Moreover, Alvar said, these fatherless bandits were men of education, well spoken. That puzzled him. It doesn’t puzzle me. The bastards, as he rightly called them, are enjoying themselves. They think the eyes of history are on them. Many are law students or unemployable lawyers; so they like playing at soldiers. I hope to live to see the day when soldiers like playing at being lawyers.
They must have eaten the villages out of house and home and become very short of rations, for they were taking big risks besides gambling against the meteorological reports. They may have thought that open llano was always open llano and they could of course be confident — after their punitive expeditions against remote villages in the Cordillera — that knives and the odd lance were not much use against machine pistols.
They dossed down, two sleeping and one on guard, in front of the ashes of Pedro’s place — a position from which they could cover all four tracks of Santa Eulalia. At dawn on Saturday there was still no sign of a break in the downpour, and it looked as if the whole settlement was about to slide down the gentle slope into the Guaviare. They were in a filthy temper and decided to get out quick. They swore to return and burn the place down if the cattle were not delivered on time.
Two miles out they tried to ford a yellow torrent and stuck fast. They hauled out the jeep backwards, found a likelier crossing and stuck again. God wished the jeep to remain there, Arnoldo said, and remain there it did. All that could be seen of it was one wheel cocked up in a slope of mud.
But God had failed to foresee the consequences. The three, furious and with mud running off them in streams, had marched back and demanded horses. This would have been perfectly acceptable in any large estancia, but not in Santa Eulalia where a man had no possessions but his horse and saddle. Cattle, all right. Women, well, there might be one or two who would consider it an honor. But horses, no!
They took what they wanted, three horses and three remounts. It turned out that they actually needed less, for their leader was neatly spitted on a long lance. The gallant llanero at the butt end was turned into a fountain. They wrote a cross on him with their guns, Alvar said. After that, resistance was hopeless.
The sun was now out again and steaming the mud. The guerrilleros coolly dried themselves, commandeered what food they could lay their hands on and rode off leading their two spare horses in the late afternoon. Before dusk five llaneros followed hard on their tracks, careful to stay out of sight. They hoped to be able to close in with the twilight when their steel would have a chance against automatic weapons. Alternative tactics would be to creep up when the two men camped for the night, cut the horses loose and round them up at leisure. A number of unpleasant things could happen to the pursued if they had to make their way back to the Cordillera on foot.
The two guerrilleros followed the forest belt along the Guaviare. Since the more open space they had for their weapons, the more unassailable they would be, this route was unexpected. The llaneros, cleverly using the folds and skylines which only they could recognize, watched them unsaddle and tether the horses. When darkness came down, they closed in on foot. They found the temporary camp all right, and nothing on the ground but horse dung.
They were innocent, of course. They seemed to have assumed that no men were as valiant and cunning as themselves. They did not realize that these veterans, though knowing comparatively little of horses and the lay of the land, had been hunted for years by experienced, well-armed enemies and were fully capable of foreseeing what the llaneros were likely to do before the honest souls thought of it themselves.
The pursuers had wasted a lot of time but still had a trick in hand. Hoofprints were distinguished with fingers and matches and established that the four horses had quietly moved on westwards. That meant that sooner or later the guerrilleros would be stopped by the lower reaches of the creek. They could not possibly cross it, so they would have to follow it up and go round the north of the marshes.
Four of the llaneros then struck straight across the grass through the night in order to intercept them. The fifth stayed on the edge of the forest as his horse was finished. A shameful failure in their ordinary daily life. Their horses, though they always look thin and un-groomed and are often saddlesore, can endure anything. But this one, which its owner had had to grab in a hurry, had been weakened by a vampire bat the night before.
The four, when we met them, had found no hoofprints north of the marsh and were sure that the guerrilleros were still in the Guaviare forest belt. I said that I doubted it. They knew of the existence of creek and marshes as well as the llaneros did. If they wanted to break contact, they could have followed the forest for a mile or two and then ridden off into the blue. It did not much matter where they found themselves at sunrise. They had only to put it at their backs and go on.
Alvar, who had lost his own reliable mount to them, would not have it. If they had got that far ahead they would kill their horses, he said furiously, at the pace they were going. I don’t suppose they cared. Assuming their jeep was the same as I saw at the estancia, it had a two-way radio in it. Before they abandoned the vehicle they could have called up guerrilla headquarters and reported their intention. Thus, if they could only keep their lead for another day, a party might come out to pick them up.
The four swept off their hats, thanking us for our sympathy and help — though we could give none — and paced on to the west.
Chucha has revised her opinion of revolutionaries. Why do idealists have to kill people, she wants to know. I forget the exact words she used. Idealist is not in her vocabularly. It is extraordinary how we can communicate in depth on any subject, even mildly technical subjects, with language which is really only fit to ask for a banana.
[ May 16, Monday ]
We tried to plow too soon and broke a tine of the cultivator on new ground outside the walls. The water had poured off, soaking in a mere three inches and leaving the soil rock hard beneath. I must remember that if I am here next year.
If I am here. I long to be. That would solve so many problems. But it is highly improbable. Both my director and the Government, when they know everything, will insist that this is a lunatic choice for an experimental station. If only I had someone to talk to! This goes round and round in circles. I am obsessed with Chucha. It isn’t only our exquisite incontinence. I swear I should still cherish her simplicity and grace and youth if she or I were impotent. There is only one word to describe what I feel for her, and I cannot and will not face it.
Oh God! Back to broken ironmongery and mustelids. They may settle the issue yet.
I rode into Santa Eulalia with the two halves of the tine knowing that if Arnoldo had them for a model he could laboriously forge another. I found the men, dark-faced, standing by their horses in the plaza. They told me there had been another murder by the partisans, who had brutally cut the throat of that unfortunate llanero left behind with his exhausted horse.
The other four had returned home early this morning, having given up the chase as hopeless. They found that their companion — Jacinto, his name was — had not come in, though he could easily have walked the distance in three hours. They rode out to meet him, and caught his hobbled horse far out on the llano. Jacinto was where they had left him, lying on a bed of dry leaves with his throat cut.
I had to go to his house, view the body they had brought in and speak the nothings of convention to his weeping Indian wife. What happens to the widows? Where do they go and how do they live? I glanced at the unpleasant sight and then looked more carefully. I asked Alvar — sure to be experienced in such matters — whether he had seen many men before with gaping throats.
“Two, or it could be three. It is not,” he added apologetically, “a very rare occurrence.”
“Didn’t the killer usually do a neater job?”
“I believe it! But what can you expect of these sons of whores? They cannot even handle a knife like a gentleman.”
“Was there much blood?”
“It seemed to me little. But leaves
are more thirsty than the ground. And there had been rain in the night.”
I embarked cautiously on the forbidden subject.
“Have you always grazed cattle along the belt of the Guaviare?”
“Without a care!”
“Jaguar?”
“None! There is no game left for them to eat. We had not always such a lack of powder and shot as there is now.”
“Could there be other hunters?”
“Not a thought! You know where those live better than any of us.”
I asked him what tracks they had seen. Unfortunately they had taken murder for granted and had pretty well ignored tracks. Jacinto had been sleeping just inside a grove of ceibas, on the same spot where the two fugitives with their four horses had pretended to be about to camp. Naturally there were prints of feet and hooves all over the place. It was difficult to judge which had been made before the killing and which afterwards, especially as there had been a short, violent storm in the night, turning the grove into an island. What was clear was the indentation of two knees on the leaves where the supposed murderer had knelt to cut Jacinto’s throat while he was sleeping.
I asked if there were nothing else. Vicente said he had noticed tracks of a big otter.
“Webbed feet?”
Vicente, trying hard to sound more polite than ironical, remarked that it was known otters had webbed feet.
“But, with your permission, did you notice the web?”
Alvar broke in impatiently to say that on leaves, especially where they stuck to whatever touched them, you couldn’t tell if the Virgin herself had webbed feet. As for otters, wherever there was new water, they journeyed to look at it. They were bored like the rest of us.
All these excuses were nonsense. They had not examined anything closely, but were not going to admit it. However, they put the identity of the assassin beyond a doubt, and this was the time to tell them what I myself had known for a week past.
“Look, friends! I have seen the animal which made the tracks and I have killed one,” I said. “It is, if you like, a sort of big otter. It is also the dwarf. And it crouched by Jacinto while he was sleeping and tore his throat open.”
They would not believe it. I may have been too sudden and dramatic. They could neither give me the lie nor laugh at me, which would have ended the conversation; but their general attitude was that I, a mere man of book learning — though, yes, I recognized one end of a horse from the other — could not know more of forest creatures than they who lived in Santa Eulalia. The dwarf could not be an animal, for who ever heard of an animal which could dance or one that drank the blood without eating the flesh?
They trotted out the lot. Live on the other side of the creek. Never go far from the edge of their forest. Do not cross water.
“Well, if all this is so, why would none of you ride alone to the estancia after dark even when there was water in the creek? And why does Joaquín dislike a guitar in Santa Eulalia?”
My obstinacy roused them out of their usual reluctance to talk. It was not true, they said, that none of them would ride alone to the estancia. They were all valiant. It was just that a man on a long ride at night, with no cattle to claim his attention, liked a companion to talk with. It could be there were dwarfs on the other side of the creek, or it could not. But the place was unhealthy. That was known. One had only to observe old Mario who made himself a prisoner every night. As for the guitar, who the devil believed that it could attract dwarfs all the way to Santa Eulalia? Only Joaquín! Good! That did not mean they thought it was true.
“When a priest comes here,” Arnoldo explained, “we do not believe all he says. There is much that is very improbable. But he is a man who might speak with the Most Holy Virgin tomorrow or the next day. So a wise man will show some faith. The same with Joaquín.”
I replied that I understood all that very well. The beast, however, was so real that it had killed my golden Tesoro before I shot it. I hesitated to say that I had hit it on the nose with a machete.
I now had their instant, warm sympathy. Poor Tesoro! What a loss! Perhaps it had been a jaguar of a strange color. Men had seen such which had more yellow than black in their skins. There was even a story of a white jaguar. Or it could have been a puma, bolder and stronger than usual. They would ride out to see what was left of the carcass and tell me which it was.
“And besides,” Alvar pronounced in the true spirit of science, “why look for dwarfs and duendes when we all know that these communists, as they call themselves, killed Jacinto?”
It was no use. Even if they saw the bones of the mustelid, they would swear it was a jaguar with short legs, seeing what they were determined to see and anyway having little knowledge of anatomy beyond that of cattle and horses. If the flooded creek were passable, curiosity might lead one or two of them to the scene; but, as it is, the journey round the marshes, down to the south and back, could not be completed in a day — and, valiant or cautious, not one of them would spend a night in that haunted country.
I had in my saddlebag a couple of bottles of rum for Joaquín and hoped to get some sense out of him before they took effect. He had had to put up with Indian cassava beer for some time and was sure to pass off into the spirit world — a pun which to him would not be one at all — an hour after the corks were pulled.
I told him the story from the time I watched the mustelid at the pool below the ridge up to the death of Tesoro. I told it very slowly with long pauses and invited his comments on the Declaration of Intent. It was difficult to illustrate my meaning by the parallel of the stoat. Small animals in this immensity are ignored, and there is no reliable, intimate natural history. I think it likely that the hunting methods of our hurón resemble those of the stoats and weasels, but Indians are only interested in food animals and pets.
Joaquín at least did not doubt the facts. I had seen the duende and was none the worse. His father, who also saw the duende, had been sick for days.
“So I have always known it was a duende, not a dwarf,” he said.
I continued to insist that it was a flesh-and-blood animal, less powerful than the jaguar but ferocious and without respect for man.
“That is the shape which the fear takes.”
“But duendes don’t die when one blows their brains out, and they don’t kill horses.”
“If they did not, horses would never die.”
We had some more rum while I worked out that fantastic statement. I translate it as meaning that whatever the cause of death — time, worms, the misfortune of breaking a leg — there is always a duende behind it. One cannot prove it isn’t so, for we have no machine which will detect the presence or absence of the malevolent duende of ill luck. The virus, that little devil of all devils, was hardly more than a word till the electron microscope revealed its material existence.
This, of course, is afterthought. At the time I was. more exasperated than analytical.
“But this duende died,” I repeated.
“Why not?”
He whispered in my ear, lest invisible listeners under the thatch should hear him, that he too had killed duendes.
I had another shot at it.
“Friend Joaquín, imagine that a jaguar is tearing open your belly with its claws! Do you say that your fear is real and the jaguar is not?”
“Man, what foolishness!” — rum was taking over from politeness — “I should feel no more fear.”
He may be right. Fear is over, leaving only submission to death.
“Then anything a man is afraid of is a duende?”
“If you came at me with a knife, I should be afraid of you. But you are not a duende.”
So there! Logic demands that the moment he fears me I am a duende. However, he won’t have it. The fact is that he makes no clear distinction between imagined fear and fear of material danger. Thus, when it comes to the mustelid/duende which produces what I call “superstitious” fear, it would take a theologian to define the difference between us.
> The power of myth is vaster than I ever imagined. The llaneros will not have it that Jacinto was killed by an animal because they won’t admit there could be an animal which they do not know. For Joaquín we are all spirits and the physical shape of the fiend is unimportant. In maintaining that all is illusion he has a better case than the fundamentalist llaneros who are emotionally bound to the old facts and refuse to accept new ones. To fill up the measure of human oddities I can add the Dominican who would at once and sanely accept the mustelids but shuddered at Pedro’s corpse.
Now that I am here in silence, except for the patter of the rain and the bird song of Teresa and Chucha in the kitchen, I begin to suspect that I too may be making myths for myself. I could be wrong in assuming that it was a fang, not a knife, which ripped open Jacinto’s throat. Those fanatics of the National Liberation Army do not shrink from terrorism. They could have found Jacinto sleeping soundly in the ceiba grove and decided that a further lesson would be good for Santa Eulalia. My suggestion that they did not spend the night in the trees but rode straight off over the llano is, after all, mere guesswork.
I must go and see for myself.
[ May 17, Tuesday ]
Today I took Pichón down the east side of the creek. The turbulent yellow river was impassable all the way. I rode Pichón into it at several likely points and we were both very glad to turn tail as soon as he was up to the cinch. Neither man nor beast could have swum across, though it was narrower than it had been at the time of the flood. Acres of mud, smooth and desolate as a sandbank at low tide, stretched along the creek without even the flotsam and jetsam of a beach. There is so little on the llano which can be carried away except dead grass and topsoil.
Where the creek entered the the Guaviare jungle the water had torn down everything in its way, piling up trunks and debris, roaring over and round the obstruction, clearing an avenue through the forest like a troop of bulldozers in line abreast. No accidental bridge or causeway could ever have existed for a minute.
This side of the creek was very different from the dark but open forest to the west through which the mustelids had chased Tesoro. There were only a few outlying trees and groves before one came right up against the green wall. In the shattered woodland the areas of mud showed no tracks but those of birds, proving that the llaneros were right and that the belt between Santa Eulalia and the creek was empty of ground life.
Dance of the Dwarfs Page 17