The Dream of the Celt: A Novel (25 page)

“I lived close to twenty years in Africa and know something about those things, Señor Israel,” Roger assured him. “By the way, I met a good number of whites there who thought the way you do.”

To keep the disagreement from becoming even more bitter, Walter Folk and Henry Fielgald turned the conversation to less thorny subjects. Tonight, in his wakefulness, after ten days in Iquitos interviewing all kinds of people, of writing down dozens of opinions gathered here and there from authorities, judges, military men, restaurant owners, fishermen, pimps, vagrants, prostitutes and waiters in brothels and bars, Roger told himself that the immense majority of the whites and mestizos in Iquitos, Peruvians and foreigners, thought as Victor Israel did. For them the Amazonian indigenous people were not, strictly speaking, human beings, but an inferior, contemptible form of existence, closer to animals than civilized people. That’s why it was legitimate to exploit them, whip them, abduct them, take them to the rubber plantations or, if they resisted, kill them like rabid dogs. It was so generalized a view of the Indian that, as Father Ricardo Urrutia said, no one was shocked that the domestic servants in Iquitos were girls and boys stolen and sold to Loretan families for the equivalent of one or two pounds sterling. Anguish obliged him to open his mouth and breathe deeply until air reached his lungs. If he had seen and learned these things in this city, what wouldn’t he see in Putumayo?

The members of the commission left Iquitos on September 14, 1910, mid-morning. Roger had hired Frederick Bishop, one of the Barbadians he interviewed, as an interpreter. Bishop spoke Spanish and assured him he could understand and make himself understood in the two most common indigenous languages spoken on the rubber plantations: Bora and Huitoto. The
Liberal
, the largest of the fleet of fifteen ships belonging to the Peruvian Amazon Company, was well maintained. It had small cabins, each accommodating two travelers. There were hammocks in the prow and stern for those who preferred to sleep outdoors. Bishop was afraid to go back to Putumayo and asked Roger for a written guarantee that the commission would protect him during the journey and afterward the British government would repatriate him to Barbados.

The passage from Iquitos to La Chorrera, capital of the enormous territory between the Napo and Caquetá Rivers where Julio C. Arana’s Peruvian Amazon Company had its operations, lasted for eight days of heat, clouds of mosquitoes, boredom, and the monotony of the landscape and the noises. The ship sailed down the Amazon, whose width, once they had left Iquitos, grew until its banks became invisible, crossed the Brazilian border in Tabatinga, continued down the Yavarí, and then reentered Peru along the Igara Paraná. On this stretch of river the banks were closer and at times the vines and branches of extremely tall trees hung over the deck. They heard and saw flocks of parrots zigzagging and screeching in the trees, or solemn pink herons taking the sun on an islet and balancing on one leg, turtle shells whose brown color stood out in somewhat paler water, and, at times, the bristling back of an alligator dozing in the mud of the bank and shot at with rifles or revolvers from the boat.

Roger spent a good part of the crossing arranging his notes and notebooks from Iquitos and outlining a work plan for the months he would spend in the territories of Julio C. Arana. According to the Foreign Office’s instructions, he was to interview only the Barbadians who worked at the stations, because they were British citizens, leaving the employees from Peru and other nations alone in order not to wound the sensitivities of the Peruvian government. But he didn’t intend to respect those limits. His investigation would be left one-eyed, maimed, and crippled if he didn’t also obtain information from the station chiefs, their “boys” or “rationals”—Hispanicized Indians responsible for guarding the works and dispensing punishments—and from the indigenous people themselves. Only in this way would he have a complete vision of how Arana’s company violated laws and ethics in its relations with the natives.

In Iquitos, Pablo Zumaeta informed the members of the commission that on Arana’s instructions, the company had sent ahead to Putumayo one of its principal officers, Señor Juan Tizón, to receive them and facilitate their travel from place to place and their work. The commissioners supposed the real reason for Tizón’s trip to Putumayo was to hide evidence of abuses and present a cosmetic image of reality.

They arrived in La Chorrera, or the Rapids, at midday on September 22, 1910. The name of the place was due to the torrents and waterfalls caused by an abrupt narrowing of the riverbed, a tumultuous, magnificent spectacle of foam, noise, wet rocks, and whirlpools that broke the monotonous flow of the Igara Paraná, the tributary on whose banks the general headquarters of the Peruvian Amazon Company were located. To move from the dock to the offices and residences of La Chorrera, it was necessary to climb a steep slope of mud and brambles. The travelers’ boots sank into the mud and sometimes, in order not to fall, they had to lean on the Indian porters carrying the luggage. As he greeted those who had come out to receive them, Roger, with a small shudder, confirmed that one out of every three or four of the half-naked Indians carrying their baggage or looking at them curiously from the bank, smacking their arms with open hands to chase the mosquitoes, had on their backs, buttocks, and thighs scars that could have come only from floggings. The Congo, yes, the Congo was everywhere.

Juan Tizón was a tall man, dressed in white, very courteous with aristocratic manners, who spoke enough English to be understood. He must have been close to fifty, and because of his carefully shaved face, small trimmed mustache, fine hands and clothing, it was obvious from miles away that he was not in his element here in the middle of the jungle, but was a man of offices, salons, the city. He welcomed them in English and in Spanish and introduced his companion, whose mere name produced repugnance in Roger: Víctor Macedo, chief of La Chorrera. He, at least, hadn’t fled. The articles of Saldaña Roca and those by Hardenburg in the magazine
Truth
in London singled him out as one of the cruelest of Arana’s lieutenants in Putumayo.

As they climbed the slope, he observed Macedo. He was a man of indeterminate age, husky, on the short side, a light-skinned
cholo
but with the somewhat Asian features of an Indian, a flat nose, a mouth with very full lips that were always open, revealing two or three gold teeth, the hard expression of someone weathered by the outdoors. Unlike the newcomers, he climbed the steep hill easily. He had a rather oblique gaze, as if he looked sideways to avoid the glare of the sun or because he was afraid to face people. Tizón was unarmed, but Víctor Macedo wore a revolver in his belt.

In a very large clearing, there were wooden buildings on pilings—thick tree trunks or cement columns—with verandas on the second floor, the larger ones with corrugated roofs, the smaller ones with roofs of braided palm leaves. Tizón was talking as he pointed—“There are the offices … Those are rubber storerooms … All of you will stay in this house”—but Roger barely heard him. He was observing the groups of partly or completely naked Indians who looked at them indifferently or avoided looking at them at all: men, women, and sickly children, some with paint on their faces and chests, their legs as skinny as reeds, pale yellowish skin, and sometimes incisions and pendants in their lips and ears that reminded him of the African natives. But there were no blacks here. The few mulatto and dark-skinned men he could see wore trousers and boots and undoubtedly were part of the contingent from Barbados. He counted four. He recognized the “boys,” or “rationals,” immediately, for though they were Indian and barefoot they had cut their hair and combed it like “Christians,” wore trousers and shirts, and had clubs and whips hanging from their belts.

While the other members of the commission had to sleep two in a room, Roger had the privilege of a room to himself. It was small, with a hammock instead of a bed and a piece of furniture that could be both trunk and desk. On a small table were a basin, a pitcher of water, and a mirror. They explained to him that on the first floor, beside the entrance, were a septic tank and a shower. As soon as he had settled in and put away his things, before he sat down to have lunch, Roger told Juan Tizón he wanted to interview all the Barbadians in La Chorrera, beginning that afternoon.

By then the rank, penetrating, oily stench, similar to the smell of rotting plants and leaves, was in his nostrils. It saturated every corner of La Chorrera and would accompany him morning, noon, and night for the three months of his stay in Putumayo, a smell he never became accustomed to, that made him vomit and retch, a pestilence that seemed to come from the air, the earth, objects, and human beings, and from then on would become for Roger the symbol of the evil and suffering that greed for the rubber exuded by the trees in Amazonia had exacerbated to dizzying extremes. “It’s curious,” he remarked to Tizón on the day of his arrival. “In the Congo I was often on rubber plantations and rubber depositories. But I don’t recall Congolese latex giving off so strong and unpleasant an odor.” “They’re different varieties,” Tizón explained. “This smells more and is also stronger than African rubber. They sprinkle talc on the bales going to Europe to reduce the stink.”

The number of Barbadians in the entire region of Putumayo was 196, but there were only six in La Chorrera. Two refused from the outset to talk to Roger, even though he, with the intervention of Bishop, assured them their testimony would be private and in no case would they be indicted for what they told him, and that he personally would take care of returning them to Barbados if they did not wish to continue working for Arana’s company.

The four who agreed to give testimony had been in Putumayo close to seven years and had served the Peruvian Amazon Company at different stations as overseers, a position halfway between the chiefs and the “boys,” or “rationals.” The first one he spoke to, Donal Francis, a tall, strong black who limped and had a clouded eye, was so nervous and distrustful that Roger immediately assumed he wouldn’t obtain much from him. He responded in monosyllables and denied every accusation. According to him, in La Chorrera chiefs, employees, and “even the savages” got along very well. There were never problems, much less violence. He had been carefully coached regarding what he had to say and do before the commission.

Roger perspired profusely. He kept sipping water. Would the other interviews with Barbadians in Putumayo be as useless as this one? They weren’t. Philip Bertie Lawrence, Seaford Greenwich, and Stanley Sealy, especially the third, after overcoming an initial caution and receiving Roger’s promise, in the name of the British government, that they would be repatriated to Barbados, began to talk, to tell everything and incriminate themselves vehemently, at times frantically, as if impatient to unburden their conscience. Stanley Sealy, a small mulatto, illustrated his testimony with so many details and examples that, in spite of his long experience of human atrocities, Roger at certain moments became dizzy and felt an anguish that barely allowed him to breathe. When the Barbadian finished speaking, night had fallen. The hum of nocturnal insects seemed thunderous, as if thousands were flying around them. They were sitting on a wooden bench on the terrace that led to Roger’s bedroom. Between the two of them they had smoked a pack of cigarettes. In the growing darkness, Roger could no longer see Sealy’s features, only the outline of his head and muscular arms. He had been in La Chorrera a short time. He had worked for two years at the Abisinia station, the right arm of the chiefs Abelardo Agüero and Augusto Jiménez, and before that at Matanzas, with Armando Normand. They both were silent. Roger felt mosquitoes biting his face, neck, and arms but did not have the energy to drive them away.

Suddenly he realized that Sealy was crying. He had brought his hands to his face and sobbed slowly, with sighs that filled his chest. Roger saw the gleam of tears in his eyes.

“Do you believe in God?” he asked. “Are you a religious person?”

“I was as a boy, I think,” the mulatto moaned, his voice breaking. “My godmother would take me to church on Sunday, back in St. Patrick, the village where I was born. Now, I don’t know.”

“I ask because it probably will help you to talk to God. I’m not saying to pray, just to talk. Try it. As frankly as you’ve talked to me. Tell Him what you’re feeling, why you’re crying. In any case, He can help you more than I can. I don’t know how. I feel as upset as you do.”

Like Lawrence and Greenwich, Sealy was prepared to repeat his testimony to the members of the commission and even to Señor Tizón, as long as he could stay close to Roger and travel with him to Iquitos and then to Barbados.

Roger went into his room, lit the oil lamps, removed his shirt, and washed his chest, underarms, and face with water from the basin. He would have liked to take a shower but would have had to go downstairs and do it outdoors, and he knew his body would be devoured by the mosquitoes that multiplied in numbers and ferocity at night.

He went down to the ground floor for supper in a dining room lit by oil lamps. Juan Tizón and his travel companions were drinking lukewarm, watery whiskey. They stood and talked, while three or four half-naked indigenous servants carried in fried and baked fish, boiled yucca, sweet potatoes, and corn flour with which they powdered food just as the Brazilians did with
farinha.
Others drove flies away with straw fans.

“How did things go with the Barbadians?” Tizón asked, handing him a glass of whiskey.

“Better than I expected, Señor Tizón. I was afraid they’d be reluctant to talk. But just the opposite. Three of them spoke with total frankness.”

“I hope you share with me the complaints you receive,” said Tizón, half joking, half serious. “The company wants to correct what it lacks and improve. That has always been Señor Arana’s policy. Well, I imagine you must be hungry. To the table, gentlemen!”

They sat and began to help themselves from the various serving dishes. The members of the commission had spent the afternoon looking over the installations in La Chorrera and, with Bishop’s help, conversing with the employees in administration and the storehouses. They all seemed tired and not very interested in talking. Could their experiences this first day have been as depressing as his?