Dance of the Dwarfs (16 page)

Tesoro's hind shoes had worn paper thin in the last weeks of drought, so I left him with Arnoldo while I read my letters. He is a very vain horse, always holding up his head as if he carried a king, and Arnoldo tells him that it is an honor to shoe him. So they get on well.

It is still difficult to adjust myself to the erratic mail. The director was acknowledging and commenting on reports which I sent up to Bogotá with Valera over six weeks ago. Valera had, I gather, delivered my stuff in person and given a somewhat too romantic picture of my life as a llanero agronomist. He had promised all the help that the army could give. That must have sounded as if the sky was going to be full of helicopters. What he meant—for his private amusement—was Chucha.

Another letter was only fifteen days old. The director was anxious because nobody could communicate with Santa Eulalia. Remembering Pedro's unintelligible messages, he told me that if I merely transmitted the word AVION he would arrange for a plane to call and fly me up to Bogotá. Well, the canoe will have reported that Pedro's store has been burned down and that I, according to Santa Eulalia gossip, was in the best of health and very satisfied.

The director also mentioned a mysterious and complimentary letter from headquarters of the National Liberation Army informing the Mission that I had nothing to fear and could continue my work in peace. Military Intelligence had confirmed that the letter was genuine and was furious at such impertinence. I was warned that the insurgents were killers first, foremost and all the time, and that I should trust them no more than mad dogs.

Bogotá! I am glad that I have no way of summoning that plane. I cannot leave Chucha here alone, and if I took her along what would she make of a Bogotá hotel? And what would friends and colleagues make of her? Not that I give a damn! Valera or some other dissolute scamp would undoubtedly advise me how to handle a situation which cannot be unfamiliar. But, whatever I did, the coarse and the comic or the degradingly secret would be emphasized at the cost of all our delicious simplicity. The only pretense which could come close to our real relationship would be to pass her off as an adopted daughter. But that would mean laying off the child—which I can't.

No, I shall not go up to Bogotá till I have to. It occurs to me that I am very happy. Is the secret of happiness a mixture of passionate fornication and somewhat chancy hunting? If so, we human beings have been continually frustrated by urban life ever since we were fools enough to invent it. It's little wonder that some of us rush off to war with a sense of relief.

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.