The Dream of the Celt: A Novel (27 page)

The situation was overturned one dawn when Roger heard someone knocking at the door with his knuckles. It was still dark. He went to open the door and made out a silhouette that belonged not to Frederick Bishop but to Donal Francis, the Barbadian who had insisted that everything was normal here. He spoke in a very low, frightened voice. He had thought about it and now he wanted to tell him the truth. Roger asked him in. They talked, sitting on the floor because Donal was afraid that if they went out to the terrace, they might be overheard.

He assured him he had lied out of fear of Víctor Macedo, who had threatened him: if he told the English what was happening here, he would not set foot in Barbados again, and once they had left, after Macedo had cut off his testicles he would tie him naked to a tree so the ants would eat him. Roger calmed him down. He would be repatriated to Bridgetown, like the other Barbadians. But he did not want to hear this new confession in private. Francis ought to speak before the commissioners and Tizón.

He testified that same day, in the dining room, where they held their working sessions. He displayed a great deal of fear. His eyes spun, he bit his thick lips, and sometimes he didn’t find words. He spoke close to three hours. The most dramatic moment of his confession occurred when he said that a couple of months earlier, two Huitotos claimed to be sick to justify the ridiculously small amount of rubber they had harvested, and Víctor Macedo ordered him and a “boy” named Joaquín Piedra to tie their hands and feet, throw them in the river, and hold them underwater until they drowned. Then he had the “rationals” drag the bodies to the forest to be eaten by animals. Donal offered to take them to the spot where some limbs and bones of the two Huitotos could still be found.

On September 28, Roger and the members of the commission left La Chorrera in the Peruvian Amazon Company launch
Veloz
, headed for Occidente. They sailed up the Igara Paraná River for several hours, made stops at the rubber-storing posts of Victoria and Naimenes to eat something, slept in the launch, and the next day, after another three hours of navigating, anchored at the Occidente wharf. The station chief, Fidel Velarde, received them with his assistants Manuel Torrico, Rodríguez, and Acosta.
They all have the faces and attitudes of thugs and outlaws
, thought Roger. They were armed with pistols and Winchester carbines. Surely they were following instructions to be deferential to the new arrivals. Juan Tizón once again asked for their prudence. Under no circumstances should they reveal to Velarde and his “boys” the things they had found out.

Occidente was a smaller camp than La Chorrera, surrounded by a stockade of wooden shafts sharpened like spears. “Rationals” armed with carbines guarded the entrances.

“Why is the station so protected?” Roger asked Tizón. “Are they expecting an attack by Indians?”

“No, not by Indians. Though you never know whether another Katenere will appear one day. No, it’s the Colombians, who want these lands.”

Fidel Velarde had 530 natives at Occidente, most of whom were in the forest now, harvesting rubber. They brought in what they had collected every two weeks. Their wives and children stayed here, in a settlement that extended along the banks of the river outside the stockade. Velarde added that the Indians would offer the “visiting friends” a fiesta that evening.

He took them to the house where they would stay, a quadrangular, two-story construction on pilings, the door and windows covered with screens to keep out mosquitoes. In Occidente the smell of rubber coming out of the depositories and saturating the air was as strong as in La Chorrera. Roger was glad to discover that here he would sleep in a bed instead of a hammock. A cot, rather, with a mattress made of seeds, where he could at least lie flat. The hammock had worsened his muscular aches and his insomnia.

The fiesta took place early in the evening, in a clearing near the Huitoto settlement. A multitude of indigenous people had brought out tables, chairs, pots of food, and drinks for the strangers. They waited for them, in a circle, very serious. The sky was clear and there was no visible threat of rain, but the good weather and the sight of the Igara Paraná cutting through the plain of thick forests and zigzagging around them could not cheer Roger. He knew that what they would see would be sad and depressing. Three or four dozen Indians—the males very old or children, the females generally fairly young—some naked and others draped in the
cushma
or tunic Roger had seen many wearing in Iquitos, danced in a circle to the beat of the
manguaré
, drums made of hollowed-out tree trunks that the Huitotos struck with rubber-tipped sticks, drawing out hoarse, prolonged sounds that, it was said, carried messages and allowed them to communicate over great distances. The rows of dancers had rattles filled with seeds on their ankles and arms, which clattered when they made their arrhythmic hops. At the same time they sang some monotonous melodies touched by a bitterness that matched their serious, sullen, fearful, or indifferent faces.

Afterward, Roger asked his companions whether they had noticed the great number of Indians who had scars on their backs, buttocks, and legs. They disagreed among themselves over what percentage of the Huitotos who danced bore the marks of floggings. Roger said 80 percent, Fielgald and Folk thought no more than 60. But all of them agreed that what had affected them most deeply was an emaciated little boy, nothing but skin and bone, with burns all over his body and part of his face. They asked Frederick Bishop to find out if those marks were due to an accident or to punishments and torture.

At this station they intended to discover in detail how the system of exploitation operated. They began very early the next morning, after breakfast. As soon as they began to visit the rubber depositories, led by Fidel Velarde himself, they discovered by chance that the scales that weighed the rubber were rigged. It occurred to Seymour Bell to get on one of them because, since he was a hypochondriac, he believed he had lost weight. He was shocked. But how was it possible? He had lost more than twenty pounds! Still, he didn’t feel it in his body, otherwise his trousers would be falling down and his shirts would be slipping off. Roger weighed himself too and encouraged his colleagues and Juan Tizón to do the same. They were all many pounds under their normal weight. During lunch, Roger asked Tizón if he believed all the scales belonging to the Peruvian Amazon Company in Putumayo had been tampered with like the one at Occidente to make the Indians believe they had collected less rubber than they actually had. Tizón, who had lost all his ability to dissimulate, only shrugged: “I don’t know, gentlemen. The only thing I know is that here everything is possible.”

Unlike La Chorrera, where they had hidden it in a warehouse, in Occidente the pillory was in the middle of the clearing around which the residences and depositories were located. Roger asked Fidel Velarde’s assistants to put him inside that instrument of torture. He wanted to know what a person felt in the narrow cage. Rodríguez and Acosta hesitated, but since Tizón authorized it, they told Roger to curl up and, pushing him with their hands, wedged him inside the pillory. It was impossible to close the wooden rods that held down legs and arms because his limbs were too stout, so they did no more than bring them together. But they could fasten the handles around his neck, which, without completely choking him, interfered with his breathing. He felt an intense pain in his body and it seemed impossible for a human being to endure that posture for hours, that pressure on back, stomach, chest, legs, neck, and arms. When he came out, before he had recovered the ability to move, he had to lean for a long time on the shoulder of Louis Barnes.

“For what kinds of crimes do you place Indians in the pillory?” he asked the chief of Occidente that night.

Fidel Velarde was a rather plump mestizo, with a walrus mustache and large, prominent eyes. He wore a wide-brimmed hat, high boots, and an ammunition belt.

“When they commit very serious crimes,” he explained, lingering over each phrase. “When they kill their children, disfigure their wives when they’re drunk, or commit robberies and won’t confess where they’ve hidden what they stole. We don’t use the pillory all the time. Just once in a while. In general the Indians here are well-behaved.”

He said this in a tone somewhere between cheerful and mocking, looking at the commissioners one by one with a fixed, disparaging gaze that seemed to be saying:
I find myself obliged to say these things but please, don’t believe them
. His attitude revealed so much arrogance and contempt for the rest of humanity that Roger tried to imagine the paralyzing fear this bully must inspire in the indigenous people, with his pistol at his waist, his carbine on his shoulder, his belt filled with bullets. A short while later, one of the five Barbadians from Occidente testified to the commission that on one drunken night he had seen Fidel Velarde and Alfredo Montt, who was then station chief at Último Retiro, wager on who could cut off the ear of a Huitoto being punished in the pillory more quickly and cleanly. Velarde succeeded in cutting off the Indian’s ear with a single slash of his machete, but Montt, who was a confirmed drunkard and whose hands trembled, instead of removing the other ear struck the middle of the Indian’s skull with his machete. When this session ended, Seymour Bell suffered a crisis. He confessed to his colleagues that he couldn’t bear any more. His voice was breaking and his eyes were red and filled with tears. They had already seen and heard enough to know that the most atrocious cruelty prevailed here. It made no sense to continue investigating this world of inhumanity and psychopathic cruelties. He proposed they conclude their trip and return to England immediately.

Roger said he would not oppose the others leaving, but he would remain in Putumayo, in accordance with the original plan, and visit a few more stations. He wanted their report to be extensive and well documented so it would have greater effect. He reminded them that all these crimes were being committed by a British company whose board of directors included highly respected Englishmen, and that the stockholders of the Peruvian Amazon Company were filling their pockets with what went on here. It was necessary to put an end to the offenses and sanction those responsible. To achieve this, their report had to be exhaustive and definitive. His words convinced the others, including the demoralized Seymour Bell.

To shake off the effects that the wager between Fidel Velarde and Alfredo Montt had on all of them, they decided to take a day off. The next morning, instead of continuing with interviews and inquiries, they went to swim in the river. They spent hours hunting butterflies with a net while Walter Folk explored the jungle searching for orchids. There was as great an abundance of butterflies and orchids in the area as mosquitoes and the bats that came at night, in silent flight, to bite dogs, chickens, and horses, sometimes infecting them with rabies so they had to be killed and burned to avoid an epidemic.

Roger and his companions were amazed at the variety, size, and beauty of the butterflies flying about in the vicinity of the river. They came in all shapes and colors, and their graceful fluttering and the splashes of light they gave off when they rested on a leaf or plant seemed to dazzle the air with delicate notes, a compensation for the moral ugliness they discovered at every turn, as if there were no end to wickedness, greed, and pain in this unfortunate land.

Walter Folk was surprised at the quantity of orchids hanging from the great trees, their elegant, exquisite colors illuminating everything around them. He did not cut them and did not allow any of his companions to do so either. He spent a long time observing them with a magnifying glass, making notes, and photographing them.

In Occidente Roger came to have a fairly complete idea of the system that made the Peruvian Amazon Company function. Perhaps at the beginning there had been some kind of agreement between the rubber barons and the tribes. But by now that was history, because the indigenous people did not want to go into the jungle to harvest rubber. For that reason, it all began with the
correrías
carried out by the chiefs and their “boys.” No wages were paid and the Indians never saw a cent. They received from the company store the tools for harvesting—knives to make incisions in the trees, tin cans for the latex, baskets for collecting strips or balls of rubber—in addition to domestic goods such as seeds, clothing, lamps, and some foodstuffs. Prices were determined by the company, so that the native was always in debt and would work the rest of his life to pay off what he owed. Since the chiefs did not receive salaries but commissions on the rubber harvested in each station, their demands to obtain the maximum were implacable. Each harvester went into the jungle for two weeks, leaving his wife and children as hostages. The chiefs and “rationals” made use of them as they chose, for domestic service or their sexual appetites. All of them had real harems—with many girls who had not reached puberty—and they exchanged them on a whim, even though sometimes, because of jealousy, there was a settling of accounts with bullets and stabbings. Every two weeks the harvesters returned to the station to bring in the rubber. This was weighed on the dishonest scales. If after three months they had not fulfilled thirty kilos, they received punishments that ranged from floggings to the pillory, cutting off ears and noses, or in extreme cases, the torture and killing of the wife, children, and the harvester himself. The corpses were not buried but dragged into the forest to be eaten by animals. Every three months the launches and steamboats of the company came for the rubber that, in the meantime, had been steamed, washed, and powdered. The boats sometimes took their cargo from Putumayo to Iquitos, and others went directly to Manaus for export to Europe and the United States.

Roger confirmed that a large number of “rationals” did no productive work. They were only jailers, torturers, and exploiters of the indigenous people. They spent the entire day lying down, smoking, drinking, amusing themselves, kicking a ball, telling one another jokes, or giving orders. All the work fell on the Indians: building houses, replacing roofs damaged by the rains, repairing the path down to the wharf, washing, cleaning, cooking, carrying things back and forth, and in the little free time they had left, tending to their crops, without which they would have had nothing to eat.