The Dream of the Celt: A Novel (20 page)

He paused to catch his breath, fatigued, and decided to drink beer. He looked at them, one by one, with eyes that seemed to say:
A point in my favor, isn’t that so?

“Whippings, mutilations, rapes, murders,” murmured Henry Fielgald. “Is that what you call bringing modernity to Putumayo, Prefect? Not only Hardenburg bore witness. So did Saldaña Roca, your compatriot. Three overseers from Barbados, whom we questioned this morning, have confirmed those horrors. They acknowledge having committed them.”

“They should be punished then,” stated the prefect. “And they would have been if there were judges, or police, or authorities in Putumayo. For now there is nothing but savagery. I defend no one. I excuse no one. Go there. See with your own eyes. Judge for yourselves. My government could have prevented your entering Peru, for we are a sovereign nation and Great Britain has no reason to interfere in our affairs. But we haven’t. On the contrary, I have been instructed to facilitate matters for you in any way I can. President Leguía is a great admirer of England, gentlemen. He would like Peru to be a great country one day, like yours. That is why you are here, free to go anywhere and investigate everything.”

It started to pour. The light dimmed and the clatter of water on corrugated metal was so strong it seemed the roof would cave in and streams of water would fall on them. Rey Lama had adopted a melancholy expression.

“I have a wife and four children whom I adore,” he said, with a dejected smile. “I haven’t seen them for a year and God knows whether I’ll ever see them again. But when President Leguía asked me to come to serve my country in this remote corner of the world, I didn’t hesitate. I’m not here to defend criminals, gentlemen. Just the opposite. I ask only for you to understand that working, trading, setting up an industry in the heart of Amazonia is not the same as doing it in England. If this jungle one day reaches the living standards of western Europe, it will be thanks to men like Julio C. Arana.”

They spent a long time in the prefect’s office. They asked many questions and he answered all of them, sometimes evasively and sometimes with bravado. Roger had not yet formulated a clear idea of the man. At times he seemed to be a cynic playing a part, and other times a good man with crushing responsibilities that he tried to carry out as successfully as possible. One thing was certain: Rey Lama knew the atrocities were real and didn’t like it, but his position demanded that he minimize them any way he could.

When they took their leave of the prefect, it had stopped raining. On the street, the roofs were still dripping water, there were puddles everywhere with splashing toads, and the air had filled with blowflies and mosquitoes that peppered them with bites. Heads lowered, silent, they walked to the Peruvian Amazon Company, a spacious mansion with a tile roof and glazed tiles on the facade, where the general manager, Pablo Zumaeta, was expecting them for the final interview of the day. They had a few minutes and took a turn around the large cleared space of the Plaza de Armas. Curiously they contemplated the metal house of the engineer Gustave Eiffel exposing its iron vertebrae to the elements like the skeleton of an antediluvian animal. The surrounding bars and restaurants were already open and the music and din deafened the Iquitos twilight.

The Peruvian Amazon Company, on Calle Perú, a few yards from the Plaza de Armas, was the largest, most solid building in Iquitos. Two stories, constructed of cement and metal plates, its external walls were painted light green, and in the small sitting room next to his office, where Pablo Zumaeta received them, a fan with wide wooden blades hung motionless from the ceiling, waiting for electricity. In spite of the intense heat, Señor Zumaeta, who must have been close to fifty, wore a dark suit with a brightly decorated vest, a string tie, and shiny half boots. He ceremoniously shook hands with each person and asked each of them, in a Spanish marked by the lilting Amazonian accent that Roger had learned to identify, whether their lodgings were satisfactory, Iquitos hospitable, or whether they needed anything. He repeated to each one that he had orders cabled from London by Señor Julio C. Arana himself to offer them every assistance for the success of their mission. When he mentioned Arana, the manager of the Peruvian Amazon Company bowed to the large portrait hanging on one of the walls.

While Indian domestics, barefoot and dressed in white tunics, passed trays with drinks, Roger contemplated the serious, square, dark face with penetrating eyes of the owner of the Peruvian Amazon Company. Arana’s head was covered by a French beret, and his suit looked as if it had been cut by one of the good Parisian tailors or, perhaps, in Savile Row in London. Was it true that this all-powerful rubber king, with elegant houses in Biarritz, Geneva, and the gardens of Kensington Road in London, began his career selling straw hats on the streets of Rioja, the godforsaken village in the Amazon jungle where he was born? His gaze revealed a clear conscience and great self-satisfaction.

Pablo Zumaeta, through the interpreter, announced that the company’s best ship, the
Liberal
, was ready for them to board. He had provided the most experienced captain and the most competent crew on the Amazonian rivers. Even so, sailing to Putumayo would demand sacrifices of them. It took between eight and ten days, depending on the weather. And before any of the members of the commission had time to ask him a question, he hurried to hand Roger a pile of papers in a folder:

“I’ve prepared this documentation for you, anticipating some of your concerns,” he explained. “They are the orders from the company to the managers, chiefs, assistant chiefs, and overseers of stations with regard to the treatment of personnel.”

Zumaeta disguised his nervousness by raising his voice and gesticulating. As he displayed the papers filled with inscriptions, stamps, and signatures, he enumerated what they contained with the tone and attitudes of an orator in a small square:

“A strict prohibition against imparting physical punishment to the natives, their wives, children, and kin, and offending them in word or deed. They are to be reprimanded and counseled in a severe manner when they have committed a verified misdeed. According to the gravity of the misdeed, they may be fined or, in the case of a very serious misdeed, fired. If the misdeed has criminal connotations, they are to be transferred to the nearest competent authority.”

He took a long time to summarize the indications, oriented—he repeated it unceasingly—toward avoiding the commission of “abuses against the natives.” He made a parenthesis to explain that “humans being what they are,” at times employees violated these orders. When that occurred, the company sanctioned the person responsible.

“The important thing is that we do the possible and the impossible to avoid the commission of abuses on the rubber plantations. If they were committed, it was the exception, the act of some miscreant who did not respect our policy toward the indigenous people.”

He sat down. He had talked a great deal and with so much energy that his exhaustion was obvious. He wiped the perspiration from his face with a handkerchief that was already soaked.

“In Putumayo will we find the station heads incriminated by Saldaña Roca and Engineer Hardenburg or have they fled?”

“None of our employees has fled,” the manager of the Peruvian Amazon Company said indignantly. “Why would they? Because of the slanders of two blackmailers who, since they couldn’t get money out of us, invented that filth?”

“Mutilations, murders, floggings,” Roger recited. “Of dozens, perhaps hundreds of people. They are accusations that have moved the entire civilized world.”

“They would move me, too, if they had happened,” an incensed Pablo Zumaeta protested. “What moves me now is that cultured and intelligent people like you credit such lies without prior investigation.”

“We are going to carry out our investigation on site,” Roger reminded him. “A very serious one, you can be sure.”

“Do you believe that Arana, that I, that the administrators of the Peruvian Amazon Company are suicidal and kill natives? Don’t you know that the number one problem for plantation owners is the lack of harvesters? Each worker is precious to us. If those killings were true, there wouldn’t be a single Indian left in Putumayo. They all would have left, isn’t that so? Nobody wants to live where they’re whipped, mutilated, and killed. The accusation is infinitely imbecilic, Señor Casement. If the indigenous people run away we are ruined, and the rubber industry goes under. Our employees there know it. And that’s why they make an effort to keep the savages happy.”

He looked at the members of the commission, one by one. He was always indignant, but now he was saddened, too. He made some faces that looked like pouting.

“It isn’t easy to treat them well, to keep them satisfied,” he confessed, lowering his voice. “They’re very primitive. Do you know what that means? Some tribes are cannibals. We can’t permit that, can we? It isn’t Christian, it isn’t human. We prohibit it and sometimes they get angry and act like what they are: savages. Should we allow them to drown the children born with deformities? A harelip, for example. No, because infanticide isn’t Christian either, is it? Well. You’ll see with your own eyes. Then you’ll understand the injustice England is committing against Señor Julio C. Arana and a company that, at the cost of enormous sacrifices, is transforming this country.”

It occurred to Roger that Pablo Zumaeta was going to shed some tears. But he was mistaken. The manager gave them a friendly smile.

“I’ve spoken a great deal and now it’s your turn,” he apologized. “Ask me whatever you wish and I’ll answer you frankly. We have nothing to hide.”

For nearly an hour the members of the commission questioned the general manager of the Peruvian Amazon Company. He answered them with long tirades that at times confused the interpreter, who had him repeat words and phrases. Roger did not take part in the questioning and often was distracted. It was evident that Zumaeta would never tell the truth, would deny everything and repeat the arguments used by Arana’s company to respond in London to criticisms in the newspapers. There were, perhaps, occasional excesses committed by intemperate individuals, but it was not the policy of the Peruvian Amazon Company to torture, enslave, and certainly not to kill the indigenous people. The law prohibited it, and it would have been madness to terrorize the laborers who were so scarce in Putumayo. Roger felt himself transported in space and time to the Congo. The same horrors, the same contempt for truth. The difference, Zumaeta spoke Spanish and the Belgian functionaries French. They denied the obvious with the same boldness because all of them believed that harvesting rubber and making money was a Christian ideal that justified the worst atrocities against pagans who, of course, were always cannibals and killers of their own children.

When they left the Peruvian Amazon Company building, Roger accompanied his colleagues to the house where they were staying. Instead of returning directly to the British consul’s house, he walked through Iquitos with no particular destination. He had always liked to walk, alone or in the company of a friend, to begin and end the day. He could do it for hours, but on the unpaved streets of Iquitos he often stumbled over holes and puddles where frogs were croaking. The noise was enormous. Bars, restaurants, brothels, dance halls, and gambling dens were filled with people drinking, eating, dancing, or arguing. And in every doorway, clusters of half-naked little boys, spying. He saw the last reddish clouds of twilight disappear on the horizon and took the rest of the walk in the dark, along streets lit at intervals by the lamps in the bars. He realized he had reached that quadrangular lot with the pompous name of Plaza de Armas. He walked around the square and suddenly heard someone, sitting on a bench, greet him in Portuguese: “
Boa noite
, Señor Casement.” It was Father Ricardo Urrutia, superior of the Augustinians in Iquitos, whom he had met at the dinner given by the prefect. He sat beside him on the wooden bench.

“When it doesn’t rain, it’s pleasant to go out and see the stars and breathe a little fresh air,” the Augustinian said in Portuguese. “As long as you cover your ears so you don’t hear that infernal noise. They must have told you already about this iron house that a half-mad plantation owner bought in Europe and is erecting on that corner. It was shown in Paris, at the Great Exposition of 1889, it seems. They say it will be a social club. Can you imagine what an oven it will be, a metal house in the climate of Iquitos? For now it’s a bat cave. Dozens of them sleep there, hanging from the rods.”

Roger told him to speak Spanish, that he understood it. But Father Urrutia, who had spent more than ten years of his life with the Augustinians in Ceará, in Brazil, preferred to continue speaking Portuguese. He had been in Peruvian Amazonia less than a year.

“I know you’ve never been on Señor Arana’s rubber plantations. But undoubtedly you know a great deal about what happens there. May I ask your opinion? Can Saldaña Roca’s and Walter Hardenburg’s accusations be true?”

The priest sighed.

“Unfortunately, they can be, Señor Casement,” he murmured. “We’re very far from Putumayo here. A thousand, twelve hundred kilometers at least. Yes, in spite of being in a city with authorities, a prefect, judges, military men, police, bad things still happen here. What can happen there where there are only employees of the company?”

He sighed again, this time with anguish.

“The great problem here is the buying and selling of young indigenous girls,” he said, his voice sorrowful. “No matter how hard we try to find a solution, we can’t.”

The Congo, again. The Congo, everywhere
, Roger thought.

“You’ve heard about the famous
correrías
,” the Augustinian added. “Those assaults on indigenous villages to capture harvesters. The attackers don’t steal only men. They also take little boys and girls. To sell here. Sometimes they take them to Manaus, where, it seems, they can get a better price. In Iquitos, a family buys a little maid for twenty or thirty
soles
at the most. They all have one, two, five little servants. Slaves, really. Working day and night, sleeping with the animals, beaten for any reason, and of course, taking care of the sexual initiation of the family’s sons.”