Capricorn and Cancer

by Geoffrey Household

  The three troopers on the left of the line had been following the bank of the creek. They were now so close that we didn’t dare whisper. Not that they would have heard us. They were cursing and damning and waving their hats about. Quite useless, but it’s a human instinct to try and clear a space in front of the eyes. Their horses were nervous and giving any amount of trouble. I doubt if they were in the least bothered by the fireflies; they had caught the exasperation of their riders, as horses always do.

  Hilario started to squirm forward foot by foot, and Rosalinda and I followed. You couldn’t tell where the police troopers were going, fighting their horses in that damned silly way instead of showing confidence. One of the poor beasts was just about to tread on me when it saw me. It shied, and its rider’s language was worse than ever. He did not look at the ground. He was trying to pierce the intolerable flickering on a level with his eyes.

  It was perfectly safe to stand up and run as soon as we were past them. At the head of the creek we took the track down to the sands, and reached Hilario’s canoe by swimming and wading.

  Of course I can never go back to Argentina, but who cares? Three thousand acres I farm here. When Hilario showed me this place and its own private river with a flow of 300,000 gallons a minute and an even drop of twenty feet in half a mile, I saw what could be done in the way of power plant and refrigeration. It wouldn’t suit everyone. But we often have visitors like yourself. And they are very welcome whether they have two legs or six. Hilario himself always preferred mining to farming. He has done very well at it.

  Rosalinda? Well, they get a bit full in the figure, you know. But does that matter when the only face you ever want to look at is on top of it? Our boys made her go out fishing this afternoon. They’ll be back any moment. Certainly before the mosquitoes start. Well, yes, if you look at it that way, I suppose they have started. But don’t go slapping at them! Round here nobody has ever died of fever since her poor mother and father.

  5

  The Brides of Solomon

  IN spite of heat, insects and isolation, Don Felipe had made himself comfortable. He had two more years to serve in the Peruvian forest, administrating the head waters of the Madre de Dios, and every reason to believe that he would finish them with some remnants of health and a reputation as a reasonable man. He preferred his cool office to the jungle. That, too, was reasonable. It was the first duty of a government servant to be easily and courteously accessible.

  He was intimidated—though he did not for a moment show it—by the determined Diocesan Visitor who had so smoothly come up from the river. Father Hilario held himself most unnecessarily upright in the curves of his basket chair. He seemed to set an awkward standard not only for administrators of Indian territory but for the flowers and creepers which rioted over the patio and were so obviously and carelessly growing when compared with the rigid black figure of the Diocesan Visitor.

  ‘It is true then that this Englishman has two hundred wives?’ Father Hilario asked.

  ‘If one believed all one heard,’ answered Don Felipe with a prudent wave of the hand by which he hoped to dismiss the subject, ‘there would be no end to investigations.’

  ‘You have not confirmed the rumour yourself?’

  ‘I cannot afford to be absent from my post so long, padre. And for what? There is no objection to a serious anthropologist living among the Indians.’

  ‘Provided he confines himself to the interests of science,’ Father Hilario said. ‘But this Englishman is conducting a mission.’

  ‘I do not remember that he had any interest at all in religion.’

  ‘It is nine years since you saw him.’

  Don Felipe looked surprised. Time ran away while one occupied oneself at leisurely government pace. But it was indeed all of nine years since Solomon Carver had called on him with—after a full measure of formal courtesies—the bald statement that he intended to go into the forest and study a primitive tribe. Don Felipe told him that he would not be allowed to do any such thing, that the days were long past when you could paddle up the rivers and establish, if you lived, a mission or a private army or your own little slave state. Peruvian policy was all against irresponsible interference with the Indians.

  ‘Here as elsewhere,’ Don Felipe had explained to Carver, ‘he who desires to serve must be appointed to do so.’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘But by whom?’

  ‘Myself,’ Carver said.

  Don Felipe pointed out that he had been thinking of some official body like a botanical or geographical society.

  ‘If you mean,’ replied Carver, ‘that I must be vouched for by any committee which will take the trouble to print a few letter-heads and obtain some half-witted minor royalty for a patron, then I will see that it is done.’

  Being a son of parents so poor that his career could only be made in territory where no one else would serve, Don Felipe was bewildered by the arrogance of an ancient university. He perceived, however, that his decayed bungalow, commanding nothing but a landing-stage, a handful of demoralised military and a collection of thatched roofs hardly distinguishable from the surrounding forest, was being invited into partnership against the whole easily impressionable world.

  ‘It will take me a month,’ said Solomon Carver.

  It took him two. When the plane from Lima set him down once more on the river, his credentials were in perfect order and described him as an anthropologist.

  The Diocesan Visitor, disapprovingly silent while Don Felipe repeated this conversation, replied at once that Carver indeed had influential friends. The suave enquiries of the Church had found out everything about the man. Before the war, a lecturer on anthropology and comparative religion. A serious and too self-sufficient colonel at the end of the war. And then, in his early forties, he had considered it his duty to reject civilisation, earnestly proclaiming that there was no other hope for the future of humanity but intensified study of its beginnings. That in itself, Father Hilario insisted, was a doctrine which might lead to all kinds of aberrations.

  Don Felipe did not agree, but had no wish to argue with Authority. From the government point of view it was far more important that he should be able to reply to consuls and relatives that Carver was safe and well, and that no unseemly expedition was required to look for him.

  News of the man had filtered down from Indian to Indian, and Indian to trader, and trader to Don Felipe’s office. He had wandered about among the tribes who understood a little Spanish, learning their languages and how to keep alive. He penetrated further and further into the vaporous gorges where the Amazon forests became the Andes, and settled down at last with the dying, melancholy Icuari. Apparently he had found what he wanted, or they had.

  His polygamy was a fact. Down the years the number of wives credited to Carver had grown from forty to two hundred. Don Felipe had once or twice considered whether it might not be his business to remonstrate with him; but it was never urgent business. The Icuari were not—by the standards of the Amazon—particularly difficult to reach; they were just of no interest. They had neither mines nor trade nor cultivated clearings nor a navigable river. Water cataracted into their country or shot out of high caves like jets from giant hosepipes.

  ‘He has gone native,’ said Don Felipe. ‘That is regrettable, but of no importance.’

  Father Hilario stabbed with two restless fingers at the report which lay on the administrator’s desk, as if laying anathema upon it. It was the report which had brought him up the river. It came from Bolivia; it was detailed and official; and it stated that Carver was not an anthropologist at all but some sort of protestant missionary in disguise.

  ‘And that is of very great importance,’ he pronounced. ‘When Anglo-Saxons give themselves to their peculiar religions, they become enraged as mad dogs.’

  ‘You have no idea of what it means, father,’ Don Felipe protested in a voice of official caution. ‘Twelve days by launch, eight by canoe, weeks when we shall be wading rather
than walking, and without food for the porters.’

  ‘When did you last undertake the regulation tour of your district?’

  ‘Bueno! Bueno! But when I am away there is no one to attend to the correspondence.’

  ‘Your secretary, perhaps—’

  Don Felipe made a last, hopeless attempt to avert the inevitable.

  ‘Look, father—is it likely, this story of wives? Doubtless it rises only from the unfortunate name with which his godparents presented him. Down here it is hard enough for a man of taste to find one tolerable woman, let alone two hundred.’

  The Diocesan Visitor showed the teeth of the Church as well as his own in a formal smile.

  ‘But if the doctrines of this man of taste—whatever they may be—were to spread to Christian Indians, you realise that my bishop would be bound to protest to Lima.’

  Don Felipe surrendered. He gave orders that his camp equipment be packed and that the white-and-gold uniform by which he was accustomed to impress the more accessible native chiefs be left behind. He knew as much about travel in the forest as any trader’s headman; that was why he had used all possible tact to avoid it.

  The river journey turned out to be more tolerable than he expected. In thirteen days—four by launch and nine by canoe—the party reached the end of the navigable waterways and the last of the Indians who had any regular dealings with the white man. Father Hilario, having got his way, was an excellent companion. He was quick to adjust his approach to any objective. Severity towards officialdom. Considerate and amusing manners in camp.

  He also had patience—and that, as soon as they set foot on comparatively dry land, was an indispensable quality. Carver and his Icuari could only be reached by choosing the right valley to follow. The ridges ran more or less parallel to the Cordillera, and each was a range of mountains in its own right. Sheer cliff and impassable forest barred all crossing from one valley to the next.

  Neither map nor instinct was the least help. A guide who knew the gorges was essential. The first deliberately wasted time. Don Felipe, who was mild as the Indians themselves, dismissed him with courtesy after four desperate days in the bed of a torrent. The second insisted that they had taken the wrong tributary of the Madre de Dios, and that they must return down river and try again. Don Felipe stood by his own notes. True, he had compiled them in his flowery patio, but the facts of geography were more easily seen from a basket chair than the bottom of a gorge; he knew that his route was not so mistaken as all that.

  The third guide, obtained when food was already beginning to run short, had traded with the Icuari and had no doubt whatever of the path. He insisted that a white man had persuaded the tribe to leave the dripping forest and take to high ground. Their country could be reached in three days’ march.

  Don Felipe understood that confidence had been established and that this at last was the truth. He decided to send his men downstream to the launch and to food, and to go on alone with Father Hilario.

  ‘Ask him about the two hundred wives,’ ordered the Visitor, who did not speak the language of the river sources.

  The Indian, not being sure of any numbers over ten, replied to Don Felipe’s question:

  ‘The cacique has as many as there are stars, and all dressed in white.’

  Feeling a natural sympathy for anyone who merely desired to be left in peace, Don Felipe was reluctant to stir up trouble before he had to. He translated tactfully:

  ‘He says that when we get nearer to the stars, we shall see women dressed in white.’

  ‘You see!’ exclaimed Father Hilario. ‘The fellow is teaching some sort of Mohammedan paradise!’

  ‘Very likely.’

  ‘And false doctrines travel as far and as fast as the true. This Salomón must leave the country at once.’

  In the next two days they approached the stars a deal nearer than suited Don Felipe, who believed in letting a mule do his climbing, or Father Hilario, who usually carried his bishop’s authority by canoe. The guide’s route, hardly ever perceptible as a path, would have nothing to do with water and rose seven thousand feet to the top of a ridge.

  Forty miles to the west, across canyon after canyon unexplorable by anything but vegetation, they could see the mists recoiling from the sheer cliffs and gravelled slopes of the Cordillera Oriental. Don Felipe looked longingly at the edge of the high Peru which was his true homeland. To reach that glimpse of bare skyline would mean, he reckoned, a journey of over six weeks, down the rivers to the frontier of Brazil and Bolivia and then up again.

  ‘And now?’ he asked the guide, dreading lest the appalling gorge beneath them should have to be crossed, and the ridge beyond it climbed.

  ‘Not far. We sleep here.’

  Slow questioning revealed that they were within three hours of the nearest Icuari village; but the guide was unwilling to appear at dusk without warning—though he agreed that the tribe was very peaceful and had no firearms, not even the white man. He spoke of them, now that he was on the edge of their country, with almost religious respect.

  Don Felipe was surprised at his tone. The Icuari, so far as he knew, were still in a state of transition from food-gathering to agriculture—hardly better, in fact, than a dejected band of apes which had retreated westwards from war and the rivers to die, alone, in the uninhabitable country of the spray.

  The two Peruvians and their guide slept in the shelter of an overhanging cliff where camp-fires had been numerous enough to burn the moss from the rock. In the morning their path entered a cleared and beaten track. The ridge broadened and then dipped to a saddle. Looking down on it, they could see huts and cultivated clearings among the trees. A white-robed woman crossed from shadow to shadow.

  ‘It is true!’ exclaimed Father Hilario, eager with indignation.

  Don Felipe, who had expected nothing more than the hardly visible, timid shelters of savages, was far more impressed by the signs of a purposeful community than by the flicker of white. There was even an alignment of huts; you could almost call it a street. He guardedly expressed his surprise, and was conscious of a humble pleasure that there below them was a situation which could not be bullied into shape by any Diocesan Visitor.

  Having no other evidence of his rank and importance, he assumed an official bearing and preceded Father Hilario into the village. There was a reserved welcome. It was clear that the Icuari expected them and had no fear. The men were the usual bobbed-haired, stocky, copper creatures of the forest, but they carried no arms and their manners were self-assured rather than chattering.

  Most of the women were heavy, apathetic and busy with objectless activities; but among them moved a kind of Wellsian élite, all very young and dressed in sack-like tunics of white cotton confined at the waist by brilliantly-dyed cords. They looked competent—the last quality one would expect, Father Hilario thought, in idle and corrupted women. Yet there could be no doubt who they were. The devil, too could sing a psalm when he wished. And why were all the visible children—plenty of them—between the ages of two and four?

  Out of the trees, upon the edge of which the children were playing, came a European woman, severely dressed and freshly laundered. She greeted the party in blunt but fairly efficient Spanish, and invited them to accompany her to the upper village.

  Invited? It was an order from the matron. Don Felipe explained that he and his companion were by no means the casual and predatory travellers they looked, but the administrator of the district and the representative of the bishop.

  ‘We know that already, Don Felipe,’ she answered, ‘and we are all very glad you have come.’

  ‘How did you get here, sister?’ he asked, knowing that she had never passed through his territory.

  ‘From Bolivia.’

  ‘On foot?’

  ‘On foot. It takes weeks, but it is not really difficult since Señor Carver made the track. A wonderful man! He has worked alone for so long.’

  ‘Alone except for you?’ Father Hilario asked.

&nbs
p; A slight lift of her heavy eyebrows suggested that she did not consider his remark in the best of taste.

  ‘Except for my cousin and myself,’ she answered. ‘Naturally there are two of us.’

  ‘You are missionaries?’

  ‘No, father. We only serve.’

  ‘But Christians?’

  ‘Of course.’

  As a priest, Father Hilario knew simplicity when he saw it. As a man of the world, he also recognised its dangers. It was quite possible for this thin, straight woman in, he supposed, her middle forties to belong to some curious sect which practised polygamy. He remembered the strange, selfless aberrations of the Middle Ages, the calm bestialities of the seventeenth century and the odd privacies of modern prophets. He was careful to phrase his next question so that its meaning was not too definite.

  ‘These women in white—are they the wives?’

  ‘Oh, you have heard of them! How unexpected!’

  She gave a professional laugh which, under the circumstances, sounded shameless.

  ‘We have heard that Señor Carver has two hundred.’

  ‘That would be too many even for him, father. At the moment he has eighty-nine.’

  The Diocesan Visitor stared into the tired, greyish face. Her reserved eyes might have belonged to a nun, and he was startled to find that he could not meet them.

  ‘Who—who looks after this—er—family?’ he asked uneasily.

  ‘My cousin does. I care for the children.’

  ‘But is there not a—a chief wife, shall we say?’

  ‘No, father. We sell them when they are fifteen.’

  It was incredible. Heaven alone knew what mad heresy was at work among these defenceless Indians! The woman talked as if it were Christian and reasonable to have eighty-nine wives and sell them after … after … oh, ghastly thought.