“Thanks to you,” he said, opening his arms theatrically and clapping his hands, “a monstrous social injustice has been uncovered in the heart of Amazonia. The Peruvian government and people have acknowledged you, Señor Casement.”
Immediately afterward he added that the report the Peruvian government had charged Judge Valcárcel with writing to satisfy the requirements of the British government was “formidable” and “devastating.” It consisted of close to three thousand pages and confirmed all the accusations Britain had transmitted to President Leguía.
But when Roger asked if he could have a copy of the report, the prefect replied that this was a state document and it lay outside his jurisdiction to authorize a foreigner to read it. The honorable consul ought to present a request in Lima to the supreme government, through official channels, and he undoubtedly would obtain permission. When Roger asked what he could do to have an interview with Judge Valcárcel, the prefect became very serious and recited in a single breath:
“I have no idea where Dr. Valcárcel is. His mission has ended and I understand he’s left the country.”
Roger left the prefecture completely stunned. What was really going on? This individual had told him nothing but lies. That same afternoon he went to the offices of El Oriente to speak with its editor, Dr. Rómulo Paredes. He found a very dark-skinned, graying man of about fifty in his shirtsleeves, covered with perspiration, irresolute, in the grip of panic. As soon as Roger began to speak, he silenced him with a peremptory gesture that seemed to say: Careful, the walls have ears. He took him by the arm and led him to a small bar on the corner called La Chipirona. He had him sit at an isolated table.
“I beg you to forgive me, Consul,” he said, always looking around him with suspicion. “I can’t and shouldn’t tell you very much. I’m in a very compromised situation. If people were to see me with you it would represent a great risk to me.”
He looked pale, his voice trembled, and he had begun to bite a nail. He ordered a glass of brandy and drank it down. He listened in silence to Roger’s account of his interview with Prefect Gamarra.
“He’s a supreme hypocrite,” he said at last, emboldened by his drink. “Gamarra has a report of mine, corroborating all of Judge Valcárcel’s accusations. I gave it to him in July. More than three months have passed and he hasn’t sent it to Lima. Why do you think he’s kept it so long? Because everybody knows that Prefect Adolfo Gamarra is, like half of Iquitos, also an employee of Arana’s.”
As for Judge Valcárcel, Dr. Paredes said he had left the country. He didn’t know where he had gone but did know that if the judge had remained in Iquitos, he would have been a corpse by now. He stood abruptly:
“Which is what will probably happen to me at any moment, Consul.” He wiped away perspiration as he spoke and Roger thought he was going to burst into tears. “Because I, unfortunately, can’t leave. I have a wife and children and my only occupation is the paper.”
He left without even saying goodbye. Roger went back to see the prefect, infuriated. Señor Gamarra admitted that, in fact, the report written by Dr. Paredes couldn’t be sent to Lima “because of logistical problems, happily resolved.” It would go out this week without fail, “and with a courier for greater security, for President Leguía himself is urgently demanding it.”
It was all like this. Roger felt rocked in a lulling eddy, going around and around in place, manipulated by tortuous, invisible forces. All the measures, promises, pieces of information fell apart and dissolved without the facts ever corresponding to the words. What was done and what was said were worlds apart. Words negated facts and facts gave the lie to words and it all functioned in a generalized fraud, a chronic divorce between saying and doing that everyone practiced.
During the week, he made multiple inquiries regarding Judge Valcárcel. Like Saldaña Roca, he inspired respect, affection, pity, and admiration in Roger. Everyone promised to help him, find out, take him the message, locate him, but he was sent from one place to another without anyone offering any serious explanation about the judge’s situation. Finally, seven days after arriving in Iquitos, he managed to escape his maddening web thanks to an Englishman who lived in the city. Mr. F. J. Harding, manager of John Lilly & Company, was a tall, robust bachelor, almost bald, and one of the few businessmen in Iquitos who did not seem to dance to the tune of the Peruvian Amazon Company.
“No one is telling you or will tell you what has happened to Judge Valcárcel because they’re afraid to find themselves involved in the imbroglio, Sir Roger.” They were talking in Mr. Harding’s small house near the embankment. On the walls were engravings of Scottish castles. They were having a coconut drink. “Arana’s connections in Lima arranged for Judge Valcárcel to be dismissed, accused of lying and I don’t know how many other falsehoods. The poor man, if he’s alive, must bitterly regret the worst mistake of his life: accepting this assignment. He came to put his head in the lion’s mouth and has paid dearly for it. He was highly respected in Lima, it seems. Now they’ve dragged him through the mud and perhaps killed him. No one knows where he is. I hope he did leave. Talking about him in Iquitos has become taboo.”
In fact, the story of the upright and fearless Dr. Carlos A. Valcárcel who came to Iquitos to investigate the “horrors of Putumayo” could not be sadder. Roger reconstructed it in the course of these weeks as if it were a puzzle. When he had the audacity to issue an arrest order against 237 people for alleged crimes, almost all of them connected to the Peruvian Amazon Company, a shudder ran through Amazonia, not only in the Peruvian Amazon but the Colombian and Brazilian as well. The machinery of Julio C. Arana’s empire immediately denounced the blow and began a counteroffensive. The police could locate only nine of the 237 men incriminated. Of these, the only really important one was Aurelio Rodríguez, one of the section chiefs in Putumayo, responsible for a long criminal record of abductions, rapes, mutilations, kidnappings, and murders. But the nine men arrested, including Rodríguez, presented a writ of habeas corpus in the Superior Court of Iquitos and the court granted them provisional freedom while it studied their documents.
“Unfortunately,” the prefect said to Roger without blinking, putting on a deeply sorrowful face, “these bad citizens, taking advantage of their provisional freedom, fled. As you must know, it will be difficult to find them in the immensity of Amazonia if the Superior Court revalidates the arrest order.”
The court was in no hurry to do so, for when Roger went to ask the judges when they would review the documents, they explained that this was done “following a strict first-come-first-served order of cases.” A large number of cases were in line “ahead of the one that interests you.” One of the court clerks permitted himself to add, in a mocking tone:
“Here justice is sure but slow, and these procedures can last for many years, Consul.”
Pablo Zumaeta, from his supposed hiding place, orchestrated the judicial offensive against Judge Valcárcel through figureheads, initiating multiple denunciations for prevarication, embezzlement, false witness, and various other crimes. One morning a Bora woman and her daughter, only a few years old, accompanied by an interpreter, came to the Iquitos police station to accuse Judge Valcárcel of “an attempt against the honor of a minor.” The judge had to spend most of his time defending himself against slanderous fabrications, making statements, delivering and writing communications instead of devoting himself to the investigation that had brought him to the jungle. The entire world was falling down on him. The small hotel where he was staying, the Yurimaguas, evicted him. He did not find an inn or a pension in the city that would dare take him in. He had to rent a small room in Nanay, a district filled with garbage dumps and standing pools of foul water, where at night he heard rats running beneath his hammock and he stepped on cockroaches.
Roger learned all of this piece by piece, the details whispered here and there, while his admiration grew for the magistrate whose hand he would have liked to shake and whom he wanted to congratulate for his
decency and courage. What had happened to him? The only thing he could find out with certainty, though the word certainty did not seem to have firm roots in the soil of Iquitos, was that when the order to dismiss him came from Lima, Carlos A. Valcárcel had already disappeared. From then on no one in the city could say where he was. Had they killed him? The story of the journalist Benjamín Saldaña Roca was being repeated. Hostility toward him had been so great he had no choice but to run. In a second interview, in the house of Stirs, Rómulo Paredes told him:
“I myself advised Judge Valcárcel to move before they killed him, Sir Roger. He had already received a fair number of warnings.”
What kind of warnings? Provocations in the restaurants and bars where Judge Valcárcel went to eat or have a beer. Suddenly a drunk would insult him and challenge him to a fight, displaying a knife. If the judge made an accusation to the police or at the Prefecture, they had him fill out interminable forms, recounting the facts in detail, and assured him “they would investigate his complaint.”
Roger soon felt as Judge Valcárcel must have felt before he escaped Iquitos or was annihilated by one of the killers on Arana’s payroll: deceived wherever he went, turned into the laughingstock of a community of puppets whose strings were moved by the Peruvian Amazon Company, which all of Iquitos obeyed with base subservience.
He had proposed returning to Putumayo, though it was evident that if here in the city Arana’s company had successfully mocked the sanctions and avoided the announced reforms, on the rubber plantations everything would be the same or worse than before as far as the indigenous people were concerned. Rómulo Paredes, Stirs, and Prefect Gamarra urged him to give up that trip.
“You won’t get out alive, and your death will serve no purpose,” the editor of El Oriente assured him. “Señor Casement, I’m sorry to tell you this, but you’re the most hated man in Putumayo. Not even Saldaña Roca, or the gringo Hardenburg, or Judge Valcárcel are as despised as you. It was a miracle I came back alive from Putumayo. But that miracle won’t be repeated if you go there to be crucified. Besides, do you know something? The most absurd thing will be that they’ll have you killed with poisoned darts from the blowguns of the Boras and Huitotos you’re defending. Don’t go, don’t be foolish. Don’t commit suicide.”
As soon as Prefect Gamarra learned of his preparations to travel to Putumayo, he came to see him at the Hotel Amazonas. He was very alarmed. He took him to have a beer at a bar where they played Brazilian music. It was the only time Roger thought the official spoke to him with sincerity.
“I beg you to reject this madness, Señor Casement,” he said, looking him in the eye. “I have no way to guarantee your protection. I’m sorry to tell you that, but it’s the truth. I don’t want the burden of your corpse on my service record. It would be the end of my career. I tell you this with my heart in my hand. You won’t reach Putumayo. I’ve arranged, with great effort, for no one to touch you here. It hasn’t been easy, I swear. I’ve had to beg and threaten the men who give the orders. But my authority disappears beyond the city limits. Don’t go to Putumayo. For your sake and for mine. For the sake of what you love best, don’t ruin my future. I’m speaking to you as a friend, truly.”
But what finally made him give up the trip was an unexpected, abrupt visitor in the middle of the night. He was already lying down and about to fall asleep when the reception clerk of the Hotel Amazonas knocked on his door. A gentleman was asking for him and said it was very urgent. He dressed, went downstairs, and saw Juan Tizón. He had lost track of him since his travels to Putumayo, when this high official in the Peruvian Amazon Company collaborated so loyally with the commission. He wasn’t even a shadow of the self-confident man Roger recalled. He looked aged, exhausted, and above all demoralized.
They looked for a quiet place but it was impossible because the Iquitos night was filled with noise, drunkenness, gambling, and sex. They resigned themselves to sitting in the Pim Pam, a bar-nightclub where they had to get rid of two Brazilian mulattas who pestered them to dance. They ordered a couple of beers.
Always with the gentlemanly air and elegant manners that Roger remembered, Tizón spoke to him in a way that seemed absolutely sincere.
“Nothing of what the company put forward has been done, in spite of the fact that after the request from President Leguía, we agreed to it at a meeting of the board of directors. When I presented my report, everyone, including Pablo Zumaeta and Arana’s brothers and other brothers-in-law, agreed with me that radical improvements had to be made at the stations. To avoid problems with the law and for moral, Christian reasons. Sheer prattle. Nothing has been or will be done.”
He told him that except for instructing its employees in Putumayo to take precautions and erase all traces of past abuses—make the corpses disappear, for example—the company had facilitated the flight of the most important of the men incriminated in the report London sent to the Peruvian government. The system of harvesting rubber with a coerced indigenous labor force continued as before.
“It was enough for me to set foot in Iquitos to realize nothing had changed,” Roger agreed. “And you, Don Juan?”
“I’m returning to Lima next week and don’t think I’ll be back here. My situation in the Peruvian Amazon Company became untenable. I preferred to leave before they could dismiss me. They’ll buy back my shares, but at a miserable price. In Lima, I’ll have to work at other things. I don’t regret that in spite of having lost ten years of my life working for Arana. Even if I have to start at zero, I feel better. After what we saw in Putumayo, I felt dirty and guilty in the company. I consulted with my wife, and she supports me.”
They spoke for close to an hour. Tizón also insisted that Roger not go back to Putumayo for any reason: he wouldn’t accomplish anything except their killing him and, perhaps, their becoming enraged in one of those excesses of cruelty he had already seen in his travels to the plantations.
Roger devoted himself to preparing a new report for the Foreign Office. He explained that no reforms at all had been made or the slightest punishment administered to the criminals of the Peruvian Amazon Company. There was no hope anything would be done in the future. The fault lay as much with the firm of Julio C. Arana as with the public administration and, perhaps, the entire country. In Iquitos, the Peruvian government was nothing more than Arana’s agent. The power of his company was so great that all political, police, and judicial institutions worked actively to permit it to continue exploiting the indigenous workers at no risk, because all the officials either received money or feared reprisals from it.
As if wanting to prove him right, during this time the Superior Court in Iquitos suddenly halted the review the nine arrested men had requested. The stoppage was a masterpiece of cynicism: all judicial action was suspended until the 237 persons on the list drawn up by Judge Valcárcel could be detained. With only a small group of prisoners, any investigation would be incomplete and illegal, the judges decreed. So the nine were definitively free and the case suspended until the police could bring all 237 suspects to trial, something, of course, that never would happen.
A few days later another event, even more grotesque, took place in Iquitos, putting Roger’s capacity for astonishment to the test. As he was going from his hotel to Stirs’s house, he saw people crowded into two locations that seemed to be state offices, since their façades displayed the seal and flag of Peru. What was going on?
“Municipal elections,” explained Stirs in his thin voice, which was so disinterested it seemed impervious to emotion. “Very peculiar elections, because according to Peruvian election law, to have the right to vote you must own property and know how to read and write. This reduces the number of electors to a few hundred people. In reality, the elections are decided in the offices of Casa Arana. The names of the winners and the percentage of votes they receive.”
It must have been true because that night, at a small rally on the Plaza de Armas, which Roger observed from a distance, bands played and
brandy was distributed as they celebrated the election of Don Pablo Zumaeta as the new mayor of Iquitos! Julio C. Arana’s brother-in-law emerged from his “hiding place” indemnified by the people of Iquitos—that’s how he expressed it in his acceptance speech—from the slanders of the British–Colombian conspiracy, determined to continue fighting unyieldingly against the enemies of Peru and for the progress of Amazonia. After the distribution of alcoholic beverages, there was folk dancing with fireworks, guitars, and drums that lasted until dawn. Roger chose to withdraw to his hotel to escape being lynched.
George Michell and his wife finally arrived in Iquitos on a ship out of Manaus, on November 30, 1911. Roger was already packing for his departure. The arrival of the new British consul was preceded by frantic efforts by Stirs and Roger himself to find a house for the couple. “Great Britain has fallen into disgrace here because of you, Sir Roger,” the outgoing consul told him. “Nobody wants to rent me a house for the Michells, even though I’m offering to pay a surcharge. Everyone’s afraid of offending Arana, everyone refuses.” Roger asked Rómulo Paredes for help, and the editor of El Oriente solved the problem for them. He rented the house and sublet it to the British consulate. It was an old, dirty house that had to be renovated against the clock and furnished somehow to receive its new tenants. Mrs. Michell was a cheerful, strong-willed woman whom Roger met for the first time at the foot of the gangplank, in the port, on the day of their arrival. She was not disheartened by the state of her new home or the town she had set foot in for the first time. She seemed immune to discouragement. Without delay, even before unpacking, she set about cleaning everything with energy and good humor.
Roger had a long conversation with his old friend and colleague, George Michell, in Stirs’s small living room. He informed him in detail about the situation and didn’t hide a single one of the difficulties he would face in his new position. Michell, a plump, lively man in his forties who manifested the same energy as his wife in all his gestures and movements, took notes in a small notebook, with brief pauses to ask for clarifications. Then, instead of appearing demoralized or complaining at the prospect of what awaited him in Iquitos, he only said, with a large smile: “Now I know what’s at stake and I’m ready for the struggle.”
The Dream of the Celt: A Novel Page 29