The Redemption of Oscar Wolf

by James Bartleman

  One year into his posting, Pilar Lopez y Ordonez, the receptionist, rang Oscar in his office.

  “There’s someone here at the front desk to see you.”

  “Who is it? What does he want?”

  “He wouldn’t give his name. He just said he had something important to say to the Indian. I guess that means you.”

  Pilar was the twenty-two-year- old daughter of an old Colombian family whose ancestors had come with the first wave of Spanish colonists to New Granada in the sixteenth century to look for gold and to establish cattle ranches and coffee plantations. Despite the black roots of her straight, dyed blond hair, her piercing black eyes, and dark brown complexion, she would have been offended if anyone had insinuated that Indian blood ran in her veins. If asked, she would have said that she had nothing against los indios, as she and members of her class disdainfully called Indians, as long as they knew their place: and their place was working for pittances seven days a week and twelve months each year as maids and cooks for the people of her social station. Another place for them, one she and her friends never discussed but tacitly accepted, was that of serving as unwilling sexual partners for their younger brothers, breaking them in, so to speak, before they married respectable women and founded families of their own.

  From the day of Oscar’s arrival at the embassy, Pilar hadn’t liked him because he was un indio, even if a Canadian one. She had naturally treated him with the same indifference and disdain she reserved for los indios in the family home, but wasn’t worried about being fired. She didn’t need her job, or any job for that matter; her family had plenty of money, and she had become a receptionist only to fill in time at a prestigious embassy until she met the right person and got married.

  “He’s over there,” she said to Oscar when he went to the reception area, pointing at a sunburned, full-bearded man who was reading an out-of-date copy of the Globe and Mail. A few minutes later, in Oscar’s office, the visitor identified himself as Luigi Ponti, a doctoral student in anthropology from the University of Verona conducting research on the Cuiva Indians of the tropical rainforest on the Meta River, close to the border with Venezuela. Death squads, he said, hired by ranchers who wanted to drive away the Indians in order to graze cattle on their lands, had moved into the area, burning their villages and shooting them on sight. He had gone to the police but they refused to act. He had spoken to Colombian bureaucrats, called on politicians of all political parties and even approached the newspapers.

  “But nobody wants to do anything about it; they all say they’re afraid of the big landowners and their hired thugs. But I think the real reason is the governing class quietly supports the death squads. Getting rid of the Indians would open up vast areas of the country and be good for national development. I’m now making the rounds of the embassies trying to get them to take an interest in what’s going on down there. So far, I’ve been to see the Americans, the French, the British, and the Dutch. They all told me that nobody back in their capitals is interested in the fate of a few primitive Indians in the jungles of Latin America. Their publics are all out of compassion. The horrors of the war burned them out.”

  “And so you’ve come to me because someone told you I was an Indian?” Oscar asked, pouring shots of aguardiente for his guest and for himself.

  “That’s right,” Luigi said, drinking to Oscar’s health. “I took a chance that you might be interested in the fate of your brothers down here.”

  “I’d like to help, Oscar, honest to God I would,” said Georges Leroux, Canada’s ambassador to Colombia.

  The ambassador had grown up in the 1920s and 1930s in Mexico City, where his father was an expatriate businessman, and had attended a school for the children of rich foreigners and upper class Mexicans. On his way to and from school each day, he could not help but see the poorly dressed, underfed, suffering people, especially the Indians, who came into the city each day in search of work.

  “You have lots of money,” he told his father, “why don’t give some of it to the poor?”

  “I’d like to help, son,” his father had said, “honest to God I really would, but the problem is far too great for any one person to solve.”

  Georges hoped his father was wrong, and after graduation from McGill University in the late 1930s, he joined the Department hoping to make the world a better place. However, his staffing officer posted him to the Canadian embassy in Buenos Aires to spend the war as an assistant to the Canadian trade commissioner. With the resumption of peace in 1945, Georges asked to be sent to the Canadian mission to the United Nations to work on human rights issues, but he had demonstrated such a flair for trade promotion in Argentina that the Department denied his request and sent him as trade commissioner to the Canadian embassy in Havana, Cuba.

  Canada’s ambassador in Havana, however, was a unilingual Anglophone who neither spoke nor had any interest in learning to speak Spanish. And since the great majority of Cubans did not know English, or if they did, preferred to speak their own language with their foreign contacts, the circle of contacts of the head of post was confined to the American and British ambassadors and members of the overseas Canadian community. Georges, who spoke Spanish like a native Cuban, thus became responsible for developing and maintaining links with members of Cuba’s government and power elite.

  The Department quickly promoted him to the rank of deputy ambassador to reflect his new duties and moved him into a fully furnished three-bedroom, four-bathroom house with extensive gardens filled with fragrant yellow and white flowering frangipani plants and chirping crickets. A cook, maid, and gardener, who lived in staff quarters on the grounds discreetly out of sight of the main house, prepared his meals, washed and ironed his clothes, and cut the grass, tended the gardens, and brought him gin and tonic cocktails with snacks whenever he rang a little bell. He became accustomed to cha-cha-cha music and white-tie dinner parties in the hot and humid night air around swimming pools under giant royal palm trees. Profiteroles stuffed with vanilla ice cream and covered in hot chocolate sauce became his dessert of choice. Dom Perignon champagne, Chambertin burgundy, and Château d’Yquem sauterne, purchased at the local diplomatic duty-free shops, became his favourite wines. He relished the atmosphere of the casinos frequented by mobsters from Miami and corrupt government officials and their high-priced call girls. Each time a high roller won or lost millions at the throw of the dice, and whenever bombs placed by revolutionaries trying to overthrow the government exploded nearby, an addictive thrill of excitement, a sense that he was living life on the edge, ran through his body.

  Georges decided that he wanted to spend the rest of his career in Latin American capitals like the Havana of the late 1940s and set aside his youthful enthusiasm for making the world a better place. And because he proved to be so good at promoting trade and making friends with the people who counted in Latin American society, the Department acceded to his desire, and in no time at all he rose to become an ambassador. His son, who attended local private schools in the countries of his service, and who was deeply concerned at the sight of so many beggars on the streets, sometimes asked his father why he never did anything to help the poor, but he never received a satisfactory answer.

  “The Spaniards and then the Colombians have been slaughtering Indians in this country for centuries,” Ambassador Leroux said, continuing to lecture Oscar, “and they’ll keep on slaughtering them until the last one is dead. When they’re not killing Indians, they’re killing each other. In the last three years they’ve murdered a half-million of their own people in some of the most godawful ways. We don’t know what makes these people tick. They’re crazy. I think they like killing people. Outsiders shouldn’t get involved. It wouldn’t do any good if we did.”

  “But we’re living in the twentieth century,” Oscar said. “Canadians helped draft the United Nations Charter and signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Surely we should speak out when we see governments standing by and doing nothing when their Indians
are being killed.”

  “Oscar, I feel like I’m talking to my son. You were a soldier. You’ve seen the Nazi death camps, I presume. You know what man is capable of doing. And yet you’re more than a little naïve. We signed those human rights declarations just for show, just to make us feel better for treating your people, and all the others in Canada who have no power, the way we do, just to make us look good internationally. The Indians will remain at the bottom of the heap for my lifetime at least. I shouldn’t have to tell you all this.”

  “What if I was to go with this anthropologist and see what’s going on for myself and send a report to Ottawa?”

  “What do you think we would do even if you prove the allegations are true?” asked the ambassador, who always associated himself with the Canadian government in his pronouncements. “We would do nothing. And we wouldn’t do anything if we could. In embassies in these places in the middle of nowhere, we don’t care about Indians. What we care about down here is selling asbestos, mining equipment, diesel generators, automobiles, tractors, trucks, bagged flour, and shiploads of beans, anything at all to make a buck and keep Canadians working. When we can’t sell our goods fair and square, we do like our competitors and bribe the hell out of the corrupt bastards in charge to get the deals, even if they just pass on the increased costs to the poor. And when you get right down to it, there’s no real difference between bribing people and killing Indians except the amount of evil involved. We all agreed to get our hands dirty, whether we knew it or not, when we joined the government. We’re all Indian killers, Oscar, even you.”

  Overcome by his admiration of his own eloquence, Georges took Oscar by the hand, squeezed it, and said, “But go for it, Oscar. Go find out what those bastards are really doing, and we’ll see what we can do to help!”

  With his backpack stocked with bottles of aguardiente, Oscar travelled with Luigi by bus, communal taxi, DC-3 aircraft, and canoe to the place of refuge of the Cuiva Indians, hidden from the death squads in the jungle fringe along the wide, slow-moving Meta River.

  In his alcohol-induced daze, Oscar felt as if he had entered the world of the ancestors as described to him by Old Mary during the evenings in her house around the kitchen table when he was a boy. In the mornings, he stripped naked and swam with the others in the deep, sheltered warm waters of a lagoon. In the evenings, he shared the meals of turtle eggs, catfish, crocodile, and monkey meat, prepared by the women over an open fire. Later on, before retiring to his hammock, he sat down on the riverbank and listened, as Luigi interpreted for him, to the murmur of the people discussing the events of the day and pointing up at the stars and repeating the legends passed down to them by their ancestors over the millennia.

  One morning, as he ate his breakfast, he saw a young woman looking at him. She was over six feet tall, with wide hips, large breasts, smooth chocolate-brown skin, and thick, straight black hair that fell down to her waist. Never before had he seen a woman with such a beautiful smile. Never before had he been so attracted to someone at first sight. It never occurred to him that her natural beauty had been enhanced by the aguardiente he had just drunk. He smiled at her and she looked away. She looked at him, he smiled back at her and she looked away. It became a game. One night, she came unbidden and joined him in his hammock. And throughout their night of lovemaking, because he couldn’t pronounce her name, he called her his little Rosa.

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” Luigi told him when he saw them together. “What if your Rosa gets pregnant? You won’t be here to take care of her and no man will want her. I should have warned you. Never sleep with the Indians. It’s the golden rule of anthropology. And by the way, in the language of her people, her name is Morning Star.”

  “But I’m Indian, too, Luigi,” Oscar said. “I’m exempt from that rule. As far as I’m concerned, she’ll always be my little Rosa.”

  When the visitors left to return to Bogota, Rosa and Oscar both cried. Two months later, Luigi came to the embassy accompanied by Rosa and asked for Oscar.

  “Your friend is back and he’s not alone,” Pilar informed him.

  Oscar could scarcely contain his pleasure at seeing Rosa again, even though she spoke only Cuiva and could only communicate with him by sign language. He had thought of her often during their weeks of separation, remembering the heat of the night on the bank of the Meta River and their two bodies thrashing around in his hammock as the posts supporting the five hundred pounds of their combined weight creaked and groaned. He would sometimes see her in his dreams swimming naked in the river. At other times in his imagination he would picture her dressed in the latest designer gown, the most elegant woman in the room, swinging her hips and smiling that captivating smile of hers as she strutted with supreme effortless panache down the runway of a famous Parisian fashion house on the Faubourg Saint-Honoré as the crowd clapped their hands in appreciation. And although Rosa now looked at him as if he were a complete stranger, he was certain she had missed him as much as he had missed her.

  “I told you you’d get into trouble when you slept with Rosa,” Luigi said, after Oscar escorted his guests back to his office. “Her family says she’s pregnant and is now your responsibility.”

  Oscar immediately asked Luigi to tell her he wanted to marry her.

  “You don’t have to do that,” Luigi said. “You can take her to a convent, make a donation, and after the baby is born, the nuns will find someone to take it. They’ll give Rosa Spanish lessons, teach her to cook simple meals, scrub floors, and wash clothes, and then they’ll get her a job as a maid or cook with a rich Bogota family. She won’t be as happy as she’d be if she was living with her family back on the river, but she’ll have a roof over her head and be fed.”

  Oscar wouldn’t hear of it. No child of his would be put up for adoption. What if the adoptive parents didn’t love the baby? What if they were just looking for unpaid labour? What if they were to beat the child? What if they were like Pilar and were prejudiced against Indians? No child of his would grow up to be as unloved as he had been. And there was Rosa, his darling little Rosa. She would not spend the rest of her life as a poorly paid servant when she could be the wife of a distinguished Canadian diplomat. He loved her, or at least he thought he did. She would never lead him on and dump him as Claire had done. She was a pure and noble Indian, just like he was, and he wanted more than anything else to spend the rest of his life with her.

  When they heard the news, Oscar’s Canadian colleagues told him he was making a big mistake, Pilar had trouble keeping from sneering, and Ambassador Leroux was offended.

  “You’re out of your mind. You just can’t wander off into the jungle, pick out a mate, and bring her back to marry as if you were some sort of caveman. Civilized people don’t do things like that. Members of the Department don’t behave like that!”

  Ambassador Leroux, Oscar thought, was just upset because he had neglected to investigate the reports of death squad activities despite his lengthy absence on official business in the Orinoco River Basin. Oscar was sure he would come around after he had thought about the matter for a few days. But Ambassador Leroux did not come around. He sent a telegram to the undersecretary to give him the news and to recommend that Oscar be returned to Canada and fired.

  As the ambassador waited anxiously for an answer, the Bogota newspapers covered the story in all its salacious details. Columnists, tipped off by Pilar, who had learned that Rosa was pregnant, provided lurid accounts of how Oscar had left the capital for the Orinoco River Basin to save the Indians from extermination at the hands of death squads; how swimming among the piranhas, he had met and seduced a buxom Indian maiden; how he had returned to Bogota leaving his newfound love alone and forlorn in her thatched hut; how two months later she arrived pregnant at the door of the Canadian embassy with a ragged, long-haired student from the University of Verona; how the distinguished first secretary of the Canadian embassy to the Republic of Colombia intended to wed his sweetheart in holy matrimony; how Ambassa
dor Leroux was beside himself with rage; and how the Canadian embassy was now the laughing stock of the entire diplomatic corps.

  The telegram from the undersecretary, when it finally arrived, was not to Ambassador Leroux’s liking. The message, copied to the prime minister, the minister of Indian affairs, the minister of national defence, the minister of citizenship, and the RCMP Security Service, took some time to get to the point.

  Acknowledge receipt of your message of 1 September. Am personally acquainted with Wolf and am sorry to hear of his troubles. Have consulted within Department with Latin American Division, Legal Division, United Nations Division, Communication Division, Information Division, Protocol Division and Defence Relations Division, and outside Department with Department of the Prime Minister, Department of Indian Affairs, Department of Veterans Affairs, Department of Justice, Department of Revenue, Department of the Solicitor General, Department of Federal-Provincial Relations and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to find solution. There is consensus matter is delicate and everyone stresses importance in exercising great prudence in handling bearing in mind Wolf is only Indian officer in Department and for that matter in entire Canadian civil service. For almost one hundred years, Canadian governments have been trying to prepare Indians to abandon their savage customs and to adopt civilized ways of white man. If all goes according to plan, it is expected that within decade or two, Indians will be given privilege of voting in elections as well as some legal rights presently reserved for white people. Thus would not want, repeat would not want, Wolf to leave Civil Service. He is war hero and example of what governments have been attempting for generations to accomplish with Indians. Worse, if fired because he wishes to marry Indian woman, even Colombian Indian woman, Indian people of Canada and churches would be irritated.