Dance of the Dwarfs (2 page)

Pedro was a corporal in the army, and perhaps a quarter of his blood is Spanish. He would be better with less, being too inclined to pointless eloquence. He is short, dark, with a wide, slack mouth and a sprinkling of hairs on the upper lip. He gains face from his intimacy with the Misionero and is pleasant enough when I swallow his abominable spirits in his company.

Santa Eulalia itself consists of some twenty mud-and-bamboo huts on a track which leads up from the river crossed by one short, dusty street with the infinity of the llanos at each end of it. We call the intersection the Plaza because it has a tree, the remains of a seat and Pedro's store. The majority of the inhabitants are llaneros who once worked for the estancia. Others are just nomads who drifted in. There are also a few families of pure Indians permanently camped in the woodland along the river and gathering more food than they grow. There is so little money in circulation that three times the same unmistakable coin has been given to me in change.

Now, what is there in this primitive and friendly society which does not make sense? I will start with the simple fact—there are others less simple—that I can never be sure why the estancia was deserted. Mario, Pedro and the rest vary the reasons they give me and forget what they have said.

Ownership is of the vaguest. Mario has a bit of paper, signed by one Manuel Cisneros, giving him the right to the house and its enclosed garden for as long as he likes. Cisneros, he tells me, was a Venezuelan who undoubtedly possessed the deeds and brought down his men and cattle across the plains. He had a sun-crazed dream of driving herds up to Bogotá on the hoof. When he found he couldn't he deserted the place, vanished into the rivers and has never been heard of since. His capital investment was small and probably never registered. I think he merely added some adobe and timber to the ruins of the ancient house and branded a lot more cattle which belonged to nobody. God knows where and from whom he bought the place! I tried to find some record of him in Bogotá, but there was nothing.

This ghostly ownership is in itself slightly disturbing to modern man. We all live like Indians without any title but custom, floating upon a sea of grass which does not lend itself to precise boundaries of social relationship. We and our horses have just enough to eat. We keep our mouths shut if we see what we are not supposed to see, and we are rather too ready to imagine what we don't see. We tend to die young from violence or accident, but general health is good, far better than in the forest. Our medicine man, Joaquín, is a specialist in tropical diseases. His remedies are more effective and his incantations more impressive than those of, say, eighteenth-century doctors. He and I are at present conducting a series of experiments—a leisure activity marked for amusement only—to see whether rhythmic prayer has any measurable effect on growth. Our preliminary results seem to show an increase of eleven per cent in cereal germination, but I must devise a more refined technique for ruling out coincidence.

That is by the way. An example just to remind me that I can and do enjoy myself. I find no lack of personal solidity in this dream life. What I want is to define the other men who share it with me. Difficult, of course. Even Freud could not analyze the motives of one's companions in a dream, only of the dreamer. These people are courteous, trusting and quite intelligent enough to understand my objectives; so there should be no mysteries. Yet they are haunted by a something which they never talk about to me and rarely, I suspect, among themselves. For want of a better theory I shall assume they collectively murdered Manuel Cisneros for good reasons of their own, but put it out that he had taken to the other darkness and might some day return, unobtrusively as he had come, by way of the Orinoco or the Amazon.

[
March 15, Tuesday
]

On Sunday one of the Intendencia's light aircraft came in with mail, some hormone weed killer which I badly needed, sacks of phosphate, a new microscope and a dozen bottles of Scotch with the compliments of the Administration. A civil, kindly lot they are! It would be so easy to forget about me and leave me to be supplied by pack horse or the government canoe. Yet if I have any urgent needs and a plane can reasonably be diverted, down it comes within a mile of the estancia. At the end of the wet season when the grass was long I was limited to rare landings on the river.

The plane also brought me a guitar. It seems incredible that in Santa Eulalia there is not a single guitar. Our remoteness does not account for it. The reason, I think, is that at bottom we are still primitive, horse-riding Indians. Although we speak Castilian and call ourselves Christians the music of the conquerors is not essential to us. So Santa Eulalia's one guitar was allowed to rot away some years ago. That shows how marginal is our Spanish-American culture. A guitar ought to be one of the simple necessaries of life along with salt, pimientos and alcohol.

Yesterday I slung it on my back like a traveling minstrel and rode Tesoro over to Santa Eulalia in the cool of the evening. I play with more emotion than accuracy and can easily improvise words and accompaniment when memory fails. It is astonishing that the English ever accepted the fashion of writing poetry in rhyme. To find rhymes in a Latin language is effortless and spontaneous, and so laborious a task in ours.

The males of Santa Eulalia collected immediately around Pedro's store, crammed on his two benches or squatting more comfortably in the dust. Inevitably he sold more of his rotgut than the public could easily afford. Upon me, too, it was forced, as if Spanish music compelled an exaggerated imitation of Spanish hospitality. I had to drink more than I wanted, but by shifting my position so that I was outside the circle of the single paraffin lamp I was able to spill a glass or two on the ground.

When I slipped off to have a pee against the back of Pedro's store—if they held firmly to one culture or the other they would clean it up—Joaquín spoke to me from the darkness. We have great confidence in each other. Natural enough. The shaman and I are the only two people for hundreds of miles who are professionals.

“I have something hard to speak,” he remarked.

“Between friends nothing is hard.”

“Look! They will all be in debt to Pedro.”

That had not occurred to me. Perhaps it should have. Of course my amateur, pseudo-Argentine performance on the guitar was as if a fair had come to town, unprecedented, unprepared for, destructive of the local economy.

Joaquín knew that my percipience was sharpened by alcohol. His own people react more brutally to the drug. With llanero or Indian he would never have embarked on the subject so abruptly. It shows what a close observer of human nature he is, even when foreign to him.

I thanked him warmly and said that I would ride home after giving two more songs for the sake of the party.

“No. I have spread a new hammock for you.”

It was pointless to sleep in his hut. I should not be allowed to go to bed for hours if it were known that I was staying the night in Santa Eulalia. I told him that I was honored by his invitation, but that the only way to put an end to the drinking was to ride off.

“Alone?”

“There is a good moon.”

“Wait!”

I knew what Joaquín was up to. He was going to arrange an escort of two or three llaneros which in the genial atmosphere would increase to half a dozen.

I would spend more evenings in Santa Eulalia if only I could avoid this ridiculous, noisy cavalcade which always has to accompany me home and then ride the twelve miles back to the settlement, refusing to stay under my hospitable roof—where there is any—till dawn.

They dislike this, however many of them there are. They won't admit it, but they are afraid of night—at any rate in the utterly empty llano between Santa Eulalia and the estancia. In Argentina I found reasonable caution, but not this childish fear. It is due, I suppose, to the proximity of the forest, although the creek and the marshes cut them off from it. These people belong to the open, blazing savannah and are not so familiar with trees as the Brazilians.

So after another song or two I mounted Tesoro without warning, shouted good night and was away before anyone could follow. It was hardly polite, but eccentricity in the otherwise entertaining Misionero will be forgiven.

I rode home without incident wondering about the relations between what one might call Church and State in Santa Eulalia. I came to the conclusion that Joaquín's intervention was odd and exceptional—as if in England the village parson had broken up a session in the village pub—and that he must have had some other reason besides that he gave me. But all one can tell is that Joaquín, in spite of the squalor of his house and person, has an older wisdom and more authority than the traditionless, semiofficial storekeeper.

This morning, during our desultory conversation while collecting grass seeds, I told Mario what had happened. I suspect that he distrusts Pedro, or rather would distrust him if he could bring himself to do so. It is essential to feel on good terms with the only man who buys and sells. What would you do without him?

“He has a good heart,” Mario said, “but thinks he knows everything.”

“And Joaquín?”

“This is his country.”

I saw what he meant. Joaquín and a few families of pure Indian blood were here or hereabouts before Santa Eulalia existed. The other inhabitants just drifted together like random particles collecting in a void to form a raindrop.

“He should not have let you ride alone.”

“I gave him no time. One moment there, the next in the darkness. And everyone knows there is not a horse in the village to catch Tesoro.”

As if to excuse Joaquín, he mumbled something about there being little danger on the way to the estancia.

“And what danger is there here?” I asked immediately.

He gave the vague answer that a man should never travel without arms. I replied that my rifle would have been useless, that I couldn't have hit the house after all I had been forced to drink.

“Better the guitar!” I added to amuse him. “If the jaguars don't like the tune, they'll run. And if they do, they can dance.”

This casual remark had the most surprising effect. He stared at me with his copper face turning yellow.

“Do not even think of it!” he said.

So Mario is afraid of the guitar as well as the dark! Could this be Joaquín's other reason: that he instinctively distrusts so small a tinkle in so much empty silence? I must be more mysterious to them than I have ever guessed, if they think of me as a possible Pied Piper for jaguars.

[
March 17, Thursday
]

When I decided to make this place my field station I was officially warned of possible danger from bandits. There aren't any. They joined the guerrillas in the hope of more regular hours for rations and murder. They will not appreciate Marxist discipline and the leadership of intellectuals; but once in, a man cannot easily get out.

These partisans of the National Liberation Army normally avoid the llanos since any considerable body of men would find no cover from air reconnaissance and attack. All the same, they keep a close watch on this flank from which their strongholds in the Eastern Cordillera might be threatened. It stands to reason that all activities in this emptiness, including my own, must be of interest.

I have at last had a visit from them. In the late afternoon of yesterday two men rode up to the estancia, dressed as forest travelers rather than llaneros and speaking cultivated Spanish. Following the custom of the country, I told them that my house was theirs for as long as they cared to honor it and I laid on drinks in the shade.

One was much taller than the other and, I should say, a Colombian of pure Spanish descent. I did not recognize the accent of his companion. He had some Negro blood and may have been a Cuban. Neither of them had the proper air of being born on horseback. They could ride all right, but might have borrowed their two weary beasts for a week's holiday.

Before darkness set in I showed them over our extensions to Mario's garden, the new experimental plots and my field laboratory, explaining the purely advisory role of the Mission. I told them that someday the government would undertake—or have the pious intention of undertaking—vast schemes of education and colonization, but that for many years to come the only farmers would be experts like myself.

The Cuban—if he was one—seemed to me somewhat naïve, as Spanish-American idealists often are. I could almost hear him thinking whether it was possible that tropical agriculture could be cover for some operation of the CIA. A pitiless, malignant bunch they are by all accounts, and no less credulous when it comes to politics!

When we had settled down again indoors, this smaller fellow started to cross-examine me. Where had I learned Spanish? I told him that I was born and bred in Argentina where my father had been a railway manager until we were thrown out. All my university education had been in England and I had opted for British nationality; but I had never lost my liking for the Americas.

Some of the subsequent conversation I shall try to give verbatim, for I might want to refer to it.

“Is it American or British capital behind you?” he asked.

I explained that there was no private capital whatever behind the Mission and that we were simply putting our technical expertise at the disposal of the Colombian government.

“To prevent revolution?”

I replied that I didn't give a damn about revolution, that communist dictatorship was a crude, sure way of developing virgin territory, but that I thought it an unnecessary discipline for viable economies.

“Good enough for the peon, but not for the British?”

Brash irony! It was time to put him in his place.

“Exactly. Like that plow you saw out there. A British farmer would have no use for it whatever. But it's cheap, and a vast improvement on anything the Indian villagers ever had.”