The Dream of the Celt: A Novel (29 page)

The chief was not there. He was leading a
correría
against five fugitive Indians who apparently had succeeded in crossing the Colombian border, which was very close by. There were five Barbadians in Matanzas and all five treated “Mr. Consul” with great respect, having been informed of his arrival and mission. They led the visitors to the houses where they would stay. They put Roger, Louis Barnes, and Juan Tizón in a large plank house with a
yarina
roof and screened windows that they said was used by Normand and his wives when they were in Matanzas. But his usual residence was in La China, a small camp a few miles upriver, where Indians were forbidden to go. The chief lived there surrounded by his armed “rationals,” for he feared being the victim of an assassination attempt by the Colombians, who accused him of not respecting the border and crossing it on his
correrías
to abduct porters or capture deserters. The Barbadians explained that Armando Normand always took the girls in his harem with him because he was very jealous.

In Matanzas there were Boras, Andoques, and Muinanes, but no Huitotos. Almost all the indigenous people had whipping scars and at least a dozen of them had the Casa Arana brand on their buttocks. The pillory was in the center of the clearing, beneath the tree called the
lupuna
, covered with furuncles and parasitic plants, for which all the tribes in the region professed a reverence suffused with fear.

In his room, which undoubtedly was Normand’s, Roger saw yellowing photographs where his childish face appeared, a 1903 diploma from the London School of Bookkeepers, and another earlier one from a senior school. It was true, then: he had studied in England and held an accounting diploma.

Armando Normand entered Matanzas as night was falling. Through the small screened window, Roger saw him pass by in the light from the lanterns and go into the neighboring house, short, slight, and almost as weak as an Indian, followed by “boys” with the faces of hangmen and armed with Winchesters and revolvers, and by eight or ten women dressed in the
cushma
or Amazonian tunic.

During the night Roger woke several times, in anguish, thinking about Ireland. He felt nostalgia for his country. He had lived there so little and yet felt increasing solidarity with its fate and suffering. Since he had seen firsthand the via crucis of other colonized peoples, Ireland’s situation pained him more than ever. He felt an urgency to finish with all this, to complete the report on Putumayo, turn it in to the Foreign Office, and return to Ireland to work, now without distractions, with his idealistic compatriots devoted to the cause of emancipation. He would make up for lost time, become more involved in the movement, study, take action, write, and by all the means at his disposal try to persuade the Irish that if they wanted freedom, they would have to win it with boldness and sacrifice.

The next morning, when he went downstairs for breakfast, Armando Normand was there, sitting at a table with fruit, pieces of yucca in place of bread, and cups of coffee. He was short and skinny, with the face of a prematurely aged boy and a gaze that was blue, fixed, hard, and appeared and disappeared because of his constant blinking. He wore boots, blue jeans, a white shirt, and over that a leather vest with a pencil holder and a small notebook visible in one of the pockets. He carried a revolver at his waist.

Normand greeted him with an almost imperceptible nod, saying little. He spoke perfect English, with a strange accent whose origin Roger could not identify. He was very close-mouthed, almost monosyllabic, in responding to questions about his life in London or specific information about his nationality—“Let’s say I’m Peruvian”—and he replied with a certain arrogance when Roger told him that he and the members of the commission had been affected by seeing that in the territories of a British company the indigenous people were mistreated in an inhuman way.

“If all of you lived here, you would think differently,” he remarked, drily, not at all intimidated. And after a brief pause, he added: “You can’t treat animals like human beings. A
yacumama
river snake, a jaguar, a puma don’t understand words. Neither do the savages. Well, I already know that outsiders passing through here cannot be convinced.”

“I lived for twenty years in Africa and I didn’t turn into a monster,” said Roger. “Which is what you have become, Mr. Normand. Your reputation has traveled with us throughout the entire journey. The horrors told about you in Putumayo go beyond anything imaginable. Did you know that?”

Armando Normand was not troubled in the least. Looking at him constantly with that blank, inexpressive gaze, he only shrugged and spat on the floor.

“Can I ask how many men and women you’ve killed?” Roger fired at him point-blank.

“All those who have committed a crime,” replied the chief of Matanzas, not changing his tone and standing up. “Excuse me. I have work to do.”

The distaste Roger felt for this little man was so great he decided not to interview him personally and to leave the task to the commission members. That murderer would tell them only an avalanche of lies. He devoted himself to listening to the Barbadians and “rationals” who agreed to testify. He did this in the morning and afternoon, dedicating the rest of the day to developing the notes he had taken during the interviews. In the mornings he went down to swim in the river, took some photographs, and then didn’t stop working until it grew dark. He would fall, exhausted, on his cot. His sleep was intermittent and feverish. He noticed he was losing weight day by day.

He was exhausted and sick of it. As had happened at a certain moment in the Congo, he began to be afraid that the maddening succession of crimes, violent acts, and horrors of every kind he uncovered on a daily basis would affect his mental balance. Would the health of his spirit resist this quotidian horror? It demoralized him to think that in civilized Britain few people would believe that the whites and mestizos in Putumayo could reach these extremes of savagery. Once again he would be accused of exaggeration and prejudice, of magnifying abuses to make his report more dramatic. Not only the iniquitous mistreatment of the indigenous people had him in this state, but knowing that after seeing, hearing, and witnessing what went on here, he would never again have the optimistic view of life he’d had in his youth.

When he learned that an expedition of porters was going to leave Matanzas carrying the rubber harvested in the last three months to the Entre Ríos Station and from there to Puerto Peruano to be shipped abroad, he told his companions he would go with them. The commission could remain here until it finished its inspection and the interviews. His friends were as exhausted and discouraged as he was. They told him that Armando Normand’s insolent manner had changed suddenly when they let him know that “Mr. Consul” had been assigned the mission to investigate the atrocities in Putumayo by Sir Edward Grey himself, the minister of foreign affairs for the British Empire, and that the killers and torturers, since they worked for a British company, could be brought to trial in England—above all if they had British nationality or were attempting to acquire it, as might be true in his case. Or they could be turned over to the Peruvian or Colombian governments to be tried here. When he heard this, Normand adopted a submissive, servile attitude toward the commission. He denied his crimes and assured them that from now on the errors of the past would not be repeated: the Indians would be well fed, healed when they fell ill, paid for their work, and treated like human beings. He had ordered a handbill saying these things to be placed in the middle of the clearing. It was ridiculous, since the indigenous people, all illiterate, could not read it and neither could the majority of the “rationals.” It was exclusively for the commissioners.

The journey on foot through the jungle, from Matanzas to Entre Ríos, accompanying the eighty Indians—Boras, Andoques, and Muinanes—who were carrying on their shoulders the rubber harvested by Armando Normand’s people, would be one of the most horrifying memories of Roger’s first trip to Peru. Normand wasn’t leading the expedition but Negretti, one of his lieutenants, an Asian-looking mestizo with gold teeth who was always digging in his mouth with a toothpick and whose stentorian voice made the army of wounded, branded, and scarred skeletons in the expedition, among them many women and children, some very young, tremble, jump, hurry, their faces distorted by fear. Negretti carried a rifle on his shoulder, a revolver in a holster, and a whip at his waist. On the day they left, Roger asked his permission to photograph him and Negretti agreed, laughing. But his smile vanished when Roger warned him, pointing at the whip:

“If I see you use that on the Indians, I’ll personally turn you over to the Iquitos police.”

Negretti’s expression was one of total confusion. After a moment he said in an undertone:

“Do you have any authority in the company?”

“I have the authority granted me by the British government to investigate the abuses committed in Putumayo. You know that the Peruvian Amazon Company you work for is British, don’t you?”

Disconcerted, the man moved away. And Roger never saw him flog the porters; he only yelled at them so they would move faster or harassed them with curses and other insults when they dropped the “sausages” of rubber they carried on their shoulders and heads because their strength failed or they tripped.

Roger had brought three Barbadians with him: Bishop, Sealy, and Lane. The other nine remained with the commission. Roger recommended to his friends that they never get far away from these witnesses, for they ran the risk of being intimidated or bribed by Normand and his henchmen to retract their testimonies, or even murdered.

The most difficult part of the expedition was not the large buzzing blowflies that hounded them day and night with their stings, or the rainstorms that sometimes fell, soaking them and turning the ground into slippery streams of water, mud, leaves, and dead trees, or the discomfort of the camps they set up at night to sleep the poor sleep God sent them after eating a can of sardines or soup and taking a few swallows of whiskey or tea from a flask. The terrible thing, a torture that filled him with remorse and gave him a bad conscience, was seeing these naked Indians bent over by the weight of the sausages of rubber, whom Negretti and his “boys” pushed forward with shouts, always hurrying them, with very widely spaced rests and without giving them a mouthful of food. When he asked Negretti why the rations weren’t also distributed to the indigenous workers, the overseer looked at him as if he didn’t understand. When Bishop explained the question to him, Negretti stated, with total shamelessness:

“They don’t like what we Christians eat. They have their own food.”

But they had none, because you couldn’t call the little handfuls of yucca flour they sometimes put in their mouths food, or the stems and leaves of plants they rolled up very carefully before swallowing them. What Roger found incomprehensible was how children of ten or twelve could carry for hours and hours those sausages that weighed—he had tried carrying them—never less than fifty pounds and sometimes seventy or more. On the first day of the trek a Bora boy suddenly fell on his face, crushed by his load. He moaned weakly when Roger tried to revive him by having him drink a can of soup. The boy’s eyes showed an animal panic. Two or three times he attempted to get up, without succeeding. Bishop explained: “He’s so afraid because if you weren’t here, Negretti would finish him off with a bullet as a warning so no other pagan would decide to faint.” The boy was in no condition to stand, so they abandoned him in the forest. Roger left him two cans of food and his umbrella. Now he understood why these feeble creatures could carry so much weight: they feared being killed if they dared to faint. Terror increased their strength.

On the second day, an old woman suddenly fell down dead when she tried to climb a slope with seventy pounds of rubber on her back. Negretti, after confirming she was lifeless, quickly distributed the dead woman’s two sausages among the other natives with a grimace of annoyance and a hoarse voice.

In Entre Ríos, as soon as he had bathed and rested awhile, Roger hurried to write in his notebooks the vicissitudes of the trip and his reflections. An idea came to mind over and over again, an idea that in the following days, weeks, and months would return obsessively and begin to shape his conduct:
We should not permit colonization to castrate the spirit of the Irish as it has castrated the spirit of the Amazonian Indians. We must act now, once and for all, before it is too late and we turn into automatons.

He wasted no time while he waited for the arrival of the commission. He had some interviews, but above all he reviewed the payrolls, store account books, and administrative records. He wanted to establish how much Arana’s company increased the prices of foodstuffs, medicines, articles of clothing, weapons, and tools it advanced to the Indians as well as to the overseers and “boys.” The percentages varied from product to product, but the constant was that for everything it sold, the store doubled, tripled, and at times quintupled prices. He bought two shirts, a pair of trousers, a hat, a pair of hiking boots, and could have acquired everything in London for a third of the price. Not only the indigenous people were swindled but also those poor wretches, vagabonds, and thugs who were in Putumayo to carry out the station chiefs’ orders. It was not strange that all of them were always in debt to the Peruvian Amazon Company and were tied to it until they died or the firm considered them useless.

Roger found it more difficult to form an approximate idea of how many indigenous people were in Putumayo in 1893, when the first rubber plantations were established in the region and the
correrías
began, and how many remained in this year of 1910. There were no serious statistics: what had been written on the subject was vague, and the figures differed a good deal. The person who seemed to have made the most trustworthy calculation was the unfortunate French explorer and ethnologist Eugène Robuchon (who disappeared mysteriously in the Putumayo region in 1905 when he was mapping the entire territory of Julio C. Arana), according to whom the seven tribes in the area—Huitotos, Ocaimas, Muinanes, Nonuyas, Andoques, Rezígaros, and Boras—must have amounted to one hundred thousand before rubber drew “civilized” men to Putumayo. Juan Tizón considered the figure highly exaggerated. He, through different analyses and comparisons, maintained that forty thousand was closer to the truth. In any case, now no more than ten thousand survivors remained. In this way, the system imposed by the rubber barons had already annihilated three-fourths of the indigenous population. Many undoubtedly had been victims of smallpox, malaria, beriberi, and other epidemics. But the immense majority disappeared because of exploitation, hunger, mutilations, the pillory, and murder. At this rate what had happened to the Iquarasi, who had been totally exterminated, would happen to all the tribes.