I slipped all this unimportant bumf in my pocket and strolled down to the river to see Joaquín. A medical consultation. Going through the fern and tall grasses into the forest and in and out of the glades I am showered with ticks and have to get them off when I arrive home with cigarette end or tobacco juice. Chucha’s attentions to my back are charming and efficient, but waste a lot of time which could be better spent. Insect repellent is useless.
Joaquín greeted me with his usual impassivity and said that it gave him great pleasure to see me. This was exceptionally polite; indeed his tone was not conventional at all. So I asked him how I could be at his service.
“If you had been here, you would have bought me rum from the canoe,” he replied. “But I speak of the day before yesterday when you were so afraid.”
I asked him how he knew I was, and he answered that he had felt my fear.
“As for Pedro?”
These shots in the dark were so often effective.
“No, not as for Pedro. For Pedro it came quickly.”
“Could you know whether I had died or not?”
“Not yet.”
I think he meant that only when my spirit had recovered from the shock and was wandering about looking for something recognizable would it be prepared to enter his revolting haze of ritual smokes and incantations. But I respectfully record the shaman without trying to explain him. I doubt if the Archbishop of Canterbury’s comments on a Mass for the Dead would be any more helpful.
I told him that I had seen his duendes and that they were solid as ourselves, though I could not yet put a name to them.
“How do we know what we are, we men? So how can we tell if duendes are the same?”
He kicked a log, exactly like Doctor Johnson refuting Berkeley, but drawing a different conclusion.
“Is my foot? Is the log? I only know what my toe feels. When we are afraid, that is the duende. That is what a duende is.”
His Spanish is even worse and less intelligible than my translation makes it sound. Understanding of him is due to our deep curiosity about each other rather than to his actual words. But I think I am safe in putting his meaning this way. Panic always has a cause. Whether the cause has green teeth and whiskers or goes on four feet is irrelevant. The only reality is the fear.
Even now I have not got it right. I have made him too skeptical. He believes profoundly in an immaterial duende which lives on fear as we live on meat. Fear gives it an existence and a shape which is material enough to kill.
I did manage to mention the ticks. He gave me a dried gourd with some whitish goo in it which, he assured me, would make any tick let go and wither. He said it was also good for wasp stings and would restore virility in the aged if taken internally. He proposed to manufacture a new batch when I was ready to hand over Chucha.
When I went back to recover Tesoro I shared Arnoldo’s dish of beans — having forgotten that one can no longer buy food in Santa Eulalia — and waited in the smithy on the off chance that one of the llaneros might ride in. And what a good and ancient scent it was under the thatch — the charcoal, the sweat of men and horses, the sizzling of a generation of patient hooves! This is rich country for the nose: llano after rain, forest at dawn, sweet cattle, breath of Tesoro when we blow at each other muzzle to muzzle. And that is to say nothing of the musk of Chucha’s damp body. It is a melancholy thought that the more successful I am, the more I help to drown the lot with the petrol and hot oil of the machine age.
I was still reluctant to say all I knew of Pedro. I shall report his death to the first official who comes along and I hope tomorrow or the day after to know the cause of it. So I switched conversation to Pichón and said what good care he took of my girl. Arnoldo told me he was nearly twenty — I had thought about fourteen — and sound as a bell. He had been left to Pedro by a llanero who owed the store money and was dying before he could repay it. They are either bandits or punctiliously honest. There seems to be nothing in between.
Alvar, one of the gentlemen who had chased Pedro to his doom, rode in when the heat of the day was fading. He had lost the silver rowel of a spur and wanted a new one. Arnoldo could only offer to file it from mild steel and said it would look like silver if regularly oiled. That didn’t suit Alvar at all. Fortunately I was able to produce a silver dollar which Arnoldo could bore and file to shape. He was even going to line the hole with a bush to prevent wear.
Alvar insisted on paying me. Both of us knew that he had nothing looking remotely like money, but neither would ever have mentioned it. However, here was the chance I had been waiting for. I told him that a silver dollar was a trifle among gentlemen such as ourselves and that I had far more important business. Would he sell me a steer and deliver it north of the marshes?
He was suspicious, not knowing whose side I was on and afraid of getting a plane and machine gun all to himself. I swore that I was not reselling to anybody, and explained that I wanted to follow the steer about, see what it ate and find out if there was anything wrong with the grasses of the unused grazing between the marshes and the forest. He looked at me oddly, but evidently decided that it was not his business to mention dwarfs.
Tomorrow, two hours before sunset, the beast is to be delivered at a tall, solitary palm with an aloe growing alongside it, known to everyone as the Mother and Child.
On my return to the estancia I told Chucha and Mario that the canoe was expected daily in Santa Eulalia and that I should spend a night or two there so as not to miss it. Tomorrow morning I shall pack up rations for myself and Tesoro, though I hope I can persuade Alvar to lead him away before dark and bring him back when the sun is up. I don’t expect any trouble and I am determined to take no risks, but I have left a note in my official journal that everything I possess on this side of the Atlantic — there isn’t much but books on the other — belongs to Chucha.
[ May 7, Saturday ]
At four o’clock yesterday I found Alvar already waiting with a bullock in the shade of the palm. Though its horns were short for our local breed of cattle, white blotches on the flanks showed a not too distant Hereford ancestry. It would be easy, I thought, to see the beast at night.
The Mother and Child were all of five miles from the bay of parkland, about as near to the forest as the llaneros will ever graze their cattle. The horizon was a vast, unbroken circle, looking emptier than I had ever seen it. There was no haze over the marshes which were hidden by the slight folding of the ground. The line of the forest under the low sun could have been a streak of cloud.
I paid Alvar a small sum for the ownerless beast and he asked me, with much circumlocution, what I intended to do with it.
“We think you know already what is wrong with the grazing,” he said, “since you have passed so many moments with Joaquín.”
I told him frankly that I did know and that I intended to present the bullock to the dwarfs.
“They have had enough already,” he answered sullenly.
“Perhaps this time they will have a surprise.”
“You are as mad as Cisneros!”
“Did he go in with a bullock?”
“No, man! He was alone, they say. I tell you that neither you nor your beast will be alive by morning.”
“If we are, you will also find a dead dwarf alongside us.”
He was not impressed by this Castilian magnificence.
“I shall not go and see. Nor any of us,” he said and turned his horse.
I started to drive my beast westwards. It preferred to go home to its herd. When I headed it off, it charged Tesoro who swung his hindquarters professionally — though he knew no more about the business than I did — and then put out for Santa Eulalia himself. While we settled our differences the bullock pretended to be grazing, and I had a chance to catch its fat rump a heavy cut with the quirt which shot it off towards the forest. It then trotted around, not knowing what to make of us, while I tried to get a rope around its horns. I couldn’t handle the fellow at all. I remembered too late
that the animals which they tie out in Africa and India are tame village goats and buffaloes, not an unmanageable Colombian steer.
Meanwhile Alvar was lying on his horse’s neck, insane with nervous laughter. It had never occurred to him that a good horsemen, as he knew me to be, could not drive cattle. He took pity on me, and we set off for the bay of parkland at such a pace that I thought the bullock would die of heart failure before it got there.
It was now nearly dusk. He was far from laughter while he helped to tether my present for the dwarfs to the bole of a thorn. He took Tesoro and said that he would wait for me all the morning at the Mother and Child, refusing to come nearer. He did not even wish me luck. I was finished for him. The nearest I got to a good-bye was a whinny from Tesoro.
Since not a one of the present llaneros of Santa Eulalia has, so far as I know, ever seen dwarf or duende, the power of superstition is extraordinary. Long before Cisneros made his rash purchase of the estancia rumors or reports must have been lurking in the grassland like ticks, fastening on to the men as soon as they began to lose beasts between the forest and the water.
Alvar was in such a hurry to be off that I could spend no time searching for a better place to tether the bullock. The tunnel which I particularly wanted to watch was further on at the bottom of the bay. Since all the trees which overlooked the bait had smooth, unclimbable trunks, I had to be content with a conical termite hill, seven feet high and hard as concrete. I reckoned that if I sat still I could pass as an extra story on top. My back felt naked, but was partly sheltered by thorn and cactus. The breeze was uncertain but seemed to be settling to its usual pattern of forest to llano.
When darkness fell I soon grew impatient, and began to realize how hopelessly inexperienced I was. Starshine among trees was not sufficient to see more than a flicker of white — and that only by straining the eyes — where the bait was quietly chewing the cud. I had tied a pencil torch beneath the barrel of the rifle, but it was not much use. My left hand either had to move to switch on, probably losing the vital half second of opportunity, or it got in the way of the beam. As for sitting still on my termite heap, I could not do it. I envied the hunters of more imperial forests who could summon up natives to build a machan.
The local herd of peccary came out to feed on the edge of the forest, some of them passing close to my spire, which proved that my scent was not disturbing them. I could only just see them and they certainly could not see me. They must have heard me, for my thigh went to sleep and I had to change position. It may be that they put me down as a monkey or that they had never been hunted by man. I think the latter likely. I am on virgin soil, and the game is as ignorantly trustful as I am.
A half moon came up about two and enabled me at last to see the bullock. He had eaten the dry grass stalks in a beaten circle around his thornbush and was now lying down. I could have shot him neatly behind the ear. There was no need to use the clumsy torch.
The peccary moved off towards the middle of the bay, the nearest of them still in sight. A pair of owls flitted to and fro, passing low over me and the bait until they decided we were too large to be of interest. After half an hour the bullock got to his feet and started pawing the, ground, with his head pointing across the bay.
What I now saw or half saw was out of pattern, for peccary are among the bravest and most formidable of any herbivorous animals. When in danger the whole herd will attack, and lord help the dog which cannot run faster or the man on foot who finds no handy tree! A shot in the air will usually turn aggressive cattle, but will not, I am told, turn a herd of peccary. If the intruder does not get off the premises, he will be under those razor-sharp little hooves.
A single peccary on the outskirts of the herd broke away and took off for the llano squealing as if the devil was after it. The herd neither attacked in its defense nor crossed its line. Indeed I had an impression — in which I put no faith although I could make out their backs in the long grass — that they actually moved off the line, leaving a space for the pursuer. It was behavior clean against the norm.
The following shadow appeared for a fleeting second as two loops. By the time I had decided that there could not possibly be a boa constrictor of that size and that no snake heaved middle sections of its body off the ground, the bullock had torn the inadequate thornbush out by the roots and was off to the llano as well.
I swung round to cover it and never had a second glimpse of the loops. I was pretty sure that what I had seen were the backs of two duendes in line chasing the peccary with their curious loping gait — in fact the sea serpent effect of two porpoises, one behind another, leaping simultaneously.
There was not another movement till birds and monkeys began their racket at dawn. I got down from my perch, stiff, bored, cold, hungry and not much wiser. Still, the duendes had only won the first round on points. The peccary gave away some of their habits. Its carcass was four hundred yards out on the llano with the vultures just settling on it. I drove them off before they could tear away the evidence.
The peccary had been killed by the usual bite. Two canines had met just below the skull. The other two had passed under the spine. That explained why both I and the guerrilleros, seeing only clean perforations in bone, had jumped at bullet wounds. There was not enough soft tissue left on either Pedro or the jaguar to show the damage done by the canines on the other side of the jaw.
The belly had been clawed open and the soft parts eaten. Teeth had torn open the jugular vein, yet there was no crusted pool of blood. I have a strong feeling that duendes not only draw their life from panic, as Joaquín suggested, but from the blood of the kill, sucked or lapped.
The bullock was a mile further on, still attached to its bush. It appeared to welcome my arrival, though not to the extent of standing to be patted. I left it to look after itself and walked on wearily over the llano to the Mother and Child.
Alvar turned up at ten with Tesoro and was surprised to see me. I wouldn’t say he was pleased. Men are not when beliefs as well as caution are shown up to be exaggerated. No doubt he also expected to be able to keep Tesoro, who would never be much use as a cow pony but at least would win him some silver in bets if he cared to ride as far as Venezuela.
I said that the dwarfs had so frightened the bullock that he had torn out his bush and was now ranging the llano. Alvar asked if I had seen them, to which I replied that I had even seen them dancing and that I hoped to persuade them to work on my irrigation channels. I shall not give it out that they are animals until I am dead certain what they are. Meanwhile let it be dwarfs with whom the learned doctor is nearly on speaking terms! That cuts them down to size and might enable me to get some active help if I need it.
I told him to take the bullock back to the herd and keep it for me. I do not think I shall want it again. This sitting up over a beast is a romantic idea borrowed from books. To be successful one would have to know far more about the habits of the creature one is observing. I had amazing luck in making contact at all, due to my hunch that the bay was regularly hunted and that the tunnel was their way in and out of the forest wall.
The next move must be to try to get a sight of this pair on their home ground in daylight, and I must not play their game when I “feel” their presence. I believe that Joaquín is on to an actual fact related to their method of hunting and general ecology. They produce what one might call a Declaration of Intent which is detectable by horse, man and even jaguar, to say nothing of peccary. So does man himself. His murderous presence signals a warning to all his four-footed cousins, and nothing but a tired, old man-eater will call his bluff. So I hope I can safely assume some timidity in the duendes, or at least the normal strong objection to starting trouble. Pedro’s death does not prove that he was deliberately chased and killed. More probably he took them by surprise on a track which they considered their own territory and did not retreat when told unmistakably to do so.
[ May 8, Sunday ]
When I rode in yesterday afternoon, supposedly com
ing from Santa Eulalia, I had no need to invent a story and truthfully said that the Canoe had called. I could not pretend it had not, thus leaving myself free to be absent from the estancia for more nights, since Chucha saw all the new letters I was carrying. I keep her out of nowhere and out of nothing she can understand. Love and youth are privileged.
I noticed a flicker of disquiet at the arrival of so much evidence that I had another, more permanent life. She can only guess at it, but of course she fears it. Sometime I have to go, and to what does she return then? I presume she thinks it inconceivable that I would hand her over to Joaquín, for that is a standing joke between us. But she must anticipate an end not far off Valera’s solution: that she will be passed with a kiss and a dowry to some fellow like Alvar. I cannot bring myself to tell her that we shall never be separated. I wish I could.
There is no limit to the oddities of the sort of human thinking which isn’t thinking. Mario, Chucha and Teresa now take the dwarfs as fact. Mario begs me to be very careful and gives me tips on how to approach untamed Indians. I am never, never to surprise them, he says. That goes for more than dwarfs.
He has been digesting the question I asked him: whether in fact the dwarfs had ever killed so much as a hen in or around the estancia. The answer is no. He even points out to me that all we know of Cisneros is that he was ruined and rode away. He may not have been killed by the dwarfs. He and his horse may be anywhere in the Americas. Everything is turned a little too much upside down. It is now I who have to impress it on Mario that at night all doors and windows have to be kept shut and that the horses must never be left in the corral.
I have been right round the perimeter with him and insisted that adobe rubble on the outside must be dug away and piled on top of the wall. To avoid alarm I play up the new legend of the pitiable pygmy. Suppose the poor little sods, I suggested, came in to steal or kill horses and were surprised at the job. Then we might not be able to avoid mutual bloodshed and enmity. So keep them out till they know us better! He never asked why, if they are men, they cannot climb a half-ruined wall like ours. All the traditions of the duende remain in force, though the duende itself is exploded.
Dance of the Dwarfs Page 13