The Dream of the Celt: A Novel

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  During his last two weeks in Iquitos, the demon of sex once again took irresistible possession of Roger. On his previous stay he had been very prudent, but now, in spite of knowing the hostility so many people connected to the rubber business felt toward him, and the kind of trap they could lay for him, he didn’t hesitate to go out at night to stroll on the embankment along the river, where there were always women and men looking for clients. This was how he met Alcibíades Ruiz, if that was his name. He took him to the Hotel Amazonas. The night porter had no objection after Roger gave him a tip. Alcibíades agreed to pose for him, assuming the postures of classical statues that he indicated. After some bargaining he agreed to undress. Alcibíades was a mestizo, white and Indian, a cholo, and Roger noted in his diary that this racial mix produced a man of great physical beauty, even greater than that of the caboclos of Brazil, in whom indigenous gentleness and sweetness mixed with the coarse virility of the descendants of Spaniards. Alcibíades and he kissed and touched but did not make love that day or the next, when Alcibíades returned to the hotel. It was morning and Roger was able to photograph him naked, in various poses. When he left, Roger wrote in his diary: “Alcibíades Ruiz. Cholo. Dancer’s movements. Thin and long, when it got hard it curved like a bow. Entered me like hand in glove.”

  During this time, Rómulo Paredes was attacked on the street. When he left the print shop of his newspaper, three nasty-looking individuals stinking of alcohol assaulted him. According to what he told Roger, whom he came to see in his hotel immediately after the episode, they would have beaten him to death if he hadn’t been armed, and he frightened his three aggressors when he fired in the air. He had a suitcase with him. Don Rómulo was so shaken by what had happened he wouldn’t go out for a drink as Roger suggested. His resentment and indignation toward the Peruvian Amazon Company knew no limits:

  “I was always Casa Arana’s loyal collaborator and satisfied them in everything they wished,” he complained.

  They had sat on two corners of the bed and spoke in semidarkness, because the flame of the gas lamp barely lit a corner of the room. “When I was a judge and when I started El Oriente, I never opposed their requests, even though they often were repugnant to my conscience. But I’m a realistic man, Consul, I know which battles can’t be won. This commission, going to Putumayo on assignment from Judge Valcárcel, I never wanted to take it on. From the beginning I knew I’d be in trouble. They obliged me to. Pablo Zumaeta in person demanded it. I made this trip only because I was following his orders. My report, before I turned it in to the prefect, I gave it to Señor Zumaeta to read. He returned it without comment. Doesn’t that mean he accepted it? Only then did I give it to the prefect. And now it turns out they’ve declared war on me and want to kill me. This attack is a warning for me to get out of Iquitos. And go where? I have a wife, five children, and two serving girls, Señor Casement. Have you ever seen anything like the ingratitude of these people? I suggest you leave right away too. Your life is in danger, Sir Roger. Until now nothing’s happened to you, because they think if they kill an Englishman, especially a diplomat, there’ll be an international incident. But don’t trust that. Those scruples can disappear in any drunken brawl. Take my advice and leave, my friend.”

  “I’m not an Englishman, I’m Irish,” Roger corrected him gently.

  Rómulo Paredes handed him the suitcase he had brought with him.

  “Here are all the documents I compiled in Putumayo, on which I based my work. I was right not to give them to Prefect Gamarra. They would have met the same fate as my report: eaten by moths in the Prefecture of Iquitos. Take them, I know you’ll put them to good use. But I’m sorry to load you down with another piece of luggage.”

  Roger left four days later, after saying goodbye to Omarino and Arédomi. Stirs had placed them in a carpentry shop in Nanay where, in addition to working as domestics for the owner, a Bolivian, they would be his apprentices. In the port, where Stirs and Michell came to say goodbye, Roger learned that the volume of rubber exported in the past two months had surpassed the previous year’s record. What better proof that nothing had changed, that the Huitotos, Boras, Andoques, and the rest of the indigenous groups in Putumayo were still being squeezed without mercy?

  For the five days of the voyage to Manaus, he barely left his cabin. He felt demoralized, sick, and disgusted with himself. He barely ate and went on deck only when the heat in the narrow room became unbearable. As they sailed down the Amazon and the riverbed widened and the banks were lost from view, he thought he would never return to this jungle. And about the paradox—he had often thought the same thing in Africa, navigating on the Congo River—that this majestic landscape with its flocks of pink herons and screeching parrots that sometimes flew overhead, and the wake of small fish following the ship, leaping and doing tricks as if to attract the passengers’ attention, harbored in the interior of these jungles vertiginous suffering caused by the greed of the avid, cruel men he had known in Putumayo. He thought of Arana’s motionless face at the meeting of the board of directors of the Peruvian Amazon Company in London. He swore again that he would fight until the last drop of energy in his body to see him punished, this small, well-groomed man who had set in motion and was the principal beneficiary of the machinery that crushed human beings with impunity to satisfy his hunger for riches. Who would dare say now that Julio C. Arana didn’t know what was going on in Putumayo? He had put on a show to deceive everyone—the Peruvian government, the British above all—in order to continue extracting rubber from jungles as mistreated as the indigenous peoples who inhabited them.

  In Manaus, where he arrived in the middle of December, he felt better. While he waited for a ship that would leave for Pará and Barbados, he could work in his hotel room, adding comments and details to his report. He spent one afternoon with the British consul, who confirmed that in spite of his demands, the Brazilian authorities had done nothing effective to capture Montt and Agüero or the other fugitives. It was rumored everywhere that several of Arana’s managers in Putumayo now worked for the Madeira–Mamoré railroad that was under construction.

  For the week he stayed in Manaus, Roger led a spartan life, not going out at night in search of adventures. He would take walks along the riverbanks and streets of the city, and when he wasn’t working spent many hours reading the books on the ancient history of Ireland recommended to him by Alice Stopford Green. A passion for his country’s affairs would help rid his mind of images of Putumayo and the intrigues, lies, and abuses of the widespread political corruption he had seen in Iquitos. But it wasn’t easy to concentrate on Irish affairs, for he constantly thought he had not finished his assignment and would have to bring it to its conclusion in London.

  On December 17 he set sail for Pará, where he finally found a communication from the Foreign Office. They had received his telegrams sent from Iquitos and were aware that in spite of the Peruvian government’s promises, nothing real had been done against the excesses in Putumayo except for permitting the escape of those accused.

  On Christmas Eve, he left for Barbados on the Denis, a comfortable ship carrying barely a handful of passengers. It was a calm crossing to Bridgetown. There, the Foreign Office had reserved passage for him on the S.S. Terence, bound for New York. The British authorities had decided to take energetic action against the British company responsible for events in Putumayo and wanted the United States to join their effort and protest together to the government of Peru for its unwillingness to respond to the demands of public opinion.

  In the capital of Barbados, as he waited for the ship to sail, Roger’s life was as chaste as it had been in Manaus: not one visit to the public bath, not one nocturnal escapade. He had reentered one of those periods of sexual abstinence that on occasion lasted many months. At times his mind became filled with religious concerns. In Bridgetown he visited Father Smith every day. He had long conversations with him about the New Testament, which he usually carried with him on his journeys. He reread it from t
ime to time, alternating this reading with the Irish poets, above all Yeats, some of whose poems he had memorized. He attended a Mass at the convent of the Ursulines and, as had happened to him before, felt the desire to take communion. He told Father Smith and he, smiling, reminded him he wasn’t a Catholic but a member of the Anglican Church. If he wanted to convert, he offered to help him take the first steps. Roger was tempted but changed his mind, thinking about the weaknesses and sins he would have to confess to this good friend, Father Smith.

  On December 31 he left on the S.S. Terence for New York, and immediately upon arriving, without time even to admire the skyscrapers, took the train to Washington, D.C. The British ambassador, James Bryce, surprised him by announcing that the president of the United States, William Howard Taft, had agreed to see him. He and his advisers wanted to hear from the mouth of Sir Roger, who personally knew what was going on in Putumayo and was a man trusted by the British government, the situation on the rubber plantations, and whether the campaign being waged in the United States and Great Britain by various churches, humanitarian organizations, and liberal journalists and publications was true or sheer demagoguery and exaggeration, as the rubber enterprises and the Peruvian government insisted.

  Staying in the residence of Ambassador Bryce, treated like royalty and hearing himself called Sir Roger wherever he went, he visited a barbershop and had his hair and beard trimmed and his nails manicured. And he renewed his wardrobe in the elegant shops of Washington. Often during this time he thought about the contradictions in his life. Less than two weeks before he had been a poor devil threatened with death in a run-down hotel in Iquitos, and now, an Irishman who dreamed about the independence of Ireland, he was the embodiment of an official sent by the British Crown to persuade the president of the United States to help the Empire demand that the Peruvian government respond forcefully to the ignominy of Amazonia. Wasn’t life an absurdity, a dramatic representation that suddenly turned into farce?

  The three days he spent in Washington were dizzying: daily working sessions with officials from the State Department and a long personal interview with the secretary for foreign relations. On the third day he was received at the White House by President Taft in the company of several advisers and the secretary of state. For an instant, before beginning his exposition on Putumayo, Roger had a hallucination: he wasn’t there as a diplomatic representative of the British Crown but as a special envoy of the recently constituted Republic of Ireland. He had been sent by his provisional government to defend the reasons that had led the immense majority of the Irish, in a plebiscite, to break their connections to Great Britain and proclaim independence. The new Ireland wanted to maintain relations of friendship and cooperation with the United States, with whom they shared a devotion to democracy and where a large community of people of Irish background lived.

  Roger fulfilled his obligations impeccably. The meeting was supposed to last half an hour but was three times as long, for President Taft, who listened with great attention to his report on the situation of the indigenous people in Putumayo, asked many thoughtful questions and solicited his opinion regarding the best way to oblige the Peruvian government to put an end to the crimes on the rubber plantations. Roger’s suggestion that the United States open a consulate in Iquitos, which would work together with the British to denounce the abuses was well received by the president. And, in fact, a few weeks later, the United States sent a career diplomat, Stuart J. Fuller, to Iquitos as consul.

  More than the words he heard, the surprise and indignation with which President Taft and his colleagues listened to his report convinced Roger that from now on the United States would collaborate in a decisive way with Britain in denouncing the situation of the Amazonian Indians.

  In London, even though his physical condition was constantly weakened by fatigue and old ailments, he dedicated himself body and soul to completing his new report for the Foreign Office, demonstrating that the Peruvian authorities had not carried out the promised reforms and the Peruvian Amazon Company had boycotted every initiative, making life impossible for Judge Valcárcel and keeping in the Prefecture the report by Rómulo Paredes, whom they had attempted to kill for having described impartially what he had witnessed during the four months (from March 15 to July 15) he spent on Arana’s rubber plantations. Roger began to translate into English a selection of the testimonies, interviews, and various documents Paredes had given him in Iquitos. This material enriched his own report considerably.

  He did this at night, because his days were filled with meetings at the Foreign Office where everyone from the chancellor to multiple commissions requested reports, advice, and suggestions regarding the ideas for taking action that the British government was considering. The atrocities a British company was committing in Amazonia that had been the object of a vigorous campaign initiated by the Anti-Slavery Society and Truth was supported now by the liberal press and many religious and humanitarian organizations.

  Roger insisted that the Report on Putumayo be published immediately. He had lost all hope that the silent diplomacy the British government had attempted with President Leguía would have an effect. In spite of resistance from several sectors in the administration, Sir Edward Grey finally agreed and the cabinet approved its publication as a Blue Book. Roger spent many nights awake, smoking constantly and drinking countless cups of coffee, revising the final copy word by word.

  The day the definitive text went to the printer at last, he felt so ill that, fearing something might happen if he were alone, he took refuge in the house of his friend Alice Stopford Green. “You look like a skeleton,” she said, taking him by the arm and leading him to the living room. Roger was shuffling his feet and, in a daze, felt that at any moment he would lose consciousness. Almost immediately he fell asleep or fainted. When he opened his eyes, he saw sitting beside him, together and smiling, his sister Nina and Alice.

  “We thought you would never wake up,” he heard one of them say.

  He had slept close to twenty-four hours. Alice called the family doctor, whose diagnosis was exhaustion. They should let him sleep. He didn’t recall having slept. When he tried to get up his legs folded and he let himself fall back onto the sofa. The Congo didn’t kill me but the Amazon will, he thought.

  After having some light refreshment, he was able to stand, and a car took him to his Philbeach Gardens apartment. He took a long bath that helped clear his mind. But he felt so weak he had to lie down again.

  The Foreign Office obliged him to take a ten-day vacation. He resisted leaving London before the appearance of his report, but he finally agreed to go. Accompanied by Nina, who requested leave from the school where she taught, he spent a week in Cornwall. His fatigue was so great he could barely concentrate on reading. His mind scattered in dissolute images. Thanks to a quiet life and healthy diet, he began recuperating his strength. He could take long walks in the countryside, enjoying some mild days. There could be nothing more different from the pleasant, civilized landscape of Cornwall than Amazonia, and yet, in spite of the well-being and serenity he felt here, seeing the routine of the farmers, the beatific cows grazing, the horses neighing in the stables, with no threat of wild animals, snakes, or mosquitoes, one day he found himself thinking this populated, civilized nature, revealing centuries of agricultural labor in the service of humanity, had lost its state of being part of the natural world—its soul, pantheists would say—compared with the savage, agitated, indomitable, untamed territory of Amazonia, where everything seemed to be coming to life or dying, an unstable, risky, shifting world where a man felt torn out of the present and thrown into the most distant past, in communication with his ancestors, returned to the dawn of human history. And he discovered in surprise that he recalled it all with nostalgia, in spite of the horrors it hid.

  The Blue Book on Putumayo was published in July 1912. From the first day it produced an upheaval that, with London as its center, advanced in concentric waves through all of Europe, the United States
, and many other parts of the world, especially Colombia, Brazil, and Peru. The Times dedicated several pages to it, and an editorial that praised Roger Casement to the skies, saying that once again he had demonstrated exceptional gifts as a “great humanitarian,” and at the same time demanded immediate action against this British company and its shareholders who benefitted financially from an industry that practiced slavery and torture and was exterminating indigenous peoples.

  But the praise that moved Roger most was the article written by Edmund D. Morel, his friend and ally in the campaign against Leopold II, king of the Belgians, in the Daily News. Commenting on Roger’s report, he said of Roger that he “had never seen as much magnetism in a human being as in him.” Always allergic to public display, Roger did not enjoy in any way this new wave of popularity. Rather, he felt uncomfortable and sought to avoid it. But it was difficult because the uproar caused by his document meant that dozens of British, European, and North American publications wanted to interview him. He received invitations to give lectures at academic institutions, political clubs, religious and charitable centers. A special service on the subject was held in Westminster Abbey, and Canon Herbert Henson gave a sermon harshly attacking the stockholders in the Peruvian Amazon Company for reaping profits from the practice of slavery, murder, and mutilation.

  The chargé d’affaires for Great Britain in Peru, Des Graz, reported on the stir caused in Lima by the accusations in Roger’s report. The Peruvian government, fearing an economic boycott by Western countries, announced the immediate implementation of reforms and the dispatch of military and police forces to Putumayo. But Des Graz added that the announcement probably wouldn’t be effective this time either, since there were governmental sectors that viewed the actions cited in Roger’s report as a conspiracy of the British Empire to favor Colombian claims in Putumayo.