I was pleased with that. I usually approach truth through wine, not whisky.
This morning they rode back to Santa Eulalia. Valera intends to return to his headquarters and then run up to Bogotá to report. I think his party should travel in civilian dress, but they will all flaunt their uniforms. I know nothing of the military art, but personally I should never employ a Latin American on any secret mission. I wonder if the National Liberation Army can do better. Perhaps that is one of the ingredients of such success as they have.
[ March 23, Wednesday ]
Today I rode Estrellera over to Santa Eulalia and spent an hour or two with Pedro — ostensibly to buy rice and cans of sardines of which Mario and Teresa are very fond. Shortage of fats, probably. I have seen Teresa with an oily sardine in one hand and a sticky sweet in the other, quivering with delight at the sensation in her potbelly and regardless of the mess on her face.
Pedro is a curious character, fairly honest and utterly unimaginative — the typical corporal. One could not wish for a more useful companion in forest or on the llano; if there was anything edible about, he would climb for it, shoot it or dig it out. But it would be hard to stand his continual chatter. I should get so tired of the rise and fall of his scanty moustache that I should be tempted to pay him to shave it off. He would, too — on condition that everyone believed he had done it to please me and not for money.
Money. He’ll need two crates to carry it to the bank when he retires: filthy little bits of paper and packets of small change. As a favor to him I took a sack of the stuff with me the last time I flew to Bogotá. He is not a miser. He knows what interest is, but wouldn’t dream of charging it on debts at the store and small loans. He has not the aimlessness of his fellow citizens. He intends to buy a bar in some poor but honest quarter of Bogotá.
His wife looks after his capital and hides it away in small flour bags, reciting a spell over every cache. She is a pure Indian who never says much. She wouldn’t have a chance anyway, since Pedro uses her as an audience when he can’t find a better. All their children died young. On these over-violent llanos death in one’s twenties is more common.
The store was empty. It always is till evening. Over the second rotgut Pedro said to me dramatically:
“One of these days I shall pop a shot in my head.”
He never will, but the fact that he can say it separates him from Indians and llaneros. For them suicide is just as impossible as for an animal. Their business is to live. They have no other.
“And why is that, friend?” I asked.
“Politics.”
“They don’t concern us here. Did Captain Valera want you to go along with him?”
No, no, he insisted. As the agent of Government he was too valuable where he was. A gallant officer such as Captain Valera knew the worth of a reliable ex-corporal at his post.
I think it likely that Valera was taken in. Pedro can play the old soldier very well. But I know that he is at least on speaking terms with guerrilla leaders, and that he tried to suggest the estancia as the cause of any rumors that Valera might have heard.
In view of what goes on at his store, his nerves ought to be proof against anything. But he is never in personal danger. He is Santa Eulalia. Without him it would have no official existence. Put it this way. Footballers assault each other, but not the referee. They are aware that if they had no referee, they would be left with only a field: a small, dull, flat llano.
So Pedro’s courage — unquestionable in matters of survival and sheer endurance — has never been tested by worries. With one hand he performed his minimal duties to the State; with the other he took a small subvention from the guerrillas. It looked as if that could go on forever in his apathetic world. Valera’s appearance was unexpected and alarming.
“What do you think?” he asked. “Who is going to win?”
“The Government, of course. There are only a hundred of the others.”
“But more can come from Cuba. Where is this Cuba exactly?”
“An island twelve hundred miles away.”
“It is said that everyone is equal there.”
“So we are here.”
“But in the cities, too, over there. Think of it, friend! If the guerrillas capture Bogotá they will give money to the poor so that everyone is equal.”
He was off. He drew an eloquent picture of Utopia which I swear must have been influenced by some army chaplain’s description of the joys of heaven. He left out harps and glassy sea, but gave me a clear impression of a smiling population sitting around listening to brass bands while shining Pedros marched up and down the main street. This stuff could certainly tickle the imaginations of the submerged Indian peons, release from hell in this life being a more substantial promise than release from hell in the next. By giving food to the partisans as well as money to the priests one could take out real comprehensive insurance.
“But do you believe it, Pedro?” I asked.
“I? Not I! There will always be rich and poor, officers and men.”
That was not put on to impress me with his loyalty to the Government. It was his sincere common-sense opinion. The world’s middle class of corporals distrust revolution.
“Then what are you worrying about?”
“Such cruelty! They take no prisoners, shooting them in the back and cutting their throats and worse! Crucifying them with their toes in an ant’s nest! Making them sit on sharp bamboos till at last the end comes out of their mouths!”
He was away again — more ants, alligators, skinning with blunt machetes, anything he could think of.
I knew very well that while he was talking about prisoners he was thinking of traitors. So I reinforced his neutrality by assuring him that the army was just as cruel. I doubt if it is, except in rare cases of revenge. I also suspect that most of the rumors of guerrilla atrocities are set going by themselves. More borrowings from the Church. Threaten the opposition with devils, fire and pitchforks, and they’ll behave!
“Thank God I do not mix myself in their quarrels!” he said. “And I advise you not to. I, Pedro, advise you.”
“Me? I’m a Government servant! With the friends I have in high places in Bogotá it would be quite impossible.”
So it is. But I reserve the right to talk to guerrilleros if I want to until such time as they are deservedly wiped out. In a village — a true, tiled village — of the Cordillera that might be irresponsible. But here any humanity is welcome. Neither politics nor religion can override the claims of hospitality.
“You will tell your friends when you go to Bogotá?” Pedro asked anxiously. “You will tell them that I think only of my duty?”
Poor Pedro! Being questioned by Valera has let in the blank. I wonder how far he has committed himself. My guess is that he merely told a few of the wilder llaneros that if they were to drive cattle to some known landmark they wouldn’t be the worse for it.
The llaneros live as best they can. The right way to look at them is not as cattlemen at all, but as hunters and conservers of semi-wild beasts. Since they have not received any wages for years they keep going by eating beef and rather reluctantly supplying — over vast distances — small herds to anyone who will pay cash. The identity of the customer does not interest them. Pedro could plead absolute ignorance that the cattle were being sold to guerrillas. The trouble is that nobody would believe him for long.
I took my siesta in one of his filthy basket chairs. It was twice as hot under his tiled roof — the only one in Santa Eulalia — as under the usual thick thatch. At last I left him sleeping to go and see Joaquín. I wanted to ask him when he thought the rains would come.
Joaquín was peacefully smoking a home-made cigar. His perfectly expressionless eyes were fixed on the water lapping against the jetty of rotten piles where goods are landed — if they don’t fall through. By looking closely one could just tell that life flowed in the river and the man.
I laid down on the floor of his hut a few presents from Pedro’s
store which were very properly ignored. We chatted about neighbors until it was permissible to come to the point. Then he told me that the drought would get worse before it got better, and that he had never known anything like it for twelve years.
“That would be when the estancia was abandoned?” I asked.
“Yes. Twelve years ago.”
“And before that?”
“The rains always came in time.”
“Can you make them come?”
“Can you?”
He did not understand what I meant. Tropical rains are normally so regular that rainmakers have no market. To set up in business one needs a less reliable climate where a witch doctor can make a reasonable forecast on the strength of weather experience handed down from father to son. Presumably there is nothing more to it.
“There is more I want to ask you, Joaquín,” I said. “I must have hands to help me, but no one will come out from Santa Eulalia. Are there any Indians west of the estancia who would work for me?”
“The forest has no men in it.”
“And on the other bank of the Guaviare?”
“Too far. They would not come.”
Well, that was that. No offer will persuade a tribal Indian to do what he doesn’t want to do, or to admit that he won’t. He will reply that of course he is coming and that he will send his brother and cousin at once. But none of them ever turns up.
Joaquín’s flat statement that the forest beyond the estancia is uninhabited lets in the blank. I used the phrase just now of Pedro. It’s obsessive. We are able, when in good spirits, to preserve the self in a solid piece; but if anything disturbs this integrity we expand into nothingness. Alcohol is a cure, and the llaneros give themselves to it as I suspect they do to a woman: very quickly and then to sleep. Myself, when the drought or the absurd fencing or my sheer inability to extract straight answers to straight questions, gets me down, I feel that the gift of speech is useless and wish that I could revel in the nothingness like my ancestor, the running ape, when he first broke out from the crowded darkness of the trees.
Mario and Teresa must have been living the most lonely life imaginable before I came. No wonder he needs a wall around him. A wall drives man and wife back on themselves, giving an illusion of solidarity and safety. So night, when no wall can be seen, is a sort of deprivation. Night forces him into unity with his environment, whereas his life is only tolerable if he can keep his environment at bay.
Amateur psychology, but I can’t be far off the truth. Obviously it was a drought twelve years ago that finally finished Manuel Cisneros, the enterprising Venezuelan. I never quite grasped that before. Mario ought to have told me. Naturally he did not. He might have frightened off the boss-companion who had dropped from heaven to make his life more normal. Or am I unjust? He always had enough water for his own surprisingly sophisticated garden and had no reason to suppose there would not be enough for me.
Joaquín and I strolled back to the store to collect Estrellera. She does not care for Pedro, who is too noisy and military, but she always touches muzzles with Joaquín though he never brings her anything to eat. He would make a good vet, if anyone here ever bothered with more than centuries-old bleedings, dosings and cauterization. Such practice as he has is confined to Indian pets: monkeys, agoutis and a variety of small creatures and large birds. His diagnosis is absurd but his sympathy is genuine. For him we are all spirits confined in flesh.
So I rode home, night falling when I was half way. Estrellera has no nerves. She will give a snort of indignation at the unfamiliar like any conservative female, but she never shies, stops dead or trembles. If I were a guerrillero I think I would prefer to ride the too-alert Tesoro, but for a journey on which dangers are, I hope, only imagined, give me Estrellera every time!
[ March 25, Friday ]
A day of paperwork. It was about time that I made a précis of my journal and sent up a report to Bogotá, if only to show that I have zealously obeyed my instructions. All experiments of any importance I have initiated myself, disguising such undepartmental enterprise under a respectful amount of paper in triplicate — very necessary when the termites may get it if only in duplicate.
The director is most reasonable, partly because I’m his showpiece. When politicians suggest that we and our like merely sit on our backsides, with an iced drink in one hand while the other explores the frilly intimacies of Latin-American womanhood, all at the expense of the Ministry of Overseas Development, he can always point to his field officer slapping mosquitoes in the dark heart of the continent.
In fact the habitable rooms are often free of insects and at times cool. When I took possession I repaired all fly screens on the barred north windows facing the courtyard and left the south windows as they were, permanently closed by heavy wooden shutters. Mario advised this on the grounds of keeping out the sun when he really meant the night.
No doubt I sound a much more romantic figure than I am. I have comfortable and modern camp equipment, a sufficiency of medical supplies, a well-stocked bar, all the apparatus I require and a minitractor which is the wonder of the district and in the drought is used for giving rides to visitors. I have even a refrigerator, powered by a small petrol-engined dynamo which supplies enough voltage for half a dozen light bulbs as well.
I prefer living on the country to tinned food. That’s where the Americans go wrong. They stock up with cans of rations as tasteless as they are luxurious. You can never really get the feel of an agricultural economy unless you surrender to it. Satisfying my own wants is an essential, additional experiment. Besides the eternal bananas and rice, I have vegetables, eggs, fresh beef and unlimited game. My dear Eibar-made 16-bore keeps me supplied with any size of wildfowl I fancy from snipe to geese, and I picked up in Barranquilla an old British Army Lee-Enfield in excellent condition which produces the occasional deer or peccary for the pot.
No, I do myself pretty well. Admittedly the tropical evenings are long, but I pass them reading or playing records (I never can do both simultaneously) or devising a few experiments so unlikely to succeed that they count as amusement rather than work. This diary helps.
[ March 27, Sunday ]
Tesoro has had a touch of colic. Now that the cracked conduits under the wall are delivering such a wretched flow, he is getting too much sediment in his water. I shall have to draw it from the well.
I was possibly unwise to buy him, for he could not be expected to have the resistance of the native criollos. But I have been amply rewarded. The story goes that some singularly vain captain of Venezuelan cavalry — lousy with oil money — imported a palomino stallion from Mexico which he used as a ceremonial charger to impress the girls. As likely as not it impressed his squadron too. We can none of us resist a touch of lunatic flamboyance.
Tesoro was by this beauty out of a criollo mare. He turned out more gold than dun with the chestnut mane and tail of his dam. I got him cheap, fifteen hands being too big for a cow pony. For polo he wouldn’t have a fault, being neat on his legs and of quick intelligence. Indeed I cannot see any faults in him at all, beyond those of youth and very sketchy breaking. When I am on his back he expects severity and does not hold it against me; when I am off it, he follows me about like a dog.
I am always entertained by the marked difference of character between my nervous, affectionate gelding and Estrellera. She got her name from being a stargazer as a filly. It now fits her temperament rather than her conformation. She is inclined to be dreamy with strong likes and dislikes, but all that remains of stargazing is a slight suggestion of a ewe-neck. The llaneros think more highly of her than I do, for she is a typical criollo skewbald of 14.2, well ribbed up and staying forever.
I would not change either of them. With those two horses I would back myself to reach the Orinoco — and that is more than one could do by canoe and still arrive all in one piece.
[ March 31, Thursday ]
I have always assumed that promises will come to nothing — and not only in Latin A
merica. Here, however, the promises have such an air of generous enthusiasm that they are a pleasure in themselves. Fulfilment stuns as a devastating and sometimes embarrassing surprise.
On the twenty-eighth the Government Canoe — more like a barge with an outboard motor — was expected at Santa Eulalia. Since one can never be sure of the exact date of arrival, especially when the Guaviare is low, I did not want to waste time hanging about and sent Mario over to deliver and collect my mail.
He returned next day, accompanied by a packhorse loaded with hardware which we needed and, on top of it, an unexpected piece of soft ware. She greeted me very shyly and escaped to Teresa. Mario then presented to me a letter which he had received from an immensely fat and dignified Negress who had insisted on establishing both his identity and mine in the manner of an obstinate sergeant of police. It was from Captain Valera.
My Very Good Friend,
You will have a few weeks in which to get over your surprise before the Canoe calls at Santa Eulalia on the way back. Put her on board if she does not suit, and accept the excuses of a friend who only wished to be of service to you.
First, this is not a whore, merely an unfortunate. My girl, who has a good heart, found it like a stranded fish upon the riverbank. She did not immediately inform me, since it was a good-looking little creature which might have caused some dissension in the family. So she boarded it out for some days until she could settle its future.
When I was about to leave on the little expedition which by good fortune brought me to your house, my girl confessed what she had done. She had to get rid of her find and was afraid that any arrangements made in my absence would come to my ears — as they surely would — and that I should suspect her of commerce rather than charity. Her past, I may say, would justify such suspicion. But her present is in every way loyal and obliging. Her fears that I might change horses if I set eyes on Chucha were entirely unfounded.
Dance of the Dwarfs Page 4