering or an official ceremony, because Junio worked for the Department of Public Works in the local government. They saw one another frequently, walked along the river, went to the movies and the theater. They welcomed their old friend with open arms. They took him to supper at a restaurant that served very spicy Bahian food, and little María, who was five years old, danced and sang for him, making amusing faces.

  That night, lying awake for a long time in his bed at the Hotel do Comércio, Roger fell into one of the depressions that had accompanied him almost his entire life, especially after a day or series of sexual encounters on the street. It saddened him to know he would never have a home like the one the Da Mattas had, that his life would be more and more solitary as he grew older. He paid dearly for those minutes of mercenary pleasure. He would die without having tasted that warm intimacy, a wife with whom to discuss the day’s events and plan the future—travels, vacations, dreams—or children to carry on his name and memory when he had left this world. His old age, if he ever had one, would be like that of stray animals. And just as miserable, for even though he had earned a decent salary as a diplomat, he had never been able to save because of the number of donations he gave to humanitarian associations that fought against slavery, for the survival of primitive peoples and cultures, and now, the organizations defending Gaelic and the traditions of Ireland.

  But even more than all that, it embittered him to think he would die without having known true love, a shared love, like Junio and Irene’s, the silent complicity and intelligence one could guess at between them, the tenderness with which they held hands or exchanged smiles, seeing little María’s enthusiasm. As usual during these crises, he lay awake for many hours, and when he finally managed to sleep, he sensed the languid figure of his mother taking shape in the shadows of his room.

  On September 22, Roger, Omarino, and Arédomi left Pará for Manaus on the steamboat Hildebrand of the Booth Line, an ugly, calamitous ship. The six days they spent sailing to Manaus were torture for Roger, because of the narrowness of his cabin, the pervasive filth, the execrable food, and the clouds of mosquitoes that attacked the passengers from dusk to dawn.

  As soon as they disembarked in Manaus, Roger resumed the hunt for fugitives from Putumayo. Accompanied by the British consul, he went to see the governor, Senhor Dos Reis, who confirmed that an order had come from the central government in Petrópolis to arrest Montt and Fonseca. And why hadn’t the police detained them yet? The governor gave him an answer he thought either stupid or a simple pretext: they had been waiting for his arrival. Could they do it right now, before the two birds flew? They would do it today.

  The consul and Roger, with the arrest order from Petrópolis, had to make two trips back and forth between the government offices and the police. Finally, the police chief sent two officers to detain Montt and Fonseca in the customs office in the port.

  The next morning, the crestfallen British consul came to announce to Roger that the arrest attempt had had a grotesque, farcical outcome. He had just been informed by the chief of police, who begged a thousand pardons and promised to make amends, that the two officers sent to arrest Montt and Fonseca knew them, and before taking them to the police station, they all went to have a few beers. They had become very drunk, and the criminals had fled. Since one couldn’t discount the possibility they had received money to allow their escape, the police in question were under arrest. If corruption were proven, they would be severely punished. “I’m sorry, Sir Roger,” the consul said, “but even though I didn’t say anything to you, I expected something like this. You were a diplomat in Brazil, and you know this kind of thing all too well. It’s normal here.”

  Roger felt so ill that the vexation increased his physical indisposition. He stayed in bed most of the time with fever and muscular pains as he waited for the ship to Iquitos to sail. One afternoon, as he struggled against the feeling of impotence that overcame him, he fantasized in his diary: “Three lovers in one night, two sailors among them. They fucked me six times! I walked back to the hotel, my legs wide like a woman in labor.” In the middle of his bad humor, the barbarity he had written made him laugh out loud. He, so well bred and polished in his vocabulary with other people, always felt, in the privacy of his diary, an irresistible need to write obscenities. For reasons he didn’t understand, salacious language made him feel better.

  The Hildebrand continued the journey on October 3, and after a rough voyage with torrential rains and an encounter with a small embankment, it reached Iquitos at dawn on October 6, 1911. Waiting for him at the port, hat in hand, was Stirs. His replacement, George Michell, along with his wife, would arrive soon. The consul was finding a house for them. This time Roger didn’t stay at his residence but in the Hotel Amazonas, near the Plaza de Armas, while Stirs took Omarino and Arédomi with him temporarily. Both boys had decided to remain in the city and work as domestic servants instead of returning to Putumayo. Stirs promised to take care of finding them a family that wanted to employ
them and would treat them well.

  As Roger feared, given what had happened in Brazil, the news here wasn’t encouraging either. Stirs didn’t know how many of the long list of 237 Casa Arana managers presumed guilty, whom Dr. Valcárcel had ordered to be arrested after receiving Rómulo Paredes’s report on his expedition to Putumayo, had actually been detained. He hadn’t been able to find out because a strange silence reigned in Iquitos regarding the subject, as well as the whereabouts of Judge Valcárcel. He had been impossible to locate for several weeks. The general manager of the Peruvian Amazon Company, Pablo Zumaeta, who appeared on that list, seemed to be in hiding, but Stirs assured Roger his concealment was a farce because Arana’s brother-in-law and his wife, Petronila, showed up at restaurants and local fiestas and no one bothered them.

  Later, Roger would remember these eight weeks in Iquitos as a slow shipwreck, a gradual sinking into a sea of intrigues, false rumors, flagrant or intractable lies, contradictions, a world where no one told the truth because that made enemies and problems or, more frequently, because people lived inside a system in which it was practically impossible to distinguish falsehood from truth, reality from a swindle. Ever since his years in the Congo, he had known that desperate feeling of having fallen into quicksand, a muddy ground that swallowed him up and where his efforts served only to plunge him deeper into a viscous substance that would eventually engulf him. He had to get out right away!

  The day after his arrival he went to visit the prefect of Iquitos. Again, there was a new one. Señor Adolfo Gamarra—heavy mustache, prominent belly, lit cigar, nervous clammy hands—received him in his office with embraces and congratulations: