Dance of the Dwarfs (8 page)

“And I do not go at night,” I added.

Nor I do. Like the llaneros, I have no exaggerated respect for predators, but it is obviously unwise to ride in the dusk where close cover overhangs the grass.

“Not in the day either,” she insisted. “Never!”

This smelled of the blank spot again. She had talked to the llaneros only in my presence, so the bad influence had to be Mario.

“Listen, love! Mario has told me a dozen times what I must do and what I must not. Except in the matter of growing pimientos, I pay no attention.”

“But he has not told you about the dwarfs.”

I took this very seriously in order to get it all out of her. I pretended annoyance with Mario and demanded why he had not warned me.

“It is not right to speak of them.”

I told her that they enjoyed being talked about, that Mario was trying to frighten little girls. There was a dwarf who rode on the necks of horses and plaited the manes. The llaneros and I not only spoke of him but cursed him to hell.

“Was Mario afraid that I would leave the estancia?”

“At first, yes. But not now. He says that if you believed they were there, you would go and talk to them.”

What a compliment! To the scientific spirit of inquiry? Or to the essential humanity of Christian culture? But it left the main question of whether they were duendes or pygmies unsettled.

“What else did Mario say?”

“I told him about the dog. He said it belonged to them and that we must take good care when dogs can cross the creek. That is all.”

Odder and odder. That a race of forest pygmies could exist is possible. Between the Cordillera and the llanos they would have more than thirty thousand square miles to play in—a primordial, uninteresting area the size of Scotland and just as unexplored as Scotland would be if travelers were confined to the Great Glen, the Forth and the Clyde.

Against their reality and in favor of myth or a folk memory is this nonsense of dogs. If they have dogs they must have been exposed at some time to Spanish influence. Then there would be some written record of them, perhaps two or three hundred years old. Even if lost, it would be alive as rumor and I should surely have heard it among a dozen other yarns of man-eating trees and Eldorados. I cannot believe that the memory should be entirely confined to Santa Eulalia.

I shall ride over tomorrow and see what I can extract from Joaquín.

[
April 12, Tuesday
]

Pedro's store is burned to the ground. No doubt the government will give him some compensation when the news gets through, which could be several weeks unless Pedro himself quickly finds river transport. Meanwhile his poor wife is living wretchedly in an abandoned hut. She must in fact be far from destitute, but is naturally unwilling to dig up her flour bags from the ashes in the sight of all. Loyalty to Pedro. She must not lose the money which is to buy that tavern in Bogotá, however much she suffers meanwhile. I shall send some food, and I have told her that if she needs petty cash she can borrow from me. Marvelous generosity! She couldn't use more than about sixpence a day if she tried.

Joaquín was drying fish in the sun. They stink to high heaven and then become sweet. I find them quite edible if stewed like salt cod with plenty of garlic and tomatoes. So I bought a few from stock in order to vary our diet and encourage so exacting a craft.

“I have a question, Joaquín,” I said at last, “for your wisdom in such matters is greater than mine. What should a man do if he meets a dwarf?”

He did not answer, busying himself with the fish, and finally spoke more to himself than to me.

“They will not cross water.”

“Can they climb?”

“It is said they cannot.”

That ruled out monkeys, which anyway are one of the staple foods of forest Indians and so familiar that they could not be feared. As for ground-living apes, it is certain that there are not and never were any in the Americas.

“Have you ever seen one?”

“Never. My father did.”

“What did it look like?”

“Who knows what he has seen in the dusk?”

“They don't come out in the day?”

“All such things dread the sun.”

“They are duendes?”

“It could be.”

“What else is said about them?”

“They dance.”

I let that go. Conversation with Joaquín has the advantage that neither party is necessarily expected to say anything for minutes on end. Whether he spends the intervals thinking or merely sitting I do not know. I myself find them useful for chewing over what he has said and working out the next move. This time I had an inspiration worthy of an anthropologist.

“Is that why there was no guitar in Santa Eulalia?”

“That is why.”

“But have the dwarfs ever come so far to dance?”

“Who knows?”

“And at the estancia?”

“It is said that Manuel Cisneros saw them.”

“Have you ever heard that they hunt with dogs?”

“What need would they have of dogs?”

That was all I could get out of him. For Pedro they were real and neither more nor less to be feared than any other unapproachable tribe. For Joaquín they are clearly duendes.

Yet his treatment of the subject differed from the matter-of-fact way in which he usually describes the various spirits which surround us. The llaneros too seem to feel a distinction. They believe, of course, in duendes but will not normally allow them to interfere with their daily life. The dwarfs do interfere. They are responsible for the llaneros' reluctance to travel at night between Santa Eulalia and the estancia, and also for the fact that the grazing west of the marshes and the creek is never used.

I wish Tesoro could speak. There may be some scent from the forest or some trick of the light which alarms horses. That would be enough to create a legend and to cause the abandonment of the estancia through lack of labor. If one's only method of transport proves unreliable without any explanation, one falls back on gremlins like aircraft pilots in the last war. A pity that I cannot materialize some arms and legs on these forest fairies and put them to work on irrigation channels!

[
April 13, Wednesday
]

I have tackled Mario and laid down the law that he is not to frighten Chucha with a lot of nonsense. I got little of interest out of him except confirmation that dwarfs don't climb. That is why he is always mending walls and stopping up holes which a little chap could squeeze through.

He admitted that low morale was the reason for the estancia being deserted. Cattle grazing in the corridor between creek and forest had been lost. In the llano beyond the marshes, where the line of the trees sweeps away to the northwest, horses had vanished into the darkness and once a man. Why not, I asked, an increase in the number of jaguars following a favorable year for the game? No, the llaneros ruled out jaguars. But why in God's name dwarfs? Because they had been seen dancing. How far away and how much light? Close to the estancia and dark. Any moon? Don't know.

It was all worthless evidence, with a slight bias in favor of actual, physical hunters from the forest. On a starlit night one's eyes pick up movement at, say, seventy yards, and can vaguely recognize size and gait. That is to say, I could not distinguish with certainty a cow from a horse or a puma from a big dog, but I could distinguish a man from any of them.

“So the llaneros killed Manuel Cisneros,” I said in the hope that he would be surprised into confessing it. I could then be sure that they had made up the whole story.

“No, Don Ojen, no! He went away when he could get no one to herd the cattle.”

“Why didn't you go too?”

“What should I do? I am not a llanero. We must eat, Teresa and I and the boys who were then at her skirts. And he gave me the paper saying that I might stay as long as I liked.”

“But all the time you were afraid?”

“Not much. In the day, as you know, what could be more peaceful? At night one must stay indoors. Then there is no danger.”

“How do you know there isn't?”

“Because there never has been.”

Not a satisfying answer on the face of it. But knowledge can only be founded on experience. How do I know there isn't a blue orange? Because there never has been.

My summing up has to be—with a mass of reservations—in favor of pygmies. Here is a picture of them:

1. They are hunters and food-gatherers like the most primitive of the forest Indians. They only leave the shelter of the trees after sunset or before sunrise. Sound enough. That is when the deer, peccary and small game are to be found browsing at the edge of the llano.

2. They will come as far as the estancia in rare and exceptional years when the creek can be crossed.

3. They won't wade (fear of alligators or eel?) and they clearly have no canoes or their presence would have been reported on the river. This is hard to believe. They must have seen canoes and their culture cannot be so primitive that they are unable to build one.

4. They are very timid and won't face a wall. Won't, I think, not can't. Presumably they have observed this place for years and know that it is inhabited by very large men on very strange animals.

5. Tribal dances take place at night on the llano. A forest glade seems a more natural choice; but one must not underrate the power of religious tradition. Perhaps they lived in the open some thousands of years ago.

Having put this down on paper, I feel it adds up to beings as improbable as duendes. You pays your money and you takes your choice. But I am determined to know. To be the discoverer of Homo Dawnayensis really would be something!

[
April 15, Friday
]

Teresa tells me that we are shortly going to run out of coffee. That is where Pedro's store was useful. He could always keep us going with staples if I forgot to order in time or the government canoe failed to deliver. One would expect some inquiries about him, but it is not surprising that the Intendencia shows no curiosity. I doubt if Pedro transmitted a message a month before I came here. He sent off his reports and did his ordering by the canoe.

Perhaps it is my duty to let somebody know what has happened, since I am the only citizen for miles around who can write. But what with pygmies, fornication and fatherliness I have hardly given a thought to Pedro. I don't know the movements of the government canoe—Pedro was the only person who could make a reasonable guess—and I refuse to spend days in Santa Eulalia waiting for the chance to send off a letter. Mañana! One of these days the Intendencia or the Mission will send somebody to see how I am getting on.

We may have had a visit. I woke up at five to hear Tesoro neighing, and some plunging in the corral. So I went out, suspecting that my pair of beauties might have set about Pichón. They do not see why he should have carrots while they get stale bread. Answer: carrots are too precious to be used for wholesale bribery.

I found all the horses sweating. Tesoro had stamped an agouti into the dust. Was the agouti responsible for the excitement, or was there anything else which panicked the horses? My only reason for suspecting there might be is the improbability of an agouti entering our compound at all and then taking refuge in the corral. Mario of course showed no sign of life. He hears nothing and sees nothing, safe from duendes and disturbances behind his closed doors.

I searched the llano with my torch from various points of vantage but saw nothing. When I returned to the house I threw open the shutters on the south side to see if the first gray of morning showed any movements between estancia and forest. It did not. One might as well be out to sea in an absolute calm.

[
April 16, Saturday
]

On the other shore of that sea are a bunch of frightened and murderous outlaws. Should I have foreseen what was on the way to me? I prefer duendes with no politics to men with them.

This afternoon the Cuban and two other fellows, all bristling with automatic weapons, arrived in a jeep—the first motor vehicle I have ever seen in this vast corner of the llanos. They put a lot of trust in their weatherman. If the rains caught them in the middle of nowhere, they would have to get back to the Cordillera on foot.

In Santa Eulalia they had found nobody to bully except women and children who did not even understand their questions. Futility and the searing heat had not improved their tempers. Chucha took one look at the party and dashed into the kitchen where she deliberately dirtied her face and hair to give the impression of some sort of half-witted slut working for her food. She instinctively felt that these three sullen revolutionaries had appeared from a traditionless world and might not even have the dubious, vestigial chivalry of the llaneros.

I received them as caballeros, for which they did not give a damn. Marxism is too mannerless a creed for Latin America.

The Cuban wanted to know if Pedro had been killed or not. He had no evidence one way or the other but a pile of ashes. I said that I had every reason to believe Pedro was alive, failing very bad luck, and explained what he had told me and how he had escaped.

“He was much too frightened of you to give your plans away,” I added.

“How do you know he was?”

“Because any fool could read his thoughts. He never could keep his mouth shut.”

“So it was you who informed the government?”

I replied that I knew no details. Even if I had, how could I have passed them on?

“There are aircraft which come down here.”

“Not since your last visit.”

“You expect me to believe that?”

“Go back to Santa Eulalia tonight and ask. At least one horseman would have seen the plane and by the time it comes down there are always two or three of them on the spot, like ants.”

“Have your servants in!”

He could not let them off without a homily. Mario, Teresa and Chucha were lectured on the joys of a society in which ruthless capitalists would no longer own the land and exploit their labor. I did not point out that Mario was the only landowner present.