The Dream of the Celt: A Novel Page 14

  “He did it because the knavery he had prepared did not succeed,” added the prefect. “Were you informed that Saldaña Roca, before publishing those infamies, tried to extort money from Señor Arana’s company?”

  “We refused, and he published that fairy tale about Putumayo,” stated Pablo Zumaeta. “He has been prosecuted for libel, slander, and extortion, and prison is waiting for him. That’s why he fled.”

  “There’s nothing like being on the spot to find out about things,” Roger remarked.

  The private conversations destroyed the general one. The dinner continued with a dish of assorted Amazonian fish, one of which, called the gamitana, had a delicate, delicious flesh, Roger thought. But the seasoning made his mouth burn.

  When the meal ended, after saying goodbye to the prefect, he spoke briefly with his friends on the commission. According to Seymour Bell, it had been imprudent to bring up so abruptly the subject of the journalist Saldaña Roca, who irritated the prominent people of Iquitos so much. But Louis Barnes congratulated him because, he said, it had allowed them to study the irate response of these people to the journalist.

  “It’s a shame we can’t talk to him,” replied Roger. “I would have liked to meet him.”

  They said good night, and Roger and the consul walked back to the diplomat’s house along the same route they had taken earlier. The noise, revelry, songs, dances, toasts, and fights had become even louder and Roger was surprised at the number of small boys—ragged, half-naked, barefoot—standing at the doors of the bars and brothels, spying with mischievous faces on what went on inside. There were also a good number of dogs digging through the garbage.

  “Don’t waste your time looking for him, because you won’t find him,” said Stirs. “Saldaña Roca is probably dead.”

  Roger wasn’t surprised. He, too, suspected, when he saw the verbal violence the mere name of the journalist had provoked, that his disappearance was permanent.

  “Did you know him?”

  The consul had a round, bald head, and his skull sparkled as if covered with little drops of water. He walked slowly, testing the muddy ground with his stick, fearful perhaps of stepping on a snake or a rat.

  “We spoke two or three times,” said Stirs. “He was very short and somewhat hunchbacked. What they call a cholo here, a cholito. That is, a mestizo. The cholos tend to be gentle and formal, but not Saldaña Roca. He was brusque, very sure of himself. With the fixed gaze that believers and fanatics have and that always, truth be told, makes me very nervous. My temperament doesn’t go in that direction. I don’t have much admiration for martyrs, Mr. Casement. Or for heroes. People who sacrifice themselves for truth or justice often do more harm than the thing they want to change.”

  Roger said nothing: he was trying to imagine the small man with physical deformities and a heart and will like those of Edmund D. Morel. A martyr and a hero, certainly. He imagined him inking with his own hands the metal plates of his weekly publications, La Felpa and La Sanción. He probably edited them in a small artisanal press that undoubtedly operated in a corner of his house. This modest dwelling also must have been the editorial and administrative offices of his two small papers.

  “I hope you didn’t take offense at my words,” the British consul apologized, suddenly sorry for what he had just said. “Señor Saldaña Roca was very brave to make those accusations, of course. A reckless man, almost suicidal, when he filed a judicial complaint against Casa Arana for torture, kidnapping, flogging, and other crimes on the Putumayo rubber plantations. He was not naïve. He knew very well what would happen to him.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “It was predictable,” said Stirs without a shred of emotion. “They burned the press on Calle Morona. You can still see the charred remains. They shot at his house too. The bullet holes are in full view, on Calle Próspero. He had to take his son out of the Augustinian fathers’ academy because the other boys made his life impossible. He was obliged to send his family to a secret site, who knows where, because their lives were in danger. He had to shut down his two publications because no one gave him another advertisement and no press in Iquitos would agree to print them. He was shot at twice in the street as a warning. Twice he was saved by a miracle. One attack left him lame, with a bullet embedded in his calf. The last time he was seen was in February 1909, on the embankment. He was being shoved toward the river. His face was swollen from the beating a gang had given him. They put him in a boat heading for Yurimaguas. He was never heard from again. It may be that he managed to escape to Lima. I hope so. Or, with his hands and feet tied and bleeding wounds, they might have tossed him in the river for the piranhas to finish off. If that’s the case, his bones, which is the only thing those animals don’t eat, must be in the Atlantic by now. I suppose I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. In the Congo you must have seen things like this, or worse.”

  They had reached the consul’s house. He lit the lamp in the small hallway at the entrance and offered Roger a glass of port. They sat together on the terrace and lit cigarettes. The moon had disappeared behind some clouds but stars were still in the sky. The distant uproar of the streets mixed with the synchronous sound of insects and the splashing of water against the branches and reeds along the banks.

  “What good did so much courage do poor Benjamín Saldaña Roca?” the consul reflected with a shrug. “None at all. He ruined his family and probably lost his life. And we lost those two little papers, La Felpa and La Sanción, that were amusing to read every week for their gossip.”

  “I don’t believe his sacrifice was totally useless,” Roger corrected him gently. “Without Saldaña Roca, we wouldn’t be here. Unless, of course, you think our coming won’t do any good either.”

  “God forbid,” exclaimed the consul. “You’re right. All the furor in the United States and Europe. Yes, Saldaña Roca began all of it with his accusations. And then, Walter Hardenburg’s denunciations. What I said was foolish. I hope your arrival does some good and changes things. Forgive me, Mr. Casement. Living so many years in Amazonia has made me somewhat skeptical about the idea of progress. In Iquitos, you eventually don’t believe any of it. Above all, that one day justice will force injustice to retreat. Perhaps it’s time for me to go back to England and take a bath in English optimism. I can see that all those years serving the Crown in Brazil have not made you a pessimist. I wish I were like you. I envy you.”

  When they said good night and went to their rooms, Roger stayed awake for a long while. Had he done the right thing in accepting this assignment? A few months earlier, Sir Edward Grey, the foreign secretary, called him to his office and said, “The scandal concerning the Putumayo crimes has reached intolerable limits. Public opinion demands that the government do something. No one is as qualified as you to travel there. An investigative commission will go as well, made up of independent people whom the Peruvian Amazon Company itself has decided to send. But even though you travel with them, I want you to prepare a personal report for the government. You have a great deal of prestige because of what you did in the Congo. You’re a specialist in atrocities. You can’t say no.” His first reaction had been to find an excuse and refuse. Then, upon reflection, he told himself that precisely because of his work in the Congo, he had a moral obligation to accept. Had he done the right thing? Stirs’s skepticism seemed a bad omen. From time to time Sir Edward Grey’s phrase, “a specialist in atrocities,” resounded in his mind.

  Unlike the consul, he believed that Benjamín Saldaña Roca had performed a great service for Amazonia, his country, and humanity. The journalist’s accusations in La Sanción: Bisemanario Comercial, Político y Literario constituted the first thing he read about the Putumayo rubber plantations following his conversation with Sir Edward, who had given him four days to decide whether to travel with the investigative commission. The Foreign Office immediately placed in his hands a file of documents; two direct testimonies of persons who had been in the region stood out: t
he articles by the North American engineer Walter Hardenburg, in the London weekly Truth, and the articles by Benjamín Saldaña Roca, some of which had been translated into English by the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines’ Protection Society, a humanitarian institution.

  His first reaction was disbelief: the journalist, beginning with real events, had so magnified the abuses that his articles exuded unreality, and even a somewhat sadistic imagination. But Roger immediately recalled the disbelief that had been the reaction of many Englishmen, Europeans, and North Americans when he and Morel made public the iniquities in the Congo Free State. It was how humans defended against everything that demonstrated the indescribable cruelties they were capable of when driven by greed and base instincts in a lawless world. If those horrors had occurred in the Congo, why couldn’t they have happened in Amazonia?

  Distressed, he got out of bed and went to sit on the terrace. The sky was dark and the stars had disappeared. There were fewer lights in the direction of the city but the uproar still continued. If Saldaña Roca’s denunciations were true, it was likely, as the consul believed, that the journalist had in fact been thrown in the river, hands and feet tied, and bleeding to excite the appetite of the piranhas. Stirs’s fatalistic, cynical attitude irked him. As if everything that had happened was caused not by cruel people but a fatalistic determination, just as the stars move or the tides rise. He had called him a “fanatic.” A fanatic for justice? Yes, undoubtedly. A reckless man. A modest man, without money or influence. An Amazonian Morel. A believer, perhaps? He had done it because he believed that the world, society, life could not go on if this shame continued. Roger thought about his youth, when his experience of evil and suffering in Africa flooded him with belligerent emotion, that pugnacious desire to do anything to make the world better. He felt something fraternal toward Saldaña Roca. He would have liked to shake his hand, be his friend, tell him: “You have done something beautiful and noble in your life, sir.”

  Had he been there, in Putumayo, in the gigantic region where Julio C. Arana’s company operated? Had he gone there knowingly to put himself in harm’s way? His articles didn’t say so but the precision of names, places, and dates indicated that Saldaña Roca had been an eyewitness to what he recounted. Roger had read the testimonies of Saldaña Roca and Walter Hardenburg so often that at times it seemed he had been there himself.

  He closed his eyes and saw the immense region, divided into stations, the principal ones being La Chorrera and El Encanto, each with its own chief. That is, its monster. That and only that was what people like Víctor Macedo and Miguel Loaysa, for example, could be. Both had played a leading role in the most memorable event of 1903. Close to eight hundred Ocaimas came to La Chorrera to turn in their baskets of balls of rubber harvested in the forests. After weighing and storing them, the assistant manager of La Chorrera, Fidel Velarde, pointed out to his superior, Víctor Macedo, there with Miguel Loaysa from El Encanto, the twenty-five Ocaimas who had been separated from the others because they didn’t bring the minimum quota of jebe—latex or rubber—they were responsible for. Macedo and Loaysa decided to teach the savages a good lesson. Indicating to the overseers—blacks from Barbados—that they should keep the rest of the Ocaimas at bay with their Mausers, they ordered the “boys” to cover the twenty-five in sacks soaked in gasoline. Then they set fire to them. Shrieking, transformed into human torches, some managed to put out the flames by rolling on the ground but were left with terrible burns. Those who threw themselves into the river like flaming meteors drowned. Macedo, Loaysa, and Velarde finished off the wounded with their revolvers. Each time he evoked the scene, Roger felt dizzy.

  According to Saldaña Roca, the managers did that as a warning but also for amusement. They enjoyed it. Making people suffer, competing in cruelties, was a vice they had contracted from engaging so frequently in flagellations, beatings, and tortures. Often, when they were drunk, they looked for pretexts for their blood games. Saldaña Roca cited a letter from the company manager to Miguel Flores, a station chief, admonishing him for “killing Indians just for sport,” knowing that laborers were scarce and reminding him that one should have recourse to those excesses only “in cases of necessity.” Miguel Flores’s reply was worse than the accusation: “I protest because in these past two months only forty Indians died at my station.”

  Saldaña Roca enumerated the different types of punishment: from floggings, to being put in stocks or on the rack, to cutting off ears, nose, hands, and feet, to killing. Hanged, shot, burned, or drowned in the river. In Matanzas, he affirmed, there were more Indian remains than in any other station. It wasn’t possible to calculate but the bones probably corresponded to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of victims. The man responsible for Matanzas was Armando Normand, a young Bolivian Englishman, barely twenty-two or twenty-three years old. He claimed he had studied in London. His cruelty had been transformed into an “infernal myth” among the Huitotos, whom he had decimated. In Abisinia, the company fined the chief, Abelardo Aguero, and his assistant, Augusto Jiménez, for target shooting at the Indians, knowing that in this way they had irresponsibly sacrificed laborers who were useful to the firm.

  In spite of being so far apart, once again Roger thought that the Congo and Amazonia were joined by an umbilical cord. The same horrors were repeated, with minor variations, inspired by greed, the original sin that accompanied human beings from birth, the hidden inspiration of their infinite wickedness. Or was there something else? Had Satan won the eternal struggle?

  Tomorrow promised to be a very intense day for him. The consul had located three blacks from Barbados in Iquitos who were British nationals. They had worked for several years on Arana’s rubber plantations and agreed to be questioned by the commission if they were repatriated afterward.

  Though he slept very little, he woke at first light. He did not feel bad. He washed, dressed, put on a panama hat, picked up his camera, left the house without seeing either the consul or the servants. Outside, the sun had risen in a cloudless sky, and it was growing hot. At midday Iquitos would be an oven. There were people on the streets, and the small, noisy trolley, painted red and blue, was already running. From time to time Indian peddlers with Asian features, yellowish skin, and faces and arms painted with geometric figures offered him fruits, drinks, live animals—monkeys, macaws, and small lizards—or arrows, mallets, and blowguns. Many bars and restaurants were still open but had few patrons. There were drunks sprawled under roofs of palm leaf and dogs digging through the trash. This city is a vile, stinking hole, he thought. He took a long walk on the unpaved streets, crossing the Plaza de Armas, where he recognized the Prefecture, and found himself on an embankment with stone railings, a pretty walk from which one could see the enormous river with its floating islands and, in the distance, sparkling in the sun, the line of tall trees on the other bank. At the end of the embankment, where it disappeared into a grove of trees and a treed hillside at the foot of which was a wharf, he saw some boys, barefoot and wearing only short pants, driving in stakes. They had put on paper hats as protection from the sun.

  They looked not like Indians but cholos. One of them, not yet twenty, had a harmonious torso with muscles that stood out with each hammer blow. After hesitating a moment, Roger walked up to him, showing him his camera.

  “Would you allow me to take your photograph?” he asked in Portuguese. “I can pay.”

  He repeated the question twice in his poor Spanish until the boy smiled. He said something Roger could not understand to the others. And, finally, he turned back and asked, snapping his fingers: “How much?” Roger searched through his pockets and took out a handful of coins. The boy examined them visually, counting them.

  Roger took several photoplates, amid the laughter and jokes of the boy’s friends, having him remove the paper hat, raise his arms, show off his muscles, and adopt the posture of a discus thrower. For the last shot he had to touch the boy’s arm for a moment. He felt his hands wet with nervousness and the heat. He stopped
taking photographs when he realized he was surrounded by ragged little boys observing him as if he were a strange animal. He handed the coins to the boy and hurried back to the consulate.

  His friends from the commission, sitting at the table, were having breakfast with the consul. He joined them, explaining that he began every day with a long walk. As they drank watery, very sweet coffee and ate slices of fried yucca, Stirs explained who the Barbadians were. He began by warning them that the three had worked in Putumayo but had ended on bad terms with Arana’s company. They felt they had been deceived and cheated by the Peruvian Amazon Company and for that reason their testimony would be filled with resentment. He suggested that the Barbadians not appear before all the commission members at the same time because they would feel intimidated and not say a word. They decided to divide into groups of two or three for their appearance.

  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.