The Dream of the Celt: A Novel (26 page)

Tizón offered them wine but, since he had warned them that with transportation and the climate, French wine arrived here disturbed and at times sour, everyone preferred to continue with whiskey.

Halfway through the meal, Roger remarked, glancing at the Indians serving them:

“I’ve seen that many native men and women in La Chorrera have scars on their backs, buttocks, and thighs. That girl, for example. How many lashes do they receive as a rule when they’re whipped?”

A general silence fell in which the sputtering of the oil lamps and the hum of the insects increased. Everyone looked at Juan Tizón very seriously.

“Most of the time they make those scars themselves,” he stated, uncomfortably. “In their tribes they have fairly barbaric initiation rites, you know, like making holes in their faces, lips, ears, noses, to insert rings, teeth, and all kinds of pendants. I don’t deny some might have been made by overseers who did not respect the company’s orders. Our regulations categorically prohibit physical punishment.”

“That wasn’t the intention of my question, Señor Tizón,” Roger apologized. “I meant that even though so many scars are visible, I haven’t seen any Indians with the company’s brand on their bodies.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Tizón replied, lowering his fork.

“The Barbadians explained to me that many indigenous people are branded with the company initials: CA, that is, Casa Arana. Like cows, horses, and pigs. So they won’t escape or be taken by Colombian rubber planters. They themselves had branded many of them. Sometimes with fire, and sometimes with a knife. But I still haven’t seen anyone with the brand. What happened to them, Señor?”

Tizón suddenly lost his composure and elegant manners. He had turned red and trembled with indignation.

“I will not allow you to speak to me in that tone,” he exclaimed, mixing English and Spanish. “I’m here to facilitate your work, not to suffer your ironic remarks.”

Roger agreed, not changing expression.

“I beg your pardon, I didn’t mean to offend you,” he said calmly. “It’s just that even though I was witness to unspeakable cruelties in the Congo, I haven’t yet seen the branding of human beings with fire or a knife. I’m sure you’re not responsible for this atrocity.”

“Of course I’m not responsible for any atrocity!” Tizón raised his voice again, gesticulating. He rolled his eyes in their sockets, beside himself. “If atrocities are committed, it’s not the fault of the company. Don’t you see what kind of place this is, Señor Casement? Here there is no authority, no police, no judges, nothing. Those who work here, as chiefs, overseers, assistants, are not educated people but, in many cases, illiterate adventurers, rough men hardened by the jungle. At times they commit abuses that would horrify a civilized man. I know that very well. We do what we can, believe me. Señor Arana agrees with you. Everyone who has committed outrages will be dismissed. I’m not an accomplice to any injustice, Señor Casement. I have a respected name, a family that means something in this country, I’m a Catholic who practices his religion.”

Roger thought Tizón probably believed what he was saying. A good man, who in Iquitos, Manaus, Lima, or London would not know or want to know what went on here. He probably cursed the hour it occurred to Julio C. Arana to send him to this godforsaken corner of the world to carry out a thankless assignment and suffer a thousand discomforts and difficulties.

“We ought to work together, collaborate,” Tizón repeated, somewhat calmer, moving his hands a great deal. “What is going badly will be corrected. The employees who have committed atrocities will be sanctioned. I give you my word of honor! All I ask is that you see me as a friend, someone who’s on your side.”

Shortly afterward, Tizón said he wasn’t feeling very well and preferred to retire. He said good night and left.

Only the members of the commission remained at the table.

“Branded like animals?” murmured Walter Folk, with a skeptical air. “Can that be true?”

“Three of the four Barbadians I questioned today assured me of that,” Roger asserted. “Stanley Sealy says he did it himself, at the Abisinia station, on the orders of his chief, Abelardo Agüero. But I don’t think branding is the worst thing. I heard even more terrible things this afternoon.”

They continued talking, not eating a mouthful, until they had finished the two bottles of whiskey on the table. The commissioners were affected deeply by the scars on the backs of the Indians and by the pillory or rack for torture they had discovered in one of the La Chorrera warehouses where rubber was stored. With Señor Tizón present, who experienced a very difficult time, Bishop explained how that framework of wood and ropes worked, how the Indian was placed in it and forced into a squatting position, unable to move his arms or legs. He was tortured by adjustments of the wooden bars or by being suspended in midair. Bishop explained that the pillory was always in the center of the clearing in every station. They asked one of the “rationals” at the warehouse when the device had been brought inside. The boy said only on the eve of their arrival.

They decided the commission would listen the next day to Philip Bertie Lawrence, Seaford Greenwich, and Stanley Sealy. Seymour Bell suggested that Juan Tizón be present. There were divergent opinions, especially from Walter Folk, who feared that before the high-level official, the Barbadians would retract what they had said.

That night Roger did not close his eyes. He made notes on his conversations with the Barbadians until the lamp went out because there was no more oil. He lay down on his hammock and remained awake, dozing for a moment and then waking with aching bones and muscles, unable to shake off the uneasiness that afflicted him.

And the Peruvian Amazon Company was a British firm! On its board of directors were individuals highly respected in the world of business and in the City, such as Sir John Lister-Kaye, the Baron de Sousa-Deiro, John Russell Gubbins, and Henry M. Read. What would those partners of Julio C. Arana say when they read in the report he would present to the government that the enterprise they had legitimized with their name and money practiced slavery, obtaining harvesters of rubber and servants by means of
correrías
by armed thugs who captured indigenous men, women, and children and took them to the rubber plantations, where they were exploited iniquitously, hanged from the pillory, branded with fire and knife, and whipped until they bled to death if they didn’t bring in the minimum quota of thirty kilos of rubber every three months. Roger had been in the offices of the Peruvian Amazon Company in Salisbury House, E.C., in the financial center of London. A spectacular place, with Gainsborough landscapes on the walls, uniformed secretaries, carpeted offices, leather sofas for visitors, and a multitude of clerks in striped trousers, black frock coats, and shirts with stiff white collars and cravats, keeping accounts, sending and receiving telegrams, selling and collecting remittances for powdered, odoriferous rubber in all the industrial cities of Europe. And, at the other end of the world, in Putumayo, Huitotos, Ocaimas, Muinanes, Nonuyas, Andoques, Rezígaros, and Boras were gradually being exterminated without anyone moving a finger to change that state of affairs.

“Why haven’t these indigenous people attempted to rebel?” the botanist Walter Folk had asked during supper. And he added: “It’s true they don’t have firearms. But there are so many of them, they could rebel, and though some would die, they would defeat their tormenters by dint of numbers.” Roger replied that it wasn’t so simple. They didn’t rebel for the same reasons the Congolese hadn’t in Africa. Revolt was an exceptional occurrence, localized and sporadic suicidal acts by an individual or a small group. Because when the system of exploitation was so extreme, it destroyed spirits even before bodies. The violence that victimized them annihilated the will to resist, the instinct to survive, and transformed the indigenous people into automatons paralyzed by confusion and terror. Many did not understand what was happening to them as a consequence of the evil in concrete, specific men, but as a mythic cataclysm, a curse of the gods, a divine punishment from which there was no escape.

Though here, in Putumayo, Roger discovered in the documents he consulted concerning Amazonia that a few years earlier there had been an attempt at rebellion at the Abisinia station, where the Boras were. It was a subject no one wanted to talk about. All the Barbadians had avoided it. One night, a young Bora village chief, named Katenere, supported by a small group from his tribe, stole the rifles of the chiefs and “rationals,” killed Bartolomé Zumaeta (a relative of Pablo Zumaeta), who had raped Katenere’s wife when he was drunk, and disappeared into the jungle. The company put a price on his head. Several expeditions went out looking for him. For almost two years they couldn’t lay a hand on him. Finally, a party of hunters, led by an Indian informant, surrounded the hut where Katenere was hiding with his wife. The chief managed to escape, but his wife was captured. The manager, Vásquez, raped her himself, in public, and put her in the pillory without water or food. He kept her like that for several days. From time to time, he had her flogged. Finally, one night, the chief appeared. No doubt he had seen the torture of his wife from the undergrowth. He crossed the clearing, threw down the carbine he was carrying, and went to kneel in a submissive attitude beside the pillory where his wife was dying or already dead. Vásquez shouted at the “rationals” not to shoot him. He himself took out Katenere’s eyes with a wire. Then he had him burned alive, along with his wife, before the natives from the surrounding area who had been placed in a circle. Was this the way things had happened? The story had a melodramatic ending that Roger thought had probably been altered to bring it closer to the appetite for ferocity so prevalent in these hot places. But at least it had the symbol and the example: a native had rebelled, punished a torturer, and died a hero.

At the first light of dawn, he left the house where he was staying and went down the slope to the river. He swam naked after finding a small pool where he could resist the current. The cold water had the effect of a massage. When he dressed he felt refreshed and strengthened. On his return to La Chorrera he turned off to visit the sector where the Huitotos’ huts were located. The huts, scattered among plantings of yucca, corn, and plantains, were round, with partitions of tucuma wood held down with lianas and protected by roofs of woven
yarina
leaves that reached down to the ground. He saw skeletal women carrying infants—none of them responded to the gestures of greeting he made to them—but no men. When he returned to his cabin, an indigenous woman was putting the clothing he had given her to wash on the day of his arrival in his bedroom. He asked how much he owed her but the woman—young, with green and blue stripes on her face—looked at him, not understanding. He had Frederick Bishop ask her how much he owed. Bishop asked in Huitoto, but the woman seemed not to understand.

“You don’t owe her anything,” said Bishop. “Money doesn’t circulate here. Besides, she’s one of the women of the chief of La Chorrera, Víctor Macedo.”

“How many does he have?”

“Five, now,” the Barbadian explained. “When I worked here, he had at least seven. He’s changed them. That’s what everyone does.”

He laughed and made a joke: “In this climate, women get used up very fast. You have to replace them all the time, like clothing.” But Roger didn’t laugh.

He would remember the next two weeks they spent in La Chorrera, until the commission members moved on to the Occidente station, as the busiest, most intense of the journey. His entertainment consisted of swimming in the river, the fords, or the less torrential waterfalls, long walks in the forest, taking a good number of photographs, and, late at night, a game of bridge with his companions. The truth was that most of the day and evening he spent investigating, writing, questioning the local people, or exchanging impressions with his colleagues.

Contrary to their fears, Philip Bertie Lawrence, Seaford Greenwich, and Stanley Sealy were not intimidated before the full commission or by the presence of Juan Tizón. They confirmed everything they had told Roger and expanded their testimonies, revealing new bloody deeds and abuse. At times, during the questioning, Roger saw one of the commissioners turn pale, as if he were going to faint.

Tizón remained silent, sitting behind them, not opening his mouth. He took notes in small notebooks. The first few days, following the interrogatories, he attempted to tone down and question the testimonies that referred to torture, murder, and mutilation. But after the third or fourth day, a transformation took place in him. He said nothing during meals, barely ate, and responded with monosyllables and murmurs when addressed. On the fifth day, as they were having a drink before dinner, he erupted. With reddened eyes he addressed all those present: “This goes beyond anything I could ever imagine. I swear on the souls of my sainted mother, my wife, my children, what I love most in the world, that all of this is an absolute surprise to me. The horror I feel is as great as yours. I’m sick at the things we’ve heard. It’s possible there are exaggerations in the accusations of these Barbadians, who might want to ingratiate themselves with you. But even so, there is no doubt that intolerable, monstrous crimes have been committed here that should be denounced and punished. I swear to you that …”

His voice broke and he looked for a chair. He sat for a long time with his head bowed, holding his glass. He stammered that Señor Arana could not suspect what was going on here and neither could his principal collaborators in Iquitos, Manaus, or London. He would be the first to demand that a remedy be found for all this. Roger, moved by the first part of what he said, thought that Tizón was less spontaneous now. And, human after all, he was thinking about his situation, his family, and his future. In any case, beginning that day, Juan Tizón seemed to stop being a high official in the Peruvian Amazon Company and become one more member of the commission. He collaborated with them zealously and diligently, often bringing them new data. And all the time he demanded that they take precautions. He had become distrustful, and peered around filled with suspicions. Because they knew what was occurring here, their lives were in danger, especially the general consul’s. He lived in a state of constant alarm. He feared the Barbadians would reveal to Víctor Macedo what they had confessed. If they did, one could not discount the likelihood that this individual, before he was taken to court or handed over to the police, would ambush them and say afterward they had perished at the hands of the savages.