The Dream of the Celt: A Novel (19 page)

Roger was paired with Seymour Bell, who, as he had expected, said he didn’t feel well a short while after beginning the interview with the first Barbadian, referring to his dehydration problem, and left, leaving him alone with the former overseer for Casa Arana.

His name was Eponim Thomas Campbell and he was not sure of his age, though he thought he was no older than thirty-five. He was black with long kinky hair where some white shone. He wore a faded blouse open down to his navel, and coarse trousers that reached only to his ankles and were held up at his waist with a length of rope. He was barefoot, and his enormous feet, with their long toenails and many scabs, seemed to be made of stone. His English was full of colloquialisms that Roger found difficult to understand. At times Portuguese and Spanish words were mixed in.

Using simple language, Roger assured him his testimony would be confidential and in no case would he find himself compromised by what he might say. He would not even take notes, he would just listen. He asked only for truthful information about what went on in Putumayo.

They were sitting on the small terrace off Roger’s bedroom, and on the table, in front of the bench they shared, was a pitcher with papaya juice and two glasses. Eponim Thomas Campbell had been hired seven years earlier in Bridgetown, the capital of Barbados, with eighteen other Barbadians, by Lizardo Arana, the brother of Don Julio César, to work as an overseer at one of the stations in Putumayo. And right there the deception began because, when they hired him, they never told him he would have to spend a good part of his time on
correrías
.

“Explain to me what
correrías
are,” said Roger.

Going out to hunt Indians in their villages to make them come to harvest rubber on the company’s lands. Whoever they were: Ocaimas, Muinanes, Nonuyas, Andoques, Rezígaros, or Boras. Any of the Indians in the region. Because all of them, without exception, were unwilling to collect
jebe
. They had to be forced.
Correrías
required very long expeditions, sometimes with no result. They would arrive and find the villages deserted. The inhabitants had fled. Other times not, happily. They would attack, shooting to frighten them and keep them from defending themselves, but they did, with their blowguns and garrotes. There would be a battle. Then the ones who could walk, men and women, had to be driven back, tied together by the neck. The old people and newborns were left behind so they wouldn’t hold up the march. Eponim never committed the gratuitous cruelties of Armando Normand in spite of having worked for him for two years in Matanzas, where Mr. Normand was the manager.

“Gratuitous cruelties?” Roger interrupted. “Give me some examples.”

Eponim shifted on the bench, uncomfortable. His large eyes rolled in their sockets.

“Mr. Normand had his eccentricities,” he murmured, looking away. “When someone behaved badly. That is, when he didn’t behave the way he expected. He would drown the man’s children in the river, for example. Himself. With his own hands, I mean.”

He paused and explained that Mr. Normand’s eccentricities made him nervous. You could expect anything at all from so strange a man, even that one day he’d feel like emptying his revolver into the person closest to him. That’s why Eponim asked to transfer to another station. When they sent him to Último Retiro, whose chief was Mr. Alfredo Montt, Eponim slept easier.

“Did you ever have to kill Indians in the course of your duties?”

Roger saw that the Barbadian’s eyes looked at him, moved away, then looked at him again.

“It was part of the job,” he admitted, shrugging. “For the overseers and the ‘boys,’ who were also called ‘rationals.’ In Putumayo a lot of blood flows. People end up getting used to it. Life there is killing and dying.”

“Would you tell me how many people you had to kill, Mr. Campbell?”

“I never kept count,” Eponim quickly replied. “I did the job I had to do and tried to turn the page. I did what I had to. That’s why I say the company treated me very badly.”

He became entangled in a long, confused monologue against his former employers. They accused him of being involved in the sale of some fifty Huitotos to a plantation that belonged to Colombians, the Señores Iriarte, with whom the company of Señor Arana was always fighting for laborers. It was a lie. Eponim swore and swore again he had nothing to do with the disappearance of those Huitotos from Último Retiro, who, it was learned later, reappeared working for the Colombians. The one who had sold them was the station chief himself, Alfredo Montt. A greedy man and a miser. To hide his guilt he denounced Eponim and Dayton Cranton and Sinbad Douglas. Pure slander. The company believed him and the three overseers had to flee. They suffered terrible hardships to reach Iquitos. The company chiefs in Putumayo had ordered the “rationals,” those men receiving company rations, to kill the three Barbadians on sight. Now Eponim and his two companions lived by begging and doing occasional odd jobs. The company refused to pay their return passage to Barbados. It had denounced them for abandoning their work, and the judge in Iquitos ruled in favor of Casa Arana, of course.

Roger promised that the government would take care of repatriating him and his two colleagues, since they were British citizens.

Exhausted, he went to lie down as soon as he had said goodbye to Eponim Thomas Campbell. He was perspiring, his body ached, and he felt a traveling indisposition that was tormenting him little by little, organ by organ, from his head to his feet. The Congo. Amazonia. Was there no limit to the suffering of human beings? The world was infested with these enclaves of savagery that awaited him in Putumayo. How many? Hundreds, thousands, millions? Could the hydra be defeated? Its head was cut off in one place and reappeared in another, bloodier and more horrifying. He fell asleep.

He dreamed about his mother at a lake in Wales. A faint, distant sun shone through the leaves of the tall oaks, and agitated, feeling palpitations, he saw the muscular young man he had photographed this morning on the embankment in Iquitos. What was he doing at that Welsh lake? Or was it an Irish lake in Ulster? The slender silhouette of Anne Jephson disappeared. His uneasiness was due not to the sadness and pity caused in him by an enslaved humanity in Putumayo, but the sensation that although he didn’t see her, Anne Jephson was nearby, spying on him from a circular grove of trees. Fear, however, did not weaken his growing excitement while he watched the boy from Iquitos approach. His torso dripped water as he emerged from the lake like a lacustrian god. At each step his muscles stood out, and on his face was an insolent smile that made Roger shudder and moan in his sleep. When he awoke, he confirmed with disgust that he had ejaculated. He washed and changed his trousers and underwear. He felt ashamed and uncertain.

He found the members of the commission overwhelmed by the testimonies they had just received from the Barbadians Dayton Cranton and Sinbad Douglas. The ex-overseers had been as raw in their statements as Eponim had been with Roger. What horrified them most was that Dayton as well as Sinbad seemed obsessed above all with disproving they had “sold” those fifty Huitotos to the Colombian plantation owners.

“They weren’t in the least concerned with the floggings, mutilations, or murders,” Walter Folk kept repeating, a man who did not seem to suspect the evil that greed could provoke. “Such horrors seem the most natural thing in the world to them.”

“I couldn’t bear Sinbad’s entire statement,” Henry Fielgald confessed. “I had to go out to vomit.”

“You’ve read the documentation collected by the Foreign Office,” Roger reminded them. “Did you think the accusations of Saldaña Roca and Hardenburg were pure fantasies?”

“Not fantasies,” replied Walter Folk, “but certainly exaggerations.”

“After this aperitif, I wonder what we’re going to find in Putumayo,” said Louis Barnes.

“They’ll have taken precautions,” suggested the botanist. “They’ll show us a very cosmetic reality.”

The consul interrupted to announce that lunch was served. Except for Stirs, who with appetite ate
sábalo
fish served with a salad of
chonta
fruit and wrapped in corn husks, the commissioners barely tasted a mouthful. They were silent, absorbed in their memories of the recent interviews.

“This journey will be a descent into hell,” prophesied Seymour Bell, who had just rejoined the group. He turned to Roger. “You’ve already gone through this. One survives, then.”

“The wounds take time to close,” Roger suggested.

“It’s not so serious, gentlemen.” Stirs tried to raise their spirits; he had eaten in very good humor. “A good Loretan siesta and you’ll feel better. With the authorities and the heads of the Peruvian Amazon Company, things will go better for you than with the blacks, you’ll see.”

Instead of taking a siesta, Roger sat at the small night table in his room and wrote in his notebook everything he remembered of his conversation with Eponim Thomas Campbell and made summaries of the testimonies the commission members had taken from the other two Barbadians. Then, on a separate paper, he wrote down the questions he would ask that afternoon of the prefect, Rey Lama, and the manager of the company, Pablo Zumaeta, who, Stirs had told him, was Julio C. Arana’s brother-in-law.

The prefect received the commission in his office and offered them glasses of beer, fruit juices, and cups of coffee. He’d had chairs brought in and distributed straw fans for ventilation. He still wore the riding trousers and boots he’d had on the night before, but had changed his embroidered vest for a white linen jacket and a shirt closed to the neck, like a Russian tunic. He had a distinguished air with his snowy temples and elegant manners. He let them know he was a career diplomat. He had served in Europe for several years and accepted this prefecture at the behest of the president of the republic—he indicated the photograph on the wall of a small, elegant man, dressed in tails and a top hat, with a sash across his chest—Augusto B. Leguía.

“Who sends through me his most cordial greetings,” he added.

“How good that you speak English and we can do without the interpreter, Prefect,” responded Roger.

“My English is very bad,” Rey Lama interrupted affectedly. “You’ll have to be indulgent.”

“The British government regrets that its requests that President Leguía’s government initiate an investigation into the accusations in Putumayo have been useless.”

“There is a judicial action in progress, Señor Casement,” the prefect interrupted. “My government did not need His Majesty to initiate it. That is why it has appointed a special judge who is on his way now to Iquitos. A distinguished magistrate: Judge Carlos A. Valcárcel. You know that the distance between Lima and Iquitos is enormous.”

“But in that case, why send a judge from Lima?” Louis Barnes intervened. “Aren’t there judges in Iquitos? Yesterday, at the dinner you held for us, you introduced several magistrates.”

Roger noted that Rey Lama gave Barnes a pitying look, the kind appropriate for a child who has not reached the age of reason, or an imbecilic adult.

“This talk is confidential, isn’t it, gentlemen?” he asked at last.

Every head nodded. The prefect still hesitated before answering.

“My government sending a judge from Lima to investigate demonstrates its good faith,” he explained. “The easiest thing would have been to ask a local judge to do it. But then …”

He stopped, uncomfortable.

“A word to the wise,” he added.

“Do you mean that no judge from Iquitos would dare confront the company of Señor Arana?” Roger asked quietly.

“This is not cultured, prosperous England, gentlemen,” the prefect murmured sorrowfully. He had a glass of water in his hand and he drank it all in one swallow. “If a person takes months to come here from Lima, the remuneration for magistrates, authorities, the military, and functionaries takes even longer. Or, quite simply, it never arrives at all. And what can these people live on while they wait for their salaries?”

“The generosity of the Peruvian Amazon Company?” suggested Walter Folk.

“Don’t put words I haven’t said in my mouth,” Rey Lama balked, raising his hand. “Señor Arana’s company advances their salaries to functionaries as a loan. These sums are to be paid back, in principle, with minimal interest. They are not a gift. There is no bribery. It is an honorable agreement with the state. But even so, it’s natural that magistrates who live thanks to those loans are not absolutely impartial when dealing with Señor Arana’s company. You understand, don’t you? The government has sent a judge from Lima to carry out an absolutely independent investigation. Isn’t this the best proof that it is determined to find out the truth?”

The commission members drank from their glasses of water or beer, confused and demoralized.
How many are already looking for a pretext to return to Europe?
Roger thought. They certainly hadn’t foreseen any of this. With the exception perhaps of Louis Barnes, who had lived in Africa, the others did not imagine that in the rest of the world not everything functioned the way it did in the British Empire.

“Are there authorities in the region whom we’ll visit?” asked Roger.

“Except for inspectors who pass through when a bishop dies, none,” said Rey Lama. “It is a very isolated region. Until a few years ago, virgin forest, populated only by savage tribes. What authority could the government send there? And to what end? For the cannibals to eat? If there’s commercial life there now, and work, and a beginning of modernity, it is due to Julio C. Arana and his brothers. You should consider that as well. They have been the first to conquer that Peruvian land for Peru. Without the company, all of Putumayo would already have been occupied by Colombia, which hungers for the region. You cannot leave out that aspect, gentlemen. Putumayo is not England. It is an isolated and remote world of pagans who, when they have twins or children with a physical deformity, drown them in the river. Julio C. Arana has been a pioneer, he has brought in boats, medicines, Catholicism, clothes, Spanish. Abuses must be punished, naturally. But don’t forget, we’re dealing with a land that awakens greed. Don’t you find it strange that in the accusations of Señor Hardenburg, all the Peruvian plantation owners are monsters while the Colombians are archangels filled with compassion for the natives? I’ve read the articles in the journal
Truth
. Didn’t you find that odd? Sheer coincidence that the Colombians, bent on taking over that land, have found a defender like Señor Hardenburg, who saw only violence and abuses among the Peruvians but not a single comparable case among the Colombians. Before he came to Peru he worked on the railroads in Cauca, remember. Couldn’t we be dealing with an agent?”